World War II proved a calamitous era for stellar dealers in Chinese Art. C. T. Loo had his stock appropriated by the Chinese in Shanghai; the Japanese firm Yamanaka & Company (with branches in Chicago, Boston, Seal Harbor, and New York) had its American stock confiscated and auctioned by the U.S. Alien Property custodian in 1944. The well-known Peking dealer Otto Burchard, who was so instrumental in helping Laurence Sickman accumulate treasures for the Kansas City museum, was triply unlucky; after he had to flee Germany in 1933, the contents of what had once been his gallery were auctioned off in a two-day sale in March 1935, and then the U.S. government confiscated his American stock as alien property during wartime. But no story is stranger than what befell thirteen Chinese objects, some purchased from C. T. Loo in 1941 and subsequently lent to the Buffalo Museum of Science in 1942—all once owned by the German-Swiss collector Baron Eduard von der Heydt.
A banker by profession and a collector by instinct, Heydt could plausibly have been a character in a novel by Hermann Hesse. He was at once a flamboyant Bohemian, a known homosexual, and a covert enabler of Hitler’s Third Reich. A childless divorcé, he left his art collection to two museums. His Asian art became a centerpiece of Zurich’s Rietberg Museum, and his collection of European art, including a number of modern masters (following his father August’s example), was bequeathed to a museum in Wuppertal, which was renamed the Von der Heydt Museum in 1961. But what concerns us here are the eight Chinese works that are now in Washington at the Freer Gallery.
The Northern Wei Bodhisattva, seized as wartime alien property by the United States, and eventually awarded to the Freer Gallery of Art.
Born in 1882 in Elberfeld (now absorbed into Wuppertal), a center of the textile industry, Eduard von der Heydt was the second son of an old, powerful, and recently ennobled family of bankers—his great-grandfather August was the Prussian minister of commerce, and later, as finance minister in Bismarck’s cabinet, he was responsible for building the Prussian Eastern Railway. Although they already belonged to the cream of the increasingly rich Ruhr industrial society, the raising of the von der Heydt family to the hereditary nobility in 1863 meant that their two sons, August and Eduard, had access to important contacts among members of the Prussian court as well as entrée into Berlin’s exclusive salons. (Their magnificent family home in Berlin, purchased by his great-grandfather before Eduard was born, became, by a stroke of fate after August’s death, the Chinese embassy.) At home, in Elberfeld, the parents played host to writers, artists, and musicians. They were also collectors of the avant-garde—Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, Kokoschka, Matisse, and the museum world’s first Picasso—art left by their son to the Wuppertal museum that still bears their name.
In 1900, after a classical gymnasium education, Eduard spent a gap year in Bonn and later joined the Dusseldorf Hussars. Two years later, he served with yet another cavalry regiment, the even more aristocratic Potsdam Ulans. (These reserve cavalry units functioned as places where the sons of parvenu burghers acquired a Prussian Junker patina.) Eduard attended university in Geneva, and in 1905 he received his doctorate in economics at the University of Freiburg. Instead of following his older brother into the family firm, young Eduard spent a year apprenticing at a New York bank, August Belmont & Company, which looked after the Rothschild family’s American interests. But the frivolous gilded life of New York and Newport didn’t agree with him and he returned home. In 1909, he was off to London, where at age twenty-seven he founded a branch of the family bank, E. von der Heydt & Company, with capital from his inheritance and that of a regimental friend.
London with its museums and art dealers captivated him. All doors opened for the young banker, who was often seen at Mayfair’s best parties and nightclubs dressed in tails. In the summer of 1914, shortly before war broke out, he happened to be in Potsdam, and as a lieutenant in the reserves of the Ulans (lancers), he served on the Western front, seeing action in the Battle of the Marne, for which he received the Iron Cross Second Class. (His comrades nicknamed him “Barönchen,” or “little Baron,” alluding to his short [five-foot-six] stature.) Wounded in 1915, he was mustered out of the military and served as counselor to the German embassy in The Hague. His military service saved him from internment in Britain, and from probable deportation, but his banking assets were expropriated as enemy property in 1917, and he lost everything, including his art.
At war’s end in November 1918, amid the revolutionary turmoil in Berlin, he married a Hamburg banker’s daughter, Vera von Schwabach. His new father-in-law, Paul von Schwabach, a converted Jew, was the co-owner of the powerful Bleichroeder Bank, which had underwritten Bismarck’s expansion of the Prussian state; thus von der Heydt’s financial future was once again secured. With his father-in-law’s help, he opened the Von der Heydt-Kersten Bank in Amsterdam in 1920. But the arranged marriage joined an inexperienced eighteen-year-old bride with a groom twice her age who was attracted to men. He confessed to a friend from his Potsdam regimental days, the German diplomat Herbert von Dirksen, that he was “unsuitable for marriage.” Eduard and Vera were divorced in 1927, although they remained on friendly terms. (The baroness became a distinguished Jungian analyst in Britain, one of the last to enter analysis with the master himself in Switzerland.)
In 1942, during the Second World War, Eduard recalled his initial mystical encounter with Buddhist art in 1908: “The autumn wind sweeps through Amsterdam’s dark streets. The pounding rain rocks the old Dutch kaebue in the canals. Everything is in motion, even the houses seem to shake. Light streams through a small window . . . a large, quiet, marble head of a Buddha appears, motionless in the storm of elements. I wait, remembering from my student years Schopenhauer, the Upanishads, the Buddhist sutras.” He was hooked.
At first, his collection began conservatively: seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, acquired in London. In Amsterdam in 1908, he purchased his first Chinese sculpture and then began to haunt C. T. Loo’s and Paul Mallon’s Parisian galleries of Asian art. His mantra was “one buys the very best from first class dealers for the reason that they immediately take back a piece that is questionable, or that you may not like.” Reminiscing on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, he spoke of his early adventures in collecting Chinese art: “One studies the old dynasties, asks professional art historians, and each gives a different answer. Everything was then in flux. The dynastic names of Han, Sui, Tang and Song were swirling around. They meant nothing to me because I did not want to take a lesson in history. I was fascinated by the works of art. I could not care less who made them, and at what time they were made.” His growing collection demanded grander quarters, and the couple acquired a patrician house on Amsterdam’s Keizersgracht, which also housed his bank. On the ground floor, they established a private gallery of East Asian art named Yi Yuan, comprising more than four hundred objects, acquired in one stroke from the estate of the Italian-French Sinologue Raphael Petrucci in 1922. Describing Yi Yuan, von der Heydt maintained that it “was not supposed to be a museum, nor a concert hall or a temple, but a combination of all three and, at the same time, living quarters and a place for study.”
It was his taste for non-European art that distinguished von der Heydt from his contemporaries, although that same year Eduard and his brother purchased their father’s European art collection, later gifted to the Wuppertal museum. Once when asked why he had collected Asian art, he replied that it was “ridiculously cheap” in its day, particularly in the 1920s in France. His Dutch banking business allowed him to buy art in countries like Austria and Germany during the crushing postwar hyperinflation, which lasted until 1923, using his backed-by-gold Dutch guilders. Von der Heydt employed an interesting investment strategy, which he would tout to his friend Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza: buy art. Most of it was purchased from dealers in Paris, London, and Amsterdam, and he was not averse to buying in bulk, such as the collection of Ordos bronzes, a form of Eurasian steppe art, that he acquired from C. T. Loo, whose gallery exhibited it in 1934–35 in Vienna.
Catalogues loom large in von der Heydt’s operations. In 1924, the art historian Karl With edited the baron’s first: the Yi Yuan objects (Bildwerke Ost-und Südasiens aus der Sammlung Yi Yuan). Although Eduard became acquainted with a number of art historians, according to With, “Heydt neither needed or wanted any professional advice and would rather dare to follow his own impulses. Born with an infallible instinct, discriminating taste and sense of quality, he could safely trust his own judgment. In his detective pursuit of hunting for unusual or even obscure art treasures, he often proved his almost clairvoyant foresight.”
Although a visionary when it came to his art, as a banker he was often in difficulty. After a falling out with his father-in-law, von der Heydt left the firm. But our Stehaufmännchen bounced back, founding yet another private bank in the Dutch spa resort of Zandvoort in 1924. The Zandvoort bank occupies space in a complex that includes a spectacular thirty-room villa, cobbled together from four smaller houses with huge panoramic glass windows overlooking the ocean and the beach. His many private clients now include Edmund Stinnes, whose considerable inheritance from his industrialist father, Hugo Stinnes, von der Heydt helps sort out. The exiled former emperor Wilhelm II is a frequent guest at Zandvoort, allowing the baron to bask in the rumor that he is “the Kaiser’s banker.” Part of the villa is open to the public as a museum and lunchroom, to which visitors are directed by a discreet signpost: MULURU (Museumlunchroom). Eduard believes that art should be accessible to the public, and at MULURU guests can “drink beer under a Japanese demon” or be “served bread and butter in front of the South Sea sculpture.” “Ars una,” meaning there was only one art encompassing all cultures, is how von der Heydt now describes his omnivorous collecting. Eduard’s taste for acquisitions—houses, art, celebrities—remains insatiable.
Von der Heydt, interwar host to Europe’s best and cleverest, in his nonbanking guise in Ascona, Switzerland.
Interwar guest books attest to the baron’s enthusiasm as a host while he is fast becoming known as a patron of the arts, financing expeditions as well as research. Now he discovers a former quiet fishing village, Ascona, in the Swiss Ticino. In its prior incarnation (1904–26), this artists’ colony had been in the forefront of the Lebensreform (life reform) movement; it was a New Age incubator espousing healthy living, anarchism, free love, vegetarianism, and nudity. In its first incarnation, Ascona attracted artists (Mary Wigman, Isadora Duncan, Paul Klee, Erich Muehsam, and Hermann Hesse), politicians (Gustav Stresemann), educators (Rudolf Steiner), academics (Max Weber), an Indian philosopher (Krishnamurti), and members of the theosophical circle of Madame Helena Blavatsky.
Introduced to the colony by a Russian-Swiss Expressionist painter and salonist, Baroness Marianne von Werefkin in 1923, the baron is enchanted by its beauty and singular location on Monte Verità (“Mountain of Truth”). There this tireless Maecenas erects a Bauhaus-style hotel in 1928 designed by the German architect Emil Fahrenkamp. In its halcyon days, guests breakfast on champagne, sunbathe, play tennis, and practice Buddhist meditation in his purpose-built successor to the celebrated art colony. An elastic circle of international acquaintances—including Jewish refugees, fervent Nazis, conservatives, and socialists—inhabit his guest cottages.
Eventually, he chooses Ascona, with its palm trees, camellias, mimosas, and magnolias and its breathtaking view of Lago Maggiore, as his primary residence. Here he installs himself, a few steps away from his hotel, in Casa Anatta, furnished with his Chinese, African, and Indian art. In this lush atmosphere he wanders about in shorts, often shirtless and always with an enormous unfurled red solar umbrella, or visits friends, driven by his chauffer in his blue Plymouth. His close friends and clients include Edmund Stinnes and the Thyssen brothers, Fritz and Baron Heinrich, the heirs of another of the Ruhr’s great industrial fortunes. Both Thyssens own nearby villas in Ascona and Lugano.
Heydt shrewdly combines friendship with his business interests. In 1925, he acquires from Stinnes the Nordsternbank AG, converting it into the Von der Heydt Bank AG Berlin. But his bank collides with other Berlin banks that have financed the Stinnes Group, and it also makes speculative investments that fail. Now he is rescued by the Thyssen brothers; they take over his bank in 1927, converting it in 1930 into the August Thyssen Bank (Thyba). Von der Heydt remains on the board but he is spending less time on his unsuccessful banking efforts and more time on collecting—both art and celebrities.
During the thirties, Ascona and his new hotel, opened in 1929, continue to attract an exotic mix of European celebrities, among them the Kaiser’s fourth son and royal contender, Prince August Wilhelm (“Auwi”); psychiatrist Carl Jung; sexual researcher Magnus Hirschfeld; philosopher Martin Buber; actor Emil Jannings; artists Paul Klee, El Lissitzsky, and Hans Arp; the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim; the founding president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann; statesmen Gustav Stresemann and Joseph Wirth, the head of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht; novelists Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Erich Maria Remarque; musicians Bronislaw Hubermann and Edwin Fischer; and miscellaneous “Russian grand dukes, Parisian cocottes and English Lords.”
One clue to the baron’s personality is hinted at by Karl With:
His pleasure was to bring together people of most different social, political or cultural viewpoints. A strange mixture of opposites—of prestigious aristocrats and radicals, of eccentric bohemians and staid conservatives, of revolutionary idealists and shrewd captains of big business. With the pretext of bridging the gaps of inter-human relationships, he gave me the impression that to him it was more like a human circus, private entertainment and amusing to watch. His tragedy was, that with no talent for friendship, no capacity for love, scared of getting emotionally involved, he remained a very lonely man, a spectator, never a dedicated participant.
After the Nazis fired With from his position in 1933, denouncing him as the “pimp of degenerate art,” he spent two years in Ascona shortly before the outbreak of war. Von der Heydt tasked him with inventorying and locating his widely dispersed collection, which entailed making trips to relevant European museums. (In some cases, With reports, he found “several hundred pieces of which he had no record at all, or any recollection.”)
After Hitler came to power in 1933, many collectors were forced to emigrate, notably those who were Jewish, but they could depart with only a limited amount of their assets. In May 1935, the contents of Otto Burchard’s former gallery—1,500 Chinese, Japanese, and Indian works—were auctioned in Berlin. According to one attendee, “The prices were especially low for ceramics of the T’ang period and for paintings, Chinese archaic bronzes commanded the highest prices.” Von der Heydt purchased five pieces: a bust of a military officer, a wooden standing bodhisattva, two vessels, as well as a kneeling male figure. The first four objects are now in the Rietberg Museum, the kneeling figure was lost during the war. There were no reserve prices and no estimates; all of the art found buyers. When Goering heard of the auction, he forbade further auctions, fearing that valuable artworks could be bought by foreign buyers.
Art collections were fungible, and it was to von der Heydt’s advantage to buy art cheap, using currency that couldn’t be taken from the country because of rigid exchange rules. Even though his purchases had to remain in Germany, they could be loaned to eager museums with friendly directors. Since he had his initial art collection confiscated by the British during the First World War, to avoid repeating the experience in the event of another war, researchers estimate that by 1938 von der Heydt had more than 2,560 objects disbursed in sixty-nine different institutions in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, England, France, Denmark, Sweden, and Austria. Each institution had to care for, restore, and house his collections, even as their exhibitions and catalogues also increased the value of his art, a fact not lost on the lender. Moving his residence from Zandvoort to Ascona, he obtained Swiss citizenship in 1937, after having reportedly made large expenditures of money for the protection of his assets. Interested parties hoped that Swiss museums might be the beneficiaries of the heirless collector. When war came, he worried that Mussolini might invade, since Ascona lay perilously near the Italian border. “The main thing,” he wrote to his secretary in Zandvoort in April 1940, “is to distribute everything possible at the present time as there is no real security anywhere.”
However, his prewar attempts to aggregate his possessions in Switzerland did not always succeed. He had lent many important pieces to Berlin’s Völkerkunde (Ethnographic) Museum and now the director general of the Prussian State Museums, Otto Kümmel, the author of the notorious Kümmel Report, a wish list of art in foreign countries to be “repatriated” by the Nazis for their planned museums, and his assistant, a Dr. Reidemeister, refused to return any of von der Heydt’s extensive loans, including many prime objects—such as his large stone Chinese sculptures and a fifteenth-century wooden bodhisattva bought from the Burchard sale in 1935. Von der Heydt suspected that the museum no longer saw itself as a custodian of the collection but as its owner. Nevertheless, he was able to move the larger objects in his collection to a forest house in the Uckermark, fifty miles north of Berlin, Görlsdorf, a property belonging to one of his noble friends, Prince Lynar. The smaller objects, including his valuable Ordos bronzes, he entrusted to the specially built vault of the Thyssen Bank, recently renovated with a special room for paintings and art.
Von der Heydt’s politics were monarchial and conservative. In 1926, he became a member of the Stahlhelmbund, a right-wing paramilitary organization, and the Herrenklub, Berlin’s most elite association of aristocrats, bankers, ministers, and industrialists, founded in 1924. From 1927 onward, he began to circulate in the upper echelons of the Nazi Party, meeting the likes of Field Marshal Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels in the fashionable salon of Hitler’s great friend Viktoria von Dirksen. This landowner’s daughter, the wife of the newly ennobled art collector and diplomat Willibald von Dirksen, was the stepmother of von der Heydt’s close friend from his regimental days and fellow Herrenklub member Herbert von Dirksen—best remembered as Germany’s last prewar ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. In her villa on Berlin’s Margaretenstrasse, old-line conservatives like General Paul von Hindenburg and German royals such as the Kaiser’s sons mixed with Center Party leaders like Heinrich Brüning and up-and-coming Nazis including the Führer himself, with whom von der Heydt reported a brief meeting in the Hotel Kaiserhof in 1931.
The Baron joined the NSDAP on April 1, 1933, membership number 1,561,948, shortly after the German elections that brought Hitler to power. Perhaps he was a true believer; more likely it was for opportunistic reasons. There were business concerns: from 1930 until 1937, he was chairman of the supervisory board of the Thyssen Bank, then a member of the same board until 1943. Its owners were his two friends, the Thyssen brothers Fritz and Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. And family motives: he had a brother and mother in Germany. Finally, he had considerable property there, including a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and his collection, much of it on loan to German museums. Ever cautious, von der Heydt kept his NSDAP membership secret until he lost his wallet on a Swiss lakefront, where it was found by a future curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum, Bernard Bothmer, who turned it in to the local police with the baron’s party card and his photograph adorned with a Nazi swastika inside.
Upon obtaining Swiss citizenship in 1937, the baron automatically lost his German passport, and his exit from the party followed. His biography becomes even more complicated and interpretations more ambiguous during the period from 1939 to 1943 when on trips to Germany even as a Swiss citizen he appears to have been under considerable pressure from the Nazis. The flight of Fritz Thyssen, an early financial supporter of Hitler, from Germany to Switzerland in 1939; the cancellation of his citizenship and the seizure of his assets; and his brother Heinrich’s forfeiture of his German citizenship—he had been adopted by his father-in-law, a Hungarian count, and was reincarnated a Hungarian citizen, Heinrich Baron Thyssen Bornemisza de Kaszón—and von der Heydt’s own Swiss citizenship had assuredly put the Thyssen Bank in a precarious position and susceptible to pressure from the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. In 1939, Eduard first used his Zandvoort bank, then after Holland had been invaded in 1940 by the Wehrmacht, the August Thyssen Bank (Thyba) in Berlin to handle financial transactions for the Abwehr. Von der Heydt laundered gold and made foreign exchange transactions between 1939 and 1943 through the Union Bank in Locarno, money used, according to U.S. government documents, for the financing of the Abwehr’s agents in Mexico and the United States. According to the historian and journalist Thomas Buomberger, there were ninety payments in more than a dozen currencies, totaling nearly one million Swiss francs. These transfers continued until November 22, 1943, when the Berlin bank was destroyed.
By the fall of 1944, the war in Europe was winding down, with Allied troops driving toward the Rhine and Soviet troops heading toward Berlin. Plans were in the offing for the peacetime occupation, postwar war crimes trials, and an operation called SAFEHAVEN, designed to prevent German industries and banks from transferring assets abroad to neutral countries in Europe and the Americas, thus ensuring that these funds would be available for reparation and the rebuilding of Europe. Directives went out to legations in August and September 1944, instructing U.S. embassy officials accordingly. Although it was originally a project of the Foreign Economic Administration (FEA), the State Department, and the Treasury, eventually the OSS Secret Intelligence Branch, responsible for the gathering of intelligence from inside occupied and neutral Europe, and its counterintelligence branch, X-2, also became involved.
Neutral Switzerland had acted as the main clearinghouse in which German gold stolen from occupied countries, or from fleeing Jews, could be converted to foreign currency in order to purchase raw materials to fuel the Nazi war machine. In Bern, the heart of these banking transactions, the station chief of the OSS was Allen Dulles, soon to become the postwar director of the CIA. In April 1945, X-2 provided an extensive summary of wartime gold and currency transiting through Switzerland. Most of the transactions were done through banks, but private individuals smuggled assets through diplomatic pouches and sold art and other valuables.
Thus it was that von der Heydt’s gold and currency exchange activities for the Abwehr brought him to the attention of the Americans. Yet in response to an inquiry from Washington, the American ambassador in Bern, Leland Harrison, on November 25, 1944, cabled the State Department that there was “no evidence for [Heydt’s alleged] ‘pro-Nazi’ activities.” Dulles had pronounced the baron, whom he had never seen, as a “somewhat harmless busybody who wants to be on the winning side and protect his property interests. I have reasons to know from a reliable source that the Germans do not care for him any more than we do.” Although his attitude was “pro-German and monarchist,” Heydt claimed to be “anti-Nazi.” Cited as evidence were files stating that he also provided intelligence to both the Americans and British in Zurich.
Von der Heydt’s postwar nightmare began in January 1946 against the background of the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg. The trials exposed the horrors perpetrated by the National Socialist government: the deportations of Jews and other unwanted persons, extermination camps, gas chambers, confiscation of assets, and so on. On trial were many of von der Heydt’s known associates—Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Hjalmar Schacht, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. One of the chief witnesses was Hans Bernd Gisevius, an Abwehr agent working under cover as the vice consul in Bern who had also served as Allen Dulles’s contact to the German Resistance.
On March 27, 1946, the Swiss, acceding to American pressure, arrested the baron at Zurich’s four-star hotel, the Baur au Lac, where he lived in princely splendor in Room 327, his quarters adorned with choice items from his private art collection. The police inspectors inventoried the room: golf bags, European paintings, and Chinese artworks were all itemized with Swiss precision. After interrogations, collection of evidence from the hotel and the Ascona villa, and twenty-four days in jail, von der Heydt was charged with “conducting or organizing the conduct of military intelligence gathering services on Swiss territory for a foreign state against another foreign state,” thus violating the Swiss Neutrality Law. The Swiss wanted answers to a number of questions: What did von der Heydt know about the financial transactions of the Third Reich? How deeply was the baron implicated with the espionage activities of the Nazis? What had really happened to the millions in gold, the Nazi treasure? Was it hidden at Monte Verità, as the Americans suspected?
The trial before a military tribunal began in May 1946. Von der Heydt was questioned about his activities for the Abwehr and his relationship to high-level Nazis. Finally, the Swiss acquitted the baron for want of “subjective culpability,” and he was permitted to retain his Swiss nationality. The court believed that when transferring the Abwehr funds, he had not known who the recipients were nor the nature of the payments. Citing lack of evidence, the Swiss court seemed reluctant to convict “a man of von der Heydt’s social and financial standing in the international community,” and it is credibly suspected that he had made a deal—1,500 objects to be given to found a Zurich museum—apparently in exchange for the museum’s opportunistic support during his trial. If he had lost, he would have been stripped of his Swiss citizenship, and Zurich would have lost the centerpiece of its projected museum. (The refugee German art historian Alfred Salmony reported that the Swiss authorities hosted a banquet in Heydt’s honor to celebrate the successful conclusion of his trial.)
In 1949, the citizens of Zurich voted in a referendum for the Villa Wesendonck, the former home of Richard Wagner’s paramour, Mathilde von Wesendonck, to be turned into a museum to house von der Heydt’s non-European collection. In 1952, the year the Rietberg opened, he bequeathed his collection of modern European paintings to Wuppertal’s Municipal Museum, renamed the Von der Heydt Museum in 1961 after its two principal patrons, August and his son Eduard. Postwar, the baron, though financially stressed, continued to support the well-regarded journal Artibus Asiae. With funds deriving from his American assets frozen in 1941, the journal had been edited in America but printed in Ascona, until the U.S. government abruptly cancelled the arrangement in 1951. Its editor in chief was Alfred Salmony, who loyally described his patron as “the greatest angel in the world to Far Eastern art.”
After his trial and gift to the Rietberg, von der Heydt began his quest to repatriate his works of art. Some had been destroyed or taken as trophy art by the Soviet occupiers, such as the items left in the vault of the Thyssen Bank in Berlin. His house in Zandvoort, whose furnishings had been given to Dutch museums, was destroyed during the Nazi blitzkrieg in the winter of 1942–43. His parental home in Wuppertal was also destroyed in June 1943 shortly before the death of his mother, along with part of his father’s art collection. Three hundred mostly African objects disappeared from the Musée de l’Homme in the 1939 evacuation of Paris, and sixteen of his paintings, discovered by French troops in storage in Koblenz at the end of the war and “recouped,” were retained by the Louvre. After the war, the baron successfully sued for the return of his art then held in Denmark.
More difficult was the art marooned in Görlsdorf, in what became East Germany in 1949. Some choice examples from his Asian collection were presented to their Communist allies by the Soviet occupiers as spoils of war. They remained in residence on Berlin’s Museum Island. A bizarre sequel followed. In June 1951, Johannes Itten, the painter and Bauhaus color theorist and subsequently the first director of the Rietberg Museum, read in a newspaper that Vladimir Lenin’s Zurich landlord, the cobbler Titus Kammerer, had died. He knew that for years the Soviets had tried vainly to persuade Kammerer to sell the contents of the two rooms on the leafy Spiegelgasse once occupied by Lenin and his partner Nadezhda Krupskaya during their exile in 1916–17 before they departed in a sealed train to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station to propel the Bolshevik Revolution. The shoemaker had refused all Moscow’s offers. However, Kammerer’s son proved more pliant, and Itten was able to acquire Lenin’s teacup, then a tea strainer surfaced and finally magically two butter knives, enabling Itten to obtain from the East Germans in exchange for Vladimir Ilyich’s “reliquaries” two truckloads carrying twenty-three Chinese sculptures subsequently ferried to the Rietberg’s door.
In 1941, von der Heydt had given Chauncey J. Hamlin, the president of the Buffalo Museum and founder of the International Council of Museums, and his friend Alfred Salmony, who was then residing in the United States, permission to draw $6,000 a year from his frozen American bank account for the purchase of art. The Office of Alien Property approved the transactions, and some forty-four works of art—African, and pre-Columbian, as well as Asian—were acquired and sent directly to the Buffalo Museum for safekeeping, without the collector actually taking possession. Described by Salmony as “lending without losing,” the loan was acknowledged by the museum as a “permanent loan.” Placed on exhibit in Buffalo, there they remained until 1951, when, under Vesting Order number 18344, they were confiscated by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
Armed with his Swiss acquittal and now seeking the return of his collection, von der Heydt appealed. But this and a further plea for a rehearing were dismissed after the district court in Washington, D.C., found that the plaintiff had willfully refused to produce material documents relating to his financial transactions during the Third Reich. What the government had in evidence was the testimony of the former director of the Thyssen Bank, Heinrich Luebke, recently returned from five years in a Soviet prison camp. In an affidavit executed in Germany in 1950, he claimed that von der Heydt was well informed as to the exact nature of the Abwehr transfers. Luebke stated that he met with von der Heydt in Lugano (in 1939, according to the records) and asked him whether he was prepared to take care of money transfers to foreign countries that he had to execute for the Abwehr, for which the baron would received the usual turnover commission. Luebke claimed that the baron was aware that the “payments were of a confidential nature and that the identity of the party [the Abwehr] giving the order was to remain concealed.” The payments, according to Luebke, continued through Thyba until 1943, when the Berlin bank was bombed.
The chief secretary of the bank, Ilse Butry, further stated that these remittances for neutral and enemy countries were handled only by von der Heydt. Thyba remitted the payments in sealed, registered letters containing exclusively Swiss francs or U.S. dollars, and von der Heydt was instructed to transfer funds to an account in his name in the Union Bank in Locarno to addresses in a neutral or enemy country for agents designated by the German High Command.
Subsequent investigations in FBI and OSS files indicate that the baron also acted for the Gestapo by receiving ransom payments for Jews held in occupied countries, including Romania. A Romanian couple then living in New York asserted that the baron, notwithstanding his denials, had profited from helping Jewish refugees obtain visas. During the last stages of the war, in 1944, Thyssen Bank employees stated that he had received “large amounts of gold” that had been smuggled into Switzerland and buried in the cellar of his house. Heydt’s files state that Swiss police searched his hotel in Zurich and found lists of Germans suspected of bringing valuables into Switzerland. After looking at the American files in the National Archives, German historians Dieter Nelles and Stephan Stracke concluded: “Eduard von der Heydt was not a fellow traveler but a supporter of the Nazi system of injustice. He was an early supporter of the Nazi movement, and as the Abwehr ‘banker’ played a central role for the Germans and had benefited from ransom payments made by persecuted Jews.” At this writing, parts of the von der Heydt files at the National Archives still remain closed.
In spite of the efforts of the Zurich city president, the Swiss ambassador, and a further petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to quash the seizure, the Department of Justice under Attorney General Robert Kennedy ruled that the baron had “exhausted all the legal remedies against the forfeiture of his property provided to him by the Trading with the Enemy Act,” and asked the Smithsonian experts to appraise the collection for auction. But, citing the high quality of the objects, the appraisers decided they wanted to keep them, and in 1966 Congress enacted legislation authorizing the legal transfer of the collection to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. According to the bill, “the Smithsonian Institution shall have complete discretion to retain, exchange, sell, or otherwise dispose of the objects.” All told, forty-four confiscated works of art. Then, in 1973, the thirteen Asian works—were transferred to the Freer Gallery. One of them, the fragment of the sandstone standing bodhisattva, was duly accessioned to its permanent collection in 1978.
Von der Heydt was never reconciled to his loss, maintaining until the end that he was a victim of slander and intrigue by German spies and that the August Thyssen Bank, since it was owned by a Hungarian citizen, Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, living in Switzerland, was never a German bank. To the end, this “Buddha with the eyes of a fox” remained inscrutable. He continued to support art and to receive kudos: an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, honorary citizenship from Wuppertal, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit from Germany. In 1998, long after Heydt’s death, the director of the Rietberg Museum, Albert Lutz, wrote to the director of the Freer Gallery, Milo Beach, requesting a long-term loan of the thirteen items, but was told that the Freer “prohibit[s] the lending or deaccessioning works in its collection.”
Since the misdeeds of the Swiss banks were brought to light in the 1990s, triggering the adoption of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-confiscated Art (1998), a number of articles and books have appeared in German on von der Heydt and the war years. Not all the facts agree, certainly not all the interpretations. Eduard von der Heydt has his defenders in Switzerland and Wuppertal.
The 2007 inquiry by Michael Knieriem, the director of Wuppertal’s History Center (Historisches Zentrum), into von der Heydt’s past resulted in a verdict summed up at a public discussion. Knierem found that Wuppertal’s honorary citizen was not a perpetrator, he was not an anti-Semite, nor did he buy looted art. Knieriem and his colleagues present on a panel drew a portrait of a lonely, angst-ridden man of the world, a failed banker whose love of art had been an obsession. This haunted, driven man feared becoming stateless, losing his fortune and his art. He was trying to protect himself from all sides using politicians of all colors in an effort to secure his existence. As Knieriem summed up, “He was a liberal conservative representative of the haute bourgeoisie. His views were not consistent with those of the Nazis.” Nevertheless the next year in 2008, owing to the efforts of other local historians opposed to this perceived whitewash, his name was dropped from the city’s cultural prize.
His Ascona hotel, Monte Verità, which he bequeathed to the Swiss Canton of Ticino in 1956, has become the ETH Zurich Conference Center, a private facility hosting seminars and meetings. In a final twist, according to Dr. Greg Bradsher, director of the Holocaust-Era Assets Records Project at the National Archives, in 1997 the baron’s Ascona hotel hosted an international conference attended by historians and archivists. The subject: Nazi gold and Swiss banks.
The Freer has made serious attempts at provenance research for items acquired during the period of the Third Reich. One such item is the gui, purchased in 1938 from C. T. Loo, who claimed to have found it in China. But recent research has shown that it was acquired in the 1935 auction of the items from the Burchard Gallery, the same forced sale from which von der Heydt purchased five items. In 2000, the Freer Gallery received a claim from the heirs of Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer, who had purchased the gallery from Burchard before he settled in Peking. They fled to France in 1933; Jakob died in exile in 1941, and Rosa was transported first to Drancy and then to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in 1943. Provenance research at the Smithsonian supported their claim and the heirs received compensation. The vessel remains in Washington.
For the Rietberg, the Freer lots remain the last prisoners of war. For their part, provenance research showed that four items donated to the Reitberg by von der Heydt were found to have been bought in the same 1935 sale of the Burchard collection. The Oppenheimer heirs were contacted and paid the current market value for four Chinese pieces. As the historian Ester Tisa Francini, employed by the Reitberg as a provenance researcher, stated in an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “Museums are a bit like diamonds and today they must be as it were flawless.”