I try to imagine how Fritz and Louise felt on that day, May 10, 1940.
I can imagine them staring up at the sky over Bosbeek in the early-morning hours, watching with shock and astonishment, and no small measure of terror, as the squadrons of German bombers roared overhead. I see them listening to the low, far-off rumble of bombs falling and the booming of Dutch antiaircraft artillery. The black, oily smoke from crashed and burning planes loomed over the horizon. In the morning twilight, they could just make out, in the distance, the tiny, eerie, white shapes of German paratroopers floating down. They were landing around Valkenburg airfield, just twenty miles away. Then the frantic phone calls started, the lines suddenly going dead in midsentence. The near-hysterical reports on Dutch radio were full of short-lived bravado. Together Fritz and Louise listened to the news from the Hilversum radio station, following the Germans’ advance. I can see their hands trembling as they clasped each other and wondered what this would mean. They must have felt the Germans’ approach like a jail door slamming.
However, one aspect of that day, and of the days that followed, I find hard to imagine. Almost every contemporary account notes that the skies over Bosbeek and the rest of western Holland were clear and blue, that it was an unusually beautiful spring morning. I know, rationally, that even under the Nazis there surely were sunny days; I just can’t see it. Whenever I think of my grandparents during the Nazi nightmare, I envision them only in the monochromatic shades of World War II newsreels, under clouds of SS black and skies of Wehrmacht gray.
For the Dutch, the struggle against the invading German army was all quite hopeless, a David and Goliath contest in which the giant soon carried the day. For their offensive on the Western Front, the Germans had a modern army and air force with Stuka dive-bombers and hundreds of tanks. The Dutch air force consisted mainly of biplanes, its armored forces comprised exactly thirty-nine armored cars, one tank, which was out of service, and five diminutive tankettes. The Dutch defense certainly showed instances of heroism. The Dutch army actually staged a successful counterattack the next day—the German attack on The Hague ended in failure. To the south, though, the battle of Rotterdam raged. Again German ground troops did not achieve immediate supremacy. Then on the fifth day, Göring unleashed the Luftwaffe. Almost a hundred bombers flattened central Rotterdam in hours. Soon after, the Dutch forces surrendered. The Battle of the Netherlands was over in five days.
Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch royal family fled to England with the Crown Jewels packed in a cardboard box. Thousands of panicked Dutch civilians tried to escape by going south to Belgium, including many Dutch Jews and German Jewish refugees who knew all too well what the Nazis were like. Unfortunately, Belgium was also under German attack, so most of them were turned back. Thousands of others fled westward in cars, on bicycles, or on foot, hoping to escape by sea. A few made it, including Fritz and Louise’s friends the art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, his wife, Desi, and their infant son. The Goudstikkers had made the heart-wrenching decision to abandon their fairy-tale castle, the art gallery, and their enormous art collection (over twelve hundred pieces). They secured passage on the last ship to leave the port of Ijmuiden, the SS Bodegraven. Tragically, Goudstikker went on deck during the night to get some fresh air, but when he tried to get back to his cabin, he opened the wrong door. He fell through an open hatch and broke his neck. Several hundred other refugees climbed aboard fishing boats, or any small vessel, and set out into the North Sea for England. While many were forced back by high seas or sunk by mines or German attacks, some successfully made their escape.
Fritz and Louise could have been among them. Later, during the war, my father’s cousin Luca, Herbert’s son, met a German Jewish refugee—his name is lost—who had known Fritz in Holland. As the invasion rolled over the country, the man had offered to try to get Fritz and Louise passage with him on a fishing boat to England. Fritz declined, the story went, and told Luca’s acquaintance, “Thank you, but no; nothing can happen to us. We are Dutch citizens.”
My noble grandfather still thought that the rules of civilized behavior would apply, even with the Nazis. It was a common enough self-delusion in the Netherlands. For every Dutch civilian who tried to flee the Nazi onslaught, thousands of others simply settled down to wait it out, unwilling or unable to abandon their homes to attempt the dangerous and uncertain path of refugees. Certainly some in the Netherlands despaired, particularly the thirty thousand Jewish refugees from Germany. They had already fled the Nazis once; now they found themselves once more at the mercy of their persecutors. Reports were that suicides in Amsterdam increased threefold immediately after the invasion, mostly among the Jewish refugees.
The writing was on the wall, but most of the Dutch people, Jews and non-Jews alike, simply hoped for the best. At first it seemed those hopes might not be misguided. The brutal measures by the Germans against the civilian population in Poland and other eastern territories contrasted dramatically with the comparatively benign way the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began. The moment the Germans marched into Poland, thousands of ordinary civilians, both Jews and non-Jews, were executed daily. Polish POWs of Jewish origin were routinely selected and shot on the spot.
Under the Nazi racial policies, the Dutch, along with the Danes and the Norwegians, were considered to be fellow “Nordics,” “racially pure Aryans,” closely tied by culture and blood to their German occupiers. Hitler thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the Dutch could therefore easily be converted to National Socialism and the Netherlands incorporated into the greater German Reich. Even Dutch Jews were buoyed by the Nazis’ initial assurances that Dutch citizens would not be treated badly.
Early in the occupation, the Nazis’ true intentions regarding Holland’s Jewish population had not yet been revealed. Their promises could still be taken at face value. For the moment, Jews still remained legal citizens. Soon after, German Jews were ordered to leave The Hague and other coastal towns and submit to registration. The illusion of Nazi benevolence did not last long.
Meanwhile, the guns had barely fallen silent over Holland before a swarm of Nazi agents and art dealers descended on the country to plunder the nation’s vast treasure trove of art. In theory, they were seeking to “repatriate” art of German origin and liberate “Christian” art from unworthy Jewish collectors. In practice, they were commissioned to stock the museum Hitler was building in his hometown of Linz and to furnish the private art collections of Hermann Göring and other top Nazis. While pursuing this twisted mind-set, the Nazi art vultures were eager to make a fortune.
On May 15, 1940, immediately following the surrender of Holland, Kajetan Mühlmann arrived in The Hague and established the Dienststelle Mühlmann, which became—under the Nazi Governor Seyss-Inquart—the central agency for all matters concerning Dutch and Belgian art properties.
Mühlmann was an Austrian-born art historian and SS Gruppenführer. Earlier, he had served in Poland as Special Commissioner for the Protection of Works of Art in the Occupied Territories—protection and safeguarding being common Nazi euphemisms for “looting.” His stated task was to identify, evaluate, and acquire Holland’s premier artworks and collections. Dienststelle Mühlmann shared offices with the Gestapo, which was available to intervene should the owners of any desired artworks raise a fuss.
Mühlmann’s chief assistant was Eduard Plietzsch, a German art historian and a specialist in Dutch and Flemish paintings. Before the war, Dr. Plietzsch had handled one of Fritz Gutmann’s major art deals and was thoroughly familiar with the best private collections in Holland, Fritz’s included.
A report on Dutch collections compiled for Hitler and Göring, authored by Plietzsch and Mühlmann, ominously noted that several “important works by German masters can be found in the possession of Fritz Gutmann: portraits by Cranach, Burgkmair and Baldung . . .”
Soon they were knocking on Fritz’s door. However, just a month after the Dutch surrender, the first Nazi agent to arrive, unannounced, at Bosbeek was a beady-eyed art dealer from Berlin named Walter Andreas Hofer. With him was Alois Miedl, another profiteer. They were particularly interested in the Gutmann silver collection. Hofer, with his brother-in-law Kurt Bachstitz in The Hague, had actually been authorized to sell several minor pieces from the collection in the 1920s. Miedl, who had moved to Holland in 1932 with his Jewish wife, had actually been present for one of the rare prewar showings of the silver collection, normally locked in Bosbeek’s strong room.
Miedl and Hofer assured Fritz that, if he wished to leave the country, they would use their influence with their superiors. The two dealers were, in fact, special agents for none other than Hermann Göring. They pointed out that it was unwise to disappoint the Reichsmarschall. Frighteningly, it dawned on Fritz that he was Hofer’s very first call since his return to Holland. Fritz realized that he had little choice.
However, Fritz was determined, at all costs, to protect the family legacy for which he was custodian. Instead, he agreed, albeit grudgingly, to part with several magnificent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century, silver-gilt pieces from his personal collection, including the Johannes Lencker ewer in the shape of a triton, the Horse and Rider by Hans Ludwig Kienle, and a pair of silver-gilt wedding cups by Hans Petzolt. A payment was made that was far below the real value of the art pieces. Additionally, the payment went into a bank account that would soon be frozen. The Nazis always insisted on covering up extortion with a veneer of strict “legality.” Hofer assured Fritz that his cooperation would be remembered, and no doubt rewarded. Fritz wanted very much to believe him.
Early on, a few threatened collectors and dealers in Holland did manage to turn the Nazis’ hunger for art into some kind of advantage. Fritz and Louise’s friend and neighbor Catalina von Pannwitz arranged through Hofer to sell Göring a Rembrandt and four other paintings from her Hartekamp collection in return for an exit visa to Switzerland, which Göring actually delivered as promised. In another case, Dutch Jewish art dealer Nathan Katz used his control over the collection of the late Dr. Otto Lanz to secure exit visas for himself and several other members of his family.
So perhaps Fritz was not naive to believe that he was still in a position to negotiate—that somehow his cooperation could get his family out of Holland. Unfortunately, as time went on and as the Nazi grip tightened, the true value of Nazi promises would become all too apparent.
• • •
Meanwhile, pro-German quislings from the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB) were quickly inserted into positions of authority. The civilian bureaucracy and police took no time in implementing the new order. Soon enough, the new masters began the systematic intimidation and persecution of Jews, which would eventually lead to genocide.
In November 1940, Dutch Jews were banned from civil service positions, including teaching. By January 1941, Jews were required to register as such with local police and receive identity papers stamped with a J. Soon all public parks, beaches, museums, and trams were off-limits to them. Cafés, stores, and cinemas posted signs saying VOOR JODEN VERBODEN or “Forbidden for Jews.”
In March 1942, Jewish businesses were required to have an Aryan administrator. Then on April 29, all Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star, with the word Jood across it. In June, Jews had to surrender their bank accounts. Later that same month, the order went out for all Jews to surrender their jewelry and art. One of the last anti-Jewish regulations prohibited the use of public phones. Authorities also disconnected the telephones of all Jewish subscribers. During this bureaucratic nightmare, the Nazis even found time to pass Decree Number 140, which banned Jews from owning pigeons.
Dutch Jews reacted to this tightening noose of restrictions in various ways. Most continued to comply because, like their non-Jewish countrymen, they were accustomed to abiding by the law, no matter how absurd. In many cases the Amsterdam-based Jewish Council actually encouraged compliance, fearing that resistance would prompt still harsher measures.
Jews by the hundreds, and then the thousands, were rounded up and transferred to the Westerbork detention camp. Starting in 1942, the deportees were “relocated” to the east, supposedly to “labor camps.” Their homes were seized and their possessions stolen, down to the last spoon and teacup. What was not kept by Dutch collaborators was shipped to Germany.
A few Jews joined the Resistance, obtaining counterfeit identification documents and staying, the lucky ones at least, one step ahead of the Gestapo and the Nazi-controlled local police. Thousands of others, such as Anne Frank and her family, became onderduikers, or literally “underdivers.” They went into hiding, usually with the help of sympathetic and brave non-Jewish friends or neighbors. Like the Franks, they spent months, even years, in attics and barns or concealed spaces in homes, trembling with fear when the Nazis and Dutch “Jew hunters” came looking. In her famous diary, Anne described watching from her attic hiding place in Amsterdam as “night after night, green and gray military vehicles cruise the streets. They knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there. If so, the whole family is taken away . . . . They often go around with lists, knocking only on those doors where they know there’s a big haul to be made. They frequently offer a bounty, so much per head.”
Twenty-five thousand Jews in Holland went into hiding; of those, some nine thousand, Anne Frank among them, were caught or betrayed. All the same, those who went into hiding stood a better chance of surviving than those who did not. A grim example is that Anne Frank and her family avoided Auschwitz for almost a year longer than her friend (and our cousin) Susi Ledermann and her family.
In Bosbeek, Louise’s seventy-eight-year-old mother, Thekla, died of natural causes shortly after the German invasion, compounded, no doubt, by sheer dread. Going into hiding had not been an option. The Gutmann–Von Landaus were too prominent, too well-known, too closely watched. For them, the early days of the German occupation were not a case of police cars racing through the streets and hard men pounding on their doors, but rather a slow shrinking of the world they had known.
As the occupation progressed, Fritz’s company, Firma F. B. Gutmann, was, like all Jewish businesses, “Aryanized” and placed under control of a non-Jewish administrator. Its assets were liquidated at a fraction of their value, of which Fritz never saw a guilder. The Gutmanns’ cars were requisitioned by the German army—Jews were prohibited from owning or driving automobiles—and the household staff at Bosbeek began to dwindle. The gardeners and chauffeurs were drafted into labor battalions or went into hiding. The Dutch maids and cooks were prohibited by Nazi decree from working in a “non-Aryan” home. Soon only Piet, the butler, was left. Jews were next forbidden to travel, except to Amsterdam and the ghetto, which left Fritz and Louise confined to Bosbeek in a form of house arrest. Life descended into genteel shabbiness. Fritz’s old friend Franz Koenigs recalled going to dinner at Bosbeek at the end of April in 1941. The Gutmanns had secured a rare Dutch delicacy, the last of that season’s kievit eggs—which Fritz, luckily, had found on the estate. Just one week later, Koenigs was in Cologne, where, in mysterious circumstances, he died under a train in the railway station.
The Gutmanns’ friends were disappearing fast. In a letter written in 1942 and smuggled to my aunt in Italy, Fritz described the creeping terror that was enveloping the country, how people they had known had been taken away, held as hostages, or gone into hiding. Others simply vanished.
“Poor Maisels has already become a victim, and if we will ever see him again only the gods know,” Fritz wrote to Lili. Rikard Maisels was originally from Vienna and Fritz’s business partner and friend. They never did see him again. Maisels perished in Auschwitz soon after Fritz wrote his letter.
From the same smuggled letter: “Reni and Egon [two of Lili’s childhood friends] have disappeared without a trace, supposedly they are safe, but I do not know . . . . Your nice professor from Leiden [one of Lili’s high school teachers] is being held as a hostage, of whom five have already been shot . . . and so many, many more that had to leave, never to return. It is a horrible misery!”
Yet, for all his despair, Fritz still held out hope.
• • •
From throughout the art world, the rapacious opportunists numbered in the hundreds. Chief among them were representatives of Adolf Hitler and his second-in-command, the corpulent Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.
Hitler, a failed artist of pre–World War I Vienna, still fancied himself an art connoisseur. His tastes, however, were limited to works consistent with National Socialist ideals. Even Rembrandt was deemed “too Jewish” by many Nazis. Works that did fit into this narrow range included most old masters, usually German, and works considered to be Teutonic. Significantly, much of Fritz’s collection fell under these headings. (Hitler also collected kitsch paintings of German peasants and heroic war scenes of the type that might be found on 1930s propaganda posters.)
Following the 1938 annexation of Austria, Hitler made plans to build the self-styled Führermuseum in Linz, where he had grown up as a boy. It was to be a monument to himself and Nazism that would be stocked with thousands of paintings and other objets d’art amassed (by his minions) from museums and private collections throughout Europe. The Special Linz Commission, under the direction of art historian and museum director Hans Posse, was created to acquire works for the planned Führermuseum.
Göring, meanwhile, was a collector of virtually kleptomaniacal proportions. He stocked his palatial hunting lodge Carinhall (and other residences) with more than four thousand artworks, including some fifty paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and thirty by Peter Paul Rubens. With typical Göring taste, these were displayed side by side with a few fakes and such lesser masterpieces as a watercolor by one Adolf Hitler, not to mention countless stuffed stag heads. Although Göring publicly toed the Nazi line against “degenerate” art, he also accumulated modern paintings by the hundreds, using them frequently as a kind of currency to trade for more acceptable works.
Julius Böhler, a Munich-based art dealer, often advised Hitler and Göring on art matters. He was also acquainted with Fritz and had even sold some paintings to him during the 1920s. Now he was also advising the Dienststelle Mühlmann. Holland was not, however, the exclusive domain of this official agency. Numerous freelancers also popped in regularly to snatch up coveted pieces for their Nazi patrons before someone else got them first. Competition among the top Nazi collectors was often fierce, sometimes even pitting Göring and Hitler against each other for possession of a particularly coveted work—although in the end Hitler always won.
Alois Miedl (despite his Jewish wife) had quickly become a major player in the Nazi plunder of the Dutch art market. Through a series of sham transactions, Miedl conveniently assumed control of the Goudstikker estate. Having fled the Nazis, the late Jacques Goudstikker had technically abandoned his collection. Miedl wasted no time in selling much of it to Göring at a substantial profit. Miedl even took over poor Goudstikker’s home and, of course, the famed art gallery on the Herengracht, right next door to Fritz’s former offices. From there Miedl continued to supply the Nazis with artworks from various collectors, many of them Jewish, who, as Miedl invariably pointed out, had little choice in the matter.
Then there was Karl Haberstock, described by one postwar journalist as “arguably the single most prodigious art plunderer in the history of human civilization.” Born in 1878, the son of a farmer, Haberstock—gruff, bewhiskered, and forever clearing his throat—never completely shed his rural image. He had begun his career selling china. Pompous and overbearing, Haberstock was a shameless opportunist who quickly jumped on the Nazi bandwagon, joining the party in 1933. He later sold Hitler his first important artwork, Paris Bordone’s rather voluptuous sixteenth-century Venus and Amor, which hung in the salon of Hitler’s country home in Berchtesgaden. Boasting both a ferocious anti-Semitism and a hatred for “modern” art, Haberstock was a relentless campaigner for the purging of “degenerate” art in Germany—while at the same time appreciating its commercial possibilities. As a member of the Nazis’ 1937 Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art, he was charged with selling on the international market the modern works culled from German museums. In this way Haberstock obtained much-needed foreign currency for the Nazis and no small profit for himself. Later, as the leading agent of the Special Linz Commission, Haberstock would make a fortune trading not only in Nazi-approved artworks, but also in the denigrated works of Van Gogh, Degas, Renoir, and Cézanne that were looted in France, Holland, and other conquered countries.
Mühlmann, Plietzsch, Miedl, Hofer, Böhler, and Haberstock—all names that I had found so eerily sinister when I first saw them in my father’s papers. The more I learned about them, the more sinister they became.
One curious aspect of this gang of thieves (and scores of others like them) was that in their minds they were not thieves at all. The Nazis insisted on wrapping even their most despicable acts, all the way down to mass murder, in a strange patina of legality. This policy clearly carried over to their acquisition of art in the occupied territories. In the Nazi view, it was all quite legal to confiscate or force the sale of artworks from terrified Jews, provided the “seller” signed the necessary paperwork in triplicate. That the purchase of such artworks was negotiated, in effect, at gunpoint did not, in the Nazi view, make the resulting deals any less legitimate. Even Reichsmarschall Göring, the most prolific looter of all, insisted to the end of his days that all of his art acquisitions were obtained “legally,” all properly bought and paid for from their owners. It was said that, while awaiting trial at Nuremberg, Göring cheerfully shrugged off accusations that he was complicit in the murders of 6 million people, yet grew truly indignant when he was accused of being an art thief.
In March 1941, the German art dealer Karl Haberstock, armed with special authorization documents from both Hitler’s Special Linz Commission and from Göring, showed up at Bosbeek’s door. Through his extensive sources—the art world was as infested with spies and informers as the military and diplomatic worlds—Haberstock was already familiar with the extent of Fritz’s collection. He was even aware that, before the war, Fritz had sent some of his best paintings to the Paul Graupe gallery in Paris for safekeeping. However, since the collapse of France in 1940, the Germans had begun, almost immediately, to seize, catalog, and haul away artworks by the thousands from Paris. Haberstock, who had a reputation as a hard bargainer even in normal circumstances, presented Fritz with an offer that was a nonnegotiable demand: Sell me the paintings I want, at my price, or they will be confiscated as “enemy property” (by the German authorities in Paris) and you’ll wind up with nothing. On the other hand, if you cooperate, perhaps something can be arranged to help you and your wife get out of the country. It was the Nazi way of doing business.
Having no alternative, Fritz signed documents authorizing Haberstock to take possession of eight of his paintings from the Paris warehouse. The eight old masters (all by German or Flemish artists, who appealed to the Nazi taste) consisted of portraits by Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Burgkmair, and Jakob Elsner, along with Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Samson and the Lion, an altarpiece fragment of a Madonna by Hans Holbein, Madonnas by Adriaen Isenbrandt and Hans Memling, and a landscape by Van Goyen. For good measure, Haberstock walked away with a very different painting that caught his eye, which was still hanging on the wall in Bosbeek. It was The Sin by the Symbolist Franz von Stuck, and Haberstock had a particular high-level Nazi buyer in mind for this piece.
At the last minute, Haberstock added to his list two magnificently carved Renaissance shields and a beautiful Chinese carpet, which he had been standing on.
Fritz was sent a payment for 122,000 Dutch guilders to the Rotterdamsch Bank Vereeniging N.V. of Amsterdam. This was the equivalent of $75,000 for all eight of the old masters and four other works of art. The account was placed in receivership by a Nazi-appointed trustee. Ultimately, Fritz got nothing except empty promises.
Haberstock, however, was far from finished. In February 1942, he returned to Bosbeek accompanied by Julius Böhler, agent to both Hitler and Göring. Böhler, in contrast to Haberstock’s bluster, appeared calm and scholarly. Behind the thinning hair and professorial beard a cruel cunning was at play. Haberstock and Böhler didn’t just want some of the artworks and antiques that still remained in Bosbeek. They wanted all of them.
As Fritz stood helplessly by—and, I imagine, as Louise sat weeping in her dressing room—Haberstock and Böhler stomped imperiously through every single room in the house like a pair of jackbooted thugs. Starting with the front hall, then the main hall, slowly and meticulously scouring every inch, they finally finished in the breakfast room with the huge red carpet. In total they compiled an exhaustive list of more than two hundred valuable works of art, all to be taken away. The paintings included a Biagio d’Antonio, a Fra Bartolommeo, two François Bouchers, a Francesco Guardi, an Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, two Hubert Roberts, and many more important pieces. Among the antiques were Aubusson tapestries, Louis XV and XVI furniture, Meissen porcelain, gilded mirrors, Ming and Qing Chinese vases, bronze sculptures, and so much more. All of it was to be loaded up and driven by truck to Germany.
In return for this huge haul, Böhler and Haberstock transferred—unbelievably, through the now Aryanized Dresdner Bank—the meager sum of 150,000 Dutch guilders, less than $100,000. This time the money went straight to the Deutsche Revisions und Treuhand AG in The Hague (the German Audit and Trustee Company—a notorious Nazi money-laundering facility).
A month later Böhler and Haberstock were back again. This time their purpose was twofold. They had received strict instructions from Göring to secure the Gutmann silver collection, one way or the other. Their secondary purpose was more of a mopping-up operation—they were to inventory the remnants of the estate. After all, the remaining household furniture, china, and silverware were all of the utmost quality. The Nazi dealers, graciously they thought, would allow those items to remain in Bosbeek as long as the residents did. The ominous implication was that Böhler and Haberstock knew, only too well, that Fritz and Louise were not going to be staying much longer.
Once again, Fritz was forced to sign a receipt for the “sale” of the remains of his collection and household goods, even though, by now, it was quite clear he would never actually receive a cent. However, concerning the Gutmann silver collection (still belonging to all of Eugen’s children), there was one stumbling block. Playing the Nazis’ own legalistic game, Fritz stubbornly refused to sign over ownership of the “Crown Jewels” of the Gutmann family. Earlier that year, Fritz had transferred legal title for the family trust (which administered the silver collection) to his brother-in-law the Italian senator Luca Orsini. Fritz insisted that he alone could not sell the silver collection.
It seems astonishing, even mad, that at a time when the Nazis were systematically murdering millions, the representatives of Nazism’s top warlords would be deterred for even a moment by a mere legalism, especially one wielded by an otherwise powerless man. No doubt the Germans did not wish to have a diplomatic incident with their Italian allies—so, for the moment, they were deterred.
However, Böhler took physical control of the Gutmann silver collection and shipped it, for “safekeeping,” to his Munich warehouse. This included the Jamnitzer Becher, Bernini’s A Flagellator of Christ, the Ostrich automaton, and both the Reinhold Clock and the Orpheus Clock. In Munich they would sit until further notice, with the actual ownership of the collection to be settled later.
By the spring of 1942, Fritz and Louise had more than enough reason to despair. The Koenigs girls found Fritz, forlorn, sitting on a bench in his garden, with the yellow star on his suit. The last of the Jewish families in Heemstede had been evacuated to the ghetto in Amsterdam. Fritz and Louise were on their own, isolated at Bosbeek. They were now dependent on the furtive assistance of a few remaining friends. Their once-beautiful home had been stripped of its glory, and Fritz’s treasured art collection had been reduced to a series of faded spots on the walls.
They no longer had even a faint belief that their forced cooperation with the Nazi art thieves would afford them any protection. Nothing was left to bargain with, nothing was left to steal. Next, the title to the estate itself was taken from Fritz and Louise by Nazi decree, like all other Jewish-owned real estate in Holland. On April 12 Bosbeek was officially transferred to the Niederländische Grundstückverwaltung (Netherlands Property Management Office). This puppet organization’s various functions included overseeing property “abandoned” by Jews, who had fled or “disappeared.” Fritz feared that he and Louise might soon be among those who “disappeared.”
“A new calamity is threatening us: the possession and expropriation of our house,” Fritz despairingly wrote in a letter smuggled to daughter Lili. “Where we shall go from here, only the gods know! The sword of Damocles is hanging again above our heads!”
For Fritz and Louise, one final source of hope and a potential path to safety remained. Ironically enough, that path led to Fascist Italy.
The Gutmann family had maintained close ties to Italy, and members of the Italian aristocracy, dating back to the late nineteenth century. Eugen had been a founding member and director of the Banca Commerciale Italiana in Milan and later was an honorary consul of the Italian government in Berlin. Fritz’s sister Toinon had lived in Rome since the death in 1923 of her husband, Baron Hans von Essen, the former Swedish ambassador in Berlin. Her daughter, Jacobea, was married to the Italian diplomat Baron Giuseppe Sapuppo. Fritz’s other sister, Lili, was married to Luca Orsini Baroni, who, after leaving his post as ambassador in Berlin in August 1932, had been nominated to the Italian Senate by the Italian King. Orsini had extensive ties with the Fascist government and with the Vatican. Fritz’s daughter Lili was married to Franco Bosi, now an officer in the Italian army, whose family was from the Tuscan landed gentry. Fritz’s brother Max, who had played piano so beautifully for Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli before he became Pope Pius XII, was acquainted with a number of important figures within the Vatican. Even Fritz’s mother had Italian ties: after she divorced Eugen, she married again and became Countess Sciamplicotti. Meanwhile, Fritz numbered among his prewar connections Count Galeazzo Ciano, who was Mussolini’s son-in-law and Italy’s foreign minister.
None of Fritz’s family members in Italy were under any illusions about the dangers he and Louise faced under German occupation; almost from the moment the Germans invaded Holland, they had desperately tried to use their connections to get Fritz and Louise safely out of Holland.
Italy had a somewhat odd relationship with its German ally. Despite Italy’s membership in the Axis alliance with Germany, Mussolini had initially sat out the conflict with France and England, not declaring war until just before France capitulated in June 1940. Afterward, Mussolini embarked on some rather inept military campaigns in North Africa and Greece, which ended with German troops having to come to the Italians’ rescue. Although Hitler had long admired Mussolini, other top Nazis soon came to regard their Italian counterparts with ill-concealed contempt.
The Italians, meanwhile, had never embraced Fascist totalitarianism with the same unquestioning gusto as the Germans. Despite the Italian anti-Jewish laws of 1938, which were only halfheartedly enforced, the Italians seemed baffled and dismayed by the Germans’ rabid persecution and murder of Jews in Germany and the German-occupied territories. In fact, the Italian government went to great lengths to rescue and return to Italy those Italian Jews who found themselves under German control in occupied Europe. While Fritz and Louise were not Italian citizens, their many family connections in Italy made them pretty close to it. So when the two Lilis (Fritz’s sister and daughter) and their relatives asked for help in getting Fritz and Louise safe passage from Holland to Italy, members of the Italian government promised to do what they could. Officials in the Vatican also agreed to help.
The Italians were very junior partners to the Germans, and thus while they could ask, they could not demand. The Vatican, meanwhile, maintained an uneasy relationship with the Nazis and Hitler, who had been angered by the pope’s protest of their treatment of Catholics—and to a lesser extent, their treatment of the Jews—in Germany and elsewhere. Its influence, too, was somewhat limited.
Still, a number of Italian and Vatican officials took up the case. On orders from Count Ciano, the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri, gently informed the German foreign office and the office of Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart in Holland that the safety and security of the Gutmanns was of some importance to the Italian government. An Italian attaché in The Hague, Franco Pietrabissa, was also helpful, personally keeping Fritz and Louise informed of the efforts on their behalf and forwarding occasional messages and letters from Fritz to his daughter Lili in Italy. Pietrabissa even managed, at some personal and professional risk, to smuggle out of Holland, by diplomatic pouch, some of Louise’s jewelry. The diplomat was able to deposit the jewels in a bank in Switzerland, later giving Lili the key.
At the Vatican’s direction the papal nuncio in Berlin, Monsignor Orsenigo, also took an interest in the Gutmann case. Unfortunately, his zeal may have been somewhat tempered by his being, as one historian put it, “a pro-German, pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic fascist.”
As the letters and diplomatic cables flew, by mid-1942 it seemed as if the Italian diplomatic efforts were paying off. In June of that year, Ambassador Alfieri in Berlin received the following message, a copy of which was later sent to Lili:
“Following your letter of 31.3.42, I notify you that no measures have been carried out against the Jew Gutmann, a Dutch citizen, who resides in Heemstede near The Hague . . . . According to your wishes, I have ordered my office at The Hague to leave Gutmann in his house and to exempt him and his wife from any kind of security police measures.”
The letter was signed “H. Himmler.”
It is more than a bit chilling to realize that Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo, architect of the murder of millions, had taken a personal interest in my grandfather and grandmother. Equally chilling to me—and no doubt even more so to Fritz—was the vagueness of Himmler’s assurances. What would happen if Fritz and Louise were to set foot outside the Bosbeek estate? Certainly the letter offered no protection against the Nazi art vultures circling around them—by that time most of the more valuable Gutmann possessions had already been taken. However, it did allow Fritz and Louise to remain at Bosbeek while other far less fortunate Dutch Jews were being forcibly herded into the Amsterdam “ghetto,” and then into the Westerbork concentration camp. Ironically, the ghetto, or Jewish quarter, was where Jewish refugees had sought refuge from the Spanish Inquisition, at the end of the fifteenth century.
The Himmler letter mentioned, crucially, not one word about the crux of the Italian officials’ requests on the Gutmanns’ behalf—that is, that they would be allowed to leave Holland and come to Italy. The Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri, seemed to share that concern. In response to an inquiry about the Gutmann case from the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Alfieri wrote, “The case mentioned in your Excellency’s letter has become the object of my lively interest in the past few months, and in spite of all the difficulties I’ve had to overcome, I have managed to receive a written guarantee by the German Chief of Police, Mr. Himmler, that the relatives of his Excellency, Senator Orsini Baroni, residing in Holland, will not be bothered. A little while ago I had the opportunity to inform His Excellency, the Nuncio in Berlin, Monsignor Orsenigo, of the above mentioned. He was interested in the fate of his Excellency Orsini’s relatives. But even though we have a written guarantee (from an official of high position) it is not certain that all doubt concerning the fate of the family of the relatives of the Senator Orsini has been diffused.”
The ambassador’s suspicions were well-founded. Despite Himmler’s assurances that Fritz and Louise were protected, the Nazis had other plans.
• • •
In the early-afternoon hours of May 26, 1943, a black Mercedes touring car sped up the long, elm-shaded driveway of the Bosbeek estate and screeched to a halt in front of the manor house. A young man in an SS uniform got out of the car and strode briskly up the steps, where he knocked, not gently, on the front door.
A certain J. E. Westerbeek, an Amsterdam solicitor of somewhat slippery character whom Fritz had employed for the family trust, was in the house that day to go over some legal matters. Much later, in a letter to Lili, Westerbeek described what happened:
We heard a car drive up and then an urgent knocking at the door. When Piet, the butler, answered the door, he returned shortly afterward, white as a ghost, with a German in civilian clothes, followed by a uniformed man. He introduced himself as Untersturmführer [Lieutenant] Werner of the SS and in the SS’s disagreeable way demanded to know who were Herr Gutmann and Frau Gutmann. He then locked the door, and your parents and I had to stay in the room while he went through the house. You can understand the fearful state we were in, and this increased shortly thereafter, because Werner came back and told us that your parents had to go with him. After repeated entreaties he told us that the journey would be to Berlin. However, they should have no fear, because nothing would happen to them.
He said that on the trip they would be allowed every comfort, and that after the journey to Berlin, they would continue on “to the south.” Your parents would be allowed to take money, jewelry, luggage, etc., and he would take care of the transportation. He said your father was a “special case,” referring to your father’s Italian relations, and he suggested that Italy was the ultimate destination, although he wasn’t really permitted to divulge anything.
Westerbeek said the Untersturmführer then told them that Fritz and Louise should pack as many suitcases as they wanted and be ready to leave at 5:00 p.m. He would return with an extra car (for the bags) and take them to The Hague. There Fritz and Louise would board the D train to Berlin, departing at 6:45 p.m. They would have first-class tickets and a sleeping-car compartment. Werner posted an armed soldier at the front door and drove off, leaving Fritz and Louise in an agony of doubt, tempered by hope. It seemed as if this might actually be the beginning of their salvation. But as always there was the question: Could the Nazis be trusted?
Westerbeek took up the story:
After his [Werner’s] departure there was a lot of busy packing, and the mood became considerably less anxious. Your mother was still very nervous, but your father seemed to regain his confidence and even found some levity. The whole afternoon was spent packing the suitcases, eventually numbering some fourteen in all, large and small. They packed all manner of clothes, a good supply of linen, toiletries, etc., and some food supplies for the journey.
Shortly after we were ready, Untersturmführer Werner came back [with the two cars]. The doors of the house were locked and the keys taken by him, and then we went full speed from Bosbeek to The Hague. I sat next to your mother in one car, and your father was in the other car with the suitcases. Your father’s car went straight to the train station, but we first went to Werner’s home so he could pick up his own suitcase. The Untersturmführer was to be their escort. We arrived at the station at the last moment, the train was already starting to move, so I had no opportunity to say good-bye. A pair of waving hands from the train window was the last thing I saw of your parents.
The train moved slowly east on the four-hundred-mile journey to Berlin, the window shades in their compartment pulled down on Werner’s order. Returning to the country of their birth filled Fritz and Louise with dread. Frequently delayed by high-priority German military traffic, their train arrived in Berlin the next morning. To their relief, Ambassador Alfieri himself was on hand to greet them at the station. Unfortunately, Alfieri was not alone. With him were two civilian representatives, one from Seyss-Inquart’s office and the other from Göring’s—their instructions were plain: obtain a release for the Eugen Gutmann Silver Collection. Fritz was unyielding.
With Untersturmführer Werner still accompanying them, Fritz and Louise and their mountains of baggage were boarded onto another train—in a private car, no less. The journey to Italy was to go via Dresden, Prague, and Vienna. After watching them depart, Alfieri’s office sent a telegram to Lili Orsini in Pisa advising her of her brother’s imminent arrival. Great-Aunt Lili immediately telephoned young Lili in Florence.
Early in the morning on May 28, young Lili rushed with great expectation to the Santa Maria Novella station. Finally the train from Vienna arrived. On tiptoe she scanned the passengers disembarking. She waited until the last solitary traveler got off the train, but Fritz and Louise were nowhere in sight. She thought that perhaps they had missed one of their connections. The next day she came back to the station, and finally the train from the north again arrived. She waited until the last passenger had cleared the platform, and still there was no sign of them. She came back the next day, and the next, and the next, a thin, increasingly forlorn-looking figure, nervously pacing the platform and holding on to the hope that this day’s train would finally bring her parents out of the hell they had been living in for the past three years.
As the days, and then nights, went by, and the trains came and went, Fritz and Louise did not arrive.
They never would.
