The fate of the Nikolsburg hoard

Nikolsburg Castle
Source: Wikipedia

Nikolsburg, now Mikulov, lies in the south Moravian region of the Czech Republic. After the Munich Pact of September 30, 1938, the town was annexed to the Niederdonau Region of Lower Austria, itself part of Austria which had been absorbed in the Anschluss and renamed “Ostmark” by the Nazis.

From the fall of 1943 to the spring of 1945, the Castle at Nikolsburg was transformed into a depot of works of art and objets d’art stolen by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) mostly in France, and to a lesser extent in Belgium, and Holland. At least 5 trains filled with loot packed into hundreds of crates made their way from Paris to Nikolsburg where they were dutifully unloaded and placed in dozens of rooms throughout the Castle. As the Western Allies advanced across France, Belgium and Holland, many of the crates were transferred to Altaussee in the Salzkammergut section of Austria where the Reich authorities had created a central underground facility consisting of a network of salt mine galleries in which to store plundered art from across Europe. Not all the crates from Nikolsburg, however, made it to Altaussee. An unknown number remained at the Castle.

In the final days of the Second World War, a fierce battle raged in and around Nikolsburg opposing retreating German forces and advancing Red Army units. The town was not spared and the Castle took massive artillery hits. As Soviet troops closed in on the town, the occupants of the Castle removed many of the remaining objects to safer locations across town, including the local museum. A major fire produced by systematic shelling gutted the Castle. To this day, it is not clear how much of it burned down.

French restitution authorities including Rose Valland concluded that the Castle had burned to a crisp and its contents turned to ash. Curiously enough, however, two years after this hasty verdict was pronounced, the Czech government returned to France several hundred items from Nikolsburg/Mikulov which bore the identifying numbers assigned to them by the ERR in occupied Paris, at the Jeu de Paume, where they had been brought and sorted.

Some of these items belonged to Veil Picard (WP), David David-Weill (DW), Louis Louis-Dreyfus (DRF, DRD), the Hirsch family (HIR), the Oppenheimers (OPPE) and many others, including objects seized during Möbel-Aktion (MA-B).

Until a full accounting is produced of the items stored at Nikolsburg, a doubt will always linger whether more objects from the Nikolsburg hoard remain in the Czech Republic or in Slovakia or even perhaps in Austria. No one knows for sure.

ERR database—Frederic Unger collection (U)

by Marc Masurovsky

I went over the items seized by the ERR from Frederic Unger, an Austrian citizen from Vienna who had left his home town in the wake of the Anschluss in late 1938 and headed to Paris, France. He had shipped his liftvans to a storage facility on the outskirts of the French capital and from there had emigrated to the United States. The liftvans never crossed the Atlantic Ocean. They remained in Paris, held hostage by the war effort. Eventually, the German Army rolled into France like in a wad of butter and by mid-June 1940, half of France was occupied as was all of Belgium and Holland.

The ERR seized the liftvans and removed their contents.

The contents of the liftvans arrived at the Jeu de Paume at some point in 1942 and some--not all--were inventoried in October 1942.

The ERR staff at the Jeu de Paume dutifully typed up a set of 44 cards which describe mostly paintings and works on paper seized from Mr. Unger's crates.

As I perused through the items, I realized that there were gaps in the numerical sequence established by the ERR personnel. I checked the inventories against the cards and noted the gaps in the sequences.

There were 6 items that the ERR had not carded. Half of them were designated as 'vernichtet' or slated for destruction including a work that he or one of his kin had penned. Whether or not they were destroyed, I know not.

Many of Mr. Unger's items were eventually shipped to a castle in the former Czechoslovakia in a town called Nikolsburg or Mikulov for our Czech friends. The town of Nikolsburg had been annexed by the Nazis and incorporated into the Reich. The castle, as it should, stood on a hill overlooking the city. It was designated as a depot by the ERR leadership in Berlin to store many items stolen in France from Jews and others as well as items from Belgium. Trainloads of crates reached Nikolsburg from France and Belgium from the fall of 1943 to the spring of 1944. Mr. Unger's paintings and works on paper were shipped from Paris on November 15, 1943.

Out of that group, some Unger items found their way to a castle in Bavaria called Neuschwanstein which served as one of the ERR's oldest and most important depots for French Jewish confiscated collections. Neuschwanstein is the famous castle built by mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

I had to re-adjust the information on Frederic Unger's collection to note that about one-third of his items had not reached Neuschwanstein before American troops discovered a small number of crates marked 'Unger' or 'U' together with thousands of other looted objects. They were all eventually shipped through Munich to Paris to be returned to their rightful owners. The present location of the missing items remains unknown. As a result, the database shows them as not having been restituted.

The final exercise for Mr. Unger's property will involve cross-checking his restitution records with information in the database so as to indicate precisely which items were returned to him and on what date. The most complex aspect of this task will involve those items that were sent to the Jeu de Paume by the ERR but were neither carded nor inventoried. All we have are crate numbers and descriptions but we don't know for certain whether they in fact transited through the Jeu de Paume Museum, the main triage and selection facility for looted art in downtown Paris between October 1940 and August 1944.

For more details, go to http://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume.

The Night of the Generals, directed by Anatole Litvak

Night of the Generals 1967 Movie Poster
Source: IMPAwards

I just finished watching this oldie but goodie from 1966, starring Peter O'Toole as a psychotic SS General, adapted from a novel by French author, Joseph Kessel.

One particular scene attracted my attention. Peter O'Toole's character, SS General Tanz, visits the Jeu de Paume in the Jardin des Tuileries, courtesy of the German General Staff in occupied Paris. He is offered a private tour of the art looted from Jewish households, which has been stored there before being shipped to Germany.

It would all be fine except that we are now on July 18, 1944. Most of the art looted by the Germans and taken to the Jeu de Paume for processing had already been either sent to the Reich for dispersal or incorporation into either the future Linz Museum collection or other State or private collections, or been disposed of on the Paris art market.

SS General Tanz is taken into a private room protected by a curtain that cloaks a metal gate. Behind the curtain and the gate is a room where 'decadent' works are stored, as they called them in the film.

This is where it gets curious. Lance Corporal Hartmann (played by Tom Courtenay) who accompanies SS General Tanz has a ledger in hand from which he describes each painting that Tanz reviews. How extraordinary! especially since such an 'exhibit' ledger did not exist. Nevertheless, we see reproductions of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec (Le Divan), a nude by Renoir which he painted in 1910, Paul Gauguin's "On the Beach," and, most amazingly a painting by Chaim Soutine described as 'Le Garcon d'Etage [the Bellboy]', Edgar Degas' 'The Tub" painted in 1886. I would stop here were it not for the self-portrait by Van Gogh, sometimes called "Vincent in Flames" which entrances General Tanz who almost goes into convulsions so hypnotic is the work.

Were these paintings ever at the Jeu de Paume? I checked the ERR database at www.errproject.org/jeudepaume, on the off-chance that they might be listed there.

None of them are and the Degas looked more like a Bonnard.

The Van Gogh does not appear to exist either.

Why take such license when there were so many great works to choose from, reproduce and display?

The only truth to the story is that many such 'decadent' works had been prepared for shipment to a castle in present-day Czech Republic at Nikolsburg/Mikulov on August 1, 1944. The train barely made it out of Paris and was stopped by the French resistance near a small town called Aulnay-sous-Bois. On that train were a trove of Impressionist works which the rightful owners recovered in due course.

The Train, 1964
Source: imdb

The subject of that dramatic story is treated in yet another film aptly called 'The Train' by John Frankenheimer, made in 1964, with Burt Lancaster in the starring role.

Epilogue

SS General Tanz is set to leave the 'decadent' room--in the film, it is labeled 'Salle E', while in the actual history of the Jeu de Paume, it is referred to as the 'Salle des Martyrs." On his way, he picks up what look like flyers from a stack on a table. These are reproductions of some of the paintings that he just looked at, as if the Nazis had organized the room in true exhibit form complete with photo-reproductions that one could take home and admire. Photos of 'decadent' works? How strange! But then, life is stranger than fiction, non?