Josef Thorak

In 1903 he began an apprenticeship as a potter in Slovakia; after completion of this and of journeyman years in Austria and Germany, he started work at a factory in Vienna and took classes from the sculptor Anton Hanak.

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,[1][3] said to have been his only book on a living artist.

[1][2] At Schloss Hartmannsberg he had a collection of medieval carvings and antique furnishings, some of which was obtained from the prominent Nazi art dealers Kajetan and Josef Mühlmann.

[3][7] 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.

"[1] In his Spandau Diaries written in prison after the war, Speer referred to Thorak as "more or less my sculptor, who frequently designed statues and reliefs for my buildings".

[8] Well known for his "grandiose monuments",[9] Thorak was nicknamed "Professor Thorax" because of his preference for muscular neo-classical nude sculpture,[10] typically "gazing fervently into the distance".

The following year he married Hilda Lubowski, with whom he had a third son, but after the Nazis came to power in 1933, the couple agreed to divorce because of her Jewish ancestry.

[20] Two of these, which had been placed in 1939 outside the Reich Chancellery built by Albert Speer, were discovered along with other Nazi art in a police raid on a storehouse in Bad Dürkheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, in May 2015.

The two horses had been removed in 1989 from a barracks ground in Eberswalde, northeast of Berlin, at the time in East Germany, where they had sat since sometime after the Second World War.