Sleuth Work Leads to Discovery of Art Beloved by Hitler
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Version 0 of 1. BERLIN — The recent startling recovery of long-lost artworks made for Adolf Hitler and his chief architect, Albert Speer, began with a telephone call to a Berlin art dealer. Two large and imposing bronze horses by Josef Thorak — missing from a Soviet military base outside Berlin since some point in communism’s collapse — were available. Was the dealer, Traude Sauer, interested? Ms. Sauer, 76, who by her own estimation is a dealer of distinction, has long been a police informant. Realizing that the Nazi-era sculptures might be classified as stolen state property, she turned to René Allonge, a chief investigator with the Berlin police. That was in September 2013. Last month, those tips culminated in one of the more sensational police raids in recent memory in Germany. The authorities descended on 10 properties nationwide, uncovering dozens of missing pieces of Nazi art and throwing rare light on the secretive market where such works are traded. It is legal to possess art commissioned by the Nazis, but it can remain in private hands only if the state has no direct claim on it. That is almost certainly not the case with several of the recovered works. The discovery of the horses, and of several sculptures and reliefs created by another Hitler favorite, Arno Breker, stunned researchers who had long lamented their disappearance. “Excited? Of course,” said Christian Fuhrmeister, an expert on Nazi art at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. “Art history is a science of objects. We really need the original work.” Especially, he added, given the paucity of surviving artworks commissioned by Hitler and his cronies. Art historians currently know much more about the art that Hitler did not like, he noted, than about works that the Nazis favored. The path to the missing works involved a cast of characters that could have come out of the board game Clue: the diminutive Ms. Sauer, a bag of art books always at her side; a private detective in Amsterdam who traces looted and stolen art; a fictitious Texan millionaire; a Belgian middleman; and a group of aging Germans still so intrigued by Hitler that at least one of them kept a Nazi-era tank on his rambling property, together with a long-lost statue, or its copy, depicting a Wehrmacht soldier as a hero. The horses, which adorned a courtyard in Hitler’s chancellery, were apparently so precious to the Führer that they were evacuated by 1943, when the first Allied bombs fell on Berlin. The Nazis took Thorak’s steeds to the town of Wriezen, Germany, and stored them there in Breker’s studio. In 1946, the Soviet forces who occupied eastern Germany apparently took several Breker pieces — and probably Thorak’s horses as well — to military barracks in nearby Eberswalde. There they remained until Communist rule started to crumble in East Germany. Sometime from mid-1988, when a group of West Berlin art historians took photographs of them, to 1991, when the Soviets began their retreat from East Germany, the horses disappeared. Their discovery was a shock for Arthur Brand, the private detective based in Amsterdam. “They came out of the sky,” he said. “Everybody thought they had been destroyed.” Mr. Brand entered the investigation in January 2014, when one of his Dutch informants reported that he, like Ms. Sauer, had been offered the Thorak horses, in his case by a Belgian middleman. But it was not until early this year that Mr. Brand and the Berlin police detective, Mr. Allonge, joined forces. Accompanied by a journalist from Der Spiegel, the pair sought to track down the sellers of the steeds. By that time, Mr. Brand had invented a Mr. Moss, a Texas oil millionaire who was, he told the Belgian middleman, interested in the Nazi works. He said he made up the character on the fly, borrowing heavily from the persona of J. R. Ewing on the television show “Dallas.” “In the end, I started to believe that Mr. Moss really existed,” he said by telephone from Amsterdam. Mr. Brand used the Moss character to lure the Belgian middleman to meetings, where he wore a camera disguised as a button to record what he hoped was the location of the horses and their owner. When the middleman kept stalling, Mr. Brand and Mr. Allonge turned to other leads, including a tip from the redoubtable Ms. Sauer. The first would-be dealer to contact her regarding the horses — a onetime car salesman named Johannes von Senkowski — had let slip that the sculptures were in the possession of a Rainer Wolf, a businessman from Bad Dürkheim, a town of about 19,000 in the bucolic Rhineland region of western Germany. And it was there that the startled police found the giant bronzes — and other works — on property apparently rented by Mr. Wolf. Based on some of their other leads, the police raided nine other locations in four other German states that same day, May 20. Together, about 30 artworks were seized, said the Berlin state prosecutor Susann Wettley. Asked why nobody apparently noticed the giant sculptures — measuring more than 11 feet tall — when they were transported or stored, Ms. Wettley said that Mr. Wolf could have wrapped them in thick plastic and told truckers that they were heavy blocks of sandstone. “For the normal citizen,” she said, “it is not clear that it is a Breker statue, or horses, made for Adolf Hitler, for the Speer project” to create a glorious new capital for the Nazis’ Thousand Year Reich. Ms. Sauer said it was evident that the works had been stolen. “The Russians just left them standing,” she said. “And overnight, they disappeared. Excuse me, but you can’t just stick them in your pocket!” Mr. Allonge, the lead Berlin investigator, has declined to comment because the investigation is continuing. The raids led investigators to eight German men, ages 61 to 79, Ms. Wettley said. None have been charged yet. Besides Mr. Wolf, who is over 70, attention has fallen on Klaus-Dieter Flick, 78, who keeps his sizable collection of Nazi paraphernalia, including a tank and possibly various historical guns, in an underground storeroom on his large property near the northern German city of Kiel. Mr. Brand, the Dutch detective, said he believed that the collection included the Wehrmacht statue by Breker and claimed to have spotted it when looking at satellite pictures of Mr. Flick’s property. Mr. Flick said the statue was a copy. In a telephone interview, he affirmed that he had been collecting artifacts from for almost 60 years. “For me, art is independent of a political dimension,” he said. In a strange twist, Mr. Flick said Thorak’s horses had resided on his property for two years in the 1990s, when they served as collateral, he said, for a 300,000 German mark loan he had made to Mr. Wolf. That would add two more long journeys for the horses. Mr. Wolf has declined to talk to reporters, but he released a statement through his lawyer two days after the raid. “The art objects were lawfully acquired more than 25 years ago from the Russian Army and the earlier producers,” it said, referring presumably to workers in Thorak’s studio. Mr. Flick had a more colorful account, claiming that Mr. Wolf had told him that either Russian soldiers or the East Germans — Mr. Flick cannot remember which — had cut up the bronzes and effectively sold the works as scrap metal to Mr. Wolf, who had them reassembled. Experts are debating why the works came to light now. “Perhaps someone thought so much time has passed, these statues won’t be recognized,” said Ralph Paschke, one of the West Berlin experts who saw the horses and other works at the Soviet base in Eberswalde in 1988. Mr. Brand suggested that repugnance for the Nazis, as well as the Soviets, lay behind the attempt to sell. The owners’ heirs “threaten to destroy the works with dynamite,” Mr. Brand said. “They do not want anything to do with them.” |