New Book on Erich Retzlaff

A while back I provided some images for an exhibition on German photographer
Erich Retzlaff, active during the Nazi era.  That book on the exhibition has just appeared, and should be interesting for anyone interested in photography during the Third Reich.

The author is Christopher Webster van Tonder, and the book is published by Aberystwyth University’s School of Art.

A 1938 Painting of Adolf Hitler Surfaces

One of the benefits of my work is that people frequently write me asking for information about something in their possession.  One of the most interesting of those comes from a woman whose father, a B-17 pilot, found this remarkable painting while visiting the bombed-out remains of the beer hall in Munich where Hitler had held many of his early meetings.  I have added it to the page of Nazi paintings of Hitler.

I am not familiar with the artist, one F. Thiele.  I welcome information from anyone who know more about the artist or this painting.

2000 Years of German Culture (1937)

1937 was a big year for art in Munich.  The new Munich art gallery opened, at which annual displays of approved Nazi art were held until 1944.  And there was a festival titled “Two Thousand Years of German Culture.”

Today I add six color photographs of the event, taken from the party’s monthly art magazine, Die Kunst im Dritten Reich.

Three New Images: Two Posters and Hitler Art

Alexander Historical Auctions kindly gave me permission to include three images from their recent catalog.  Two are of interesting posters I’ve not seen before.  These posters are now on the poster page covering 1933-1945.

1933 Nazi Leaders

Poster Advertising the SS Weekly

The next image is what they are confident is one of Hitler’s later paintings, dating to around 1920.  There are a lot of fake Hitler paintings in circulation, but they are an established firm that knows what it deals with, so the chances are they are correct.  

A good general summary of Hitler’s paintings from a 1998 article reprinted by Snyder’s Treasures, another dealer in such items.

A 1937 Oil Painting of Adolf Hitler

There were enormous numbers of paintings of Hitler during the Third Reich.  The annual Greater German Art Exhibition in Munich generally had several.  This one comes from the 1937 exhibition, and is the work of Heinrich Knirr (another of whose Hitler oil paintings is also on the GPA. It comes from Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, the glossy art magazine published by the Nazi Party.

This and other art pieces depicting Hitler are available on the Hitler portraits page.

Paintings from Hitler’s Personal Collection

I have a page of Nazi war art on the GPA.  One of the paintings is by Franz Eichhorst.  It was titled “Remembrance of Stalingrad.”

A Nazi  art magazine Kunst dem Volk considered it a masterpiece:

“The pale colors, the splendid presentation, and the solemnity of the moment are emphasized in this picture, which has an almost monumental character. Although the painting demonstrates the artistic understanding of the painter and also his mastery of drawing, one forgets it all because of the artist’s splendid work, accepting it as obvious and given. That is probably the best that a painting can do.”

It turns out that the painting ended up in Hitler’s personal collection and disappeared after the war.  It was just found in a Czech monastery along with six other paintings.

The Nazi House

Nazism had opinions on everything, as it claimed to be a worldview that applied to everything. Today, I add a 1937 piece on how a German house should look. It goes along with an older GPA piece on Nazi interior decoration. The picture below is one view of said house.

A New Cover from the NS Frauen-Warte

The NS Frauen-Warte was the Nazi Party's magazine for women. It often had rather vivid covers. I've added an August 1941 cover from a copy I just received to the page on the magazine, an example of Nazi military art.

The $400,000,000 Lawsuit

In 1935, Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a prominent Jewish banker, died in Berlin. He was also an art collector, and his art wandered off in unclear ways after his death. In Fall 2008, I got a call from the lead attorney for a group of his descendants who were claiming ownership of two of the Picassos, which are now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. They asked for either $400,000,000 or custody of the paintings.

The case was interesting. Case law is clear in cases where Jewish art was seized by the Nazis. In this instance, however, Mendelsson-Bartholdy had turned the art over to a somewhat suspect art dealer before his death, after which the pieces migrated to Switzerland, and eventually to the United States. The museums contended either that he had given the artwork to his wife as a wedding present before 1933, or that he had been under no untoward pressure to sell, and that therefore the heirs had no claim.

The lead attorney discovered several items relating to the family on the GPA, and asked if I could provide copies of them, and perhaps others as well. That turned out to provide several interesting months of research at my end as I provided dozens of relevant items.

I was scheduled to testify at the trial before a federal court in New York early in February, but as often happens, the case settled on the day the trial was to begin. The details of the agreement are sealed, though one can reasonably assume that if one asks for $400,000,000, one does not settle for $500,000.

The settlement got considerable publicity. A later NYT article reported that the judge was unhappy with the secrecy of the settlement, noting that the issue was of larger public interest.

Nazi Postcards Series: "Women Working for You"

Soldiers appreciate pictures of women, and Nazi propaganda supplied soldiers with what they wanted. I've added a page with seven postcards from 1943 on the theme Women working for you. They showed attractive women at work in what formerly had been mostly male occupations.

Nazi Painting of Dunkirk

While looking for something else, I came across this Nazi painting of Dunkirk, which I added to the page on World War II Nazi military art.