Alford Kenneth D. Allied Looting in World War II: Thefts of Art, Manuscripts, Stamps and Jewelry in Europe
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Chapter 26
Clara Elisabeth Hertling
In April 2001, a television and media sensation was created in Germany
after a mysterious golden cauldron was found in a Bavarian lake. An amateur
diver found the 23-pound solid gold vessel at the bottom of Lake Chiemsee,
a tourist destination southeast of Munich.
The gold cauldron was adorned with a relief of mythical Celtic and
Indo- Germanic figures. The cauldron, 20 inches across and 12 inches high,
based on the weight of the gold alone, was worth some $100,000. The vessel
resembled the Gundestrup Cauldron that had been found in a Danish bog
in 1891; it was believed to be more than 2,000 years old and is now housed
at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
As Celtic coins and other Celtic items had previously been found in
Lake Chiemsee, it was easily established that the beautiful vessel was of that
origin. As required by German law, it was turned over to the Archeological
State Museum of Bavaria in Munich. The museum then placed the item on
the art market and immediately found a buyer. This made the finder very
happy, as he had 50 percent ownership rights of the cauldron, for a value of
$50,000.
The acquirer examined the valuable relic and decided not to purchase
it, as the cauldron appeared to be a fake. How could this be possible? Dr.
Ludwig Wamser, director of the Archaeological State Museum, began a
detailed examination of the object, using knowledge from other experts and
x- rays. Dr. Wamser linked the cauldron to the Nazis and their ideology, which
drew heavily on ancient mythology and hero worship.
1
A trail led to Munich and art dealer Herbert von der Marwitz as well as
master goldsmith Luitpold Pirzl. It was here that Marwitz commissioned Pirzl
to make imitations of antique figures. In Pirzl’s workshop, he counterfeited
numerous artifacts, including ornamental gold items from the Celtic and
Viking periods, such as a controversial eagle brooch. Marwitz told Pirzl that
these pieces were to be made as stylistic imitations at the order of interested
customers, and Pirzl was paid a normal fee for his work. Pirzl would deliver
180
these works fresh from his workshop, perfectly executed, to Marwitz, who
then “antiqued” them by damaging them slightly or giving them a patina in
order to give them the appearance of genuine antiques found in excavations.
Marwitz then had these items photographed and articles published in
scholarly periodicals by prominent archaeologists as treasures found in various
excavations. With these articles, which did not mention his name, he would
sell the items to unsuspecting art dealers and museums.
Pirzl made a gold eagle brooch in the summer of 1937 upon instruction
from Marwitz, and Marwitz furnished the large garnets used in it. Marwitz
then loaned the brooch to art historian Frederic Adama van Scheltema, who
publicized the brooch by writing about it in Germanic Heritage, the official
Nazi Party magazine. In the full belief that the brooch had been found in an
excavation in Königsberg, Czechoslovakia, it was sold through an art house
to the German National Museum in Nuremberg for 42,000 Reichsmarks.
Marwitz’s counterfeiting caught up with him, and on March 16, 1940,
Herbert von der Marwitz was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for know-
ingly selling forgeries of ancient gold jewelry. The “valuables” in Marwitz’s
possession were also confiscated. During the trial, Marwitz denied his male-
factions to the last, and, surprisingly, many experts contended that the pieces
sold by him were genuine.
The art scholar Scheltema, despite the final solution of the forgery case,
believed in the genuineness of the gold eagle brooch and so apparently did
the Nazi officials. During the war years, the Munich Police took the notorious
eagle brooch, on orders from Heinrich Himmler, from the museum in Nurem-
berg to Castle Berg at Starnberg, near Munich. At the castle the gold brooch
was secretly buried. After the war, the grounds of the castle were searched
and the hole in which the case with the brooch had been was now found to
be empty. Today the whereabouts of the brooch remain unsettled. Will it
show up in the foreign art market, or has it been smelted down for the value
of the gold and the garnets?
Marwitz served his time and, after the war, told U.S. Army authorities
that the Nazis wrongly prosecuted him. At that point the counterfeit items
confiscated from him in 1940 were returned and Marwitz continued to main-
tain his innocence. It took nine years to fully clear up the matter of his for-
geries. In 1949, Luitpold Pirzl, the Munich goldsmith, applied for conservation
work with the Bavarian Office for the Care of Monuments. To exhibit his
skills, Pirzl submitted photographs of the work that had been done in his
shop. Among these were replications in gold that had been made for Marwitz.
Upon questioning, Pirzl admitted that he had fashioned the controversial
eagle brooch and most of the pieces sold by Marwitz as antiques. Pirzl stated
that he could furnish prima facie evidence of his statement by submitting
26. Clara Elisabeth Hertling 181
photographs, models, and special tools.
2
Without question, Marwitz was a
master swindler, and he had already found another victim.
In 1939, Clara Hertling, her husband, and Gunter, her nine- year- old
son, traveled from Pasadena, California, to Hamburg, Germany, to visit her
family. Just before the outbreak of the war on September 1, Gunter’s father
returned to the United States. There he filed for a divorce and remarried.
Gunter and his mother remained in Hamburg through the last week of July
1943, when Allied bombing created one of the greatest firestorms in World
War II, killing roughly 50,000 civilians and practically destroying the entire
city. Mother and son left the ruins of the city for the southern part of Ger-
many, where she taught music and English in a number of private schools.
Then she taught school in the village of Marquartstein, just six miles south
of Lake Chiemsee, coincidentally the site of the discovered golden cauldron
in the year 2001. Gunter, now a teenager, was one of her pupils. It was here
that his mother met and befriended the elderly art dealer Herbert von Mar-
witz.
3
They were in Marquartstein when the war ended and, as Gunter was an
American citizen born in Pasadena, he was immediately reissued an American
passport. His mother, however, was a German national, whom he was not
about to leave alone in war- torn Germany. In order to leave Germany, Clara
had to have an American sponsor so that she and her son could return to the
United States together. Accordingly she was sponsored by Franz Gutmann, a
Methodist minister from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Dr. F. S. Chandler
from Milwaukee. Gutmann, through contacts with Herbert von der Marwitz,
had immigrated to the United States in the 1930s and lectured in economics
at the University of North Carolina from 1939 to 1945.
On December 12, 1947, the 47- year- old Clara Elisabeth Hertling and
her 17- year- old son returned to the United States from Germany aboard the
Marine Flasher, which had sailed from Bremen, Germany. Since 1946, this
ship had carried many Holocaust survivors and displaced persons seeking bet-
ter lives in America.
Mrs. Hertling had in her possession 11 pieces of antique gold jewelry that
were given to her by Herbert Marwitz. One of their first stops on December 17
was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where she left several
of the items and presented an affidavit of ownership that read as follows:
I, Clara Elisabeth Hertling, declare that the pin, which I am offering to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art for $500, was originally the property of Dr.
Lederer, a collector from Vienna, who died in Switzerland during the war.
Dr. Lederer was befriended by Graf Herbert von der Marwitz and lived in
his castle in Switzerland. In gratitude he gave to Marwitz this pin with other
gold objects. Mr. Marwitz is a friend of mine and met me at Marquartstein
182 Part V : Vignettes of Looting
26. Clara Elisabeth Hertling 183
Clara E. Hertling and Herbert von der Marwitz during a hike in 1946. She may have
participated in a deception by master swindler Marwitz.
[near Munich and Rosenheim], where I taught school for eight years during
the war, when I was stranded in Germany, where I had gone with my son to
visit my mother.
Mr. Marwitz gave me the gold piece, including this pin. I hereby declare
that I am the sole owner of these objects, including this pin. Mr. Marwitz is
now living in his castle at Marquartstein and hopes to come to this country
next year. He was in a concentration camp for a number of years....
/S/ Mrs. Clara E. Hertling
4
Apparently Clara Hertling wanted to sell only one of the items, as she
was in need of cash. James J. Rorimer, curator of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, recognized the jewelry as a modern forgeries. The following day,
December 18, 1947, Clara Hertling removed the items from the Met in order
to add them to the customs declaration as antique jewelry in her private
collection.
5
A couple of days later, she and her son left by train for Los Ange-
les.
At an early date, Rorimer suggested that the Paul Drey Gallery in New
York had purchased four of the pieces, which he considered to be originals.
Dr. Drey acquired the jewelry from Mrs. Hertling for $850. These four pieces
were prehistoric gold objects consisting of a bowl from the Bronze Age, one
Langobarden pin, a bracelet, and a brooch, all supposedly dating from or
before 1000 b.c. On October 12, 1948, Dr. Drey wrote Marwitz a letter and
stated that three of the four items had been sold and that the remaining one
was being offered to an institute. The arrangement for the purchase and sale
between Rorimer, Hertling, Drey, and Marwitz indeed sounds out of the
ordinary. Did Rorimer purchase them for the museum from Drey so that he
could have clear title?
Little more became known about this case until six years later, in the
autumn of 1952; Herbert von Marwitz dined in the elegant restaurant in Lago
Maggiore, on the Italian-Swiss border. He left a large tip on the tray and
retired to his room in the nearby hotel. The next morning, he, identified from
his passport, was found dead. The craftiest art forger of the Third Reich had
shot himself with a pistol.
Also at this time the jewels brought into the United States by Mrs.
Hertling take on a strange twist. Somehow a Mrs. William George became
custodian of this jewelry. In 1953, the Bureau of Customs began an investi-
gation of Clara E. Hertling when these seven forged items were introduced
into the art market as genuine antiques. Four of the original pieces of jewelry
had been previously sold, and during this investigation James J. Rorimer told
an agent of the Bureau of Customs that these four were “in his opinion genuine
artifacts.” He further told the agent the four items had been purchased by a
dealer in New York, although he refused to identify the dealer. Rorimer’s
184 Part V : Vignettes of Looting
rationale was “that customs had not lost anything on the transaction inasmuch
as the items were genuine antiques.”
6
The purchaser of the antiques, Paul Drey, died on March 18, 1953, and
his wife destroyed most of the firm’s records just before she set sail on the
Queen Mary for Europe. Therefore the purchasers of the four items from the
Paul Drey Gallery remain unknown.
According to a customs investigation, the entire amount of $850 from
the original four items was paid by Mrs. Hertling to Mrs. William George.
The remaining seven pieces were known as the Szirach Treasure. According
to an article in the periodical Germania, these gold treasures, from the people’s
migration period, were found in Szirak in northern Hungary. In 1937 Marwitz
had submitted the article. For these remaining items, Clara Hertling was ask-
ing $350,000.
In the summer of 1953, U.S. Customs was hot on the trial of Marwitz’s
items brought to the United States by Clara Hertling. On August 28, 1953,
customs agents in Los Angeles recommended seizure of the jewelry and insti-
tuted forfeiture proceedings.
The following seven items were seized from Clara Hertling. On Sep-
tember 21, 1954, they were turned over to the Smithsonian Institution.
1 gold necklace set with 30 garnets
1 round- headed fibula [brooch] with garnet inlay
1 brooch
1 amethyst ball pendant framed with gold
1 gold ring studded with 3 garnets
1 Y- shaped fibula
1 coin of Constantine II (317–340)
A handwritten note on the receipt of the Smithsonian Institution reads
“forgeries with the possible exception of the coin.”
7
R
On February 1, 2010, after several years of correspondence, Gunter H.
Hertling, the son of Clara, wrote a letter to the Smithsonian requesting a
release of the seized objects “on ethical and moral grounds.”
The papers of James J. Rorimer, museum director and art historian, are
today in the Smithsonian. They were donated by Kay Rorimer, his widow,
after his death in 1966.
Clara Hertling died in Munich in March 1980.
26. Clara Elisabeth Hertling 185
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Part VI
Looting from Hungary
in World War II
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Chapter 27
Hungary
Early in 1940 the Hungarians had formed an alliance with Germany and
furnished 13 divisions to fight against the Russians on the Eastern Front. After
the German defeat at Stalingrad, a battle in which Hungarian units suffered
tremendous losses, Admiral Miklos Horthy and Prime Minister Miklos Kallay
recognized that Germany would likely lose the war. With Horthy’s tacit
approval, Kallay sought to negotiate a separate armistice for Hungary with
the Allies. In order to forestall these efforts, German forces occupied Hungary
on March 19, 1944. Horthy was permitted to remain regent. In the 1920s he
had restored the monarchial government of the kingdom of Hungary without
filling the throne of King Karoly IV, who had been exiled to Austria. Thus
Hungary had become an anomaly—a kingdom without a king, governed by
an admiral without a navy, who acted as a Protestant representative of a
Catholic crown.
Most tragically, Adolf Eichmann, working under the directions of Himm-
ler, would within a few months murder 300,000 Hungarian Jews, 75 percent
of the Jewish population in Hungary, as part of a methodical plan to destroy
European Jewry. Up to then, because of the alliance with Germany, Hungarian
Jews had escaped the horrors of the concentration camps.
In light of the worsening military situation and facing threats, Horthy
resumed efforts to reach an armistice with the Soviet Union, whose army was
on Hungary’s borders. When the Hungarians signed a peace agreement with
the Russians on October 11, 1944, the Germans, under Otto Skorzeny’s com-
mand, attacked with SS tanks and airborne troops. Skorzeny captured Regent
Miklos Horthy and his cabinet, and within the hour Budapest radio pro-
claimed the new Hungarian Nazi regime.
On October 15, 1944, a German officer informed Horthy that the “prime
minister” was requesting his presence. Horthy followed the German officer
into the next room and to his astonishment, Ferenc Szalasi, an ally of the
Nazis, stood before him. Horthy suggested that Szalasi have the Germans
appoint him, Horthy, prime minister unless that had already been done. Hor-
189