Hitler’s Museum
The Linz Museum—conceived of by Adolf Hitler, designed by architect Albert Speer, financed and administered by Martin Bormann, envied (at times even sabotaged) by Hermann Goering, stocked by Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Posse, Hermann Voss and the Sonderauftraug, or “Special Commission,” of more than 20 of Hitler’s leading art specialists (curators of paintings, prints, armor, and coins, restorers, photographers, librarians, architects, and engineers)—was among the strangest of Hitler’s criminal ambitions, envisioned to become the Nazis’ Smithsonian Institution: a Louvre for the 1,000-Year Reich. A colossal art museum created to house the world’s greatest Aryan cultural achievements, this campus of buildings in Linz was planned to hold works by all of the great masters of Europe that the Nazis bought and seized during the occupation of Europe. Under Hitler’s direct command, Special Commission agents stationed in France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland systematically acquired more than 10,000 art objects, objects that, in turn, were shipped on to Germany and Austria for wartime storage in castles and deep underground mines that had been converted for the purpose. Such was Hitler’s attachment to the project that when he committed suicide in Berlin in April 1945, the scale model of the museum was there, underground in the bunker, next to him.
Launching a museum project with a continent-wide acquisitions staff in the middle of a brutal world war is further detail about the operatic insanity of the German Fuhrer, himself an Austrian artist and failed art student. And the detail is extraordinary. Quite apart from the entire infrastructure of the German political leadership, military, and police deployed across Europe, the Fuhrermuseum, as it was called, requisitioned the services of almost the entire apparatus of German art dealing and curation—dealers like Karl Haberstock in Berlin, Maria Dietrich in Munich, Hildebrandt Gurlitt in Hamburg and Dresden, auction house owner Adolf Weinmueller in Vienna and Munich, the brothers Kajetan and Josef Muehlmann; Dresden Gallery Director Hans Posse, Bavarian State Museum Director Ernst Buchner, Armor Curator from the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Institut Leopold Ruprecht; even Walter Andreas Hoefer, director of Goering’s art collection. At the end of the war, when the Allies located Hitler’s private library, they discovered hundreds of detailed architectural drawings of the buildings that Hitler had intended to build in Linz.
The art bought and seized—bought for tens of millions of Reichmarks—in the name of the Fuhrer and this Museum was also extraordinary, from perhaps the greatest work bought for Linz, Vermeer’s “Portrait of the Artist in His Studio,” to works by Breughel, Durer, Fragonard, Rembrandt, and Rubens. When the U.S. Army arrived in Austria in May 1945, American soldiers found thousands of the precious paintings, sculptures, coins, and armor that had been collected, many in a deep salt mine converted for the purpose in Alt Aussee. The U.S. War Department and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) swiftly established a special Art Looting Investigation Unit and began to conduct detailed interviews with the surviving Nazi figures from the Linz operation—recommending, in a final confidential report issued in 1946, that many of them be prosecuted at Nuremburg for their crimes.
Today, at long last, the full story of the Linz Museum can be told. Key documents seized by the Soviet Red Army in its sweep through Austria and Germany in 1945 and 1946—documents about the Museum’s operational details previously thought to have disappeared—have been located in Russia and the former East bloc. Together with other materials that only recently have come to light—photos, over 10,000 of them, for the catalogs and albums of the Museum, now located in Dresden; German secret police interviews with members of the Special Commission, now open and on file in Berlin; interviews with German military officials by the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit, in the National Archives in Washington; supplementary material from the German Bundesarchive in Koblenz; and the odd bits of evidence, miscellany, and memorabilia from the city of Linz itself—the total picture of this Museum at last is becoming clear.
Distinguished Boston art historian James Plaut, former director of the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, was appointed head of the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit. He wrote in The Atlantic in 1946 about Hitler and the Museum:
Hitler devoted a disproportionate amount of time and energy, for a chief of state, to the plans for Linz, personally creating the architectural scheme for an imposing array of public buildings, and setting the formula for an art collection which was to specialize heavily in his beloved, mawkish German school of the nineteenth century. His private library, discovered by the American Army deep in Austria [and now in the Library of Congress in Washington], contained scores of completed architectural renderings for the Linz project, of which the Führer-museum was to be a single edifice related to the whole, comprising a great library (with an initial quota of 250,000 volumes), a theater, and a separate collection of armor. German painting of the nineteenth century was to be assembled in such quantity that, should the need arise for a separate building to house the monumental collection, it could be integrated successfully with the master plan.... The Führer-museum, with a colonnaded façade about 500 feet long, the design paralleling that of the great Haus für Deutsche Kunst already erected in Munich, would stand on the site of the present Linz railroad station, which was to be moved four kilometers to the south. Roderich Fick, the official architect, made his drawings entirely from Hitler’s personal prescriptions.
The Soviets were deeply involved in these art-theft questions. Soviet leader Josef Stalin personally supervised much of the Soviet effort at plundering art objects in Germany. His Defense Committee Resolution #9256, designed officially to “supplement the collections of Soviet State Museums,” launched a Soviet continent-wide art hunt operatic in scale in its own right. Like the Nazis, the Soviets employed art experts with profound knowledge of European cultural artifacts. Mikhail Khrapchenko, who had directed part of the Communist Institute of Literature and Art, was charged with running the new Art Committee of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars. The Soviets established a forward art front headquarters at Pilnitz, an estate in Dresden where the men charged with carrying out Resolution #9256 found an idyllic spot from which to sort through canvases, sculptures, and antiques. Igor Grabar, painter, art historian, and the former Director of the Tretiakov Gallery, compiled a long list of artwork the Soviets specifically were to look for—world-class art masterpieces from Bosch, Goya, Rubens, Titian, van Dyck, van Gogh. Officially, the Russians grounded their claims to this art in reparations—agreed upon, they said, at Yalta. When the men at Pilnitz—operating under the guise of the Education Department of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany—shipped Raphael’s Sistine Madonna to Moscow, Khrapchenko fantasized that “it would now be possible to turn Moscow’s Pushkin Museum into one of the world’s great museums, like the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Hermitage.”
Stalin’s soldiers shipped back trainloads more art. Soviet intelligence and counter-intelligence organizations like the NKVD and SMERSH had been engaged in a fierce hunt for Nazi archives, mainly for political, intelligence, counter-intelligence, and scientific-technological purposes, with a focus on scientific and technological information. But in the process, the Russians located and returned to Russia with thousands of detailed records from the Sonderauftraug. Many of these records, hidden from Allied bombers in the warrens beneath Schloss Weesenstein, a 13th-century castle once home to the King of Saxony, were carted back to Moscow for the Pushkin Museum, and were transferred in 1976 to the Center for Historical Documentary Collections “Special Holdings” unit. Much of this material, including the Linz archives, has come to light in the Russian archives—the Linz collection features extensive lists and registers of art works, business and work correspondence with various offices of the Third Reich on acquiring these works of art for the Museum, expert accounts and appraisals; administrative memos of various kinds; invoices; receipts; and, toward the end, detailed if hastily written evacuation reports. And these evacuations had been dramatic. As Plaut had written 60 years ago:
Hysteria in the Reich Chancellery had become so intense by the end of 1943 that Hitler ordered a wholesale evacuation of the [many] repositories [in Germany and Austria] in favor of a still safer refuge. In February, 1944, with the snow blanketing the country, truck convoys began to move south with their precious cargo, in the direction of Linz itself. Just east of Salzburg, however, they turned off and began to climb laboriously into the mountainous region of the Upper Danube. Their destination was a fourteenth-century salt mine, high above the picturesque village of Alt Aussee.
Few undertakings of the war were more painstaking or futile. The road to Aussee climbs over two high passes, virtually unassailable in the dead of winter. With frantic determination to conceal the loot in the very earth of the last redoubt, tanks and even oxen were used where trucks failed to scale the slippery barrier. For thirteen months, through the winter and summer of 1944 and into the winter of 1945, the convoys limped over the mountains and left their cargo at the entrance to the mine.
The Steinberg mine is a labyrinth with a single outlet. A tunnel little more than six feet in height—so that a tall man negotiates it with difficulty—cuts two kilometers horizontally into the mountainside and, winding around, links a series of mammoth caverns, from which salt has been mined through the centuries. A miniature gasoline engine can proceed through the tunnel on narrow-gauge rails at snail’s pace, hauling a tiny flat car. There is no other access to the mine’s interior.
For “Dora” (the code name of the secret deposit) workmen transformed these grotesque subterranean vaults into model storage rooms, fitted with clean wooden floors and specially constructed racks, dehumidification equipment, and modern lighting fixtures. Dora was surely the most fantastic manifestation of the last-ditch Nazi stand. Here, Hitler planned literally to go underground.
In 1944 and 1945, “Dora” received 6,755 old master paintings, of which 5,350 were destined for Linz, 230 drawings, 1,039 prints, 95 tapestries, 68 sculptures, 43 cases of objects d’art, and innumerable pieces of furniture; in addition, 119 cases of books from Hitler’s library in Berlin, and 237 cases of books for the Linz library. The last convoy arrived at the mine less than a month before V-E Day.
These detailed, annotated catalog records of the art sought and seized for the Museum, along with the Museum’s blueprints and full financial and administrative records, form the basis of this extraordinary new television, radio, and online history of Hitler’s Linz Museum. Taken together, these records, drawings, photographs, and interviews, allow the world that Hitler had imagined for Linz to be shown to the public interested in the history of World War II, art, Germany, and Russia.
The documentary, book, exhibit, and the digital creation of this failed museum (enlisting virtual reality technologies such as those at http://www.cvrlab.org/) will allow people to see for the first time this strange, evil, and bizarrely artistic vision from one of the cruelest, most powerful men in the history of the world.
The executive planning committee of this Linz Museum media project includes Nina Bouis, author, translator, and former Executive Director of the Soros Foundation in Russia; Nicolas V. Iljine, European Representative of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; and Jonathan Sanders, veteran CBS news correspondent, Director of the Project on the Russian Future, Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, and former Assistant Director of the W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
