Many sources assert or imply that he found opportunities to interpret his mandate and /or to enrich himself unreasonably while undertaking this work for the government: details remain hard to pin down, however.
That was followed by three months in Karlsruhe where he worked at the venerable "Braunsche Hofbuchhandlung" (bookshop), before moving further south to the francophone western part of Switzerland.
[12] The address came with its own powerful historical resonances, since the house at Potsdamer Straße 134 had been the home of the much-loved novelist Theodor Fontane till his death in 1898.
His daughter would later recall that frequent visitors to the family home included Hans Poelzig, Ernő Kállai, Will Grohmann, Edwin Redslob, Max Kaus, the publisher Eduard Stichnote and the Noldes.
The article stands out because neither the tone nor the forthright opinions are representative of Ferdinand Möller's later views, any more than they were adumbrated by his words or actions during his life up till that point.
How it found its way into the newspaper remains something of a mystery, but it may very well have provided the writer with some valuable political capital six years later, when the Hitler government took power.
[2] As parliamentary deadlock persisted and political polarisation intensified, in January 1933 the National Socialists took power and in the space of a few months transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship.
In the event the exhibition quickly triggered an intense power struggle between the party's students and the "art-traditionalist racial purists" of Alfred Rosenberg's "Kampfbund für deutsche Kulturwurden".
[4] On 4 July 1933, the exhibition's scheduled opening was accompanied by a large rally of supportive National Socialist Students which generated extensive press coverage and public interest.
[4][19] The "30 German artists" exhibition of 1933 can be seen as a battle won on behalf of contemporary art, but over the course of the twelve Hitler years it is hard to discern any equivalent public victory in the longer term.
The men were instructed to sell the art works on the international market, obtaining the best prices they could, and accounting to the government for the resulting foreign currency receipts.
The youngest daughter, Angelika, stayed on in Berlin, living at what remained of the gallery in Kluckstraße, to which Möller had relocated the focus of his business activities back in 1939.
[4][2] There are no surviving written records from Ferdinand Möller or anyone else of how he experienced the arrival, in the Neuruppin area, of the Red army as they made their way towards Berlin during the early months of 1945.
In May 1945 war ended, and during the next couple of months the central third of Germany, including Zermützel and the eastern part of Berlin, were placed under military administration as the Soviet occupation zone.
The entire front section of his own premises had been blown away during the final days of fighting in the city and were probably, as he wrote to a friend, beyond repair, although some rooms at the back of the building, including what had been the bedroom, were largely untouched by the destruction of war.
In a letter addressed to the artist Joachim Utech (who had ended up in one of the western zones) Möller wrote reassuringly that the artworks were safe because the Soviet armed forces had placed the entire house under "museum protection".
Maria Möller-Garny was soon kept busy painting portraits of the Russian military, which gave the family a special status with the occupying authorities locally.
In doing this, he invariably included an offer to pay with artworks, reviving a habit he had first adopted when making equivalent requests during his self-imposed "professional exile" in Potsdam, between 1924 and 1927.
During the later 1940s this was replaced by a growing resignation and recognition that the world - and especially Berlin - had changed for ever, and that the revival of his own position as a dominating figure in a version of the arts establishment that had existed before the war was never going to happen.
Apparently it never occurted to him that he might consider applying for the denazification procedure on his own account, though he was solicitous in securing an "Unbedenklichkeitsbescheinigung"(loosely, "clearance certificate") on behalf of a son-in-law.
A previous proposal which he said he had submitted to the Propaganda Ministry to sell all the "between 3 and 10,000" works by German and foreign artists to "the Americans" as a single job lot had, he explained, been turned down.
The letter continued with a series of implausible but in the short term unverifiable assertions and half-truths, and the entire disposal operation developed out of the discussions that ensued.
The letter to the national education department is easy to dismiss as the devious literary fictions of a consummate truth twister, but under conditions of post-war destruction and instability, whereby Möller had good reason to fear for his life and the lives of other family members, and at as time when he was also fighting for his property, his future and his reputation, he was far from unusual in resorting to this level of falsification.
He seems to have been under the impression - which may have been correct under criteria frequently encountered in the Soviet occupation zone - that all debts had been paid off or cancelled in the aftermath of a war in which millions of people had died, meaning that the art works in his possession were, almost by definition, his to dispose of as he wished.
A lengthy series of misunderstandings between the two men over the timings and amounts of payments due between them following the confiscation by the American military authorities in Munich of two of the three paintings.
Meanwhile, his contacts with dealers beyond the Berlin bubble, whether in Dresden to the south or Bielefeld to the west, were more friendly, relaxed and, in some cases, revealing of his situation and feelings at the time.
Details of where the paintings were ultimately moved to are in many cases unclear, but most of the art works and household effects in Möller's possession when he lived in Zermützel seem to have made the journey to West Berlin without significant confiscation or other loss.
[c] At the time when he crossed to the west had nevertheless already suffered major losses at Dresden and at Halle when pictures that he had sent for exhibition and possible sale were spotted by art lovers among the Soviet administrators and unceremoniously confiscated, ostensibly due to suspicions as to their wartime provenance.
Cologne, like Berlin, had been in large part destroyed by the bombing, and the building in which Möller installed his gallery was a new one, designed by Wilhelm Riphahn, one of the city's twentieth century architects.
[28] During the decade following reunification, starting in 1994, four paintings that he been on display at the Moritzburg gallery in Halle, having been confiscated from Möller in the late 1940s were returned to his youngest daughter, Angelika Fessler-Möller (1919–2002).