Forged Hitler Watercolours
Unfortunately, there is a large market (or larger than you might think) for paintings made by Adolf Hitler. Selling these paintings is banned in large auction houses and websites but the market is thriving and some of the works, we’re now discovering, are forgeries.
The Forgeries
I don’t want to spend too much time talking about Hitler himself tbh. He was a painter as a young man and applied to art school multiple times, and was rejected multiple times. Every article I’ve read says that’s because his paintings are painfully unremarkable and the only reason there’s any market for them today is because of his notoriety as a person. “The few surviving paintings by the later Nazi dictator that can be authenticated depict lifeless townscapes, devoid of character, perhaps reflecting the emptiness of his inner being” (Evans, 2019). Lol.
So, as I said, there’s a surprisingly large market for paintings made by Hitler. Why, you might ask? Because there’s money in it. The annual turnover of the market in Nazi memorabilia of all kinds is estimated to be around £30 million, with one of these paintings selling in 2014 for £112,000. Wild. So of course people are forging these works trying to make a buck. Apparently, because they’re so bad, they’re very easy to forge and this results in perhaps more forgeries than actual surviving paintings. But it’s almost like this doesn’t matter to collectors in a weird way, forgeries have been around for decades but still that name at the bottom of the canvas attracts attention and interest.
Apparently, forgeries started popping up as soon as Hitler rose to power and even he couldn’t tell the difference between his originals and the fakes, so he banned their sale after an attempt to have his original works authenticated and catalogued which didn’t work out. Because these paintings have no aesthetic value and their inherent controversy, major dealers and galleries haven’t bothered going through the tedious task of authenticating the paintings and they’re the only ones with the experience to do so.
Recently there have been a huge number of raids on auction houses selling these forgeries. In January 2019 three paintings were seized in Berlin prior to auction. Police said they believed these works were fakes being passed off as the real thing to buyers. In February of the same year, 63 paintings were taken from an auction house in Nuremberg on the suspicion they weren’t genuine. Those are only the raids in Germany! 77 lots of paintings attributed to Hitler were sold by Mullocks Auction House in Shropshire between 2009 and 2018. These were all written off by a Dutch art expert as fakes. “Many of them are still-life paintings, which Hitler never attempted, or oils rather than watercolours, although watercolour is the only medium that Hitler is known to have used, or depict scenes of towns and villages that Hitler never visited. Mullocks rightly pointed out in advance that these artworks were not authenticated, but buyers paid a total of £271,000 for them anyway, not heeding the auctioneer’s warnings” (Evans, 2019).
And who are these collectors who are just buying up these pieces even with warnings that they’re probably not real? They’re, of course, the slimiest people you can think of.
A notable collector is Texan millionaire, Billy Price. He collects everything to do with Hitler (which, if that’s not a red flag I don’t know what is) he even has his cutlery. At one point he tried to own all of the real Hitler paintings in existence and even tried to sue the US government to try to get them to release all real or forged paintings in their custody. Apparently, he had about 33 paintings attributed to Hitler hanging in his home. He also spent a lot of money publishing a catalogue of Hitler’s artworks titled “Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist”. Art historian Birgit Schwartz “describes Price’s book as “catastrophic”—more than 30 years ago, the historian Hermann Weiss identified several of the works included as fakes by Konrad Kujau, who was imprisoned as the forger of the Hitler diaries” (Hickley, 2019).
Another collector is British property millionaire Kevin Wheatcroft. He has an absolutely massive collection, so big he has to store it in a series of barns, that includes tanks, Eva Braun’s record player, a wine rack from their home, and the door of Hitler’s jail cell. He even has his bed. And he sleeps in it. That’s a HARD no.
Finally, we have another Texan, conservative political donor Harlan Crow. He has another large collection with one of the prize pieces being a painting signed by A. Hitler that hangs in his library. Multiple scholars and art historians have come out and said that there is absolutely no chance that the painting is real, mostly because it depicts Vienna’s Old Carolinian Gate which was demolished before Hitler was born. Crow had no comment when news outlets tried to reach out but I think we can safely assume he doesn’t care and just maybe loves dictators seeing as he has a garden full of statues of them, swastika embroidered napkins, and a soup tureen that (allegedly) belonged to Sadam Hussein.
Aside from establishing that the worst people ever are those who are drawn to collecting this sort of thing, it’s interesting to look into a case where I (and people way more qualified than me) don’t really care about the forgeries being created. They’re really only being looked into by police because selling forged art is illegal. This is the one instance where I’m not concerned about the artist’s body of work being diluted or their reputation being damaged, he did that just fine on his own. The market for these, and original, Hitler works is disgusting both from a moral and aesthetic stance. Kind of funny that the people drawn to these works (real or not) are gross millionaires, I guess you really can’t buy taste.
Works Cited
Evans, Richard J. “Forging the Führer: Inside the Sinister Trend for Fake Hitler Paintings”. Prospect Magazine. 2019. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/42451/forging-the-fuhrer-inside-the-sinister-trend-for-fake-hitler-paintings
Hickley, Catherine. “Faking Hitler: The Story Behind a Sinister Market”. The Art Newspaper. 2019. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/02/26/faking-hitler-the-story-behind-a-sinister-market
Long, Katherine and Jack Newsham. “One of Harlan Crow’s Hitler Paintings from his Collection of Nazi Memorabelia is Likely a Fake, According to Two Top Experts”. Insider. 2023. https://www.businessinsider.com/harlan-crow-nazi-memorabilia-art-collection-hitler-painting-fake-2023-4