Nazi-hunting reporter hits pay dirt
By Richard Willing Posted Jan 1 2007
In September 1997, when editors at the Boston Globe needed help confirming a tip about a possibly stolen Monet, acquired by the Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, they called on Austrian journalist Hubertus Czernin in Vienna.
Czernin’s legwork, in family and government records, ultimately proved that the museum had, in fact, legally acquired the “Portrait of Eugenie Graff,” a painting once owned by famed concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein. Despite the debunked lead, Czernin made an intriguing discovery while digging through ownership records of works owned by Austria’s public galleries.
In the 1940s, before Austria’s culture ministry acquired them, some of the nation’s prized art treasures had passed through the hands of high-ranking Nazis. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister who was executed as a war criminal, were among the past owners of works that now graced Austria’s public art museums. Before March 1938, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, the art had been in the private collections of wealthy Austrian Jews.
“In that moment, I remember thinking ‘obviously, there is a big story here,’” said Czernin in an interview last April, eight weeks before he died from a rare cell disease, at age 50.
There was. Before he was done, Czernin had produced a seven-part series in Der Standard, a Vienna daily, and a book called The Forgery?, which forced a review of the provenance of thousands of Austria’s art treasures that were acquired during or immediately after World War II. In an ongoing process, launched by his reporting, hundreds of paintings, sculptures and pieces of jewelry and decorative art have been restituted by the Austrian government to dozens of descendants of their rightful owners, mostly Austrian Jews.
Czernin’s reporting led to more than the restitution of the art works. In Austria, it began a painful and ongoing conversation about the nation’s relationship to its Nazi past. History records indicate that Austria was the first victim of Nazi empire building. But modern Austrians, as Czernin learned as he published his stories, were unaware that many of their countrymen embraced the Nazis and robbed and persecuted their Jewish neighbors.
“We never learned about the Nazi period at school,” Czernin said. “So there were many things that people didn’t know, or were only a little aware of. Or maybe did not want to know.”
When he began work on the story, Czernin was already a veteran disruptor of the status quo. Born in 1956 to an aristocratic Viennese family, Czernin left university without a degree and began reporting for Wochenpresse, a small weekly. In 1984 he began to cover politics for Profil, a mainstream newsweekly comparable to Time, Newsweek or Der Spiegel. In the mid-1980s, Czernin broke stories about former United Nations Secretary General and Austrian president Kurt Waldheim’s wartime links to the Nazi student movement. Beginning in 1995, Czernin uncovered charges that Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, Vienna’s Roman Catholic archbishop, had sexual relationships with seminarians, beginning in the 1950s until the early 1990s.
Czernin began freelance work a year later, after Profil fired him for running a cover that featured the head of then-Chancellor Franz Vranitzky over the body of a naked man. The headline, tied to a story about the centrist Vranitzky’s forced alliance with a right-wing party, read “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
“Vranitzky didn’t like it, and we had some conservative shareholders,” Czernin said. “I still consider it a good cover.”
Czernin’s first stories about stolen art came from information that was hidden in plain sight. It was found in ownership, transfer and acquisition records held by Austria’s federal monuments commission. It appeared, Czernin said, that most records had been left unexamined since the art works were acquired during the German annexation period and the years that immediately followed the war. Because of that oversight, Czernin discovered, museum catalogues and art history books often gave erroneous or incomplete provenances for works held in the nation’s cultural institutions.
“No one had any idea that there was so much looted art,” he said. “The writers [of art history] usually just took the word of an earlier writer about where the works had come from. Nobody had really checked.”
The stories, published by Der Standard in 1998, moved Austria’s parliament to act. An art restitution law was passed that year, which made it easier for families who had lost treasures to learn whether they had been acquired by public museums and to win restitution. Soon after the law’s passage, Czernin said, “hundreds of pieces” were returned to their rightful owners.
One story in particular, about the provenance of “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” by Gustav Klimt, led to the return earlier this year of the gold encrusted masterpiece to a 90-year-old Los Angeles widow. In June, the widow, Maria Altmann, sold the “Golden Portrait,” which pictured her late aunt and had been commissioned by her late uncle to cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder for a price the New York Times estimated as $135 million, likely the most ever paid for a piece of art.
Czernin’s research had demonstrated that the Golden Portrait was acquired during the war by a Nazi sympathizer. Its owner, Jewish sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, had left the portrait behind when he fled Austria shortly after the German annexation.
But the Austrian government balked at handing over the art. At Vienna’s Belvedere Castle museum, where the portrait had been a popular attraction for years, officials cited the will of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the portrait’s subject. Before she died in 1925, the woman whose slim haunting features had endowed the work with an icy hauteur had bequeathed the painting to the national museum. So it was the museum that had rescued the Golden Portrait from the Nazis in 1941, and was its rightful owner, gallery officials claimed.
Czernin read the will and realized that Mrs. Bloch-Bauer had actually requested that her husband, Ferdinand, leave the painting to the nation upon his death. But when Ferdinand died in poverty in Switzerland in 1945, he didn’t honor that request. So, the Golden Portrait and its companion paintings, Czernin concluded, rightfully belonged to the heirs of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer.
Czernin’s book, The Forgery?, which he published through a company that he set up for himself, was about the Bloch-Bauer will controversy.
In Los Angeles, Maria Altmann took note. A niece of the childless couple, she was their closest living heir. Of course, she knew about the Golden Portrait. After Adele died of meningitis at 42, a grief-stricken Ferdinand displayed the portrait in a room set aside in the couple’s Vienna mansion. Each morning, he set a bowl of fresh flowers in front of it.
“We were told [the portrait] was gone, we had no expectation of getting it back,” says Altmann.
But after a friend in Vienna alerted her to Czernin’s reporting, she acted. She pursued the paintings first in Austrian and then in American courts. In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court, over Austria’s objections, found that Altmann had the right to sue in the U.S. for art works held in Austria. In January 2006, an Austrian arbitration panel awarded the Golden Portrait and three lesser-known Klimts to Altmann and her family. She displayed them, and another Klimt, which was returned later, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, before the sale to Lauder.
The five works are on permanent display at the Neue Galerie in New York City.
“Hubertus’ work made all this possible,” says Altmann, now 90. The widow, who has three sons and a daughter, says of the reporter “now I have one child more.”
Czernin came to Los Angeles for the opening of the Klimt exhibit. He was introduced to the crowd, to sustained applause. In Vienna, he accepted an award from B’nai B’rith International for his work in restoring art to its rightful owners. Among the achievements cited is the Library of Theft series by Czernin Verlag, the Vienna publishing house that the reporter founded. The series was designed to catalogue and attempt to trace all art appropriated from private collections during the Nazi period. The Forgery? was the Library of Theft’s first volume.
In Austria, not everyone applauded Czernin’s work. Museum officials, he said, indicated they considered him a dangerous pest and made him hand-copy documents and obtain multiple permissions to view public records.
At a cocktail party, a 30-something couple referred to him as an “asshole” who had dredged up unhappy memories and cost the nation a portion of its artistic heritage.
“Until the mid-1980s, history [of the Nazi period] was never discussed in a shameful way,” Czernin said. The art stories, he explained, challenged the prevailing notion that “if we are the Nazis’ first victims we can’t have produced” other victims.
Although Czernin suffered an untimely death, other reporters in Vienna are carrying on his work. Thomas Trenkler of Der Standard and Marianne Enigl at Profil remain on the “stolen art” beat. In the tradition of Czernin, both continue to uncover appropriated art in national museums by matching public records with Gestapo documents.
Art historian Sophie Lillie, one of Czernin’s protégés, says she has “picked up the torch.” As part of his Library of Theft series, Czernin tasked Lillie, a Vienna-born and Columbia University-trained art historian, to catalogue art stolen from the Rothschilds, Gutmanns and other prominent families. In 2003, Czernin Verlag published Was Einmal War, Lillie’s 1,440-page- account of the whereabouts of about 5,000 pieces of art from 148 looted collections.
But lately the story has become harder to report. Lillie says most of the remaining unaccounted for art appears to be in the hands of private collectors, who are under no legal obligation to give up the works. Paperwork proving the provenance of stolen art is often sketchy or non-existent, she adds, because Nazi-favored auction houses that listed their Jewish owners only as anonymous donors sold most of the pieces.
“Rarely do private collectors publish what they really know, “ Lillie says.
Czernin also found the stolen art story increasingly frustrating. Shortly before his death, he was tracking a Klimt landscape that appeared to have moved from Berlin to California, as well as other Klimts he believed had been looted in private collections in the U.S. and Canada. He was hoping for a breakthrough, such as a bitter divorce or a battle over a will, to disclose enough documentary evidence of long-ago theft to support a story. But Czernin was not optimistic.
Even with a new generation of reporters following Czernin’s lead, a hope to return all stolen artwork is unlikely at best. Because many of the looted works are now private possessions, it is near impossible to get them back into the hand of the original owners’ heirs, Czernin said.