Kajetan Mühlmann

[2] On reaching the required age of 17 in 1915, he volunteered for service in the First World War; he was decorated several times but in 1918 was seriously wounded and suffered a lung infection which affected his health for the rest of his life.

[7] While doing his best to avoid overt political affiliations, he became a prominent member of the moderate wing of the Austrian party, which ultimately triumphed over the radical faction;[8][9] early in 1938 he met with Hitler on behalf of Seyss-Inquart and gave him confidential information which strengthened his bargaining position in his meeting with Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, in addition to urging the removal of Josef Leopold.

[22] In addition, as earlier in Austria, they took the legal position that the Jews were a separate nation with whom no peace treaty had been concluded at the end of the First World War, and whose property they were therefore at liberty to seize as that of an enemy.

[25][26] Mühlmann's work in Poland was so efficient (by his own account, "within six months almost the entire artistic property of the land was seized") that Wolfram Sievers, business manager of the Ahnenerbe, wanted to have him oversee the removal of artworks from South Tyrol, which had been ceded to Italy.

[27] He visited the area in spring 1940 and reported to Sievers and to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, arguing for the forceful removal of all Germanic art.

[29] The Dienststelle Mühlmann functioned as a clearing house for art expropriated from Jews and other "enemies" during the occupation of the Netherlands, France (where they competed with a branch of the Amt Rosenberg), and also Austria and Poland.

Mühlmann's staff included his half brother, Josef, and art historians, Franz Kieslinger, Eduard Pletzsch and Bernhard Degenhart.

[31][32][33][34] Although he officially retained his post in Poland, he welcomed the move to a location where the occupation was in most ways less repressive, and also had found himself in a difficult position in Kraków between the competing demands of different superiors: Martin Bormann had suggested that he should go to a concentration camp for not supplying enough art to Hitler, Göring had threatened to have him put in prison for returning pictures including Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine to Poland from Berlin on Hans Frank's orders (in the end he carried it together with Raphael's Portrait of Gentleman and Rembrandt's Landscape with the Good Samaritan with him to Berlin by train twice),[35] and Frank's anger at him reportedly led to his leaving the position in Poland, which he did in mid- or late 1943.

[38] He had no official duties, but advised many powerful Nazis; for example, Ernst Kaltenbrunner consulted him about forming a transitional Austrian government which might be acceptable to the Allies.

[39] He supplied useful testimony against leading Nazis and therefore in 1947 he was returned to Munich into the custody of the American military government in Bavaria; there he helped identify artworks and antiques.

In addition to numerous paintings and antiques (one 1941 bill from a Parisian dealer totals 560,000 francs for rugs, crystal lamps, and furniture),[47] he used various "Aryanised" residences including a villa in Anif, a suburb of Salzburg, that was taken from a Jewish woman, Helene von Taussig, in 1941 for Josef Wojtek's use and transferred to the ownership of his daughter, Mühlmann's then wife; she continued to live there after the war.

He was committed to the "re-Germanising" of eastern territories which he and others thought of as having been usurped by Slavs, and wrote books during the war in which he described the cultural heritage of Kraków in particular from this point of view.

A book on the city which he co-wrote with Barthel begins:The Ostmark, the Sudetenland, Eastern Silesia, the region of the river Weichsel—many names characteri[s]e a piece of German history from an inner consistency that affects us all deeply.

[51] As his second wife said, regarding modern art "[h]e was never entirely true to the Nazi line": when in office in Vienna, he had a fresco by Anton Faistauer on the Salzburg Festspielhaus preserved and approved funds to purchase work by the Expressionist Herbert Boeckl [de], which helped the artist and his eight children to survive.