The Rape of Europa (31 page)

The program so successful in Holland was first proposed for France in late October 1940. In November French police prefects were instructed to begin listing Jewish enterprises, which were to be put under “provisional administrators.” By December 4, 1940, a French agency, the Société du Contrôle-Administrateurs Provisoires, was set up to run this program under the aegis of a M. Fournier, former director of the Banque de France and president of the French Railroads.
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Soon the premises and remaining assets of Paul Rosenberg, Bernheim-Jeune, Léonce Rosenberg, and many more were being run by government-appointed administrators whose duty it was to “suppress Jewish influence in the French economy.” Attempts to circumvent such takeovers could be most unpleasant. Permission for the transfer of title to the Galerie Simon, owned by Daniel Kahnweiler, to his French Catholic sister-in-law, Louise Leiris, was granted only after arduous negotiations and the production of innumerable documents. The process was not helped by the series of anonymous notes, made up of letters cut from newspapers, which were sent to the authorities to remind them that Mme Leiris was related to the “German Jew Kahnweiler.”
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By early April 1941 an accountant named Gras had been appointed as administrator of Wildenstein, but the Aryan Dequoy was left in charge of day-to-day operations. This was perfect. Haberstock could now claim that the Sourches pictures were private Aryan property, and should be returned to the business which owned them. Gras, who was busily selling off the private collection of Bernheim-Jeune (of which he was also administrator) via the dealer Charles Montag (who had once been Winston Churchill’s painting teacher), did not object.

Haberstock used all his clout for this operation. At 6 p.m. on Monday, May 12, a Kunstschutz official, Dr. Pfitzner, received a call from Haberstock in Berlin. The dealer said that the Wildenstein pictures held at Sourches would be removed, but that they were to be reserved for Posse or himself, and were not to be released or sold to anyone else. The ERR, which was planning to claim the same items on the fifteenth, was amazed. The Kunstschutz, also startled, warned Louvre officials that an “unidentified agency” was planning to remove the Wildenstein objects.

On Tuesday, Baron von Pollnitz, an Air Force officer who was a close friend of Haberstock, appeared to make transportation arrangements. When the Kunstschutz pointed out that only the ERR could remove non-Aryan collections, von Pollnitz produced a document from Gras stating that the Wildenstein firm had been transferred to Aryan hands. The Kunstschutz, always happy to obstruct the ERR, conceded that “since the new Aryan owner wishes the return of the pictures in order to sell them” there was no reason to prevent the transfer.

Von Behr had in the meantime asked Goering to intervene, but Goering replied that if the collection had been Aryanized he could do nothing.
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The ERR had lost this one, and Haberstock triumphantly rushed to Paris to see the collection. He was disappointed in its quality and bought only seven pictures for FFr 930,000, of which he resold five to Linz for FFr 1.27 million. Dequoy politely wrote von Pollnitz to thank him for helping to “liberate his pictures from Sourches.” But Dequoy was not liberated from Haberstock, who from then on used the Wildenstein premises and the shop of the non-Aryan Hugo Engel as his branch offices in Paris.

To complete the “Aryanization” of the firm, Dequoy and two partners attempted to buy it outright from Gras, so that it could be operated privately in Dequoy’s name. The French Commission of Jewish Affairs and related German agencies were suspicious of this request, as they were perfectly aware of Dequoy’s long association with Wildenstein, and felt that the price Dequoy was offering for the firm was ludicrously low. It was also rumored in the more fanatic German circles that Dequoy was hiding part of the Wildenstein collection somewhere, and therefore holding Jewish property against German interests. Only after months of correspondence, in which Dequoy swore repeatedly that he had not been in touch with his former employer since 1939 and had made no secret arrangements with him, and many letters from Posse and Haberstock invoking the name of the Führer, Goering, and various other highly placed occupation figures, which described the many works of art Dequoy had procured for the Reich, did the firm finally become his in early 1943.
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This arrangement was to be short-lived. After the death of Posse and the subsequent eclipse of Haberstock the elegant galleries in the rue la Boétie were requisitioned in January 1944 by the extraordinarily optimistic German embassy for an Institute of Franco-German Cultural Exchange.

Dequoy, nothing daunted, continued to trade in new premises in the faubourg Saint-Honoré. Throughout, he did very well, his establishment being viewed by French and Germans alike as a continuation of the famous Wildenstein house. In September 1941 the Swiss collector Emil Bührle bought two Renoirs, a Greuze, and a David, all of which he had to leave in Paris for the time being because of strict Swiss Customs laws.

Some old clients came back too. In 1942 the wine broker Etienne Nicolas asked Dequoy to sell two major Rembrandts, the
Portrait of Titus
and
Landscape with Castle
, which he had bought in 1933 from Wildenstein, to whom they had come from Calouste Gulbenkian, who had in turn bought them from the Hermitage. This was a change of heart for Nicolas, who had promised them to the Louvre before the war, but the high prices being paid, especially for Dutch artists, were perhaps too tempting. Dequoy negotiated the sale with Haberstock for Linz, and Nicolas received the very satisfactory sum of FFr 60 million ($1.2 million) for the pair, paid through the cashier’s office at the German embassy. Dequoy got FFr 1.8 million directly from Haberstock for “having found and made arrangements for the sale of two paintings by Rembrandt.”
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Georges Wildenstein’s hope for continuing business as usual with Haberstock’s help on an import-export basis was not destined to succeed, but it took him considerable time to grasp the true situation. The letters with which he bombarded Dequoy were full of advice and the gossipy information so vital to the art trade, all written with little codes and disguised names (Haberstock was referred to as “Oscar”). He suggested that his former employee buy “cheaply” forty pictures by Rouault, roll them up in paper, “as Rouault does,” and try to send them to New York through American Express. He urged Dequoy to keep any engravings he had as long as possible, as he had heard that prices were rising wildly. The answers came back very slowly, prompting Wildenstein to write imperiously: “I cannot understand what is happening: would you try to see if it is not possible by some means to receive your correspondence for certain?”

The problem was partly solved by routing the letters through Switzerland, but Wildenstein clearly could not comprehend the New Order in Europe. In March 1941 he wrote indignantly to complain about three cases of works held by a transit shipper in Bordeaux, “which had been at the free disposal of this firm in November 1940” and had apparently been seized. Accusing the shipper of “extraordinary negligence,” he fumed that “if they were taken away, it was by the shipper, and not the Germans, who it cannot be believed would contradict an official ruling of their own.” Dequoy was enjoined to do “what you can from your side.” This was precious little. Dequoy had nothing much to ship, and Haberstock, for reasons which will become clear, had not been able to obtain any modern pictures to trade. Wildenstein correctly suspected that someone else had, and wrote to ask Dequoy “to find out who Oscar’s competition is.” He also told him that he would not be interested in any items from Haberstock “unless he can guarantee shipment.”
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There was very good reason for this proviso. The only recorded attempt
to ship works to Wildenstein, like so many others, was plagued by the new legalities of the war. Seventeen French pictures by such “dead painters”—as the customs so elegantly put it—as Greuze, Watteau, Robert, Corot, and Renoir, with suspiciously low valuations, and which technically were the property of Wildenstein’s London branch, ran into the same British blockaders as had Fabiani’s lot. London had originally refused to authorize the export on grounds that “proceeds of sales made in the United States on behalf of Wildenstein’s London house were not remitted to the UK,” a reference to the firm’s problems with the David-Weill collections.

To get around this, Wildenstein ordered Dequoy to send the pictures instead to Martinique on a French ship, the SS
Carimare.
This maneuver did not fool the British, who informed their American friends that Wildenstein had evaded blockade controls and did not deserve any consideration, as he had originally promised London not to ship the paintings. The entry of the pictures into the United States was now subject to agreement between the State Department and the French authorities in Martinique. The shipment was eventually allowed to enter, but was placed in a blocked account.
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The ultimate fate of these works, and others in the same situation, is most difficult to trace, not least because of the vague names assigned them by their shippers. On the bill of lading for the
Carimare
shipment no fewer than twelve pictures are entitled
Painting of a Girl;
four are
Landscapes;
one is a
Virgin.

When entry to the United States proved difficult many dealers opened branches in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Havana. American and British Intelligence and Treasury intercepts show reams of correspondence from Europe and the United States to South America and the Caribbean on the subject of art sales. These were only the tip of the iceberg, and before long the Allies, fearing the establishment of Nazi power bases in the Americas, would begin to try to monitor the flow of assets to the region.

After the entry of the United States into the war this trade became increasingly lively and complicated. An American professor in Panama City reported that “shipments from Germany via Spain reached Colombia quite easily. Lots of stuff was stopped by the English, but much got through.”
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One of the escaped Katz family, now ensconced in New York, sent his relation in Curaçao a number of Dutch paintings to sell there with the comment “there are so many buyers, that nobody needs to know how much you paid for these paintings.”
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There were plenty of buyers in New York too. American art periodicals in the summer of 1941 reported that the buying activities of exiles from Europe had had a “galvanizing” effect on the market. Dealers reported selling hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of
paintings per month and Parke-Bernet announced the best season in twelve years, up 54 percent over the year before, adding that “the news is that a minority of the buyers were Americans.”
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So Byzantine were these international trading arrangements that even the normally unflappable agents of the U.S. Treasury, who had presumably been privy to more than one convoluted deal, were sometimes at a loss to explain them, and in their reports resorted to such descriptive phrases as “a long letter filled with confused accounts of business deals, shares of profits, ownerships, disputes, etc…. and various juggling of citizenships as occasions suggest.”
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This was in reference to the intricate proposed dealings between a German dealer named Paul Graupe who lived in New York; Arthur Goldschmidt, his onetime partner, whom we last saw in contact with Haberstock and Wildenstein in the south of France, and who eventually escaped to Cuba; Theodore Fischer, he of the Lucerne “degenerate” art auction; Hans Wendland, a German lawyer, possibly Jewish, who was a Swiss resident; Haberstock himself; and a whole series of French dealers—a combination, according to the Treasury, “lending itself to any trickery.”

Graupe had arrived in New York in early 1941. In April he received a letter from Hans Wendland suggesting a scheme very much like the one Haberstock had suggested to Wildenstein, with the remarkable difference that Wendland mentioned that dealers in Paris would buy “out of the Louvre” and not in the private sector, and ship the pictures to Switzerland, where Wildenstein or someone else would repurchase them. From there they could easily be shipped to America on neutral Swiss boats from Genoa. All this would be financed with the knowledge and help of the Germans. Graupe replied that his reception in New York had been “overpowering” and that he could use such material, but in the end he turned down Wendland’s proposal.

There was no question that enormous profits could be made in this way, but the wartime censorship made negotiations very difficult. Indeed, the whole reason for the Treasury investigation had been the voluminous correspondence they had intercepted concerning the disputed ownership of a van Gogh entitled
The Man Is at Sea
, which had not left France in a normal way. Accusations, denunciations, and threats flew from dealers in Lisbon to New York, and vice versa, all being read by Allied censors and Treasury officials trying to decide what monies they should or should not block and tax. Such sharing of ownership led to numerous other inquiries, some more justified than others; but nowhere does the fact that life and death were sometimes involved enter into the reports. In the light of what was happening in Europe, the investigation of the Perls Gallery for “turning
over without compensation or license an oil painting called
Rabbi in Flight
by Marc Chagall, a French national,” to the owner, the same Marc Chagall, who had escaped from France and arrived in New York in July 1942, now seems quite unnecessary.
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