44. Degenerate Art

Book Burning

“All great art,” Hitler proclaimed in Mein Kampf, “is national” and therefore had to be protected.[1] Hitler’s rise to power on January 31, 1933, was quickly followed by actions intended to cleanse the culture of “degeneracy”: book burnings took place, artists and musicians were dismissed from teaching positions, and curators who had supported modern art were replaced by Party members.[2] On April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union (DSt) organized the first book burnings. The DSt had been dominated since 1931 by the National Socialist German Students’ League, a division of the Nazi Party, founded in 1926, and dedicated to integrating university education within the framework of the Nazi worldview, in accord with the Führerprinzip, and which dressed its members in classic brown shirts and Swastika emblems. On the same day, the DSt, whose board was dominated by Burschenschafter, published the “Twelve Theses,” a title chosen to commemorate Martin Luther’s burning of a papal bull when he posted his ninety-five theses in 1520, and the book burning at the 1817 Wartburg Festival.

Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, the authors of The Pink Swastika, reveal that the first Nazi book burning took place four days after Röhm and his Storm Troopers raided Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sex Research Institute in Berlin. Hirschfeld claimed to have transcripts from two male clients who testified that they had sexual encounters with Hitler.[3] The SA removed all volumes from the library and storing them for the later book burning event. The institute had extensive records on the sexual perversions of numerous Nazi leaders, many of whom had been under treatment there prior to the beginning of the Nazi regime, as required by the German courts for persons convicted of sex offenses. Ludwig L. Lenz, who worked at the Institute at the time of the raid but managed to escape with his life, later wrote:

Why was it then, since we were completely non-party, that our purely scientific Institute was the first victim which fell to the new regime? The answer to this is simple… We knew too much. It would be against medical principles to provide a list of the Nazi leaders and their perversions [but]… not ten percent of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal… Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material—we possessed about forty thousand confessions and biographical letters—was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.[4]

The books targeted for burning were any deemed to degrade German purity, including books by Jewish, communist, liberal, pacifist author, or considered pornographic. A total of over 25,000 volumes were burned, including those by Marx, Heine, Einstein, H.G. Wells, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, or which advocated degenerate art like the music of Felix Mendelssohn or the Bauhaus architectural movement. In Berlin, in from of some 40,000 people, Goebbels proclaimed:

The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path… The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death - this is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed - a deed which should document the following for the world to know - Here the intellectual foundation of the November Republic is sinking to the ground, but from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise.[5]

During the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, Germany emerged as a leading center of the avant-garde. Films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) brought Expressionism to cinema. It was also the birthplace of Expressionism in painting and sculpture, of the atonal musical compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, and the jazz-influenced work of Kurt Weill (1900 – 1950), a Jewish composer active from the 1920s in his native Germany, and in his later years in the United States. In 1919, Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956), wrote the poetic memorial Epitaph honoring Luxemburg and Weill set it to music in The Berlin Requiem in 1928. With Brecht, Weill also developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad “Mack the Knife.”

As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. The term Entartung (“Degeneration”) had gained currency in Germany by the late nineteenth century the Zionist Max Nordau devised the theory presented in his 1892 book by that name. Nordau drew upon the writings of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835 – 1909), the self-proclaimed founder of modern scientific psychiatry, who is purported to have coined the term criminology. In The Criminal Man, published in 1876, Lombroso attempted to prove that there were “born criminals” who could be identified by their physical traits. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Count Dracula is described as having the type of physical appearance Lombroso would have described as criminal.[6]

Lombroso published The Man of Genius in 1889, which argued that artistic genius was a form of hereditary insanity, and provided inspiration for Nordau's work, as evidenced by his dedication of Degeneration to Lombroso. Nordau developed a critique of modern art, explained as the work of those so corrupted by modern life that they have lost the self-control needed to produce coherent works. According to Nordau, the degenerate artists and writers were “mentally disturbed.” Art, he said, should be uplifting and “wholesome,” and not glorify the ugly and sick like a “lunatic.” Nordau mainly wanted to point out the “degeneration” caused by “modem mysticism,” which transgressed the values of Enlightenment, the worst examples being Wagner and Nietzsche.

“Nordau’s book,” explained Brigitte Hamann, “made the word degenerate fashionable but transformed its meaning in Vienna. It now was applied to the Jews and became an anti-Semitic slogan that acquired a Darwinist twist.”[7] The modernist movement in Vienna was considered to be largely Jewish. As far back as in his essay Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (“The Work of Art of the Future”)—which he began by stating “As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man”— Wagner referred to “Jewish modernism,” calling it “something quite miserable and very dangerous, especially for us Germans.” In fact, Jews did share a proportionally large part in fin-de-siecle Vienna, as builders, patrons, buyers, and audience at performances of plays, exhibitions, and concerts.[8]

Around 1900, the German-national newspapers in Vienna published numerous reports of the alleged interference other ethnic groups’ against “German” culture, calling for every German to assume the responsibility of fighting for “pure German art.” In 1909, when Hitler was in Vienna, pan-German newspapers discussed a hierarchy of “racial esthetics,” assigning the modem, “degenerate” artist to the lowest level in Darwinian terms. A change, they proposed, could only occur “by way of an appropriately long-lasting inbreeding” toward improving the race, and thus art.[9] George von Schönerer’s Unverfälschte Deutsche Worte (“Unadulterated German Words”), claimed that German culture needed to be protected from “clever seducers” through censorship.

German nationalists, as well as a growing number of middle-class Germans, feared the end of the German Reich and German art, and even the German nation itself. Combatting the Bolsheviks, and the socialists, explains David Ian Hall, in “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany’s Rebirth after the First War,” became increasingly understood to implicate fighting for the nation and its Kultur. Many Germans began to long for a return to a familiar Heimat (“Homeland”), and there was a growing sense of Germanness and the notion of a Volksgemeinschaft (“national community”).[10] Bolshevism thus became a catch-all for left-wing politicians, pacifists, the liberal press, Jews, and anyone else who could be blamed for Germany’s defeat and post-war problems. The term was also used to stigmatize new trends in art, architecture, literature, and music. Atonal music, Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism—anything that was modern and experimental—was deemed to be an assault on traditional German life and culture.[11]

Militant League for German Culture

The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur remained under Rosenberg’s leadership until it was reorganized and renamed to the Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde (“National Socialist Culture Community”) in 1934. Members included anti-Semitic literary historians Adolf Bartels, Ludwig Polland, Gustaf Kossinna, physicist and Albert Einstein-opponent Philipp Lenard, the composer Paul Graener, the philosophers Otto Friedrich Bollnow, and Eugen Herrigel, the poet and later president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer Hanns Johst, the architect Paul Schulze-Naumburg, who edited the periodical Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”), Gustav Havemann, a violinist and later leader of the Reichsmusikkammer and who founded and lead a Kampfbund orchestra, the theater director Karl von Schirach, Fritz Kloppe who led Werwolf, a paramilitary organization, and the theologian, nationalist musicologist Fritz Stein, actors Carl Auen and Aribert Mog, philosopher, sociologist and economist Othmar Spann, and Austrian political philosopher and a teacher of Friedrich Hayek.[12]

In response to Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and of his own conflict with the Weimar “progressive” architectural scene, Paul Schulze-Naumburg (1869 – 1949) began condemning modern art and architecture in racial terms, thereby providing some of the basis for Hitler’s theories, in which classical Greece and the Middle Ages were the true sources of Aryan art.[13] Schultze-Naumburg wrote books such as Die Kunst der Deutschen. Ihr Wesen und ihre Werke (“The Art of the Germans. Its Nature and Its Works”) and Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”), published in 1928, in which he argued that only “racially pure” artists could produce a healthy art which reflected the timeless ideals of classical beauty, while racially “mixed” modern artists betrayed their inferiority and corruption by producing distorted artwork. As evidence, he reproduced examples of modern art alongside photographs of people with deformities and diseases.

Eckart introduced Hitler to Adolf Bartels (1862 – 1945), who in 1897 wrote a history of German literature that became a pioneering work for National Socialist literary reviews. According to Bartels, even authors whose names sounded Jewish, who wrote for the “Jewish press,” or who were friendly with Jews were “contaminated with Jewishness.” The noblest task of völkisch cultural policy would therefore be a radical de-Jewing of the arts, and thus the “salvation of National Socialist Germany.” Bartels led a successful campaign to prevent the unveiling of a statue of Heinrich Heine in 1906. After World War I, to promote his ideas, Bartels’ followers formed the Bartelsbund (“Bartels Society”), which later merged with Ludendorff’s Tannenbergbund.[14] Bartels’ work achieved “quasi-official” status in Nazi Germany, and Hitler personally awarded him the Adlerschild (“Eagle Shield of the German Reich”) medal, Nazi Germany’s highest civilian honor, in 1937.[15] The Adlerschild was introduced during the Weimar Republic, under President Friedrich Ebert and continued under Nazi Germany.

The Kampfbund published the periodical Mitteilung des Kampfbundes für deutsche Kultur (“Proceedings of the KfdK”) from 1929 to 1931. Under the heading “Signs of the Times,” they listed their enemies: Erich Kästner, Kurt Tucholsky, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Mehring, and the Berlin Institute for Sexual Research. Later, the most frequently mentioned were Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Kurt Schwitters, the Bauhaus Movement, Emil Nolde, Karl Hofter, Max Beckmann, and Dada artist Georg Grosz. Books by Jewish authors such as Ernst Toller, Arnold Zweig, Jakob Wassermann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnolt Bronnen, Leonhard Frank, Emil Ludwig, and Alfred Neumann were dismissed as not properly German. In 1930, the society directed a campaign against Ernst Barlach and the so-called Hetzkunst (“hate art”) of Käthe Kollwitz.

Also members of the Kampfbund were publishers and Thule Society members Julius Friedrich Lehmann and Hugo Bruckmann (1863 – 1941). Hugo’s wife Elsa Bruckmann was the Munich publisher of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and who with Winifred Wagner, helped to teach Hitler table manners and helped reform his public image.[16] Elsa held the “Salon Bruckmann” which was attended by Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages, both members of the George-Kreis. Bruckmann and her husband financially supported International Modernism in art and design. In 1899, Chamberlain read at Elsa Bruckmann’s first salon in January 1899. Attendees at their salon included Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Wölfflin, Rudolf Kassner, Hermann Keyserling, Karl Wolfskehl, Harry Graf Kessler, Georg Simmel, Hjalmar Schacht and her nephew Norbert von Hellingrath.[17] Hitler was known to have attended some of Schuler’s lectures there in 1922 and 1923.[18] Rilke’s lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Freud’s pupil as well as Paul Rée’s and Nietzsche’s temptress, was eventually attacked by the Nazis as a “Finnish Jewess.”[19] A few days before her death, the Gestapo confiscated her library, because practiced “Jewish science” and had many books by Jewish authors.[20]

Carl Jung’s friend, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who spoke at the Eranos conference in 1934, had joined both the Hitler Youth and the Kampfbund, and was subsequently inducted by Himmler and Heydrich personally into the SS and the SD.[21] Mary Wigman and her associates decided to join the Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund (“National Socialist Teachers League”) and the Kampfbund. Letters to the branch schools pointed out that that they would need to dismiss their Jewish teachers and pupils.[22] The Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund was founded by former schoolteacher Hans Schemm (1891 – 1935), the Gauleiter of Bayreuth. In 1919, Schemm was a member of the Freikorps Bayreuth, which took part in the suppression of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich. Schemm had joined the Nazi Party in 1922. In 1923, he first met Hitler. When the Party was banned in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch, Schemm, with Hitler’s blessing, became First Assessor in the Bayreuth Völkischer Bund in 1924 and, when it disbanded, joined the National Socialist Freedom Movement (NSFB) led by Ludendorff. When the NSFB won 32 seats in the Reichstag in the 1924 elections, Ludendorff, former SA head Ernst Röhm and also Thule Society founder Theodor Fritsch, were among the winning candidates.

When Schemm died in 1935, he was given a lavish state funeral, attended by Hitler and most Party and State dignitaries. One observer noted:

[It] was the biggest Bayreuth had ever seen and far more ostentatious than Richard Wagner's. When all the guests had taken their places, for the funeral ceremony, Hitler arrived unexpectedly, and walked silently between the ranks of the raised arms. ... Hess delivered the main funeral oration, followed by Goebbels, Frick, Frank, Rosenberg, Himmler and many others. The ceremony concluded with the funeral march from the Twilight of the Gods.[23]

In 1930, Thule Society member Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi Interior and Cultural minister of Thuringia and KdfK regional leader, named Hans Severus Ziegler (1893 – 1978) of the Schultze-Naumburg firm as director of the Weimar Architecture Institute. Ziegler, who was in Eisenach, was the son of a banker and, through his mother, the grandson of New York publisher Gustav Schirmer, who had promised to acquire Wagner’s texts for German immigrants in the United States.[24] Ziegler grandmother, the American-born Mary Francis Schirmer, was a close friend of Cosima Wagner, through whom Ziegler was attracted to the militant nationalism and from an early age.[25] Frick ordered artworks by “degenerate artists” to be removed from the Schlossmuseum in Weimar. These included works by Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Barlach, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, and Emil Nolde, although the latter was himself a Nazi. Works by modernist composers Stravinsky and Hindemith were removed from state-subsidized concert programs, and books by Erich Maria Remarque, and films by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and G.W. Pabst were banned.

Ziegler was a strong critic of atonal music, dismissing it as decadent “cultural Bolshevism.”[26] In May 1938, he curated the Entartete Musik exhibition in Düsseldorf, where Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Walter Braunfels, Karol Rathaus and Wilhelm Grosz were amongst those who received the strongest condemnation. Whilst working under Frick, in Thuringia, Ziegler had also overseen the removal of works of modern art pieces museums and public buildings, and helped to bring about a crackdown on the “glorification of Negroidism” by restricting the performance of jazz music.[27] After the war, Ziegler was politically active in Deutsches Kulturwerk Europäischen Geistes, where he became a regular guest of Winifred Wagner, who often hosted such other far-right personalities as Adolf von Thadden, Edda Göring, and Oswald Mosley.[28]

Lion Feuchtwanger (1884 – 1958), one of the artists denounced by the Nazis, was a German Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht. His most successful work in this genre was Jud Süß (“Jew Sweet”), written 1921–1922, published 1925, which was well received internationally. The novel is the story of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, a German Jewish banker and court Jew for Charles Alexander, Duke of Württemberg in Stuttgart. Charles Alexander’s, Charles Eugene, Duke of Württemberg, was a patron of Friedrich Schiller. Charles Eugene’s sister, Duchess Auguste, married Karl Anselm of Thurn and Taxis, Head of the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis, whose preferred banker was Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild dynasty.

Nevertheless, in 1940, Goebbels commissioned Nazi film-maker Veit Harlan (1899 – 1964) to make film-version of Jud Süß, based in part on Feuchtwanger’s novel, which is considered one of the most antisemitic films of all time.[29] In Feuchtwanger’s novel, it is Süss Oppenheimer’s daughter who is raped and killed by the Duke of Württemberg. In Harlan’s film, it is Süss who infiltrates and corrupts the gentile community, dupes the innocent Duke, and rapes a pure Christian woman, who drowns herself in shame. To the cries of “Kill the jew!” from the gathered crowd, Süss is hanged in the climactic scene.

The film starred Werner Krauss (1884 – 1959), who dominated the German theatre and cinema of the early twentieth century. Krauss initially gained minor and secondary roles like King Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. Committed to playing sinister roles, he became a worldwide sensation for his demonic portrayal of the titular character in Robert Wiene’s film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Considered a milestone of German Expressionist cinema, the film tells the story of an insane hypnotist, played by Krauss, who uses a mind-controlled somnambulist to commit murders. The script was written by two Jewish writers, Hans Janowitz (1890 – 1954) and Carl Mayer (1894 – 1944).

Mayer worked with Béla Balázs (1884 – 1949) on the script for Das Blaue Licht (“The Blue Light”), a 1932 film version of the witch Junta directed by Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. Balázs was a moving force in the Sonntagskreis (“Sunday Circle”), the intellectual discussion group which he founded in the autumn of 1915, together with the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács (1885 – 1971), who was an important influence on the Frankfurt School. Lukács befriended Thomas Mann who later based the character of the Jewish Jesuit Naphta on Lukács in his novel The Magic Mountain. Shortly after, in 1933, Mayer moved to London to escape the Nazi regime. Riefenstahl later removed Balázs’s and Mayer’s names from the film credits because they were Jewish.

Riefenstahl heard Hitler speak at a rally in 1932 and was mesmerized by his talent as a public speaker.[30] Hitler was immediately captivated by the work Riefenstahl, who fit his ideal of Aryan womanhood, as he had noted when he saw her starring in Das Blaue Licht.[31] However, rumors of an affair between Riefenstahl and Hitler, as well as allegations that she was of mixed Jewish-Polish descent, were circulated in German political circles as early as 1933, and even found their way into the international press, such as the French newspaper Paris-soir in September 1934.[32] An article that appeared in October 1934 in Hayarden, the newspaper of the Revisionist movement in Palestine, noted that after 1933, Riefenstahl was appointed head of the UFA studio, not because of her professional qualifications. In 1927, Alfred Hugenberg (1865 – 1951), a leader of the DNVP who became Minister of the Economy and Minister of Agriculture and Nutrition in Hitler’s cabinet, purchased UFA and transferred ownership to the Nazi Party in 1933. According to Hayarden, “Until the ‘national awakening,’ she committed transgressions of racial disgrace with Jewish directors… and thanks to her special talents she quickly reached an agreement with the new masters.”[33] Riefenstahl directed the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will (1935), distributed by UFA, and Olympia (1938), both widely considered two of the most effective and technically innovative propaganda films ever made.[34] When Paris was occupied by the Nazis in June 1940, Paris-soir was the only newspaper to have its printing press, which was new and considered the best in Europe, handed over to the Germans right away.[35]

Reichskulturkammer

Winifred was also close to Magda Goebbels. On September 22, 1933, at the instigation of Goebbels, the Reichskulturkammer (“Reich Chamber of Culture”) was passed into law, as part of the Gleichschaltung. Its vice-presidents included Walther Funk of the Reichsbank; Karl Hanke (1903 – 1945), the final Reichsführer of the SS; and Werner Naumann (1909 – 1982), who was State Secretary in Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. SS officer Hans Hinkel (1901 – 1960), who editor for the Berlin edition of the Völkischer Beobachter. In 1920, Hinkel joined the Freikorps Oberland, which had been formed by Sebottendorf and the Thule Society[36], and took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Hinkel also became the Organisationsleiter (“Organizational Leader”) of Rosenberg’s Kampfbund, and was one of the officers in charge of the chamber and Goebbels’ special commissioner for the removal of Jews from German cultural life.

As Reichstheaterkammer (“Reich Theatre Chamber”), Goebbels chose Rainer Schlösser (1899 – 1945), who was Culture-Political Editor of the Völkischer Beobachter. Rainer’s father was a professor at the University of Jena who, in 1917, became the director of the Goethe-Schiller Archives at Weimar, where Rudolf Steiner worked for a time. Schlösser was a proponent of the Thingspiele, described as “multi-disciplinary outdoor theatre.” About forty outdoor theatres, usually modelled on those of ancient Greece, were developed during the Third Reich. Schlösser described the Thingspiele in a speech in 1934, as “a longing for a drama that intensifies historical events to create a mythical, universal, unambiguous reality beyond reality.” He added that “…only someone who understands this longing will be able to create the cultic popular drama of the future.”[37] Schlösser’s view was encapsulated in his comments about von Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz:

The cultural-political goal of the Third Reich is not to focus upon bureaucratic power, but to create fervor in the service of Holy Art. Der Freischütz is a mirror of the soul.[38]

Carl Froelich (1875 – 1953) headed the Reichsfilmkammer (“Reich Chamber of Film”) from 1939. In 1913, Froelich made his directorial debut with the silent film Richard Wagner. In 1929, Froelich made the first German sound film, Die Nacht gehört uns (“The Night Belongs To Us”). In 1931, Froelich was advisor, to Leontine Sagan’s famous boarding-school film and later lesbian classic, Mädchen in Uniform (“Girls in Uniform”). Some of Froelich’s best-known films included Ich für dich, du für mich (“I for You, You for Me”), for the Reich Propaganda Directorate of the Nazi Party in 1934, which promoted the concepts of blood and soil. Froelich headed the Reichsfilmkammer (“Reich Chamber of Film”) from 1939.

G.W. Pabst (1885 – 1967) began his career as a film director at the behest of Froelich, who hired Pabst as an assistant director. Pabst, who was one of the most influential German-language filmmakers during the Weimar Republic, developed a talent for “discovering” actresses, including Greta Garbo, Asta Nielsen, Louise Brooks, and Leni Riefenstahl. After the coming of sound, Pabst made a trilogy of films that secured his reputation: Westfront 1918 (1930), The Threepenny Opera (1931) based on the Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill musical, and Kameradschaft (1931). Under the auspices of Goebbels, Pabst made two films in Germany during this period: The Comedians (1941) and Paracelsus (1943), starring Werner Krauss as the medieval alchemist Paracelcus.

A silent film version Frank Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box in 1929 was directed by Pabst. Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box also formed the basis for the opera Lulu by Alban Berg (1885 – 1935) in 1935. Berg studied with Schoenberg and was a part of Vienna’s cultural elite during the heady fin de siècle period, which included Kraus, Loos, the musicians Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, the painter Gustav Klimt, and the poet Peter Altenberg. Adolf Loos was a widely-known critic of the Art Nouveau movement, and a friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein. During the summer of 1908, after Mathilde left him for several months for a young Austrian painter, Richard Gerstl, Schoenberg composed Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide (“You lean against a silver-willow”), the thirteenth song in the cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Op. 15, based on the collection of the same name by the German Stefan George, founder of the George-Kreis.[39]

Berg’s opera tells the story of a mysterious “femme fatale” known as Lulu, who follows a downward spiral from a well-kept mistress in Vienna to a street prostitute in London. In 1935, as he was financially and artistically ruined by the Reichskulturkammer, which proscribed his work as “degenerate music” under the label Kulturbolschewismus (“Cultural Bolshevism”), Berg accepted a commission from Russian-born American violinist Louis Krasner, dedicated Manon Gropius, the deceased daughter of architect Walter Gropius (1883 – 1969), founder of the Bauhaus School, and Gustav Malhler’s widow Alma.[40] A monument in honor of the workers who were killed in the wake of the Kapp Putsch was erected in the Weimar central cemetery according to plans submitted by Gropius. In 1936, the monument was destroyed by the Nazis, who considered it an example of “degenerate art.”

To head the Reichsmusikkammer (“Reich Chamber of Music”), Goebbels appointed Richard Strauss.[41] Along with Werner Krauss, Richard Strauss was among the signatories of the Aufruf der Kulturschaffenden (“call to the artists”), a declaration by German artists printed in the Völkischer Beobachter on August 18, 1934, showing their support for the merger of the offices of President and Chancellor in the person of Hitler. In 1933, Krauss joined the Vienna Burgtheater ensemble to perform as Napoleon in 100 Tage (“Hundred Days”), a drama written by Giovacchino Forzano with Benito Mussolini, who supposedly advised him on how to play the part. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s foreign press chief at the time, was in charge of artistic supervision.[42] Krauss also made the acquaintance of Goebbels, who appointed Vice President of the theatre department of Reichskulturkammer, where served from 1933 to 1935.[43]

Some works of several of the artists to sign the Aufruf, like Ernst Barlach and Emil Nolde, were later condemned as degenerate. Another signatory was Hanns Johst (1890 – 1978), who had joined Rosenberg’s Kampfbund in 1928. It was in response to Johst’s play Der Einsame (“The Lonely”), a dramatization of the life of playwright Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801 – 1836), that Bertolt Brecht wrote his first play Baal, about a wastrel youth who becomes involved in several sexual affairs and at least one murder. Heinrich Heine saw Grabbe as one of Germany’s foremost dramatists, calling him “a drunken Shakespeare” and Freud described him as “an original and rather peculiar poet.”[44] Succeeding Hans-Friedrich Blunck in 1935, Johst became the President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (“Reich Writers Chamber”). In the same year, Martin Buber was expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer. During the war, Johst held various positions within the SS, including on the personal staff of Himmler, which Thomas Mann stated was the reason that several charges of pedophilia and abuse of children were dropped against Johst in the winter of 1944.[45]

Reichskammer der bildenden Künste (“Reich Chamber of Fine Arts”) was headed by Eugen Hönig (1873 – 1945). Through the pages of Völkischer Beobachter, Hönig, along with other German architects such as Alexander von Senger, Konrad Nonn, German Bestelmeyer and especially Paul Schultze-Naumburg, openly attacked the modern style of architecture, calling Bauhaus “the cathedral of Marxism.” Hönig was succeeded by Adolf Ziegler (1892 – 1959), who met Hitler in 1925 and became one of his advisors in artistic matters. In 1937, Ziegler painted the Judgement of Paris, a scene typically associated with alchemical symbolism.[46] Hitler personally acquired the painting, hanging it in his Führerbau residence at Munich. Similarly Hitler later also hung Ziegler’s The Four Elements, over his fireplace.

Nevertheless, Strauss attempted to ignore Nazi bans on performances of works by Debussy, Mahler, and Felix Mendelssohn. And due to his influence, his Jewish daughter-in-law was placed under protected house arrest during the war, but despite extensive efforts he was unable to save dozens of his in-laws from being killed in Nazi concentration camps.[47] Strauss famously defied the Nazi regime by refusing to sanction the removal of Stefan Zweig’s name from the program for the work’s première in 1935 in Dresden.[48]

Strauss enjoyed a close association with Zweig, who collaborated with Theodor Herzl. Zweig provided the libretto for Strauss’ Die schweigsame Frau (“The Silent Woman”). Zweig had belonged to the same Young Vienna circle that frequented Café Griensteidl, including Mahler, von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Frederick Eckstein, the founder of the Theosophical Society of Vienna, and a friend of Freud and Franz Hartmann, member of the OTO and the List Society. Zweig had been a prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s, befriending Freud and Schnitzler, a member of the of the pan-German circle of Engelbert Pernerstorfer, and fellow student and friend of Herzl.[49] Schnitzler’s works were called “Jewish filth” by Hitler and were banned by the Nazis in Austria and Germany. In 1933, when Goebbels organized book burnings in Berlin and other cities, Schnitzler’s works were thrown into flames along with those of other Jews, including Einstein, Marx, Kafka, Freud and Zweig.[50]

The opening to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra became one of the best-known pieces of film music when Stanley Kubrick used it in his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though he was born Jewish, Kubrick, in 1958, married Christian Harlan, the niece of Veit Harlan, director of the anti-Semitic Jud Süß. Schnitzler’s Rhapsody, also published as Traumnovelle (“Dream Story”), later adapted as the film Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick. The book deals with the thoughts and psychological transformations of Doctor Fridolin over a two-day period after his wife confesses having had sexual fantasies involving another man. In this short time, he meets many people who give clues to the world Schnitzler creates. This culminates in the masquerade ball, an event of masked individualism, sex, and danger for Doctor Fridolin, the outsider. The first book edition appeared in 1926 in S. Fischer Verlag, founded in 1881 by Jewish publisher Samuel Fischer (1859 – 1934). Famous authors include Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann, both awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

Nazi Looted Art

Also in 1937, Ziegler organized Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst (“The Degenerate Art exhibition”) in Munich, which presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. The systematic dispossession of Jewish people and the transfer of their homes, businesses, artworks, financial assets, musical instruments, books, and even home furnishings to the Reich was an integral component of the Holocaust.[51] Art dealers and profiteers like Hildebrand Gurlitt, Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Möller, and Bernhard Boehmer set themselves up in Schloss Niederschonhausen, just outside Berlin, to sell a cache of nearly 16,000 paintings and sculptures which Hitler and Göring removed from the of German museums in 1937–1938. They were first put on display in the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 1937, with the Nazi leaders inviting public of two million visitors to mock and condemn modern art in the Degenerate Art Exhibition, organized by Adolf Ziegler. On exhibit were the works of Paul Klee, Picasso, Mondrian, Chagall and Kandinsky. Goebbels in a radio broadcast called Germany’s degenerate artists “garbage.” Hitler opened the Haus der Kunst exhibition with a speech describing German art as suffering from “a great and fatal illness.”

After 1933, Ferdinand Möller (1882 - 1956), being neither Jewish nor among those identified by the party as an opponent of the government, remained a leading figure in the German arts world and was recruited in looting “degenerate art.” Many sources assert that he found opportunities to enrich himself while undertaking this assignment for the government.[52] The grandmother of Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895 – 1956), however, was Jewish, which would prove problematic under Nazi rule, as he was considered a “quarter-Jew” under the Nuremberg laws.[53] In 1923, Gurlitt married ballet dancer Helene Hanke who was trained under Mary Wigman.[54] In 1936, Gurlitt was visited in Hamburg by modernist author Samuel Beckett.[55] Gurlitt used his “officially sanctioned” status to also further enrich his own holdings, and became very wealthy from commissions paid by Hitler’s regime for artworks. Some of the works also went to swell Göring’s personal art collection.[56]

Karl Buchholz (1901 – 1992) dealt in art looted by the Nazis, both from museums and from Jewish collectors. Buchholz worked with German-Jewish art dealer Curt Valentin (1902 – 1954), who was given special dispensation from Hitler and Göring to sell looted art in New York to help fund Nazi war efforts.[57] Before working for Buchholz, Valentin worked Alfred Flechtheim (1878 – 1937), whose gallery in Berlin was “Aryanized.” The Nazis seized and sold off the contents of Flechtheim’s gallery as well as his private collection.[58] In 1939, Valentin bid for art looted by the Nazis—including paintings that had been seized from Flechtheim—that was being auctioned at the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne on behalf of Valentin’s close friend Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902 – 1981) who provided money donated to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).[59]

After studying at Harvard, Barr was a professor of art history at Wellesley College from 1926, where he offered the first-ever undergraduate course on modern art, “Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting.” In 1929, Anson Conger Goodyear (1877 – 1964), member of the Goodyear family and one of the founding members and first president of MoMA, acting on the recommendation of Paul J. Sachs (1878 – 1965), offered Barr the directorship of the newly founded museum. Goodyear was invited by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Lillie P. Bliss to help establish MoMA in 1929. Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs and Frank Crowninshield (1872 – 1947) to join him as founding trustees. Crowninshield is best known for developing and editing the magazine Vanity Fair, where he attracted those who are regarded as the best writers of the era, including Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The magazine was also the first periodical in the United States to print reproductions of works by artists such as Picasso and Matisse. Paul’s father, Samuel Sachs (1851 – 1935), was a partner of the investment firm Goldman Sachs, and his mother was the daughter of the firm’s founder, Marcus Goldman (1821 – 1904). Marcus’ older son, Julius Goldman, married Sarah Adler, daughter of Samuel Adler, the head rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, the leading Reform congregation in the United States. Adler was succeeded by Gustav Gottheil, father of Richard Gottheil, the founder of American Zionism.

In June 1942, Barr, who knew all about Valentin’s relationship with Buchholz and the Nazi regime, lied when he wrote in support of Valentin’s application for U.S. citizenship: “Mr. Valentin is a refugee from the Nazis both because of Jewish extraction and because of his affiliation with free art movements banned by Hitler. He came to this country in 1937, robbed by the Nazis of virtually all possessions and funds.”[60] Barr at MoMA and Hilla Rebay at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting—the precursor of the Guggenheim Museum—bought artwork confiscated or stolen by the Nazis from Valentin, usually at below market prices, by German artists such as George Grosz and Paul Klee, which are still in the permanent collections of both MoMA and the Guggenheim. Valentin later told the FBI, which during the war investigated him for violating the Trading with the Enemy Act and seized paintings sent to him by Buchholz, that he had started his gallery with the help of both the banker E.M. Warburg, who was on MoMA’s board, and someone from Cassel & Co., a small investment firm.[61]

Beginning in 1937, the Nazis had seized more than 17,000 works of art from German museums. After selecting the ones Hitler preferred, the Nazis piled up most of the remainder, about 4,000 works, in front of Berlin’s central fire station and burned them, on March 20, 1939. A further 700 of these artworks were given to art dealers to sell in order to raise foreign currency. One such sale of 126 paintings and sculptures took place at the Fischer Gallery, organized by Barr and Valentin. Barr secretly enlisted Valentin as his agent in the Fischer auction, with funds supplied by his trustees. In addition to works by Braque, Chagall, Gauguin, Klee, Matisse, Modigliani, and Mondrian, there were also works by the leading German and Austrian Expressionists. The day after the auction, Barr wrote to a MoMA colleague from Paris: “I am just as glad not to have the museum’s name or my own associated with the auction… I think it very important that our releases on our own German acquisitions should state that [the works] have been purchased from the Buchholz Gallery, New York.”[62]

Several private collectors participated in the Fischer auction of 1939, including the Saint Louis publisher Joseph Pulitzer Jr. (1913 – 1993), grandson of the famous newsman Joseph Pulitzer, and the New York banker Maurice Wertheim (1886 – 1950), who would serve as president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in 1941–1943. In its early years, the AJC was led by lawyer Louis Marshall, Jacob H. Schiff, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, scholar Cyrus Adler, and other wealthy and politically connected Jews. Wertheim was married to Alma Morgenthau, the sister of Henry Morgenthau.

Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce

In January 1940, Hitler gave Rosenberg the task of looting Jewish and Masonic cultural treasures, including synagogues, libraries, and archives in western Europe. Georg Ebert, who was a member of Rosenberg’s Office of Foreign Affairs, discovered that the Grand Orient de France in Paris had been abandoned and personally guarded the building, with its library collection, museum and archives, until he could turn it over to the army. In 1940, an organization known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (“Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce”), or ERR, was formed by Rosenberg with the chief purpose of collecting Jewish and Freemasonic books and documents, either for destruction or for removal to Germany for further “study.” Between 1940 and 1945, the ERR operated in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Greece, Italy, and on the territory of the Soviet Union in the Reichskommissariat Ostland and Reichskommissariat Ukraine.[63]

In France, the Nazis took 50,000 books from the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 10,000 from L’Ecole Rabbinique, one of Paris’ most significant rabbinic seminaries, and 4,000 volumes from the Federation of Jewish Societies of France. They took a total of 20,000 books from the Lipschuetz Bookstore and another 28,000 from the Rothschild family’s personal collection. The Nazis moved on to the Netherlands where they would take millions more. They raided the house of Hans Furstenberg, a wealthy Jewish banker and stole his 16,000 volume collection. In Amsterdam, they took 25,000 volumes from the Bibliotheek van het Portugeesch Israelietisch Seminarium, 4,000 from Ashkenazic Beth ha-Midrasch Ets Haim, and 100,000 from Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. In 1943, Nazis came through Italy, and took every book from Rome’s central synagogue’s two libraries, one owned by the Italian Rabbinic College and the Jewish community Library.

With France part of the German-occupied territories, the ERR and Rosenberg now fell under Hermann Göring’s authority and control. Göring and Nazi dignitaries like Foreign Affairs minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, also took advantage of German military conquests to grow their private art collections. Almost immediately, the Nazis turned their attention to the Rothschild art collections, which were the largest and most valuable Jewish-owned art collections in Austria. After the Anschluß of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, when the Rothschild family was forced to flee and went into exile in England, Adolf Eichmann moved into the vacated Palais Albert Rothschild, a palatial residence in Vienna, and set up the infamous Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, to “organize” the emigration of Jews from Austria. The Palais Albert Rothschild, was one of five Palais Rothschild in the city that were owned by members of the Rothschild banking family of Austria, a branch of the international Rothschild family. Commissioned by Baron Albert von Rothschild (1844 – 1911), it was designed and built by the French architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur between 1876 and 1884.

Albert’s brother was Nathaniel Meyer von Rothschild, who had a homosexual relationship with Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, close friend of friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Theodor Herzl. In 1898, Eulenburg had summoned Herzl to Liebenberg to announce that Wilhelm II wanted to see a Jewish state established in Palestine. From 1868 to 1875, their brother Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839 – 1898), became Treasurer of the Jewish Board of Guardians and Warden of the Central Synagogue in 1870. In 1886, over the issue of Irish Home Rule, Ferdinand joined the Liberal Unionists and hosted meetings at Waddesdon Manor—where Joseph Chamberlain, Arthur Balfour and Lord Randolph Churchill were often guests—that led to the formation of the Conservative Party. Albert was forced to sign a document giving his consent to the art collection’s confiscation, plus the appropriation of all Rothschild assets in Austria by the German government, in exchange for his brother’s release from Dachau concentration camp and safe passage for them both out of Austria.

After the Anschluß, Albert’s son Baron Louis de Rothschild (1882 – 1955) was arrested and taken into custody by the Nazis because he was a distinguished member of the Jewish oligarchy. While in prison, he was visited by Heinrich Himmler. Louis apparently impressed the SS leader, who subsequently ordered that Louis’s prison conditions be improved.[64] Louis was released only after lengthy negotiations between the family and the Nazis and upon payment of $21,000,000, believed to have been the largest ransom payment in history for any individual.[65] Louis also signed away his rights to Vitkovice works, the Czech iron and steel company owned jointly by the Gutmanns of Vienna and the Rothschilds of Vienna and London. Reichswerke Hermann Göring, an industrial conglomerate established in Nazi Germany in 1937, forcibly absorbed ownership of Vítkovice in June 1939.[66] At the request of Britain’s Queen Mary, the mother of the Duke of Windsor, Göring granted safe passage to Louis, whose brother Eugène Daniel von Rothschild, with his wife Kitty, were friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.[67]

Late in 1940, Göring, who in fact controlled the ERR, had issued an order that effectively changed its mission, mandating it to seize “Jewish” art collections and other objects. Göring also commanded that the loot would first be divided between Hitler and himself. Hitler later ordered that all confiscated works of art were to be made directly available to him. Under Rosenberg and Göring’s leadership, the ERR seized 21,903 art objects from German-occupied countries.[68] The treasures of Baron Louis von Rothschild, composed of paintings, statues, furniture, books, armor and coins, were all seized and removed from his house at Theresianumgasse, prior to the Gestapo commandeering the building as its Vienna headquarters. All of the Rothschild possessions were plundered and subsequently “Aryanised.”[69] The city-palace of the family was destroyed after the war. The baron never received most of his former belongings back, since most of the paintings were taken over by the Austrian state, which did not allow the paintings to leave the country. In 1998, over 200 art works were returned to the Rothschild heirs by the Austrian Government, and were placed at Christie’s in London for auction in 1999.[70]

[1] Hitler. Mein Kampf; cited in Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany’s Rebirth after the First War,” p. 162.

[2] Peter Adam. Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992), pp. 52.

[3] Tyson. Hitler’s Mentor, p. 326.

[4] Irwin J. Haeberle. Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Elite Rights Committee (1992), cited in Scott Lively and Kevin E. Abrams. The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (Sacramento: Veritas Aeterna, 2002).

[5] Michael Dickerman & P.R. Bartrop. The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection (ABC-CLIO, 2017), p. 458.

[6] Daniel Pick. Faces of Degeneration: a European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 109–110.

[7] Hamann. Hitler’s Vienna, p. 82–83.

[8] Ibid., p. 79.

[9] Ibid., p. 84.

[10] Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 162.

[11] Ibid., p. 162.

[12] Anna Rosmus. Hitlers Nibelungen (Grafenau: Samples, 2015), pp. 61f.

[13] Peter Adam. Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992), pp. 29–32.

[14] Roderick Stackelberg. “Bartels, Adolf.” in Richard S. Levy (ed.) Antisemitism: a historical encyclopedia of prejudice and persecution (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), p. 59-60.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Von Schmid. “Wohlklang aus Seifhennersdorf.” Zeit Online (December 27, 2001). Retrieved from http://www.zeit.de/2002/01/200201_24_bechstein_hau_xml

[17] Oliver Rathkolb and John Heath (trans.) “Baldur von Schirach: Nazi Leader and Head of the Hitler Youth.” (2022). Chapter 4.

[18] Jackson Spielvogel & David Redles. “Hitler’s Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources.” In Michael Robert Marrus (ed.). The Nazi Holocaust, Part 2: The Origins of the Holocaust (De Gruyter Saur, 1989). Retrieved from https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/archive-2795/

[19] Julian Young. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010) p. 553.

[20] Heinz F. Peters. Lou Andreas-Salomé: Das Leben einer außergewöhnlichen Frau (München: Kindler, 1964, p. 7.

[21] Hakl. Eranos, p. 79.

[22] Tresa Randall. “Hanya Holm and an American Tanzgemeinschaft.” In Susan Manning & Lucia Ruprecht (eds.). New German Dance Studies (University of Illinois Press, 2012), p. 89.

[23] Brigitte Hamann. Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth (Harcourt, 2005), p. 237.

[24] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 198.

[25] Richard A. Etlin. Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 51.

[26] Celia Applegate & Pamela Potter. Music and German National Identity (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 208.

[27] Alan E. Steinweis. Art, Ideology & Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 24.

[28] Gottfried Wagner. Wer nicht mit dem Wolf heult – Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen eines Wagner-Urenkels (Cologne, 1997), p. 69.

[29] Dieter Borkowski. Wer weiß, ob wir uns wiedersehen: Erinnerungen an eine Berliner Jugend (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), pp. 42–43.

[30] Taylor Downing. “The Olympics on Film.” History Today (August 8, 2012), p. 23. Retrieved from http://www.historytoday.com/taylor-downing/olympics-film

[31] Patrice Petro. Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (Camden, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2010), p. 278.

[32] Jonathan Kaplan. “When the Hebrew-language Press Reported on the 'Jewess Who Had Hitler in Her Clutches’.” Haaretz (April 8, 2023). Retrieved from https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-04-08/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/when-the-hebrew-language-press-reported-on-the-jewess-who-had-hitler-in-her-clutches/00000187-5de2-dde0-afb7-7ff3b80d0000

[33] Ibid.

[34] Downing. “The Olympics on Film.”

[35] J. Flanner, I. Drutman & W. Shawn. Janet Flanner’s World: Uncollected Writings, 1932-1975 (A Harvest/HBJ Book. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981).

[36] Kellogg. The Russian Roots of Nazism, p. 174.

[37] Karl-Heinz Schoeps. Literature and Film in the Third Reich (Camden House, 2004).

[38] German Music Yearbook (1937). Cited in Donald G. Henderson. The Freischütz Phenomenon: Opera As Cultural Mirror (Xlibris Corporation, 2011).

[39] Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt. Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, translated from the German by Humphrey Searle (New York: Schirmer Books, 1977), p. 96.

[40] Anthony Pople. Berg: Violin Concerto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 28.

[41] Bryan Gilliam & Charles Youmans. “Richard Strauss.” Grove Music Online. (January 20, 2001). Retrieved from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040117

[42] Boguslaw Drewniak. Der deutsche Film 1938-1945, Ein Gesamtüberblick. (Düsseldorf 1987), p. 567.

[43] “Werner Krauss.” Classic Monsters. Retrieved from https://www.classic-monsters.com/werner-krauss/

[44] Ladislaus Lob & Matthias Konzett (ed.). Encyclopedia of German Literature (Routledge, 2015), pp. 362–3.

[45] “88 ‘writers’.” Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949, Volume 12 of Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism (University of California Press 1998).

[46] Helmut Nickel. “‘The Judgment of Paris’ by Lucas Cranach the Elder: Nature, Allegory, and Alchemy.” Metropolitan Museum Journal, Vol. 16 (1981).

[47] Bryan Gilliam & Charles Youmans. “Richard Strauss.” Grove Music Online. (January 20, 2001). Retrieved from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040117

[48] Richard Strauss/Stefan Zweig: BriefWechsel, 1957, translated as A Confidential Matter, 1977.

[49] John Fowles. Introduction to “The Royal Game” (New York: Obelisk, 1981), p. ix.

[50] Petri Liukkonen. “Arthur Schnitzler.” Books and Writers (Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20120206131904/http://kirjasto.sci.fi/schnitz.htm

[51] “Turning History into Justice: Holocaust-Era Assets Records, Research, and Restitution.” National Archives (August 2016, 15). Retrieved from https://www.archives.gov/research/holocaust/articles-and-papers/turning-history-into-justice.html

[52] “Biographie Ferdinand Möller.” Ferdinand-Möller Stiftung, Berlin. Retrieved from https://www.ferdinand-moeller-stiftung.de/?page_id=853

[53] Walter Laqueur. “Degenerate Art and the Jewish Grandmother.” Mosaic (December 5, 2013). Retrieved from http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2013/12/degenerate-art-and-the-jewish-grandmother/

[54] Evelyn Dörr. Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2008), pp. 99-101

[55] Mark Nixon (ed). Samuel Beckett's German Diaries 1936–1937 (Continuum, 2011). p. 212.

[56] Hector Feliciano. “The Lost Museum.” Bonjour Paris (1998). Retrieved from http://www.bonjourparis.com/story/the-lost-museum/

[57] William D. Cohan. “MoMA’s Problematic Provenances.” ART News (November 17, 2011). Retrieved from https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/momas-problematic-provenances-477

[58] Isaac Kaplan. “Heirs of Major Jewish Art Dealer Sue Bavaria over $20 Million of Nazi-Looted Art.” Artsy (December 7, 2016). Retrieved from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-heirs-of-major-jewish-art-dealer-sue-bavaria-over-20-million-of-nazi-looted-art

[59] “Nazi Art Loot Found Its Way to New York’s Modern Museum.” The New York Times (Novemer 12, 2012). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/opinion/l-nazi-art-loot-found-its-way-to-new-york-s-modern-museum-483346.html

[60] William D. Cohan. “MoMA’s Problematic Provenances.” ART News (November 17, 2011). Retrieved from https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/momas-problematic-provenances-477

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Jonathan Petropoulos,. Art As Politics in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 190.

[64] G. MacDonogh. 1938: Hitler’s Gamble (New York: Basic Books, 2009). p 61.

[65] “Baron Louis De Rothschild Dead: Paid $21,000,000 Ransom to Nazis.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (January 17, 1955). www.jta.org. Retrieved 2018-10-26.

[66] Kurt Lachmann. “The Hermann Göring Works.” Social Research, 8, 1 (1941), pp. 33.

[67] Joseph Howard Tyson. The Surreal Reich (Bloomington: iUniverse, 2010), p. 430.

[68] Andrew Walker. Nazi War Trials (United Kingdom: Pocket Essentials, 2006), p. 141. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/naziwartrials00walk

[69] Sophie Makris. “Rothschild lawsuit draws attention to family's Vienna past.” Times of Israel (February 19, 2020) Retrieved from https://www.timesofisrael.com/rothschild-lawsuit-draws-attention-to-familys-vienna-past/

[70] “At $90 Million, Rothschild Sale Exceeds Goals.” New York Times (July 9, 1999). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/09/world/at-90-million-rothschild-sale-exceeds-goals.html