Führermuseum

The Führermuseum (English: Leader's Museum), also referred to as the Linz Art Gallery, was an unrealized museum complex, planned by Adolf Hitler for the Austrian city of Linz. In it would expose the collection of art obtained by the Germans throughout Europe during World War II under the name Linz Collection.

Design

The plans for the Linz complex designed by Albert Speer and other architects included a monumental theatre, an opera house and an Adolf Hitler Hotel, all surrounded by huge boulevards and a parade ground. A library would house at least 250,000 books; the museum itself would have a colonnaded façade about 500 feet (150 meters) long, in the design paralleling that of the House of German Art (Haus der Deutschen Kunst) already erected in Munich. It would stand on the site of the Linz railroad station, which was to be moved four kilometers to the south.

Collection

On 21 June 1939, Hitler, the Führer, set up the Sonderauftrag Linz (Special Commission: Linz) in Dresden and appointed Dr Hans Posse, director of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Dresden picture gallery), as special envoy. The Sonderauftrag collected art for the Führermuseum, which Hitler wanted to build in Linz, his hometown in Upper Austria, and for other museums in the German Reich, especially in the eastern territories. The artworks would have been distributed to these museums after the war.

The Sonderauftrag was located in Dresden and consisted of art historians in service of the Dresden Gallery of Paintings, e.g. Robert Oertel and Gottfried Reimer. Posse died in December 1942 of cancer. In March 1943, Hermann Voss, an art historian and director of the Wiesbaden Gallery took over the Sonderauftrag Linz.

The methods of acquisition ranged from confiscation to purchase and includes many cases of forced sale, using funds from sales of Hitler's book Mein Kampf and stamps showing his portrait. The purchases were mostly stored in the Führerbau (Hitler's office building) in Munich; the confiscated artworks were stored in deposits in Upper Austria. Since February 1944, the art works were moved to the salt mines of Altaussee to protect them from increased bombing. Detailed records of the collection were kept at Dresden and moved to Schloß Weesenstein at the end of the war, where they were confiscated by the Russians.

In 2008, the German Historic Museum of Berlin published a database with paintings collected for the Führermuseum and for other museums in the German Reich. But the most important historical and visual sources relating to the gallery of the "Führermuseum" are photo albums, which were created by the Sonderauftrag between autumn 1940 and autumn 1944. They were presented to Hitler every Christmas and on his birthday, 20 April. Originally thirty-one volumes existed, but only nineteen have been preserved. The album are documents of the intended gallery holdings, the first 20 volumes show the gallery in a provisional state finished.

There is some debate about whether art for the Führermuseum was stolen or purchased. Hanns Christian Löhr argues in "The Brown House of Art" that only a small portion of the collection – possibly 12 percent – came from seizures or expropriation. Moreover, another 2.5% was derived from forced sales. However other researchers, whose objectivity is questionable, claiming that most of the works were not purchased but were looted.

Post-war

After World War II, the American Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) made thirteen detailed reports on the Linz museum and the Nazi plundering of art. These reports were synthesised into four consolidated reports; the fourth of these was written by S. Lane Faison covering the Führermuseum. These reports focused on returning art to rightful owners.

In Eastern Europe, Stalin charged Mikhail Khrapchenko with taking many of the Führermuseum artworks to stock Soviet art galleries. Khrapchenko said "it would now be possible to turn Moscow’s Pushkin Museum into one of the world’s great museums, like the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Hermitage."

In 2010, an album that an American soldier looted from Hitler's home, Berghof, during the war that catalogued artwork Hitler desired for the museum is to be returned to Germany.

See also

• Degenerate art
• Art in the Third Reich

Further reading

• Spotts, Frederic: Hitler and the power of aesthetics. Woodstock & New York 2003, pp. 188–220. ISBN 1-58567-345-5.
• Schwarz, Birgit: Hitler's Museum. Die Fotoalben Gemäldegalerie Linz. Wien, Böhlau Verlag, 2004. ISBN 3-205-77054-4.
• Schwarz, Birgit: Hitler's Museum, in: Vitalizing Memory. International Perspektives on Provenance Research. Washington 2005, pp. 51–54.
• Schwarz, Birgit: Le Führermuseum de Hitler et la Mission spéciale Linz, in: André Gob, Des musées au-dessus de tout soupcon, Paris 2007, pp. 164–176. ISBN 978-2-200-35099-4
• Löhr, Hanns Christian: Das Braune Haus der Kunst. Hitler und der "Sonderauftrag Linz". Berlin Akademie Verlag, 2005. ISBN 978-3-05-004156-8.
• Schwarz, Birgit: Sonderauftrag Linz und „Führermuseum“, in: Raub und Restitution, Jüdisches Museum Berlin 2008, pp. 127–133 ISBN 978-3-8353-0361-4

External links

• 2004 article from Die Welt (in German)
• OSS Report on Hitler's Museum (from Prof. Jonathan Petropolous)
• Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States
• National Archives Announces Discovery of "Hitler Albums" Documenting Looted Art
• Online database of Linz Special Collection at The German Historical Museum covering 4747 works. "It shows paintings, sculptures, furniture, porcelain, and tapestries that Adolf Hitler and his agents purchased or appropriated from confiscated property between the end of the 1930s and 1945, primarily for a museum planned for Linz, but also for other collections."
• History of Linz Collection at the German Historical Museum