Fuhrermuseum Project

The Führermuseum was the centerpiece of Hitler’s plans for the postwar transformation of his hometown of Linz, in upper Austria, into a cultural capital that would rival Vienna. The museum was to house the largest art collection in the world, drawn from across occupied Europe and selected for the Führer’s personal taste. By the end of the war the Linz collection contained around eight thousand paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, tapestries and decorative items. Almost all of it had been bought at deflated prices, extorted under duress, or simply confiscated from Jewish collectors and museums in occupied Europe. The museum was never built. The collection was found by American forces in the Altaussee salt mine in May 1945.

Hitler had set the project in motion in June 1939, three months before the war. He appointed the Dresden Gemaldegalerie director Hans Posse, an art historian of standing, as Sonderbeauftragter für Linz, special commissioner for Linz, with personal authority to acquire works for the new museum from across the German cultural sphere and, after September 1939, from occupied territory. Posse worked directly with Hitler and reported to him personally on his major acquisitions. He died of cancer in late 1942 and was succeeded by Hermann Voss, also an art historian of professional standing, who continued the work until the German collapse.

The acquisition methods varied by country. In Austria after the Anschluss in 1938, the Vienna apartments of Jewish collectors were systematically searched and the contents inventoried. The Bondi-Jaray, Bloch-Bauer, Lederer, Rothschild, Gutmann and Lanckoronski collections were the major Vienna sources. The works the Führermuseum did not select were redistributed to other German museums, to Göring’s collection, or to the regional galleries. In occupied Czechoslovakia from 1939, the Lobkowicz, Czernin, Schwarzenberg and other major collections were stripped to a similar pattern. In occupied France from 1940, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg ran the operation; the Führermuseum had first refusal on the works the ERR collected at the Jeu de Paume. In occupied Poland, the Mühlmann office ran a parallel operation, draining the Polish national collections, the Czartoryski collection at Kraków and the Lanckoronski collection at Žółkiew, of their major works. In occupied Italy from 1943, after Mussolini’s fall, the Hertziana collection in Rome and the Florence galleries were targeted for evacuation to Germany.

The works flowed back to Munich, where they were held in the Führerbau and the Verwaltungsbau, the two administrative buildings on the Königsplatz, while Hitler personally inspected the major acquisitions and approved their inclusion in the Linz inventory. The Linz catalogue, around three thousand pages of typed sheets with photographs, was kept in Munich until late 1944 and is now held at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. The catalogue is the basis of the postwar restitution work. Where a work appears in the Linz catalogue with a clear acquisition source, the source can be traced and the original owner or heirs identified. Where a work appears with the source listed as Posse-Lager, Posse Stockpile, the chain is murkier and individual research is required.

The collection was evacuated to the Altaussee mine in spring 1944. The mine, deep in the Salzkammergut alps, had been chosen because the temperature and humidity inside the salt workings were stable and because the mine could not be bombed. By the time of the German collapse in May 1945, around six thousand five hundred paintings, two hundred and thirty drawings, one hundred and thirty seven sculptures and around eighty thousand books were stored in the mine. The local SS commander August Eigruber received an order in late April 1945, attributed to Hitler personally and signed by Eigruber’s office, to dynamite the mine if the Allies approached. The mine’s miners and supervisors, with the help of the regional engineer August Pichler and the SS officer Albrecht Gaiswinkler, refused to carry out the order and physically removed the explosives. American forces arrived on 8 May 1945 and the contents of the mine were preserved.

The Monuments Men inventoried the find over the next year. Most of the works were returned to the country of origin. France received around two thousand. The Netherlands received around fifteen hundred. Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union received their works back. The receiving countries did not, in most cases, do thorough work to identify and contact the original owners or heirs, and many of the works ended up in national collections rather than restituted. The Washington Principles of 1998 and the various national restitution commissions established since have begun, slowly, the work of finding the original owners. The Linz catalogue is the master document for that work. The job is not yet finished and the rate of restitutions has slowed in the last decade as the easier cases have been settled and the harder ones, with murkier provenance and more contested ownership, have been left to the slow apparatus of the courts and the commissions.

See also

Sources

  • Hanns Christian Löhr, Das Braune Haus der Kunst: Hitler und der Sonderauftrag Linz, Akademie Verlag, 2005
  • Birgit Schwarz, Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst, Böhlau, 2009
  • Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa, Knopf, 1994
  • Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain, Oxford University Press, 2000
  • Linz inventory and Sonderauftrag Linz catalogue, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B 323
  • Robert M. Edsel, Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, W. W. Norton, 2013