Raubkunst
This word, literally translated, means art confiscated from private collections, especially from Jewish collectors in Nazi Germany. Yup, we’re talking about Nazi art thefts, but not all of them because that would be way too much to cover (they did it a lot). We’re going to be talking about one specific person and his role in all this.
September 22, 2010
At around 9:00 pm the high-speed train from Zurich to Munich was crossing the border. It is routine for customs officers to come on board and check passengers because there is often money changing hands destined for Swiss bank accounts so officers are on the lookout for any suspicious behaviour.
One officer asked an old man for his papers and he presents an Austrian passport saying that he is Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt born in 1932. He was giving answers to the officer when questioned but he was behaving so nervously and suspiciously that the officer ended up searching him. He found an envelope with €9,000 ($12,000) in crisp new bills. That’s not illegal though, amounts under €10,000 don’t need to be declared, but something just felt very off to this officer. He let the man go back to his seat but flagged him, which ended up being the first step in uncovering mysteries that had been left unsolved for decades.
At first glance, Cornelius really seemed to be a ghost. He told the officer he lived in Munich but his residence (and where he files his taxes) is in Salzburg. After more research, they were hard-pressed to come up with any information on this man at all. However, after even more digging they finally found that he had been living in Schwabing, a nice Munich neighbourhood, in a $1 million apartment for years. Interesting.
His name also set off some alarm bells. Gurllit. During the time when Hitler was in control in Germany, Hildebrand Gurlitt was a museum curator and one of the Nazi-approved art dealers. During these years he gathered together a huge collection of art that had been stolen from Jewish collectors. People started to wonder if there was a connection between Cornelius and Hildenbrand. But because of private property and invasion of privacy laws, the police weren’t able to get a search warrant for his apartment until 2011. And then they were so nervous and weird about it that it wasn’t executed until 2012.
February 28, 2012
When the police (and tax officials, since the warrant was officially for tax evasion) entered Cornelius’ home what they found shocked them. They were confronted with an apartment filled with looted art; 121 framed and 1,285 unframed artworks. Including work by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Chagall, Max Liebermann, Otto Dix, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Kirchner, Delacroix, Daumier, and Courbet. The list goes on but I genuinely don’t think I have space to list them all. It was estimated that the collection could be worth over $1 billion.
Over the next three days, Cornelius sat quietly and watched as the police packaged up and took away the artworks that had filled his home for almost half a century. All of this was done on the down low so no one even knew this was taking place until years later, but we’ll get to that.
Let’s first back up a bit because how did Cornelius (or more accurately, Cornelius’ family) get these paintings in the first place?
The Third Reich
Hildenbrand, Cornelius’ father, was a distinguished art curator and even though he was ¼ Jewish he was an art dealer for the Nazis. He helped Goebbels confiscate art from public and private collections in order to make some money for the party. He helped organize the “Degenerate Art” show which was the culmination of all this confiscation and blatant theft. The show had an average of 20,000 people attending each day it was open. During this time he was permitted to acquire “degenerate art” for himself as long as he paid for each piece in hard foreign currency. So, in 1937 and the next few years he took full advantage of this, acquiring over 300 pieces for next to nothing.
When France fell in 1940, Hildenbrand was there a lot of the time and honestly, he was playing everyone. No one more than the owners of the paintings he bought in the name of giving them some cash to help them escape persecution. He would also enter abandoned Jewish homes and just take their artwork that had been left behind. Yeah.
It goes on like that for a while until April 14, 1945. Allied troops entered the beautiful Aschbach castle in Bavaria where they found Hildenbrand hiding out with his collection of art objects. They counted 47 art objects. If that number seems weird you’re not alone. Hildenbrand was placed under house arrest at the castle until 1948 and his works were taken away for examination. He said that they were all legitimately his and that the documentation proving this, along with the rest of his collection, had been destroyed along with his home during the bombing of Dresden. Again, if this seems super fishy you’re right! Hildenbrand was lying! The rest of it had been hidden in multiple secret locations around France and Germany.
At this time Cornelius was 12 and he and his sister were sent off to boarding school while their father was under castle arrest. In 1956 Hildenbrand was killed in a car crash. In 1960 Helene (Cornelius’ mother) sold four paintings from her late husbands’ collection. That’s how they were paying the bills, and how Cornelius continued to be able to afford such a life of luxury in Munich for so long.
November 4, 2013
Almost 20 months after the paintings were removed from Cornelius’ apartment the story broke. The news that potentially the biggest cache of looted Nazi art in recent history had been found made headlines around the world. In the only interview he granted, with a Der Spiegel reporter, Cornelius said that “the loss of his pictures hit him harder than the loss of his parents, or his sister, who died of cancer in 2012” (Shoumatoff, 2014).
“He insisted his father had only associated with Nazis in order to save these precious works of art, and Cornelius felt it was his duty to protect them, just as his father had heroically done. Gradually the artworks became his entire world, a parallel universe full of horror, passion, beauty, and endless fascination, in which he was a spectator. He was like a character in a Russian novel—intense, obsessed, isolated, and increasingly out of touch with reality” (Shoumatoff, 2014).
Restitution
After the artworks were seized Meike Hoffman, an art historian, was brought on to help trace the artworks’ provenance. She worked on this project for a year an a half and concluded that 380 were “degenerate” artworks. The works were then put online on the Lost Art Database’s website. One notable connection made through this was an heir of Paul Rosenberg spotting their Matisse (for which they still have the bill of sale) that had been missing for years. The Rosenbergs have filed a claim for it with the chief prosecutor, Nemetz. Lots of stories like this one. However, there is no German law that compels Cornelius to give these works back to their owners. Nemetz estimated that at least 310 of the seized works are the true property of Cornelius and should be returned to him whereas the President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany thinks that this stance should be reconsidered.
In December 2013, just months after the story broke, Cornelius was admitted to a clinic in Munich where he remained until May 6, 2014, when he died of heart failure. In his will, he named The Museum of Fine Arts Bern his sole heir. He chose a foreign museum because he felt that Germany had treated his father and himself poorly. Notably, though, the will also stipulated that the museum should research the provenance of each piece and make restitutions as appropriate. The museum accepted the paintings that were pre-WWII era and have slowly been returning the others to their rightful owners as they’re able to make these connections.
One last thought to leave you with. About his cousin Cornelius, Ekkeheart Gurlitt said he was “a lone cowboy, a lonely soul, and a tragic figure. He wasn’t in it for the money. If he were, he would have sold the pictures long ago.” He loved them. They were his whole life. Without admirers like that, art is nothing” (Shoumatoff, 2014). Not condoning anything he or his father did but it makes you think.
Works Cited
Shoumatoff, Alex. “The Devil and the Art Dealer”. Vanity Fair. 2014. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/04/degenerate-art-cornelius-gurlitt-munich-apartment