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NEW YORK, MAY 1944
The New York Times headlines on the war in Europe for May 1944 revealed "Wounded Dubious on Gains in Italy-Still a Long Way to Anzio," followed by "Germans Face Destruction in Italy-Whole Army May Suffer Fate of Stalingrad and Africa by Fight and Die." Domestic headlines ranged from "Aid for War Victims-Jewish Group Will Provide 300,000 Packages This Year" and "Smith, A Pint Please-Appeal Made to 420,000 of That Name to Give Blood" to "No Rise in Sugar Rations" and "Television Tests Asked for After the War."1
The arts-whether on stage, at the movies, in books, or in museums-gave a welcome escape into another world. The 1944 Oscar winner Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, still played in the movie houses, along with For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on Ernest Hemingway's book. Music, too, did its bit to soothe ravaged souls. The Andrews Sisters, big-band leaders Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and singing comedians Bob Hope and Bing Crosby made scores of films. La Bohème played at the Central Theatre, alternating with Aida, Faust, and La Traviata. Duke Ellington held his live performances at Carnegie Hall and also played live with his orchestra at the Brill Building's Hurricane Club on Forty-Ninth Street and Broadway. It was Ellington's swinging big-band draw-more than the naked lady strategically covered with a palm frond on its menu-that attracted its fully integrated audiences. In books, fiction reigned supreme. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, topped the New York Times best sellers' fiction list. Evelyn Waugh's saga Brideshead Revisited was crowned "first" of the worldwide English best sellers.
New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened its exhibit of twenty-five-year-old W. Eugene Smith's photographs taken during the previous eight months in the Pacific theater of war. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) countered with a reopening of its picture galleries, having previously removed its priceless collection to safety. Americans remained generally unaware that they were targeted by art dealers and museum directors to help finance the Nazi war effort for years; and that "trading with the enemy" was the bread and butter of the American and British visual-arts market. Had they known at the time, the more outraged might have called for lynching the culprits, while law-abiding citizens would have cried out for trials based on high treason. Neither happened-then or later-and the art dealers for Hitler already suspected as much.
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On a beautiful and sizzling May 29 morning, a few weeks before the D-day landings in 1944, a large shipment of 391 artworks was off-loaded at Manhattan's West Side docks. As usual, an agent from the Hudson Shipping Company signed off on the consignment and waited for his customs clearance. It wasn't the first shipment consigned to the New York gallery named after the German art dealer Karl Buchholz. In fact, the Buchholz Gallery was one of the Hudson Shipping Company's good clients since 1937. Its manager, Curt Valentin, was-so the agent claimed-the darling of the art world, a suave and sophisticated man of impeccable taste who'd somehow managed to save the modern art that Hitler wanted to destroy.
All of the artists on the manifest were expressionists-such as Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Käthe Kollwitz, Gerhard Marcks, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, and August Macke, to name names. There was even a bronze called Galloping Horse by Edgar Degas.2 Why this particular shipment attracted such attention is lost to posterity. Perhaps it was the sheer scope of the consignment or maybe because customs officials were alert to the fact that every artist was labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis that rang alarm bells. Possibly, the decision to investigate the shipment came from the countless briefings by Washington's Office of Alien Property, designed to confiscate any enemy property that would benefit America's foes.
More than likely, no one was more shocked than the luckless agent of the Hudson Shipping Company when he was told that the US government would be seizing the art shipment under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The expediter, Karl Buchholz, was an enemy alien. Valentin, too, had been a German. The Hudson Shipping Company had done nothing wrong, but if they allowed this "outrage" to go ahead, they'd probably lose a valued client. Chances are, threats or promises of cash under the table were made. Why or how such blandishments were refused is also lost in time, as are the names of the officers involved in the sequestration of the 391 artworks under Vesting Order 3711, signed by the Office of Alien Property's trusted second-in-command, James E. Markham.
Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the custodian for alien property could-if the shipper or recipient qualified as an enemy alien, as both Buchholz and Valentin did-hold, use, administer, liquidate, sell, or otherwise deal with the property in question in the interest, and for the benefit, of the United States through the issuance of a "vesting order."3 Naturally, the stateless Valentin, who had "fled" Germany in 1937 and avoided courting any unwanted government scrutiny successfully until then, was most anxious to have the artworks released. Things would, however, take a turn from bad to worse.
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The Port of New York Authority thought, rightly, that there should be an official inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and contacted the field office on Lexington Avenue between Sixty-eighth and Sixty-ninth Streets.4 J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's battle-hardened director, had made staunch efforts against Nazi fifth columnists and saboteurs, and the New York field office was primed and already working on counterintelligence and counterespionage investigations. The link between foreign-exchange transactions, art, and armaments hadn't gone unnoticed by Hoover.
The hunt for enemy aliens attempting to sell loot taken from Nazi victims figured high in the FBI's priorities.5Consequently, it was the value, origin, and destination of the shipment that determined the FBI's need to ferret out the truth. Yet whether the FBI discovered what that truth was is anyone's guess. In its infinite wisdom, the FBI destroyed the Karl Buchholz and Curt Valentin file relating to the shipment toward the end of the twentieth century-without storing the information on microfilm or compact disc.6
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Earlier that same May, the putative seller of some of the Käthe Kollwitz artworks in the consignment, Dr. Hildebrand Gurlitt, dictated his own authorization to the director of Hitler's Führermuseum for unfettered travel to France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. His purpose was to import artworks to Germany. The authorization made it clear that Gurlitt's use of the German railway system in these countries must receive top priority-even before troop movements.7
By the time the shipment was vested by the Office of Alien Property in New York, Gurlitt was safely ensconced in his suite at the Grand Hotel on rue Scribe in Paris. In fact, he received a telegram there a few days prior to the vesting order from the director of the Führermuseum, who headed the "Sonderauftrag Linz," requesting that Hitler's thieving art dealer Gurlitt thank Walter Weber for the photo of the still-life painting from the school of Vallayer, but that it was of no interest to the museum at Linz.8 Gurlitt remained in Paris at the Grand Hotel during the D-day landings, leaving the city a mere six days before its liberation, on August 25, 1944.
How did the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt engineer such a position of power, where he could write his own travel authorization and use the railways to ship artwork when the Germans expected D-day at any moment? A second question, seemingly less interesting to some, is why no one ever made the link between Hildebrand Gurlitt and the shipment.
Even more damning is that on June 7, 1944, the day after D-day, Hildebrand Gurlitt was sent another telegram by Hitler's museum commission, Sonderauftrag Linz: "Acquiring Goya portrait from Edzard in case not yet packed in transport STOP And Guardi Ruins by the Sea from Dr. Lohse STOP Bring the pictures with you to Dresden or have them delivered through the Embassy STOP Regret deferred payment not possible."9
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Another seventy years would pass before the tie between the seized shipment and the pivotal relationship between Hitler's art thieves Karl Buchholz, Curt Valentin, and Hildebrand Gurlitt would be made.
Copyright © 2015 by Susan Ronald
