In Berlin in the 1920s, Thorak lived mainly on commissions to design cemetery monuments for soldiers, also assisting wealthy friends, many of them Jewish, with design work. He was helped by friendships with
Hjalmar Schacht, President of the
Reichsbank, and above all with the art museum director
Wilhelm von Bode, who wrote a monograph on Thorak in 1929, said to have been his only book on a living artist. He won a state prize in 1928. To promote himself, he began calling himself "professor". His commissions were reduced by the
German economic crisis of the 1920s and the
Great Depression; eventually in 1932 he received a commission to design fittings for a church in Tegel, After the Nazis
came to power in 1933, Thorak took advantage of friendships with many prominent members of the Party. Through the film maker
Luis Trenker, he was engaged after Hanak's death in 1934 to complete the
Emniyet monument (Security Monument; now the
Güven (Trust) Monument) in
Ankara, Turkey, and he sculpted busts of
Joseph Goebbels and
Ernst Hanfstaengl in addition to
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and
Józef Piłsudski. In 1937, he was named professor of sculpture at the
Munich Academy of Fine Arts; in 1939, Hitler decreed that a studio should be built for him in
Baldham to
Albert Speer's design. Well known for his "grandiose monuments", Thorak was nicknamed "Professor Thorax" because of his preference for muscular neo-classical nude sculpture, typically "gazing fervently into the distance". In the late 1930s, he became less popular with the Nazi leadership than Breker, because of his less voluptuous female nudes; he returned to favour during the war years after producing female statues expressing pathos. ==Later life and death==