(Q55255491)
Statements
Hitler's Capital (English)
James S. Plaut
October 1946
1 reference
Two months after the invasion of Holland, Posse established an office at The Hague, appearing there in the role of Referent für Sonderfragen (Adviser on "Special Questions"). Belgium and Holland proved to be fertile ground. Posse's informers and middlemen, supported actively by the Seyss-Inquart government, were able to tap rich sources through confiscation and "purchase." The richest acquisitions of Linz in the Netherlands was the major portion of the Mannheimer Collection (purchased in 1944 for 2,000,000 gulden less than the Dutch authorities asked, following a Seyss-Inquart threat to confiscate the whole as enemy property). It contained such treasures as Rembrandt's Jewish Doctor. The remainder of the collection was acquired subsequently in France, also by forced sale. (English)
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29 June 2018
Mühlmann...served as Secretary of State for Austria under the Anschluss government... On May 15, 1940, immediately following the surrender of Holland, he arrived in the Hague and established the Dienststelle Mühlmann, which became -- under the Seyss-Inquart occupation regime -- the central agency for all matters concerning Dutch and Belgian art properties. (English)
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Mühlmann served two masters -- Göring and the Linz Commission -- with effective detachment. He shared with Baron Kurt von Behr, Director of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg in Paris, the odious distinction of top looter. It may be said of Mühlmann and von Behr that they actually enjoyed their work, so relentless and uncompromising was their spoliation of the occupied countries (English)
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Posse was succeeded in April, 1943, by Hermann Voss, Director of the Wiesbaden Gallery, who assumed the Dresden portfolio as well as the Linz directorship. Far less energetic and capable than his predecessor, he was nevertheless caught squarely in the flow of loot. With the pattern already established and the machinery smoothly in motion, Voss, a weakly scholar, simply went along. Under interrogation, Voss boasted that he had purchased over 3000 paintings for Linz in 1943 and 1944, at a total cost of 150,000 marks. The figure was probably embroidered substantially by his vanity (the official Linz records place his numerical "contribution" much lower), but that he was fully as active as Posse in swelling the total is clear. Voss admitted that the majority of the objects acquired in his regime were nineteenth-century German paintings of secondary importance. Nevertheless, there are several beacons marking his devious course.One of the most involved, and ugliest, swindles in France was the confiscation of the celebrated Schloss Collection by the Vichy government in 1943 -- in concert with the German occupation authorities. (English)
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Kajetan Mühlmann was the most implacable Nazi in the group of looters held for American interrogation during the summer 1945. A hard man, of cold Prussian mien and iron nerves, he shamed his colleagues with a consistent exhibition of arrogant defiance toward his captors; well after V-E Day, he made two bold, if unsuccessful, attempts to escape. Mühlmann served two masters -- Göring and the Linz Commission -- with effective detachment. He shared with Baron Kurt von Behr, Director of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg in Paris, the odious distinction of top looter. It may be said of Mühlmann and von Behr that they actually enjoyed their work, so relentless and uncompromising was their spoliation of the occupied countries. Mühlmann had been identified prominently with the Nazi surge from the period of the Austrian occupation, when he served as Secretary of State for Austria under the Anschluss government. In 1939 he went into Poland with Hans Frank's General Government to take charge officially of the "safeguarding" of Polish art treasures. On May 15, 1940, immediately following the surrender of Holland, he arrived in the Hague and established the Dienststelle Mühlmann, which became -- under the Seyss-Inquart occupation regime -- the central agency for all matters concerning Dutch and Belgian art properties. Mühlmann thus controlled Poland and the Netherlands as von Behr did France, with direct access to a substantial proportion of the national wealth. (English)
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Voss struck a second dirty blow in forcing the sale of the French portion of the Mannheimer Collection in 1944. The two great Rembrandt canvases, Landscape and Portrait of Titus, purchased from the French wine merchant Étienne Nicolas for 3,000,000 marks (60,000,000 francs), and the Mendelssohn Rembrandt, for 900,000 marks, were acquired through Haberstock, the Number One Nazi dealer, in the interim between Posse's demise and Voss's succession.4THE Linz program was a bonanza for a large group of favored German art dealers. Karl Haberstock, in Hitler's good graces from 1936 on, was clever enough to accept no commission on his major acquisitions for Linz. He was able to reap a fortune, however, by transacting a tremendous volume of normal business for Linz and the Reich Chancellery, exacting normal profits on a percentage basis. Haberstock not only had his German agents everywhere -- a Luftwaffe major stationed in Paris, a Viennese refugee in the South of France, and German dealers in Holland and Switzerland -- but an intricate and highly efficient network of collaborationists in the occupied countries. Haberstock's correspondence divulges the names of seventy-five persons in France alone who dealt with him during the war. (English)