Myrtil Frank’s wartime record in German-occupied Holland

by Marc Masurovsky

[Editor’s note: This survey is based almost exclusively on Allied documents, reports, and investigations into the wartime art market in the Netherlands and the plunder of Jewish collections under the auspices of Dienststelle Mühlmann.]

After the Germans completed their occupation of Dutch territory, Myrtil Frank offered his assistance as well as paintings to the Dienststelle Mühlmann, based at Sophialaan 11 Den Haag. Headquartered in the Hague, its main figures were Eduard Plietzsch, the Dienststelle’s official representative or “fondé de pouvoir” and Dr. Franz Kieslinger, administrator of confiscated Jewish property who presumably brought Plietzsch into the organization as expert and purchasing agent in Holland, Belgium, France, for the Dienststelle Mühlmann. Plietzsch and Kieslinger were responsible for, among other things, targeting Jewish collections the Dienststelle wished to confiscate. The Dienststelle’s office manager was Dr. Joseph Ernst.

Although not a well-known art expert, Myrtil Frank proved himself to be a quick study enough so to “fulfill the desires of Eduard Plietzsch.” He thus became a “most important intermediary of the Dienststelle.”

Some of Frank’s contacts and collaborators at and close to the Dienststelle Mühlmann included:

-Adolf Weinmüller, a Munich-based art dealer and auctioneer of confiscated Jewish property, with close ties to Mühlmann’s operations in both Austria and the Netherlands,

-Dr. Herbst with whom Frank dealt from 1942-1944 during his brief tenure as an administrator of the Dienststelle;

-Dr. Schmidt, SD official responsible for travel permits [Ein-und Ausreisestelle] whom Frank had befriended and who allegedly gave him cover from anti-Jewish decrees in wartime Holland,

-Dr. Vitale Bloch whom Frank solicited in his capacity as a purchasing agent for Mühlmann.

-Karl Legat, Zeestraat 59, Den Haag, a German-born art dealer based in Holland, with whom Frank did extensive business during and after WWII,

-Jaguenau, art dealer

-J. Vermeulen, art dealer

-d’Autresch, art dealer active in the Noordeinde. Mühlmann interceded on his behalf to free his son partly in recognition for his services to secure works of art for the Dienststelle.

- Muelder, tied to Dr. Herbst and Weinmüller who did business with the Dienststelle Mühlmann through Myrtil Frank,

-Parry [Parri], who also cooperated with dealers Hoogendijk and Pieter de Boer.

Myrtil Frank acquired a number of works for the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna which were sold to Hitler’s Linz Museum project. Most of these transactions occurred in 1943. Dr. Herbst confirmed these transactions in April 1946.

How should we then view Myrtil Frank in wartime Holland? Somewhere between collaboration, duress and persecution?

Shortly after WWII ended, Dr. Alfred Stix, director of State Art Collections in Vienna, in a letter to the US occupying forces in Austria, described some of Mühlmann’s activities in Holland during WWII. He indicated that local Jewish art dealers were forced to act as agents to Mühlmann in order to help him procure paintings. Stix argued that “these Jews told a lot of things to buy their lives in that way.”

A scholarly assessment produced by Anita Hopmans of the RKD over the disputed ownership of paintings at the Boymans Museum buttressed Stix’s argument. It suggested that art dealers like Myrtil Frank had acted under duress. On the other end of the spectrum, Dr. Anna-Carolin Augustin echoed the Allied investigators’ suspicions when she described Myrtil Frank as a “Nazi collaborator” in an article published in 2011 in Medaon, an online journal.  In its Provenance Research Database, the German Lost Art Foundation noted Myrtil Frank’s inclusion in a master list of art looting suspects drawn up by the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) in 1946.

Where do these contrasting views and events leave us with respect to Myrtil Frank? In some ways, we need to be very careful with how we record Myrtil Frank’s wartime activities and behavior. Simple, almost Manichean views where everything is either black/white, good/bad, ethical/unethical, may not render proper justice to Jewish art dealers like Frank who remained in the Netherlands after the Germans invaded. His actions proved that he did his utmost to protect his family (in that, he succeeded!), while he engaged in activities that favored the interests of the enemy.

In a broader context, we may need to revisit what duress really means in these instances where physical survival blended with the pursuit of commercial activities with the occupier. Did Frank go beyond the call of duty in his relationship with the “Dienststelle Mühlmann”? The answer to this question depends on how one defines “beyond the call of duty”, a notion closely tied to the threshold beyond which one’s wartime activities in territories occupied by the Nazis become acts of collaboration with the enemy. Similar debates in countries like France may shine a light on this discussion.


Primary sources:

Reports:

Vlug Report, 25 December 1945.
Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU), Final Report, Strategic Services Unit, May 1946.
Consolidated Interrogation Report #2, The Goering Collection, 15 September 1945, p. 79

Selected documents:

Dr. Alfred Stix note to Major Miller, USFA, Vienna, 9 April 1946, RG 260 M 1926 File R&R 51 Roll 150 NARA.

Secondary accounts:

Augustin, Anna-Carolin,  “Nazi Looted Art in Israel: Kulturguttransfer nach 1945 und Restitution heute,” Medaon (2011), p. 9.

Hopmans, Anita  “Disputed ownership. On the provenance of two works by Jan Toorop at the Boymans Museum…” pp. 13-14. 

The Jagershuis, Doorwerth, Holland

by Helen Driessen

With so many terrible things happening in the world, does it make any sense to write about other terrible things that happened more than 60 years ago? A small incident in my life convinced me that it does. Waiting in a line to receive my drivers' license in one of Venezuela´s public offices, which, since the Revolution, are organized according to Cuban, communist rules, and listening to the commanding voice of one of its officers, suddenly I found myself back in my country of birth, Holland, then occupied by German military forces…. Fascism, I realized, under whatever name it goes, never changes and if we don´t denounce it in time, it will always pop up again in some part of the world.

I was born 2 years before the war. My father was the owner of a then very well-known chocolate factory, called Driessen. Besides being a successful businessman, he also was an intellectual, a lover of art, literature and music. He bought a small hunting lodge, the “Jagershuis”, in the woods overlooking the river Rhine in Doorwerth, near Arnhem, and transformed it into an enormous villa.

Outside view of the "Jagershuis"
Source: Helen Driessen

Poets, writers, painters and musicians were our constant visitors. Jean-Paul Sartre and his wife Simone de Beauvoir were often our guests. Besides his Steinway piano, he had a medieval pipe organ installed which he often played for a selected public and which was connected to bells in one of the towers of the house, so that on Sundays, public from the outside could come and listen as well. He had an art collection which was so important, that it was under the protection of the Dutch Government. Even the smallest object in our house was chosen because of its esthetic beauty.

Helen Driessen (seated) with her aunt
Source: Helen Driessen

The Jagershuis "music room" with the organ
Source: Helen Driessen

As a child I remember playing among objets d'art of enormous value. On the few photographs that still exist, I recognize my usual playground of expensive Persian tapestries, ivory statues, beautiful elaborate lamps, chairs, poufs…..I even had my own miniature set of Meissen china from which I ate and drank while the others enjoyed their grown up version of it. In a very modern concept of nature, the trees and vegetation in my father´s woods were kept without any human interference: he had several gardeners tending to them, but he never altered the course of nature. On the whole, between drivers, gardeners, nurses, ladies for laundry and ironing, cleaning and cooking, we had a constant staff of 13 people in and around the house.

Then Germany declared war on Holland and everything changed. The Jagershuis, because of its important strategic position, became in September 1944 a centre of intense combat. In my father’s diaries which were recently rediscovered by the Dutch State Archives, we get an exact picture of how Allies and Germans fought around our house. The movie “One Bridge Too Far” was based on these facts. In the end, the Allies pulled back to one side of the Rhine, while we were on the other side. Germans took over our house. First they arrived in small groups, some Nazi officers lived with us and then came the troops and our house became a barrack, being constantly attacked by the Allies. One of the Nazi officers was an art lover and often stood looking approvingly in front of one of my father´s most treasured works of art: a triptych; “Purificatio Mariae,” by Marco d´Oggione, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, which my father had acquired after months of negotiations from an art gallery in Florence, Italy. (see April 20, 2011: "in search of a triptych 'Purificatio Mariae,' by Marco d'Oggione)

One day we were ordered to leave the house immediately, without taking anything with us. The Ortskommandant who was currently living in the house, told us that according to their espionage service, the house would be bombed flat by the Allies. We left with a wooden cart and nothing else and we stayed that night in our neighbors’ cellar. The next morning my father walked back to the house and to his enormous dismay saw how three big trucks were being loaded with all of our possessions and then departed, supposedly in the direction of Germany. The next day the Allies bombed our house with phosphor bombs and the only thing that reminded us of it, was an enormous hole in the ground.

After having spent several more nights in the cellar, my parents, 5 children and a dachshund on a cart, left and walked for three days to Utrecht, where we found a temporary home and where we spent the famous “winter of hunger”, living on a diet of tulip bulbs with which the Germans sustained the Dutch population.

After the war, and until his death, my father claimed and searched for his possessions. Unfortunately, these being protected by the Dutch Government, he never had them insured and so there does not exist a detailed description of them. His belief that they had arrived safely in Germany was strengthened after the war by the fact that he and my mother, in a hotel in Basel, recognized a Persian tapestry that had belonged to the Jagershuis. Not only was the pattern familiar, but my mother also recognized one of its corners which, regardless of the heavy object that she would put on it, would always flap up…..

For a long time my older sisters continued my father´s search but not being familiar with the complicated world of lost art, their search was not done in a professional way and at the end they gave up. They did however concentrate on one particular work of art, the Marco d´Óggiono tryptic, because, in my father´s factory, they were so lucky as to find its photocopy so that it was easy to recognize..

Now it is up to me, the youngest of the family, who, probably due to a very similar political situation in the country I chose to live in, Venezuela, has taken up the battle with renewed forces. I have many questions. Why are all ways of finding our possessions so full of hindrances and difficulties? Why does not there exist one general database where all stolen works of art are registered? How come there is so much resistance to assist people in recovering their legitimate property? Why is there only this blog dealing with the subject? Why should I live in a difficult financial position without any need? How sad that it is so much easier to find a stolen car than an important work like the Marco d´Oggione!

Here I sit with, in front of me, the only object remaining from all my father´s possessions: a Meissen plate, that was given by my mother to a friend to take a piece of cake home……

May 1945 and beyond

The Second World War is over in Europe and North Africa. The Third Reich no longer exists. The only active military front is in Asia where the Japanese Imperial Army continues to put up fierce resistance to American-led troops. That all comes to an end with the detonation of two atomic devices, one over Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki, in early August 1945.

60 million people are known to have died as a direct result of the Second World War. This figure includes six million Jewish men, women, and children exterminated in death camps, ghettos, forests, fields, marshes, and concentration camps. It also includes at least 5 million men, women, and children of other faiths decimated in concentration camps, forced labor, in villages and cities across Axis-occupied Europe. The remainder died in the crossfire between rival armies, as victims of reprisal killings, from hunger, disease, and exposure to the elements.

The victorious Allied powers set in motion policies to effect the repatriation of assets looted by the Axis to the countries from where they were forcibly removed. While laying down complex reparations formulae that leave no country satisfied, they also lay claims to assets owned by the Reich and its collaborators in countries often referred to as ‘neutral’, viz., Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and to a far lesser extent, Turkey, and Argentina.

Restitution is often confused with repatriation, but one thing is certain, restitution can only mean one thing: return of a stolen object to its rightful owner.

France and the Soviet Union argue for replacement policies—to replace objects stolen from them with objects of similar quality and value in the current possession of the defeated powers. The United States and Great Britain oppose such a move. While France continues to press for replacement into the early 1950s, the Soviet Union does not quibble over words and policies. It is busy removing untold numbers of items, equipment, and other goods from countries that the Red Army overran in its bid to defeat the Third Reich as partial payment for its losses—both infrastructural and human. One out of every three Soviet male between the ages of 17 and 45 is dead or unaccounted for at the end of the global conflict.

It is fair to say that 90 per cent of all those involved in direct fashion with the cultural plunder of Europe escaped severe punishment, with the notable exception of Alfred Rosenberg and a handful of his acolytes.  The rest faced mostly fines, escaped prosecution altogether, and few were tried and handed down light sentences. 

Every formerly occupied country in Europe busily enacts laws that restrict the ability of victims to recover items plundered by fellow citizens. Most egregious are the waivers granted to so-called third-party transactions: all individuals who were involved in brokering forced sales and illegal removals of property are granted the benefit of the doubt, lest it be explicitly proven that they knowingly handled items which had been misappropriated for racial and other reasons.  Worst of all: the main proponent of postwar restitution, namely the United States, walks away from the restitution process in the early 1950s, feeling that the job was 'well done', ignoring the plight of claimants who by then have become naturalized US citizens.

No one has done an accounting of the numbers of claimants who actually obtained restitution of lost items and assets.  Judging by the number of victims, their surviving next of kin, the figures can only be ridiculously low--in the single percentile digits.

Where are all the looted objects, aside from those which victorious armies recover by the truckloads in the aftermath of victory?

From East to West:

• items removed from Soviet territory, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, find their way into Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. For instance, many cultural objects stolen in Poland are discovered in the French zone of Occupation in Germany, while Russian icons, books from the Ukraine and private collections from Latvia end up in various parts of Austria and Germany.  Although a percentage of those items are repatriated to the Soviet Union, the picture is unclear as to their numbers and the percentage that they represent of all items recovered by Allied forces.
• items from Yugoslavia enter Italy, Austria, and Switzerland.
• items from Italy go north to Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, as well as west to Spain and France (after August 1944).
• items from France, Belgium, Holland, travel to Italy, Spain, Germany, and as far as Austria and Poland, and in some cases even to German-occupied Ukraine where Belgian books looted by the ERR find a final resting place.
• items discovered in the various zones of occupation controlled by Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union in Germany and Austria will never be properly repatriated and/or restituted and, instead, are transferred to the territories of the occupying powers.

Meanwhile, the international art market continues to thrive unabated. Art dealers and museum officials, especially in the United States, press the US military to release unclaimed items and entrust them with their sale and safekeeping since their owners are more than likely dead.  Jewish relief organizations confuse recovery with rehabilitation and are quick to sell items that might be restitutable so that they can obtain quick cash, granted, to assist survivors.  However, a significant number of choice items end up in libraries and collections, in Europe, North America, and Palestine, sometimes at the expense of recovering Jewish communities in liberated Europe.

Plundered items infest bustling black markets across Europe; their sheer numbers make it impossible for local and Allied police and investigative agencies to intercept them. As a result, these items will slip through export restrictions and end up in collections as far away as Argentina.

The residual problem of World War II and Holocaust-related plunder is a global problem since, if half of what has just been put forth is correct, looted items are to be found everywhere, both in private and government hands. If we want to resolve this question in a way that is acceptable to all parties, knowing full well that full, 100 per cent restitution was--and will never be--possible, all countries involved must come to the table and carve out a solution which allows them once and for all to close the book on one of the worst chapters of human history. Failing that, all that we have accomplished is to inform the next generation that plunder is permissible and the passage of time allows the thieves to enjoy the fruits of their mischief without fear of accountability.