Hitler’s Horses
Hitler is known for having looted and stolen, for his own personal collection, countless works of art including paintings, drawings, sculptures, and more. While some of these pieces have been repatriated or returned to their owners, what happened to the rest?
2013
Obviously this story starts long before 2013 but this is where it really gets good so I’ll just give you a little of the background before I get into it. During his regime, Hitler made it very clear the kind of art he did not like but not as much is known about the art that he did favour.
Some of his favourite artists, from whom he commissioned many pieces for different state and personal buildings, were Arno Breker, Josef Thorak, and Fritz Klimsch. Breker was commissioned to create granite reliefs to adorn the Reich Chancellery but were never installed. Thorak crafted two horse statues out of bronze to guard the front of the Chancellery, and Klimsch created two statues of women to sit in a courtyard behind the building.
During WWII all of these art pieces vanished, many assumed they were destroyed in the bombing of Berlin, where the Chancellery was, but some always wondered if they had somehow survived.
Now, back to 2013. Long time art dealer, and sometimes police informant, Traude Sauer received a call asking if she would be interested in purchasing two bronze horse sculptures that came from a Soviet military base outside of Berlin. As a result of her long history in the business Sauer realized that these could be stolen Nazi-era state property and promptly reported the call to René Allonge, a chief investigator with the Berlin police.
As an aside, it’s legal to own art commissioned by the Nazis in Germany but it can only be privately owned as long as the state doesn’t have a claim to it. Right from the beginning, it was known that this wasn’t the case with these artworks.
What Happened During WWII
Well that’s a big question but in terms of these artworks I can give you an answer. The two horse statues created by Thorak were so precious to Hitler that when the Allies started bombing Berlin in 1943 they were evacuated from the city (keep in mind that they’re each 16 feet high, 33 feet long, and weigh 2 tons apiece). They were taken to Wriezen, Germany where they were stored in Breker’s studio.
In 1946 the Soviets, occupying Eastern Germany at the time, took some of Breker’s works (and presumably Thorak’s horses as well) and moved them to military barracks in a nearby town. That’s where they stayed until communism started to crumble in East Germany.
2014
Now jumping back to the future again, guess who was also involved with this case? If you guessed Arthur Brand, you’d be correct! He had heard about the tip that Sauer had passed along to the Berlin police along with photos that the seller sent as proof. “Brand said when he first saw the photos, "Yeah, right, those horses were destroyed. This is ridiculous”” (Associated Press, 2015). However, this stuck with him and in the end piqued his interest enough to start looking into the matter.
Brand and his company looked at everything from Russian military documents, satellite images, documentaries, and German archives before finally becoming convinced that the horses that were offered to Sauer were the real deal. They were the same ones that had once guarded the entrance to the Reich Chancellery in downtown Berlin.
2015
In early 2015 Brand, Allonge, and the wider German police joined forces and the investigation really gained some steam as they tried to figure out who was the seller of these statues. In order to reach out to the seller as a potentially interested buyer, Brand invented a character called Mr. Moss, a Texas oil billionaire. Brand used Mr. Moss to lure the Belgian middleman to meetings where he wore a camera disguised as a button on his lapel to hopefully capture some clues as to where the horses were or who was the seller. However, the middleman stalled and stalled and never gave any good information in any of the meetings.
So Brand and Allonge went back to the drawing board. They reviewed the original tip from Sauer where she said that the caller “a onetime car salesman named Johannes von Senkowski — had let slip that the sculptures were in the possession of a Rainer Wolf, a businessman from Bad Dürkheim, a town of about 19,000 in the bucolic Rhineland region of western Germany” (Smale and Coburn, 2015).
When the police went to Bad Dürkheim, as part of a huge simultaneous raid of 10 properties across Germany, they entered a property rented by Wolf and were startled to find the giant bronze horses along with several other works (such as some of the reliefs by Breker). Altogether, around 30 artworks were seized across all 10 raids on May 20, 2015.
“Ms. Sauer said it was evident that the works had been stolen. “The Russians just left them standing,” she said. “And overnight, they disappeared. Excuse me, but you can’t just stick them in your pocket!”” (Smale and Coburn, 2015).
And the Thieves?
Well, it’s still a little unclear but after these raids 8 people were arrested in connection with this case (but their identities haven’t been released to the public). One of these people is Wolf, the man who owned the property where the horses were found, and he says that “the art objects were lawfully acquired more than 25 years ago from the Russian Army and the earlier producers” (Smale and Coburn, 2015). So we’ll see where that goes and how this plays out in court, hopefully soon.
But the good news in the horses weren’t destroyed, they somehow survived the war and they are now in the hands of the German government who can choose whatever is most appropriate to do with them.
Works Cited
Associated Press. “Dutch Art Sleuth Helps Track Down Nazi Art”. VOA. 2015. https://www.voanews.com/a/dutch-art-sleuth-helps-track-down-nazi-art/2786016.html
“Lost Reich Chancellery Horses Found in Warehouse”. The History Blog. 2015. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/36729
Smale, Alison and Jesse Coburn. “Sleuth Work Leads to Discovery of Art Beloved by Hitler”. The New York Times. 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/world/europe/sleuth-work-leads-to-discovery-of-art-beloved-by-hitler.html