[MSN] Nazi crime revelations raise questions about the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

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Nazi crime revelations raise questions about the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

The late collector Heini Thyssen forced himself to forget his family’s Nazi
involvement, but so did the countries that vied for his and his father’s
pictures in the 1980s. This well documented book gives the details

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=578

By Anna Somers Cocks | Posted 01 March 2007 

   
 The baron and his fifth wife, Carmen “Tita” Cervera (Photo: Alan Davidson):
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=578 
 
 
Collecting art and then putting it on public display is a very traditional
way of polishing up a murky reputation. Think of Henry Clay Frick of the
oh-so-refined Frick Collection: a capitalist of the most ruthless kind, a
heavy-handed strikebreaker, with 16 workers left dead on one occasion. No
one today remembers the origins of that museum, or if they remember, they do
not care. 

In recent years, however, there has been one crime for which this convenient
amnesia does not seem to work and that is any support of the Nazi regime. In
2001, when Friedrich Christian Flick wanted to put his collection of
contemporary art on display in Zurich, the locals got together a protest
movement because his fortune came from Mercedes, and Mercedes had been
deeply involved in armaments production for the Nazis, employing slave
labour. Flick is too young to have been involved himself, but the mere fact
that his money came from a tainted source and that he chose to collect art
rather than compensate ­victims was enough for Zurich to turn him down.
Berlin then went on to accept the ­collection, but not without a huge public
row about it. 

David Litchfield’s book on the Thyssen family now forces us to be aware of
what that family of steel barons was up to during World War II. This had
largely been forgotten or fudged but is now clearly revealed. 

Baron Hans Heinrich (Heini) Thyssen, who died in 2002, is immortalised in
the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, one of the city’s main tourist
attractions. His fifth wife, Tita, is still buying and hopes that the
Spanish government will continue to finance an expansion of the museum. Mr
Litchfield, a friend of Heini’s nephew Stephen Bentinck, was originally
employed 14 years ago by Heini and Tita to write a hagiography, but
gradually, with the help of the researcher Caroline Schmitz, the book
emancipated itself (although the author is clearly a Tita fan). Heini’s
eldest son George also gave them access to the family and business archives
in Monte Carlo, which put the project on an altogether more serious footing.


Mr Litchfield’s judgement on Heini Thyssen is that he managed to repress all
memory of what the family enterprises had been doing ­during the war. He
quotes the baron as saying to the Spanish journalist Luis de Villalonga:
“During the war, a group of big industrialists employed Jewish deportees in
their plants and made them work like slaves. When they became too ill or too
weak to work, they were sent to concentration camps and to the gas chambers.
Not only did we have nothing to do with this, but we were persecuted by the
Nazis as well.” 

But Heini must have known this was not true. Although only a very young man
and living in Switzerland during the war, he was present at all the meetings
there of the directors of the Thyssen enterprise. He would have known, for
example, that in 1942, everything was going swimmingly, with the steel
factories posting a 2% ­dividend, Thyssen Gas a 6% dividend on profits of 2m
Reichsmark, their Dutch bank, BVHS (which had helped finance the Nazi party
in the early 1930s) had a DFL3m surplus, while the “armament enterprises” at
one of their shipyards were credit-worthy: it is all in the company reports
in the Monte Carlo archives. 

In addition, Heini’s brother Stephan, who remained in Germany during the
war, was chairman of the board of MABAG, a company that sank mine shafts,
built machinery, including parts for the V1 and V2 rockets that bombed
Britain, and built petrol storage installations. Together with IG Farben, it
constructed the Reich’s main fuel-storage depot in the Kohnstein mountains.
By the end of 1943 there were more than 10,000 forced labourers living
underground and by October 1944, it had become a concentration camp in its
own right, Mittelbau, which would hold 60,000 prisoners of whom 20,000 were
worked to death. In addition, a US government memo in the Washington
Archives says that in 1943, one in two miners in the Thyssen’s Walsum mine
was a slave labourer. 

There was also the dreadful happening in 1945 at the family castle, Schloss
Rechnitz, involving Heini’s sister Margit Batthyany. The very least that can
be said about her is that she enjoyed extremely bad company. She stayed
there throughout the war and became very friendly with the SS officers
billeted on her. On the night of the 24 and 25 March, it was decided to hold
a party in the castle for local Nazi dignitaries and around midnight, Franz
Podezin, the chief of the Gestapo, invited the senior guests for fun to
shoot 200 or so half starved Jews, who had been working on the town’s­
fortifications. Their burial place has never been found. Shortly afterwards,
as the Russians moved in the castle burnt down, some say razed by locals to
destroy incriminating evidence. No action was taken against Margit
Batthyany, but the rest of the family could not have escaped knowing what
had happened because there were trials in Rechnitz after the war, although
no one went to jail for more than a few years because all the key witnesses
died in “accidents”. The Thyssens never rebuilt the castle. 

It was the Allies themselves, especially the Americans, who decided to let
bygones be bygones and help revive the Thyssen empire in the interest of the
German economy and opposing the Soviets. Before Berlin was even taken,
Thyssen Gas and Water was working with the Allied Military Governor and by
1948, Bremer Vulkan, the Thyssen shipyard that had made U-boats for the
Nazis, had orders from the Allies worth DM11.25m. The fact that in 1946,
Averell Harriman, who in January 1941 still nominally held the Thyssen
shares in their BVHS bank, became Secretary of State for Commerce almost
certainly helped the family get back their banking assets. 

Forty years pass and in 1986 the word gets out that Heini Thyssen is
thinking of moving his collection from the Villa Favorita on Lake Lugano.
Countries fall over themselves to get hold of it (including Prime Minister
Thatcher—the only time she takes a direct interest in the arts) and the Nazi
past never gets mentioned. As Heini intended from the outset—because it was
what his new Spanish wife, Tita, wanted—Spain wins, and in 1993 pays $350m
for half the collection. 

What of the man himself? One of the less attractive aspects of the art world
is the servile admiration for major collectors when, for every true
collector, in the sense of someone with real knowledge and passion, there
are dozens of neurotic shopaholics, snobs or greedy investors. This book,
which describes Heini’s addictions to alcohol and women with gusto, puts him
squarely in the shopaholic category and says that he had little real
knowledge or love of art, merely a craving to acquire. Since, however,
Heini’s most dynamic and inspiring art advisor, Simon de Pury, refused to
talk to David Litchfield, this is the part of the book that is weakest.
During the period when de Pury worked as Thyssen’s curator, the range of his
collecting expanded to include US art and the Russian Avant-garde, the
collections were properly ­published and the extraordinary exchange
exhibitions of the 1980s between the Hermitage and the Villa Favorita took
place. It was a good partnership and probably the most productive and
enjoyable part of Thyssen’s generally disappointing life, so it is a pity
that it does not get more ­subtle and informed treatment, because the rest
of this Thyssen saga is pretty unedifying, with almost everyone in it
variously or severally degenerate, deranged, greedy, ­callous, ­vulgar or
snobbish. 

Should Heini Thyssen be blamed for what his family did? No. Although he knew
what was happening, he did not take part in events and was too young to
influence them. Would a Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum be created today with such
insouciance by a national government? Probably not. What should happen now?
The provenance of any works in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum bought by
Heini’s father, Heinrich Thyssen, in the period 1932 to 1945, but
particularly after the fall of France, should be examined very closely.
Because one of the revelations of this book is that, far from having ceased
to buy works of art in 1938, as Heinrich and then Heini maintained, pictures
moved between Paris and Switzerland, where Heinrich Thyssen lived, and by
1945, 218 works of art had been bought. Heinrich Thyssen always denied that
he went to France during the Nazi occupation, but in fact he made numerous
journeys to Paris, where Hotel Drouot was selling works stolen from French
Jews. And so were Julius Böhler and Karl Haberstock, with both of whom he
had dealings. If any works are found to have been stolen from Jews, the very
least that should happen is that they should be returned to the rightful
owners.


http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=578