Half a century later, the paintings of Adolf Hitler are still a federal case: PART II Images added by this website
FROM the case file of Billy Price v. United States of America, in which the late historian Sybil Milton provided a 35-page statement on behalf of the government, arguing that it was essential for the United States to maintain control of Hitler's paintings: "The only reason that the four Hitler watercolors have any value at all is because of the notoriety of the painter. An excellent case can be made that these drawings 'might revitalize the Nazi spirit or German militarism' (the language of the Potsdam Agreement of 2 August 1945), since they make Hitler look harmless and therefore could be used to disguise the horror and murderous brutality of Nazi Germany through Hitler's seemingly innocuous amateur art." Hitler was 18 when he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, planning to make his life as an artist. He flunked the drawing test and was rejected. He later wrote in Mein Kampf, "That gentleman [the rector] assured me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for painting." Hitler's ability lay instead in architecture, the rector told the young man. By 1910 the 20-year-old Hitler was working in Vienna as a draftsman and painter of watercolors. William Shirer wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that Hitler "sold hundreds of these pitiful pieces" to "petty traders to ornament a wall, to dealers who used them to fill empty picture frames on display and to furniture makers who sometimes tacked them to the backs of cheap sofas and chairs after a fashion in Vienna in those days." Hitler's biographers generally give short shrift to the dictator's years as a failing artist. Alan Bullock's classic, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, concludes that the future Fuehrer produced "entirely unoriginal drawings" and "grandiose plans." "He had the artist's temperament without either talent, training or creative energy." In Hitler: The Path to Power, Charles Bracelen Flood writes that "Hitler had a flair for drawing; filling the apartment at 31 Humboldtstrasse with his sketches, he dreamed of becoming a great painter." But for most historians, the only moment that matters in Hitler's artistic career is the art school rejection. The key text is from Hitler friend August Kubizek, who wrote that after receiving the rejection, Hitler launched into a tirade in which "his face was livid, the mouth quite small, the lips almost white. But the eyes glittered. There was something sinister about them. As if all the hate of which he was capable lay in those glowing eyes . . . Hitler never ceased to feel ashamed of what his dream of being a painter had become."
That's where they were in 1945 when U.S. soldiers found them. Five years later, Col. H.E. Potter, chief of the U.S. Army European Command's Historical Division, ordered the artwork confiscated and sent to Washington -- along with thousands of other works by Germans depicting the Nazi war effort, florid and melodramatic scenes of glory and sacrifice on the home front, and overt propaganda for the Nazi leaders and their policies. The U.S. government confiscated the whole mess and has spent half a century arguing with itself and outsiders about whether the art is dangerous and what to do with it. As late as 1966, according to files at the Army Center of Military History, the military was telling collectors that it wanted to add to its collection of Hitler material. But in the 1970s, West Germany asked for the return of thousands of artworks still held by Washington. The Defense Department set up a committee of bureaucrats and art experts to determine whether the art should be given back. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum argued against returning any art -- by, of or about Hitler and his henchmen. Such images could rekindle German nationalism and feed latent anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism, museum officials said. Robert Wolfe, who at 81 remains the leading expert
on the National Archives' collection of World War II
materials, served on the committee and pushed for just about
everything to be given back to the Germans. Congress eventually complied with most of the committee's recommendations, but, Wolfe says, "in their usual ignorance," lawmakers refused to send back anything that showed a swastika or Nazi symbols or leaders. "They had this idea that if we sent the Nazi symbols back, all the Germans would become Nazis again," Wolfe scoffs. The Army kept about 200 Nazi-tainted works, a representative sample of about 250 pieces of the rest of the collection, and the four Hitlers; the remaining 8,000 or so works were delivered to the Germans.
"The attitude on the committee was, 'Everything goes -- except . . . ' " says another member of the panel, Marylou Gjernes, former curator of the U.S. Army Art Collection. "Germany still has very firm laws about what can and cannot be displayed. We didn't want to embarrass them." So the watercolors sit in their drawer. Occasionally, a scholar makes an appointment to look at them. In the 1960s, they were put on display in a couple of touring exhibitions. But Gjernes and her successor, Renee Klish, are the only people who have had daily custody of the works for all these years. Gjernes, now retired in Silver Spring, is no fan of Hitler's art, yet she has developed a certain fascination: "It's a side of him that no one expects. You don't expect to see an artist. It's very incongruous, and in a way, it's frightening. If someone who can perpetrate such evil can also have this softer side, then who's to say that possibly isn't in each one of us? Or that it won't happen again? "I often looked at them and wondered, 'What if? What if he had been accepted into art school? What if he had gone into landscaping or architecture? Would World War II have happened?' It becomes a real psychological study." Klish, custodian of the watercolors for three years, has inherited her predecessor's fascination with the works and exasperation with the attention they steal from the better art in the collection. Among the four pictures, there is only one human figure, a matronly woman standing alone in an eerily empty urban square in Vienna. Would the woman's utter lack of detail and the painting's odd absence of emotion stand out so sharply if we didn't know what had become of the artist? Is it possible to look at these antiseptic street scenes and see the roots of Hitler's obsession with cleanliness and his belief that his mission in life was to cleanse Germany and the world of the germ of Judaism?
Billy Price is a Houston businessman and pecan farmer who made his fortune in the compressor industry. A World War II buff, he realized at some point that Hitler, Churchill and Eisenhower were all painters and thought there might be something to learn from this fact. He delved into their art and ended up one of the world's foremost collectors of Hitler artwork. At one point in the 1970s, he owned 28 Hitler paintings and five sketches. In 1982, the children of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's photographer, sold Price an interest in the four watercolors Hitler had given to their father as presents. Price volunteered to take on the task of getting the pictures back from the U.S. Army. Washington conceded all along that the pictures had belonged to Hoffmann, but said that treaties signed at war's end prohibited their return. "The government is going to prevent dissemination of Nazi propaganda," the Justice Department declared near the beginning of Price's legal odyssey. But Price was undeterred, and in the early years, he seemed to hold the high ground in the dispute. "This is a simple dispute over the right to some personal property," U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes said in an early opinion in Price's favor. Not so simple. "Some representatives of the United States saw early on that this material should go back to its owner, but others decided to fight to the death," says Larry Campagna, a Houston lawyer whose firm has represented Price for 18 years. "They've thrown up every legal defense you can imagine, but if you're asking what the principle is behind their argument, I haven't figured out any principle, to be honest." Jeffrey Axelrad has worked the Price case for the Justice Department for much of his career. "I've written more briefs on this than you can shake a stick at," he says. But he believes the case really is quite simple: "The Nazis were a horrible, evil regime, and one consequence of that is that they don't have any equity. The rights of Germans who were in Germany then were wiped out." In a brief he wrote in 1989, Axelrad put it even more succinctly: "The United States is entitled to retain Hitler memorabilia . . . because we won the war." Price cannot accept that. He clings to the line in the Geneva Protocol, the law of war, that says "all seizure or destruction of works of art . . . is forbidden." In the years in which the legal battle has moved from Texas to Washington and back and forth among at least four courts, Price has bowed to various other pressures. As his collection became well known, he was routinely denounced as a neo-Nazi. Galleries and museums refused his offers to display his Hitlers.
In 1990, court records indicate, someone who didn't like the idea that Price's office held all those Hitler works put a bullet through the front of his place of business. Disheartened and scared, Price sold all 24 of his Hitlers, which had been valued at about $4 million. Price has since remained silent about his collection and lawsuit -- as is his policy, he did not respond to requests for an interview for this article. But the lawsuit continues, and Campagna says Price will not back away. He wants the watercolors or compensation for them, about $1.5 million -- far less than the $7.9 million the Texas judge granted him in 1989, before an appeals court reversed that ruling. "He does this out of a sense of what he thinks is right," Price's lawyer says. "The concept that these paintings would foster a new round of Nazism is absurd, especially given the number of Hitler paintings that are out there. And there are some very beautiful paintings by Hitler, things that people should be permitted to see. There is something to be learned from studying art and history. These paintings show there's more than one side to this man."
Hitler had his own solution for his artwork. In his will, he wrote that his paintings were intended "exclusively for the establishment of an art gallery in my native town of Linz. It is my heartfelt desire that this legacy be fulfilled." Clearly, he cared deeply about his erstwhile identity as an artist. Even as he hurled his nation into war, Hitler took the time to burnish his artistic credentials, designing his capital city, defining acceptable, "Aryan" art, declaring many modern works to be "degenerate" art by demented and subhuman artists. What offended Hitler most deeply was art that aimed to show the artist's state of mind rather than mirroring an external reality.
"too close to the Fuehrer, so close that the magnitude of his evil became a distorting lens that makes any human perspective impossible. So close that the temptation, the inevitable tendency, is to begin looking at all history in terms of how it led to Hitler and the death camps. And a concomitant temptation . . . to view all evil in relation to Hitler's evil. A process that can end up turning Hitler into a kind of graven image -- a defining, if not ruling, principle of all being." Similarly, those who collect Hitler's art eventually come to look at the dictator through the prism of his paintings. Charles Snyder and Billy Price and other collectors end up asking how an artist can be evil, how someone who devotes himself to and even creates beauty can be considered a person of pure malice? If there is an answer in Hitler's watercolors, no collector has found it. But Berel Lang, a philosopher at the State University of New York at Albany, has explored an idea that brings together the artist and the architect of genocide. Writing about "evil as an art, the art of evil," Lang looks at the Nazi genocide and Hitler's lies about it and sees "an artistic consciousness of an overall design." The notion is shocking, even offensive. But Rosenbaum concludes that the Nazis were very much aware of their own wrongdoing, and to make their evil intent palatable to the masses, Hitler and the Nazis returned repeatedly to the Fuehrer's lifelong image of himself as an artist. In Lang's view, the mass rallies, so intricately staged; Hitler's studied performances in his speeches; his posing as his nation's art critic; his grandiose architectural plans -- all of this was "nothing if not art." Lang believes that the design of the Nazi regime was the ultimate expression of Hitler's frustrated art -- the art his father had raged against; the artistic ambition that the academy crushed when it rejected him. Long after he gave up on his watercolors, Hitler continued to be an artist in his own mind, a mythmaker. This, of course, is an academic point; surely Hitler didn't consider the Holocaust a work of art. Maybe you have to be an American to accept this retrospective analysis; maybe only Americans, who love to personalize history and politics, can shoehorn Hitler into our entertainment culture, turning his artworks into a commodity, a celebrity artifact. Lang concludes that Hitler's was an "immoral imagination" at work, truly an "evil genius." What remains from the evil genius's hand and vision did
not end up where he wanted. Instead, Hitler's art is
dispersed around the world, largely hidden from public view,
in collectors' vaults and here, in a drawer in a windowless
U.S. Army office in the basement of an ordinary office
building at 14th and L, under the supervision of a nice
Jewish curator whose first love is the very kind of
"degenerate" art that Hitler ordered destroyed.. Marc Fisher is a Post columnist.
Related item on this website: |
IN 1935, Hitler ordered the Nazi Party to find and obtain as
many of his paintings as possible. Many were purchased from
German citizens for prices of about two years' average
salary for a German worker. The assembled pictures were
stored in underground bunkers.
write
to David Irving