Hanging Hitler - Haaretz

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Fri., September 14, 2007 ,

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		A Hitler self-portrait and (left) works sold in the auction. The average sale price was $12,000.

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Hanging Hitler

By Assaf Uni

LOSTWITHIEL, Cornwall, England - They came from England, from Estonia, from Russia and from the United States. A peculiar group of elderly men, young businessmen, and Russian oligarchs of various ages. Nearly all male, nearly all pretending to be someone else - one claimed he was a Belgian journalist, another that he was an Estonian lawyer. They avoided the cameras and barely spoke to the media. All of them had a lot of money, all of them denied having any sympathy for Nazism or the Third Reich, and all of them came to this village in southwest England for one reason: to buy paintings by Adolf Hitler.

Last week, one of the largest sales ever was held of works attributed to the Nazi tyrant. Nineteen watercolors and two pencil drawings were offered for sale by Jefferys, a small auction house. In an effort to avert a media melee, the agency moved the sale to a hotel in the village of Lostwithiel - population 3,500 - a five-hour drive from London. In the end, the auction's outcome surpassed all expectations: The 21 items fetched a total of about NIS 1 million ($223,000), twice the highest pre-sale estimate. Hitler seems to be a hot name in the art market.

Carlo, a young Italian of 25, his hair parted neatly down the middle and his eyes darting about nervously, was one of those who came to the auction to buy a Hitler. "Don't get me wrong," he said on the day before the sale. "Hitler was a big son of a bitch, but what I'm counting on is that in another 10 years there will be small sons of bitches who will want very much to buy his works." Personally, he added, like everyone who was ready to talk about his motives for buying a painting by the man who was responsible for the greatest atrocity of the 20th century, "I wouldn't hang his pictures even in the toilet." Carlo said he was acting purely from business interests and that like every successful businessman, he did not concern himself with questions of morality. "One day it will be worth a lot of money," he said.

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Portait of the tyrant as a young artist

Carlo may well be right. Commerce in collectors' items from the Second World War - including items that belonged to the leaders of the Nazi Party, works of art by Hitler, weapons and uniforms - is now flourishing as never before, thanks to the Internet and the large amount of leisure time available to citizens of the West. A search in the sales arena of eBay, the vast sales Web site, turns up thousands of pieces of Nazi memorabilia that are up for sale, and more searching reveals the sites of a number of merchants who will be delighted to sell you pictures by the Nazi leader for tens of thousands of dollars.

It is not easy to draw a profile of the average collector of Hitler objects. Most of the buyers, like those who came to the public auction in Cornwall, maintain anonymity and are not eager to give interviews. But conversations with experts, e-mail interviews and face-to-face talks turn up the following portrait: The average collector is a man in his fifties who takes a keen interest in World War II and has the money and the time to invest in collecting these items. Sympathy for Hitler and Nazism appears not to play a part. Above all, the collectors want "to have a piece of history in the house."

And when this group heard that a collection of Hitler paintings had been discovered in a house in Belgium, where Hitler served in the First World War, and that they would be auctioned off, the news created a considerable stir, alongside allegations that the works were certainly fakes.

"The paintings were discovered in an attic in Belgium in 1986," said Ian Morris, the auctions manager at Jefferys, who lives in a nearby village. "As far as we know, they were left there in the 1940s by two migrants who passed through the house after the Second World War. They were given to us for sale about half a year ago by the Belgian woman who found them."

The agency's experts estimate that Hitler did the paintings between 1916 and 1918, Morris noted, while he was recovering from the effects of the mustard gas he inhaled on the front. At the same time, he admitted that the auction house had not been able to authenticate the paintings, because all the experts who had been involved in the process of their identification since 1986 had died.

Even to a non-expert, the paintings themselves, which were on display in the hall where the auction was held, look like amateurishly done fakes. Unlike other works by Hitler, which are characterized by an abundance of detail, depict impressive structures with great precision and are done in a realistic style, the collection of works in the auction hall looked like they were done by a boy whose mind was elsewhere. Vague shapes of rural buildings, still lifes, non-realistic colors and a signature that is somewhat different than the documented signatures of the failed artist Hitler.

If genuine, their road to Lostwithiel was long and winding. In 1907, at the age of 18, Hitler applied to study at the prestigious Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He was determined not to choose the career of a public servant, he wrote later in "Mein Kampf," and viewed himself as an artist at the outset of his career. According to neighbors of the family, he spent his youth in intensive, independent work on paintings and drawings. Hitler submitted a portfolio to the academy. He made it through the first round of admissions - associative drawings according to themes - but did not survive the second stage, of drawings on specific themes.

Many biographers have tried to assess the impact this rejection had on the young Hitler and how it influenced his brutal worldview of later years. According to his own testimony, Hitler was certain he would easily pass the admission examination; the rejection came as a "shock." Some biographers maintain that Hitler accused the Jews in the academy of deliberately failing him. He took solace, though, in the fact that his examiners found he had a talent for drawing and recommended that he study architecture. However, this was not an option for him, because he had not passed the required exams in high school, so he wandered the streets of Vienna trying to sell his paintings, mainly of buildings, as well as postcards showing landscapes. A year later he tried to take the admission exams again, but this time was not allowed even to sit for them. Hitler spent five years in Vienna, during which he did hundreds and perhaps thousands of paintings.

After the Nazi Party under his leadership took power, his aides started to collect his works with the idea that they would one day be exhibited in a museum that would be opened in the Austrian city of Linz, which Hitler considered his hometown. The works were placed in albums that were kept in party headquarters and in bunkers of the Third Reich. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the pictures, which were seized by American and Russian soldiers, were dispersed all over the world. People who had been close to Hitler and survived the war also began to sell them. But over the years, many forgeries began to turn up, owing to a high demand. It is to this group, experts said in recent weeks, that the works auctioned by Jefferys belong.

The oligarchs are coming

About a week before the auction, a dealer in military items for collectors, Mikey Hughes, claimed the paintings were fake. The fact that he is almost totally blind didn't help his case, but he said he had used his fingers to go over a copy of the signatures on the paintings ("A. Hitler," in some cases "A.H.") and he could say with certainty that they were not original. Hughes also showed up at the auction house with a BBC television crew and tried to get permission to examine the canvasses with ultraviolet light, but was thrown out.

"The truth is," Carlo says, "that I very much hope there will be as much talk as possible about the pictures being fakes - that will only lower the price in the auction itself, because in any case it will never be possible to arrive at a definitive conclusion about whether they are originals or fakes."

On the evening before the sale, after a few pints of local beer at the pub, Carlo agreed to talk about the moral dilemmas entailed in trying to make a profit from Hitler's name.

"I admit that everyone I approached to try to get funding to buy the paintings was turned off by the idea," he said. "But I am a businessman. Not long ago I bought two apartments in Georgia [the republic] and sold them at a profit of 250 percent. I bought a few apartments in Tallinn [Estonia] and sold them for one and a half times what I paid. So why shouldn't I try to make money from this deal, too?" Carlo said he had heard that many Russians had shown an interest in the sale and was worried that "the oligarchs, with all their oil money," would grab as many works as possible and prevent him from achieving his goal.

Carlo's fears proved to be justified. "We received a great many calls from Russia and we expect that several Russians will come here especially for the auction," said Nate (who, like many others, declined to give his surname), a Jefferys employee who is in charge of the phone calls. He jots down the details of everyone who calls in a small notebook - interest has been shown from Switzerland, Germany, South Africa, Russia. "No one from Israel," he remarked with a smile.

Nate, a history and philosophy buff, believes that as time passes, the name Hitler will be shorn of its violent context but will remain famous, - "and then it will be worth having pictures by the man."

Just so beautiful

Half an hour before the auction started, the hall was packed. Journalists are poised, notebooks ready, trying to discern the faces of potential buyers. At one end of the room stand a battery of telephone operators, overseen by Nate, who are now calling anonymous buyers around the world and informing them that the sale is starting. In the center of the hall are about 50 people, including, as will soon become apparent, two comics in disguise who have come to break up the sale in an attempt at self-promotion.

The auction begins. From the start it is clear that the prices will be high. Carlo frantically waves the card on which his number appears as he bids for every picture, but gives up every time the price goes above $10,000. He gestures despairingly with his arms: What can I do? The pace is dizzying. Ian Morris, a practiced auctioneer, jumps the price by $400 a time. Sitting next to Carlo is a Russian couple in sunglasses with fixed smiles on their lips. The woman keeps nudging her partner, and he ups his bid. A battle develops between some of the bidders. Phone bidders also drive up the price. Morris doesn't stop talking. The average price: $12,000 a picture.

Suddenly, a man dressed as Hitler stands up and shouts, "Six million! I bid six million!" and as he adds "The pictures are fakes, they're obviously by Mussolini," he is ushered out of the room. Nate and the security guards give chase, expel him from the hotel and lock the door behind him. Television crews rush after the comic and his colleague, who was in the audience all along, and hear outside that the two are protesting the sale in the name of Holocaust survivors, meanwhile handing out invitations to their new show.

Eight pictures have already been sold, and the auction gets under way again. Carlo, somewhat despairing, is ready to compromise on the quality of the paintings, as long as he comes away with something. Finally he manages to get a small painting of a village house for 4,200 pounds. Two rounds later, he will buy a pencil drawing at a similar price. Four other works go to the Russian couple next to him, two are bought by a local resident and two more are taken by a British business couple, who are quick to declare that they do not admire Hitler and are buying the works solely for "business reasons" for an elderly American, who says he loves the paintings and the colors.

In half an hour it's all over. Morris sighs. "This is probably the last time we will hold an auction of Hitler paintings," he says.

Watching the proceedings is Charles Palmer, 47, who lives in the area. He says he is "very sad to see all this money around Hitler's paintings." Palmer recently got rid of another such painting. As the buyers make their way to the office of the auction house to pay and get the paintings, Palmer relates that he owned a Hitler painting until last November, but decided to sell it after visiting Auschwitz.

"I was always interested in the history of the Second World War," he says, "and that is what led me to buy a painting by Hitler in the first place, about two years ago." After buying the work, he says, "I started to take a greater interest, to read about the horrific deeds for which Hitler was responsible, and I decided to visit Auschwitz." He broke down in Birkenau, he says, and as soon as he got back he decided to sell the painting. "You see, it became a moral question for me - how can I possess a painting by such an evil man?" He admits, though, that a key reason for his decision was pressure by his wife, who is sitting by his side. "I just didn't want that painting in the house," she says.

That is why he now feels "sadness" about the Jefferys auction. "I think that Hitler's art should be in a museum and not in private homes. I am depressed because it only goes to prove that everything in our world revolves around money. No history, no memory. To see everything that went on here today was a gloomy experience, but that's apparently the society we live in."

So who bought a work by Hitler? After the sale I approach a bearded Englishman who bought two pictures today. "I didn't do it because I am an admirer of Hitler," he says with an embarrassed smile. "He is just an important historical figure and I bought them because they are a piece of history. In fact," he adds, "my wife is Jewish and I am well aware of what Hitler did. I bought them because I think it's a good idea for a gift."

Carlo, worn out but pleased, asks the organizers to send the pictures to his home in Bologna. "I'm afraid of their bad karma," he says. "I really don't want to fly with them in my suitcase." Now, he says, the pictures will go into a safe for a few years, until he puts them on the market via eBay.

People begin to leave. The Russian couple returns for a moment to figure out whether they need a receipt, and the American buyer stops next to Palmer and his wife and says, "I'm sure the picture I bought is a fake - it's just so beautiful."

No sentiments

At his home in Maryland, Charles Snyder, a leading dealer in works by Hitler, can feel satisfied with the high prices fetched at the auction. He has 11 paintings at home, whose authenticity is not in doubt, ready to sell to the highest bidder. What Carlo and his colleagues will learn in the years ahead about trading in Nazi art, Snyder has already forgotten. The former soldier has been dealing in World War II memorabilia for more than 30 years. He writes books, appears in the media and meets with potential buyers. Over the years he has sold nearly 40 paintings.

"The estimates are that Hitler painted nearly 2,000 pictures before he abandoned art and went into politics," he says, "and that's not counting the fakes that were sold in Lostwithiel." Two of the original pictures, he says, hang in the study from which he is speaking. For Snyder, too, it's all a matter of commerce.

"In this business, either you collect or you sell, and I sell," he says. "I have no sentiments about the paintings themselves. I have them because I am convinced that their value will rise in a few years. Generally, the value of collectors' items from the Second World War is increasing all the time. When I started this business back in the 1970s, I sold a Wehrmacht knife for $12. Nowadays knives like that go for hundreds, even thousands of dollars. There's nothing we can do about it," he sums up. "'Bad guys' stuff sells well."W

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1.	May hitler`s memory be cursed in mankind in eternity	14:02	\|	Joseph E .	07/10/06

2.	the forbidden painter	15:16	\|	christoph	07/10/06

3.	What`s Next?	16:30	\|	leon	07/10/06

4.	# 1	18:10	\|	Shanna	07/10/06

5.	They`re just paintings	18:25	\|	Dante	07/10/06

6.	if HITLER had been accepted to the Art School	18:36	\|	Vina	07/10/06

7.	I would love to have one of those paintings	19:19	\|	Joe	07/10/06

8.	Paintings with Numbers and Numbness	00:10	\|	Ronnie Wolman	08/10/06

9.	26 authenicated Hitler items	03:09	\|	Lynn Norley	14/09/07

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