Hermann Göring’s personal art collection was the largest single accumulation of looted art assembled during the Second World War by anyone other than Hitler himself. By the time of the German collapse in May 1945, Göring had amassed around fourteen hundred paintings, two hundred and fifty sculptures, one hundred and seventy tapestries and around three thousand other items, including books, prints, drawings and decorative objects. The collection was housed at his hunting estate Carinhall, north of Berlin, and at his various other residences. Almost all of it had been stolen, extorted under duress, or acquired at deflated prices from Jewish owners across occupied Europe.
The collection was not built passively. Göring ran it as a personal project. He visited Paris twenty times between 1940 and 1942, sometimes for stays of several days, and inspected the storage rooms at the Jeu de Paume and the Louvre, where the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg had concentrated the property of arrested Jewish families. He made selections personally. The Jeu de Paume curator Rose Valland, who continued to work at the museum throughout the occupation while secretly recording every transaction, observed Göring’s visits in detail. Her wartime notebooks, deposited at the French archives after liberation, are the basis of the surviving record. Göring took home what he wanted. The Rosenberg organisation acquired what he had not selected for shipment to Carinhall and the other senior recipients of the looted property.
The collection’s strengths were Old Master paintings, in particular Dutch and Flemish work of the seventeenth century. Göring particularly liked Cranach, Memling, Rubens, Vermeer and Rembrandt. He also acquired a substantial body of nineteenth century French painting, including Impressionist work he had previously condemned in public as degenerate. The conflict between his official ideological position on modern art and his private taste for the same art was a theme of the postwar literature on him; he was, on this question, a hypocrite who knew the value of what he was condemning. The collection also included substantial bodies of medieval ivory, Renaissance bronzes, and tapestries from the great French and Flemish workshops.
Carinhall itself was an enormous hunting lodge, expanded in stages between 1934 and 1944, and named for Göring’s first wife, Carin, who had died in 1931 and whose body he had reinterred in a mausoleum on the grounds. The art was hung throughout the lodge and stored in dedicated vaults. Photographs from 1944 and 1945 show the great hall hung with major works in two and three rows. As the Soviet army approached the estate in April 1945, Göring ordered Carinhall packed up and dynamited. The art was loaded onto trains and trucks and sent south toward the Berchtesgaden complex. Some of it was hidden in the Altaussee salt mines in Austria, alongside the works that had been earmarked for Hitler’s Linz Führermuseum.
American forces arrived at the Altaussee mine in May 1945 and found, alongside the Führermuseum collection, around twelve hundred paintings, drawings and sculptures from Göring’s holdings. American Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives officers, the Monuments Men, took inventory of the find. The Göring portion of the holdings was returned to the countries of origin under the Allied policy of external restitution: France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the other occupied countries received their works back, in principle, for redistribution to the original owners or, where the original owners had been murdered and no heir could be found, for transfer to national collections. The receiving governments did not, in most cases, conduct serious efforts to find the original owners or their heirs. Around five hundred works are still listed on the French national inventory of MNR works, the Musées Nationaux Récupération, the works recovered after the war from the German loot and held by the French state pending restitution to identifiable owners. Most of these works passed through Göring’s hands at some point.
Göring himself was tried at Nuremberg, convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in October 1946, and sentenced to hang. He took cyanide on the night before his execution, on 15 October 1946. The art collection that was his pride was already, at that point, being unpicked across the Allied zones. The unpicking has continued for eighty years and is still continuing.
See also
- Hermann Göring
- Adolf Hitler
- Fuhrermuseum Project
- The Salt Mines at Altaussee
- The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg
- The Monuments Men
Sources
- Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, Knopf, 1994
- Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 2000
- Jonathan Petropoulos, Goering’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World, Yale University Press, 2021
- Rose Valland, Le front de l’art: Défense des collections françaises 1939, 1945, Plon, 1961
- Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men, Center Street, 2009
- French national MNR inventory, Musées Nationaux Récupération, ongoing