Führermuseum

[10] Additionally, after a state trip to Rome, Florence and Naples in 1938 – between the Anschluss with Austria and the taking of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia – Hitler, "overwhelmed and challenged by the riches of the Italian museums"[11] expanded the conception of his planned gallery.

[Hitler] envisaged Linz as the future seat of the new German Kultur, and lavished all his limited pictorial talent and architectural training on a vast project which would realize this ambition.... [He] devoted a disproportionate amount of time and energy, for a chief of state, to the plans for Linz, personally creating the architectural scheme for an imposing array of public buildings, and setting the formula for an art collection which was to specialize heavily in his beloved, mawkish German school of the nineteenth century.

His private library, discovered by the American Army deep in Austria, contained scores of completed architectural renderings for the Linz project...[14]According to one of Hitler's secretaries, he never tired of talking about his planned museum, and it was often the subject at his regular afternoon teas.

"[17] In Autumn 1940, Hitler commissioned architect Hermann Giesler, a devout Nazi,[18] to be in overall charge of the rebuilding of Linz,[19][20] one of the five designated Führerstädte ("Führer cities"), along with Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich, which were to be redeveloped drastically.

[1] Near the end of the war, when American forces overran Hitler's private library, which was hidden deep in Austria, it contained "scores" of plans and renderings for the museum and the complex.

The Führer requests that this artwork, for the most part from Jewish hands, be neither used as furnishings of administration offices or senior bureaucrats' official residences nor purchased by leading state and party leaders.

Even though a large number of important works have doubtless been removed recently from Holland, I believe that the trade still contains many objects which are desirable for the Führer's collection, and which may be acquired without foreign exchange.

[14]As a result of this, accounts of about 500,000 Reichsmarks were opened in Paris and Rome for Posse's personal use, and, around July 1940, he expanded the scope of the Sonderauftrag Linz into Belgium and the Netherlands when he established an office in The Hague as Referent für Sonderfragen (Adviser on "Special Questions").

[3][46][47] Hitler was pleased with Posse's work, and in 1940 awarded him the honorific of "Professor",[48] something the Führer did for many of his favorites in the arts, such as Leni Riefenstahl, the actress and film director; architects Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler; sculptors Arno Breker and Josef Thorak; Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic; actor Emil Jannings; and photographer Heinrich Hoffmann; among others.

Voss attempted to mend his fences with Hitler with an elaborate gift for his birthday in 1944, accompanied by a list of his acquisitions in which he claimed to have bought 881 items, compared to 122 paintings that Posse had collected the year before.

[54] On the next level of hierarchy, Reichsminister Hans Lammers, who was President of the Reich Chancellery, and Helmut von Hummel, Bormann's Special Assistant and "a particularly vicious Nazi", actually drew up the directives which set out the policies and procedures which governed the collecting process, both for confiscations and purchases.

[54] Other Nazi officials involved in the confiscation of art, but not specifically with collection for the Linz museum, included the Reich Minister for Science, Education, and Culture, Bernhard Rust; the Governor General for Poland, Hans Frank; and Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS.

[59][60] Notably, the collection included three Rembrandts, La Danse by Watteau, the Memling portrait by Corsini, the Rubens Ganymede, and Vermeer's The Artist in His Studio, a forced sale at a knock-down price.

[14] On 5 November 1940, a directive from Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring to Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the ERR, and to the Chief of Military Administration in Paris outlines the several categories of "ownerless" art confiscated from Jews for "safeguarding".

This apparently brought about some internecine squabbling, as Dr. Posse had been given the authority to act on Hitler's behalf, and the German commanders of occupied countries were required to keep him regularly informed about their confiscations of artwork.

[14] On 20 March 1941, Rosenberg reported that his unit had proceeded to follow the directive, having "collected" over 4000 items; those personally selected by Göring had already been shipped by train to the air-raid shelters of the Führer Building in Munich.

These collections – those of the French Rothschilds; Paul Rosenberg, the art dealer; Georges and Daniel Wildenstein; the investment banker Pierre David-Weill; Germain Seligman, the art historian and dealer; Alphonse Kann; and the other great collectors of the time[70] – were systematically subjected to confiscations under various bureaucratically outlined pretenses of "protection", and were then brought to the Jeu de Paume museum, where they were cataloged and divided up for Hitler's collection – Posse took 53 paintings,[45] for Göring's, for the use of Alfred Rosenberg's "scholarly" institutions which were attempting to prove the inferiority of Jews, as well as for other purposes.

Valland kept lists of all the works which came in, the secret storehouses where they were stockpiled when they left the museum, and the numbers of the train cars when the last of the paintings were shipped to Germany just before the Allied recapturing of Paris.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, on the other hand, Hitler's anointed successor and the head of the Luftwaffe, was an avid collector of confiscated artworks, with an unquenchable appetite for jewels and finery as well.

[83] Unlike Dietrich, SA-Gruppenführer Prince Philipp of Hessen was a connoisseur of the arts and architecture and acted as Posse's principal agent in Italy, where he lived with his wife, a daughter of King Victor Emmanuel.

A grandson of the German Emperor Frederick III, and a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, Philipp provided "a veneer of aristocratic elegance which facilitated important purchases from the Italian nobility.

[81] Other Nazi agents in the Linz program included Kajetan Mühlmann, a high SS official whose territories were Poland and the Netherlands; Baron Kurt von Behr, the head of the ERR in France; and Hitler's photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, an early art adviser who fell from Hitler's favor after 1941, due to Martin Bormann's dislike of him, but who had acted as an intermediary between some German art dealers and the Linz program, and possibly did the same in the Netherlands as well.

[86] Gerard Aalders, a Dutch historian, said those sales amounted to "technical looting," since the Netherlands and other occupied countries were forced to accept German Reichsmarks that ultimately proved worthless.

[86] Birgit Schwarz, an expert on the Führermuseum, in her review of Löhr's book, pointed out that the author focused on the purchases which were held in the Führerbau in Munich and ignored the deposits of looted art in Upper Austria in Thürntal, Kremsmünster and Hohenfurt/Vyssi Brod.

[14][42] Rose Valland eventually shared the trove of information she had gathered at the Jeu de Paume museum, while the Nazis were using it as a way-station for confiscated art, with 1st Lt. James Rorimer, one of the "Monuments Men" of the MFAA, who would be attached to the U.S.

[102] Despite the fact that the original storage locations, which had no military purpose and were culturally important in any case, would have been extremely unlikely to have been the subject of an Allied air attack, in 1943 Hitler ordered that these collections be moved.

[103] The transfer of Hitler's Linz collection from the repositories to the salt mine took 13 months to complete, and utilized both tanks and oxen when the trucks could not navigate the steep, narrow and winding roads because of the winter weather.

Into these spaces, workmen built storage rooms which boasted wooden floors, racks specifically designed to hold the paintings and other artworks, up-to-date lighting, and dehumidification equipment.

Much of Göring's collection from his estate at Carinhall was discovered in a cave at Berchtesgaden, where he had a summer home near Hitler's Berghof retreat,[14] part of it was also left in his private train, which was found in Unterstein, and had been looted by the local residents.

[121] In 1998, the Federal Republic of Germany and 43 other countries agreed to the "Washington Principles", which required them to closely inspect their art inventories to establish the provenance of works which had changed ownership between 1933 and 1945.