Kajetan Mühlmann

Kajetan Mühlmann at a reception for performers in the Vienna Hofburg, 30 March 1938, seated between Frau Seyss-Inquart and Paula Wessely; Joseph Goebbels speaking

Kajetan "Kai" Mühlmann^[1] (26 June 1898 – 2 August 1958) was an Austrian art historian who was an officer in the SS and played a major role in the expropriation of art by the Nazis, particularly in Poland. He worked with Arthur Seyss-Inquart in the initial Nazi government in Vienna following the Anschluss, in the General Government (occupied Poland) and in The Hague where he headed an art clearing house in the occupied Netherlands known as the Dienststelle Mühlmann (Mühlmann Agency). He has been characterised as one of the greatest art thieves among the Nazis, and possibly ever.

Life

Early life and World War I

Mühlmann was born on 26 June 1898 in Uttendorf, near Zell am See in Austria. His father died and his mother remarried to his father's cousin; the family included eight children, six of whom survived. Mühlmann's elder brother Josef was later to join the Gestapo. Mühlmann grew up on a farm and attended school in Salzburg.^[2] On reaching the required age of 17 in 1915, he volunteered for service in the First World War; he was decorated several times but in 1918 was seriously wounded and suffered a lung infection which affected his health for the rest of his life. At this time he joined the Socialist Party, and remained a member for several years.^[3]

Salzburg

In 1922 he entered university, studying art history in Innsbruck and Vienna, and in 1926 he completed his doctorate at the University of Vienna with a thesis on Baroque Fountains and Water Art in Salzburg.^[3][4] He then returned to Salzburg, where he acquired a reputation as a civic activist, advocating for the improvement of the city's landmarks and publishing a book on one preservationist's work, wrote generally positive art reviews, and worked as chief publicity agent for the Salzburg Festival.^[5] He spoke Austrian dialect and became known as a networker. People whom he met at this time and before and who later helped him in his career included Hermann Göring (Mühlmann was friends with his sisters, who lived in the Salzburg area, and there is a story, which he denied, that he helped Göring to escape from Germany after the failure of the Beerhall Putsch in Munich in 1923) and Arthur Seyss-Inquart.^[6]

The Austrian Nazi Party was banned in July 1934 after the murder of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, and Mühlmann always denied having been a member then or earlier; however, both American Intelligence and Nazi sources state that he was an early member, and in 1935 he and five others were arrested in Salzburg and charged with being Nazis; the charge against Mühlmann was reduced from high treason to 'membership in a secret society' and his sentence reduced to time served, but according to a report by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the original sentence was 20 years.^[6] After his trial and conviction he continued to work as a liaison between those Nazis who remained in Austria and the party organisation and paramilitary forces in exile in Bavaria.^[7] While doing his best to avoid overt political affiliations, he became a prominent member of the moderate wing of the Austrian party, which ultimately triumphed over the radical faction;^[8][9] early in 1938 he met with Hitler on behalf of Seyss-Inquart and gave him confidential information which strengthened his bargaining position in his meeting with Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, in addition to urging the removal of Josef Leopold.^[10][11][12]

Vienna

Following the Anschluss in March 1938, Seyss-Inquart appointed him Secretary of State in the Federal Chancellery and then in the Ministry for Interior and Cultural Affairs, and also Representative for State Art Policy.^[4][13] He became a captain in the SS;^[4] he later rose to the rank of Oberführer.^[9][14] As head of Department III in the office of the Reichsstatthalter, which was responsible for the "administration and detachment of 'volksfeindliche' property" (i.e., that of "enemies of the Volk"), he played a major role in the confiscation of the property of Viennese Jews, which preceded the actions in the Altreich (pre-Anschluss Germany).^[15]

In June 1939 he was fired by Josef Bürckel, the new Gauleiter of Vienna, ostensibly for sanctioning cabaret performances critical of Altreich Germans, but actually for "Austrian tendencies": funding Austrian cultural institutions outside Vienna and seeking to keep artworks expropriated from Viennese Jews in Vienna.^[16][17][18] This was part of a wave of dismissals of Austrians on Bürckel's part which led to considerable resentment.^[19]

Occupied Poland

After the invasion of Poland, Göring offered him a position as his Special Delegate for the Securing of Artistic Treasures in the Former Polish Territories, his mission being to "secure" (plunder) artworks. He also had orders from Hitler through Reinhard Heydrich and from Hans Frank, who had been appointed Governor of the General Government (the German-occupied section of Poland);^[20] Seyss-Inquart was also sent to Poland as Deputy General Governor under Frank.^[21] Part of the rationale for the plundering of Poland was cultural impoverishment; the Nazis also killed off the intelligentsia, closed all institutions of higher education and instituted measures to reduce the birthrate.^[22] In addition, as earlier in Austria, they took the legal position that the Jews were a separate nation with whom no peace treaty had been concluded at the end of the First World War, and whose property they were therefore at liberty to seize as that of an enemy. Thirdly, in a policy which had been laid down before the invasion of Poland, they claimed the right to repatriate "Germanic art", by which they understood all works by Germans and in addition all that had previously been in the possession of Germans.^[23]

In the General Government, Mühlmann oversaw a "work staff" of nine art experts, eight with doctorates, and two commandos each with a dozen men: one, led by his brother Josef, was responsible for the northern part of the country above the 51st parallel and was based at the National Museum in Warsaw, the other, led by Gustav Barthel and based at the Jagellonian Library in Kraków, for the south. Working outwards from the cities, they emptied state and private collections, universities, churches and monasteries.^[21][24] The artworks were classified into three grades: the top grade, Wahl I, were photographed and stored as reserved for the German Reich; the second grade, Wahl II, classified as "not necessarily worthy of the Reich, but of good quality", were stored either in Poland (primarily in the Jagellonian Library) or at the Deutsche Bank in Berlin; works of the third grade, Wahl III, were usually retained by the occupation administration or the SS, "for representational purposes", that is, for Germans' homes and offices.^[25][26]

The Dienststelle Mühlmann in the Netherlands

Leonardo Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine

Mühlmann's work in Poland was so efficient (by his own account, "within six months almost the entire artistic property of the land was seized") that Wolfram Sievers, business manager of the Ahnenerbe, wanted to have him oversee the removal of artworks from South Tyrol, which had been ceded to Italy.^[27] He visited the area in spring 1940 and reported to Sievers and to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, arguing for the forceful removal of all Germanic art.^[28] However, instead he was appointed to set up an office in The Hague, where he worked under his old associate Seyss-Inquart, heading the Dienststelle Mühlmann (Mühlmann Agency), which functioned as a clearing house for art expropriated during the occupation of the Netherlands, France (where they competed with a branch of the Amt Rosenberg), and also Austria and Poland, and also as the major dealership for selling art to Nazi leaders and for liquidating the rest.^[29] This was the most wideranging, ruthless and prolific Nazi plundering organisation.^[30] Most famously, Mühlmann acquired and catalogued the huge Mannheimer collection, which Hitler acquired for his projected Führermuseum in Linz in a forced sale that netted Seyss-Inquart a large commission.^{[31][32][33][34]} Although he officially retained his post in Poland, he welcomed the move to a location where the occupation was in most ways less repressive, and also had found himself in a difficult position in Kraków between the competing demands of different superiors: Martin Bormann had suggested that he should go to a concentration camp for not supplying enough art to Hitler, Göring had threatened to have him put in prison for returning pictures including Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine to Poland from Berlin on Hans Frank's orders (in the end he carried it together with Raphael's Portrait of Gentleman and Rembrandt's Landscape with the Good Samaritan with him to Berlin by train twice),^[35] and Frank's anger at him reportedly led to his leaving the position in Poland, which he did in mid- or late 1943.^[36][37]

Postwar

In July 1944, seeing the war as lost, Mühlmann retreated to Vienna; he had already sent his wife and children to safety.^[38] He had no official duties, but advised many powerful Nazis; for example, Ernst Kaltenbrunner consulted him about forming a transitional Austrian government which might be acceptable to the Allies.^[39] He was captured by the Americans in Seewalchen in the Austrian Alps on 13 June 1945. At his interrogation, he confessed to expropriating the property of Jews but claimed not to have known about the Holocaust.^[4][39] He also claimed to have worked for the resistance and to have freed Göring from imprisonment by the SS.^[39] He supplied useful testimony against leading Nazis and therefore in 1947 he was returned to Munich into the custody of the American military government in Bavaria; there he helped identify artworks and antiques. In February 1948, he became ill and was taken to the hospital, from which he managed to escape. Despite both Polish and Austrian efforts to extradite him, he was never recaptured. In 1951–52 he was tried in Vienna in absentia and found guilty of high treason; his property was declared forfeit, but the authorities were only able to find a portion of it. He lived in Southern Bavaria near Lake Starnberg, periodically selling artworks which he had hidden and left with friends, and occasionally visiting his wife and children; his ex-wife lived near them.^[40]

In 1958, he was operated on in Munich for stomach cancer, but died of it there on 2 August. His widow had his body returned to Salzburg for burial.^[41]

Private life

In 1932, Mühlmann married Leopoldine "Poldi" Wojtek (also called Woytek), a successful Salzburg artist.^[5] Her father, Josef Wojtek, was a building official in the city until 1938.^[42] He divorced her in 1941 and the following year, with Himmler's permission, married his mistress, Hilde Ziegler.^[43] He had four children. As a fugitive in Bavaria after the war, he reportedly had several romantic relationships, including with Leni Riefenstahl.^[4][44]

Assessment

Mühlmann was one of the most successful art thieves of Nazism. He was described in 1946 as "the most implacable Nazi in the group of looters held for American interrogation during the summer [of] 1945."^[45] and Jonathan Petropoulos, an art historian specialising in Nazi plundering, has called him "arguably the single most prodigious art plunderer in the history of human civilization."^[46]

He acquired considerable property for himself during his Nazi career. In addition to numerous paintings and antiques (one 1941 bill from a Parisian dealer totals 560,000 francs for rugs, crystal lamps, and furniture),^[47] he used various "Aryanised" residences including a villa in Anif, a suburb of Salzburg, that was taken from a Jewish woman, Helene Taussig, in 1941 for Josef Wojtek's use and transferred to the ownership of his daughter, Mühlmann's then wife; she continued to live there after the war.^[48][49] During his tenure as Secretary of State in Vienna, he lived in a flat at the Belvedere Palace,^[48] and at war's end the Americans found in his then Vienna home a triptych taken from a Jewish art dealer plus stored cases of Dutch soap, Bols liqueur, rugs and lamps.^[38]

He was committed to the "re-Germanising" of eastern territories which he and others thought of as having been usurped by Slavs, and wrote books during the war in which he described the cultural heritage of Kraków in particular from this point of view. A book on the city which he co-wrote with Barthel begins:

The Ostmark, the Sudetenland, Eastern Silesia, the region of the river Weichsel—many names characteri[s]e a piece of German history from an inner consistency that affects us all deeply. German history in the East: that is the fulfillment of a thousand year old struggle and fight of Germanic life energy ... Already centuries ago [this region] was settled and secured by our Germanic ancestors.^[50]

However, his helping friends extended to those not popular with the Nazis, such as Guido Zernatto, a poet who was General Secretary of the Fatherland Front; Zernatto had worked hard to obtain Mühlmann's release from prison in 1935, so when the Germans entered Vienna in March 1938, Mühlmann enabled him to escape through a side door of the Federal Chancellery.^[51] As his second wife said, regarding modern art "[h]e was never entirely true to the Nazi line": when in office in Vienna, he had a fresco by Anton Faistauer on the Salzburg Festspielhaus preserved and approved funds to purchase work by the Expressionist Herbert Böckl, which helped the artist and his eight children to survive.^[52]

References

Further reading

• Jonathan Petropoulos. "The Importance of the Second Rank: The Case of the Art Plunderer Kajetan Mühlmann". In: Günter Bischof and Anton Pelinka, eds. Austro-Corporatism: Past, Present, Future. Contemporary Austrian studies 4. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, 1996. ISBN 9781560008330. pp. 177–222.