Führermuseum

The ''Führermuseum'' or ''Fuhrer-Museum'' (English: Leader's Museum), also referred to as the Linz art gallery, was an unrealized art museum within a cultural complex planned by Adolf Hitler for his hometown, the Austrian city of Linz, near his birthplace of Braunau. Its purpose was to display a selection of the art bought, confiscated or stolen by the Nazis from throughout Europe during World War II. The cultural district was to be part of an overall plan to recreate Linz, turning it into a cultural capital of Nazi Germany and one of the greatest art centers of Europe, overshadowing Vienna, for which Hitler had a personal distaste. He wanted to make the city more beautiful than Budapest, so it would be the most beautiful on the Danube River, as well as an industrial powerhouse and a hub of trade; the museum was planned to be one of the greatest in Europe.Spotts (2002), pp. 377–78

The expected completion date for the project was 1950, but neither the ''Führermuseum'' nor the cultural centre it was to anchor were ever built. The only part of the elaborate plan which was constructed was the Nibelungen Bridge, which is still extant.

History and design

As early as 1925, Hitler had conceived of a "German National Gallery" to be built in Berlin with himself as director. His plan, drawn out in a sketchbook, may have been influenced by the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, and consisted of a building with two sections, one with 28 rooms and the other with 32. Hitler denoted which of his favorite 19th-century German artists were to be collected, and in what rooms their work would hang. Among his favorite painters were Hans Makart, Franz Defregger, Eduard Grützner, Franz von Stuck, Franz von Lenbach, Anselm Feuerbach, Heinrich Zügel and Carl Spitzweg, Fest, Joachim and Bullock, Michael (trans.) ''The Face of the Third Reich''. New York: Penguin Books, 1979. p. 97 & p. 543 n.19 . Originally published 1970; and he had extolled "Aryan art" by Moritz von Schwind and Arnold Böcklin in '' Mein Kampf''. At one time in his planning he dedicated five of the rooms in the museum to the work of Adolph von Menzel and three rooms to both Schwind and Böcklin. Carl Rottmann, Edouard von Engerth, and Anton von Werner were to share a single room, as were Makart and Karl von Piloty; Wilhelm Trübner and Fritz von Uhde; Grützner and Defregger; and the artists of the Nazarene movement. Other painters who would enjoy their own room in Hitler's original plans were Peter von Cornelius, Hans von Marées, Bonaventura Genelli, Anselm Feuerbach and Wilhelm Leibl. These choices reflected Hitler's taste at the time, which was a preference for sentimental 19th-century Germanic romantic painters,Spotts (2002), p. 194 including "both 'schmaltzy' genre pictures ... ndheroic, idyllic, allegorical. historical-patriotic themes, the visual equivalent of Wagner, without the genius."

It was after the ''Anschluss'' with Austria, with the House of German Art in Munich already completed, that Hitler conceived of having his dream museum not in any of the premiere cities in Germany, where it could be overshadowed, but in his "hometown" of Linz in Austria, and discussed his plans with the director of the local Provincial Museum, Theodor Kerschner, while visiting there.

Additionally, after a state trip to Rome, Florence and Naples in 1938 – between the ''Anschluss'' with Austria and the taking of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia – Hitler, "overwhelmed and challenged by the riches of the Italian museums"Fest (1975), pp. 530–531 expanded the conception of his planned gallery. It would now be the unsurpassed art gallery in all of Europe, indeed "the greatest museum in the world", featuring the finest of all European art. He conceived that the best of Germanic art would have pride of place in the National Gallery in Berlin, while the new museum in Linz would feature the best of the art of the Mediterranean world, especially from the nineteenth century.

The idea and overall design concept for a new cultural district in Linz anchored by the ''Führermuseum'' was Hitler's own. He intended Linz to be one of the future cultural capitals of the Reich, to have its own university, and to overshadow Vienna, a city in which he had spent some years as a struggling artist,Plaut (1946) and about which he felt considerable distaste, not only because of the Jewish influence on the city, but because of his own failure to gain admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

itlerenvisaged Linz as the future seat of the new German ''Kultur'', and lavished all his limited pictorial talent and architectural training on a vast project which would realize this ambition.... edevoted 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, contained scores of completed architectural renderings for the Linz project...

According to one of Hitler's secretaries, he never tired of talking about his planned museum, and it was often the subject at his regular afternoon teas. He would expound on how the paintings were to be hung: with plenty of space between them, in rooms decorated with furniture and furnishings appropriate to the period, and how they were to be lit. No detail of the presentation of the artworks was too small for his consideration. He said of the museum in 1942 "Anyone who wants to study nineteenth-century painting will sooner or later find it necessary to go to the Linz gallery, because only there will it be possible to find complete collections."Spotts (2002), p. 218

Design and model

In Autumn 1940, Hitler commissioned architect Hermann Giesler, a devout Nazi, to be in overall charge of the rebuilding of Linz,Kershaw (2000), pp. 777–778 one of the five designated '' Führerstädte'' ("Führer cities"), along with Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich, which were to be redeveloped drastically. Linz was to become a major cultural center, an art capital of Europe, a hub of trade and commerce, and the most beautiful city on the Danube, surpassing Budapest. It would have a new City Hall, new Nazi Party headquarters, a "Gau forum" featuring a massive auditorium, and a new railway station, a stadium, a community hall, a technical university, an institute of metallurgy, a planetarium, a suspension bridge, and two new towers, one of them with a carillon and a mausoleum for Hitler's parents. The city would also have Hitler's own retirement residence, designed by Giesler. In addition to all this, the Vienna facilities of the Hermann-Göring-Werks steel plant were to be moved to Linz as well, over the objections of officials of the city, the architects, and Fritz Todt, who thought the industrial facilities were incompatible with a city of art, architecture and culture. Hitler, though, wanted to provide the city with an ongoing means of income after he was dead and could no longer subsidize it.Spotts (2002), pp. 374–76

The cultural center at the heart of the redevelopment, the buildings for which were based on Hitler's ideas and rough designs, came to be referred to as the "European Culture Center". It included a monumental theatre, a concert hall, a library with over 250,000 volumes, an opera house as well as an operetta house, a cinema, a collection of armor and an Adolf Hitler Hotel, all surrounded by huge boulevards and a parade ground.Spotts (2002) p. 213 Located south of the historic section of Linz, the main buildings, including the ''Führermuseum'', were to be aligned along one main avenue, In den Lauben, which after the war was called "a typical National Socialist axis street." It would be anchored at the other end by the new railway station.

The design of the many buildings of the cultural center were assigned to various architects Hitler favored. The museum itself was designed by Roderich Fick based closely on Hitler's sketches and specifications, modeled somewhat after Paul Ludwig Troost's '' Haus der Deutschen Kunst'' ("House of German Art") in Munich – itself strongly influenced by Hitler's participation in the design process – and would feature a colonnaded facade about 500 feet (150 meters) long. It would stand on the site of the Linz railroad station, which was to be moved four kilometers to the south. Should the volume of German art bought, confiscated and plundered for the museum be such that expansion was needed, an additional building could easily be integrated into the planned district.

By January 1945, Hitler became obsessed with seeing a model of the planned cultural complex; he had his adjutants and Martin Bormann, his personal secretary and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, call Giesler's office repeatedly, to ask when the Führer could view the model. Giesler's office worked around the clock to finish it. On the night of 7-8 February, Giesler brought the model to Berlin by truck and had it set up in the cellar of the New Chancellery building, where it was ready for viewing on 9 February by Hitler, Robert Ley, the Leader of the German Labor Front, and SS-''Oberguppenfūhrer'' Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Security Police, along with Hitler's personal photographer Walter Frentz and his valet, Heinz Linge. Frentz took some pictures of the event, one of which shows Hitler seated in deep contemplation of the model. Hitler was apparently entranced by what he saw:

Bent over the model, he viewed it from all angles, and in different kinds of lighting. He asked for a seat. He checked the proportions of the different buildings. He asked about the details of the bridges. He studied the model for a long time, apparently lost in thought. While Geisler stayed in Berlin, Hitler accompanied him twice daily to view the model, in the afternoon and again during the night. Others in his entourage were taken down to have his building plans explained to them as they pored over the model. Looking down on the model of a city which, he knew, would never be built, Hitler could fall in reverie, revisiting the fantasies of his youth, when he would dream with his friend Kubizek about rebuilding Linz.

Hitler visited the model frequently during his time living in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery, spending many hours sitting silently in front of it. The closer Germany came to military defeat, the more viewing the model became Hitler's only relief; being invited to view it with him was an indication of the Führer's esteem.

Near the end of the war, when American forces overran Hitler's private library, which was hidden deep in Austria, it contained "scores" of plans and renderings for the museum and the complex. They also found ''The Future Economic Status of the City of Linz'' a 78-page bound volume prepared for Hitler by the Economic and Research Section of the Oberdonau Department of the Interior, which outlined in detail how the revitalization of Linz would take place. The entire Linz project was treated as a state secret on Hitler's order.

Collection

The collection for the planned museum in Linz was accumulated through several methods. Hitler himself sent Heinrich Heim, one of Martin Bormann's adjutants who had expertise in paintings and graphics, on trips to Italy and France to buy artworks, which Hitler paid for with his own money, which came from sales of ''Mein Kampf'', real estate speculation on land in the area of the ''Berghof'', Hitler's mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg, and royalties from Hitler's image used on postage stamps. The latter, which was divided with his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, amounted to at least $75 million marks over the course of Hitler's reign.

This, however, was not the primary method used to build up the collection.

Hitler's birthday

In Nazi Germany, Hitler's birthday was celebrated nationally on 20 April beginning in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, through 1944. For his 50th birthday in 1939, the day was declared a National Holiday. As part of these celebrations Hitler would receive numerous presents, among which were paintings and other art objects. These were set aside for use in the planned ''Führermuseum'' in Linz. Stern, J. P. ''Hitler: The Führer and the People'' Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1992. p. 71.

Hitler's 56th birthday in 1945 was a private celebration held in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin as the Soviet Red Army battled to take the city; even under those circumstances, Hitler would frequently spend hours in the basement of the Chancellery looking at the scale model of the proposed rebuilding of Linz, which centered on the cultural district around the ''Fŭhrermuseum''. Nine days after his birthday, Hitler married Eva Braun, and they committed suicide together the following day.

''Führer-Reserve''

In the first weeks after the Anschluss in March 1938, which brought Austria into the German Reich, both the Gestapo and the Nazi Party confiscated numerous artworks for themselves. In response, on 18 June 1938, Hitler issued a decree placing all artwork that had been seized in Austria under the personal prerogative of the Führer:

As part of the seizure of assets hostile to the state– especially Jewish assets – in Austria, paintings and other artwork of great value, among other things, have been confiscated. The Führer requests that this artwork, for the most part from Jewish hands, be neither used as furnishings of administration offices or senior bureaucrats' official residences nor purchased by leading state and party leaders. The Führer plans to personally decide on the use of the property after its seizure. He is considering putting artwork first and foremost at the disposal of small Austrian towns for their collections.

The intent of the order was to guarantee that Hitler would have first choice of the plundered art for his planned ''Führermuseum'' and for other museums in the Reich."The Führer’s prerogative and the planned Führer Museum in Linz"
Art Database of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism website This later became a standard procedure for all purloined or confiscated art, and was known as the "''Führer-Reserve.''"Spotts (2002), p. 198

''Sonderauftrag Linz''

On 21 June 1939, Hitler set up the ''Sonderauftrag Linz'' ("Special Commission Linz") in Dresden and – at the recommendation of art dealer and Nazi Party member Karl Haberstock – appointed Hans Posse, director of the ''Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister'' ("Dresden Painting Gallery"), as a special envoy. A few days later, on 26 June, Hitler signed a letter intended to give Posse the authority he would need to do this job. He wrote:

I commission Dr. Hans Posse, Director of Dresden Gallery, to build up the new art museum for Linz Donau. All Party and State services are ordered to assist Dr. Posse in fulfillment of his mission.

Posse had a checkered relationship with the National Socialists. His wife had joined the Nazi Party in 1932, but when Posse himself tried to join in 1933, his application was rejected a year later. He was later accused of having promoted so-called "Degenerate art", and of having Jewish ancestry. In 1938 he was asked to resign as director – a position he had held since 1910 from the age of 31 – but refused, taking a leave of absence instead. He was nevertheless fired, only to be restored to the position on Hitler's orders, possibly through the influence of Haberstock.

Although Hitler had favored German and Austrian paintings from the 19th century, Posse's focus was on early German, Dutch, French, and Italian paintings.Enderlein, Angelika; Flacke, Monika and Löhr, Hanns Christian
"Database on the Sonderauftrag Linz (Special Commission: Linz): History of the Linz collection
German Historical Museum Posse wrote in his diary that Hitler intended the museum to hold "only the best of all periods from the prehistoric beginnings of art...to the nineteenth century and recent times." Hitler told Posse that he was only to answer to him.Spotts (2002), p. 187

The ''Sonderauftrag'' not only collected art for the ''Führermuseum'', but also for other museums in the German Reich, especially in the eastern territories. The artworks would have been distributed to these museums after the war. The ''Sonderauftrag'' was located in Dresden had approximately 20 specialists attached to it: "curators of paintings, prints, coins, and armor, a librarian, an architect, an administrator, photographers, and restorers." The staff included Robert Oertel and Gottfried Reimer of the Dresden Gallery, Friedrich Wolffhardt, an SS officer, as curator of books and autographs; Leopold Rupprecht of the '' Kunsthistorisches Museum'' as curator for armour, and Fritz Dworschak, also of that museum, as curator for coins.

Under Hans Posse

On 24 July 1939, Martin Bormann, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess's assistant, informed Josef Bürckel, who Hitler had appointed to head the administration of Austria after the Anschluss, that all artwork which was confiscated was to be made available for examination by Posse or by Hitler personally. Although the order did not originally include the artworks taken earlier from the Vienna Rothschilds, by October Posse had managed to get those included in his remit as well.

In the late summer and autumn of that year, Posse traveled a number of times to Vienna to the Central Depot for confiscated art in the Neue Burg to pick out art pieces for the Linz museum, and in October he gave to Bormann, for Hitler's approval, the list of artworks confiscated from the Rothschilds which Posse had selected for the museum. These included works by Hans Holbein the Elder, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Tintoretto, Gerard ter Borch and Francesco Guardi, among others. These 182 pieces were also included in Posse's July 1940 list of 324 paintings he had chosen for the museum's collection.

On 13 June 1940, Hitler authorized Posee to travel to the Netherlands, where he had to compete with Alfred Rosenberg's ERR organization ( see below), Kajetan Mühlmann, Hermann Göring's art curator Walter Andres Hofer and Göring himself in claiming works by Dutch masters, many of which had been purloined, expropriated or confiscated by various Nazi agencies on a number of grounds.

Posse went to Poland around November 1940 to examine expropriated artworks there, some of which had been looted by the German Army from museums, palaces and country homes. All of the country's artworks in the German-occupied areas were then cataloged by SS officer and art historian Kajetan Mühlmann, who had done the same previously in Vienna. Posse selected works by Leonardo, Raphael, and Rembrandt for the museum in Linz, although these pieces never actually left the control of the General Government, the Nazi-occupied rump of Poland left after Germany and the Soviet Union took the territory they wanted.

On 10 June 1940, Posse wrote to Bormann:

The special delegate for the safeguarding of art and cultural properties has just returned from Holland. He notified me today that there exists at the moment a particularly favorable opportunity to purchase valuable works of art from Dutch dealers and private owners in German currency. Even though a large number of important works have doubtless been removed recently from Holland, I believe that the trade still contains many objects which are desirable for the Führer's collection, and which may be acquired without foreign exchange.

As a result of this, accounts of about 500,000 ''Reichsmarks'' were opened in Paris and Rome for Posse's personal use, and, around July 1940, he expanded the scope of the ''Sonderauftrag Linz'' into Belgium and the Netherlands when he established an office in The Hague as ''Referent für Sonderfragen'' (Adviser on "Special Questions"). Posse was able to report to Bormann that as of March 1941 he had spent 8,522,348 ''Reichsmarks'' on artworks for the ''Führermuseum''. He later bought most of the Mannheimer Collection in 1944, including Rembrandt's ''Jewish Doctor'' – assisted by the threat of confiscation from the Nazi government of Arthur Seyss-Inquart – with the remainder of the collection being purchased in the same manner in France later on. The collecting of the ''Sonderauftrag Linz'' includes many such cases of forced sale, using funds from sales of Hitler's book '' Mein Kampf'' and stamps showing his portrait. Members of the ''Sonderauftrag Linz'' made a considerable number of purchasing trips throughout Europe, acquiring a significant number of artworks, and also arranged purchases through art dealers.

Hitler was pleased with Posse's work, and in 1940 awarded him the honorific of "Professor",Spotts (2002), p. 193 something the Führer did for many of his favorites in the arts, such as Leni Riefenstahl, the actress and film director; architects Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler; sculptors Arno Breker and Josef Thorak; Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic; actor Emil Jannings; and photographer Heinrich Hoffmann; among others.

In October 1939, Hitler and Benito Mussolini had made an agreement that any Germanic artworks in public museums in the South Tyrol – a traditionally German-speaking area which had been given to Italy after the First World War in return for entering the war on the side of the Triple Entente – could be removed and returned to Germany, but when Posse attempted to do so, with the assistance of Heinrich Himmler's ''Ahnenerbe'', the Italians managed to keep putting things off, and no repatriations ever took place.

Posse died in December 1942 of cancer. His funeral was a high state event to which Hitler invited the directors of all art museums in the Reich; Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels delivered the eulogy, although there was no mention made of the Linz Museum project, since it was a state secret Posse had gathered more than 2500 artworks for the Linz museum in the three years he was head of the ''Sonderauftrag Linz''.

Under Hermann Voss

In March 1943, Hermann Voss, an art historian, director of the Wiesbaden Gallery and former deputy director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin took over the Special Commission. His appointment was considered odd by some, since he was known to be an anti-Nazi with a considerable number of Jewish friends and colleagues, but Hitler was known to overlook political factors when dealing with matters of art, and Voss's knowledge of southern German artwork, as well as French and Italian painting, may have decided the matter for him.Spotts (2002), p. 192 Voss was not nearly as active or energetic as Posse had been, but was still "caught squarely in the flow of loot." He was prone to send out agents rather than to travel himself to make purchases, or to make dealers bring works to him.

Hitler's relationship with Voss was not as warm as with Posse. The two men met only on several occasions, and Voss was not given authority over books, armour and coins, as Posse had been. Voss is said to have remarked after one meeting with the Führer, "He's even worse than I thought." Voss attempted to mend his fences with Hitler with an elaborate gift for his birthday in 1944, accompanied by a list of his acquisitions in which he claimed to have bought 881 items, compared to 122 paintings that Posse had collected the year before. Voss did indeed spend money more profligately than Posse had, and his budget was later reduced near the end of the war. Under interrogation after the war he claimed to have acquired 3000 painting for the ''Führermuseum'' between 1943 and 1944, although the records do not support this figure, and many of the artworks were of distinctly secondary importance.

In April 1943, the German public first heard about the Linz project in a special edition of Heinrich Hoffmann's art magazine ''Kunst dem Volk'' ("Art to the People"). It revealed both the intention to build a great art gallery in Linz and the existence of the collection which had been amassed for it, although, of course, nothing was said about the methods used to acquire many of the pieces. The magazine featured colored plates of works in the collection by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Breughel and Vermeer, among others. Up to that time, only two works which had been collected for the Linz museum had been seen by the public – but without disclosure of where they were eventually designated to go – the first was Myron's sculpture ''Discobolus'' ("The Discus Thrower"), which Hitler obtained surreptitiously in 1938 through the Berlin State Museum, but ordered to be displayed at the ''Glyptothek'' in Munich, where he proudly told his invited guests at the unveiling "May you all then realize how glorious man already was back then in his physical beauty". The other work was Makart's triptych ''The Plague in Florence'', which Hitler acquired as a gift from Mussolini, who, when the owners refused to sell it, seized their villa and confiscated the painting, which he presented to the Führer at the train station in Florence.

Results

By December 1944, Posse and Voss had collectively spent 70 million Reichsmarks (equivalent to million euros) on accumulating the collection intended for the ''Fuhrermuseum''; although artworks bought in Vichy France were paid for with francs which were set by the Nazis at an artificially low exchange rate with the Reichsmark. In 1945, the count of art items in the collection was over 8,000. Evans, Richard J. (2008) ''The Third Reich at War''. New York: Penguin Books

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