The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [20]
The cold was as bad as the hunger, Maass writes, and in desperation, the residents of Holland’s proud cities ransacked their parks, chopping trees for firewood. Many of the poor burned their own furniture for heat. Then they tore apart abandoned or bombed houses so that they could burn scraps of window frames and stairs and doors. The Dutch clawed the wooden ties from railroad tracks. They resorted to burying their dead in cardboard boxes or blankets, because there was no wood for coffins.
“Beautiful old houses in the center of the city disappeared overnight,” recalled a man who spent the war years in Amsterdam. “On every floor people were sawing, hammering, breaking away the wood…. Everywhere the trees were cut down. In the evening one stumbled and fell over the trunks. The white-painted railings along the canals were cut down.”
Holland’s streets streamed with silent, starving zombies. “Along the roads,” the same observer continued, “there are endless processions of desperate people who are trying to find food—somewhere, sometime. Never have I seen so much misery and despair as in those silent processions. They are silent. Nobody talks, nobody complains. Most of the people are too tired, too embittered.”
As the winter of 1944 dragged on, starving city-dwellers trudged into the countryside to forage for food or in the hope of bartering a ring or a plate or a shirt for a bite to eat. One observer recalled an “endless road behind Hoorn [in the north of Holland] filled with fearful, anxious, hungry Amsterdammers. They stumbled along, towing carts and carriages. Some dropped along the road; they couldn’t go any farther and had no strength left. Women who had accompanied their sons or husbands sat on the carts. And they were whipped by the wind and drenched by the icy, streaming rain.”
FOR THE NAZI higher-ups, Dutch desperation meant opportunity. Conquerors flush with cash cast a vulture’s eye around the denuded landscape. The Dutch, for their part, took advantage of almost the only asset available to them, their extraordinary stock of art. Especially at the war’s onset, the historian Lynn Nicholas observes, the Dutch still hoped that these dark days might somehow pass. In the meantime, “there was no reason to forgo the enormous profits to be made at the expense of the enemy. Nowhere would these be greater than in the art trade, and nowhere was the survival of the otherwise doomed more possible than through the satisfaction of the collector’s fever by which the Nazi leadership was possessed.”
Art had intrinsic, lasting value and, conveniently for the new owners, it was portable as well. “Art soon became a major factor in the economy,” writes Nicholas, “as everyone with cash, from black marketeers to Hitler, sought safe assets. As the trade heated up, prices rose and family attics were scoured for the Dutch old masters and romantic genre scenes beloved by the conquerors.”
For the occupiers, it was a game with a deck stacked in their favor. The Nazis could buy what ever they wanted, with state money, from intimidated sellers. A cadre of eager agents helped them scout out special prizes and “bargain” with the owners. One of the most notorious was a Goering crony named Kajetan Mühlmann, an Austrian who held the title of “Special Commissioner for the Safekeeping of Works of Art in the Occupied Territories.” This was lucrative work. In his role as middleman, Mühlmann pocketed a fortune, one 15 percent commission at a time.
IF THE NAZIS wanted paintings, one might think that they could simply have stolen them. And they could have. But they had scruples, of a sort, about stealing from “fellow Nordics.” Instead, they concocted “legal” means of obtaining what they wanted.