LOVE IS GREEDY. LOVE IS BLIND.

Hitler’s goddaughter is dead.  The New York Times reported today that Edda Göring, the only daughter of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the highest ranking officer in the German Nazi army, died on December 21, 2018, in Munich.  She was 80 years old.

Notwithstanding her father’s starring role in the Holocaust, Ms. Göring assured the journalist Gerald Posner, for his book Hitler’s Children: Sons and Daughters of Third Reich Leaders:

I loved him very much, and it was obvious how much he loved me.  My only memories of him are such loving ones.  I cannot see him any other way.

Yes, love is blind, and there are none are so blind as those who will not see.  Ms. Göring seems to have had her head firmly buried in the sand.  Per the obituary:

Hermann Goering, who was known for his lavish lifestyle, accumulated a vast collection of looted jewelry, furniture and artwork during the war.  The German government seized most of his collection — property that Ms. Goering said rightfully belonged to her and her mother. “It was all profit for the government,” she said, “and of course I did not receive anything.”

And that may have been all to the good, since receiving stolen goods is a crime.

Edda’s Christening, with Hitler in attendance, Göring in white uniform

Göring’s position as second in command in the Nazi Reich meant he could get anything he wanted—zoo animals, jewels, antiques, morphine, and art.  His appetite for the latter seems to have exceeded even his drug addiction.  Between 1939 and 1944, Göring acquired 4,263 individual works of art, including 1,375 paintings, almost all of them confiscated. 

The party line enabled his collecting.  In 1933, the Nazi Party decreed that all public institutions be purged of “degenerate art,” meaning modern French and German cubists, expressionists, and impressionists.  Think van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Chagall, Kirchner, Dix.  Purged works were shown at state-sponsored degenerate art exhibitions to educate the German people as to the types of art that were considered incompatible with Nazi principles.   But as with all dictatorships, the rules were for the little people, and some degenerate artworks found their way into the private collections of senior party members, including Göring.

What started as a racist ideological teaching tool soon became a systematic government policy of looting.  It began in Austria in 1938, spread to Poland in 1939, and from there it followed the German army into France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.   Nazi bureaus for confiscation were set up in the newly occupied territories, and the bureaucrats kept meticulous records.  They started with the Jews and Göring led the effort. 

Göring’s Ledger

In 1940, he established the official Nazi office of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg to confiscate important art collections in western Nazi-occupied Europe.  The spoils came predominantly from Jewish collectors and dealers and were stored in the Jeu de Paume in Paris between 1940 and 1944.   Göring visited the repurposed orangerie at least 20 times to select works for himself, his wife, and his homes.  He kept a detailed ledger of his collection in his own hand.  Sarah Wildman describes the catalog in The New Yorker (12.02.2016):

The folder is, at first glance, unremarkable:  gray, archival, tied with a small, neat ecru ribbon.  Jotted in pencil is a notation:   “Collection GOERING, inventaire des peintures.”  Inside is a ledger, brittle with age but well preserved, its handwritten notations spanning two-hundred-odd pages and eleven years.  The first is from April 1933:  a listing for a Venus painted in oil on wood by Jacopo de’ Barbari, purchased in Rome for twelve thousand lira, displayed in a private office of Carinhall, [his] hunting estate outside Berlin…. One thousand three hundred and seventy-five paintings follow this Venus, all of them carefully recorded:  date of receipt, title of painting, painter, description, collection of origin, and destination.  Tintoretto, Renoir, Rubens, Monet, Corot, van Gogh, Botticelli, a large group of Cranach; it goes on.  After 1940, the pace of acquisition becomes frantic, obsessive, and the names of the European masters are often matched in provenance with names of some of the greatest art-collecting families and dealers of the early twentieth century:  Goudstikker, Rothschild, Rosenberg, Wildenstein.   It all stops abruptly in the spring of 1944.

Allied Soldiers Examine Looted Artworks

Fearing that the Allies were closing in at the end of the war, Göring loaded his art collection onto private trains bound for the Austrian border.  But the trains were intercepted by the Allies and rerouted to Munich, where the contents were offloaded and inventoried.  Göring himself was caught in Bavaria and convicted of war crimes in the 1946 Nürnburg Trials.  Rather than face hanging, he swallowed a cyanide pill the day before his execution.

Carinhall

For all his collecting fervor, Göring was an art gourmand, not a gourmet, and his eyes were bigger than his ample stomach.  The New Yorker:  “His haul was hung carelessly in his enormous hunting lodge:  layered on the walls, without regard for presentation, origin, or appreciation.”  Perhaps Edda didn’t notice her father’s greedy excess, enjoyed at the expense of those with genuine taste.  After all, love is blind.  

Keep it real,

Marilyn