Last week, two men announced they had found a legendary treasure buried in Poland: a Nazi train stuffed with stolen gold, jewels, gems and works of art. The train had gone missing in 1945, at the end of World War II, as Russian troops advanced on Germany.
The men’s claim has yet to be substantiated, but Simon Goodman, author of the new book “The Orpheus Clock,” would probably not be surprised if it turns out to be true. As he knows all too well, not only were the Nazis excellent thieves, they were even better at hiding their bounty.
His family’s personal art and silver collection had been wrested from Goodman’s grandfather, a German banker, in the years before his brutal murder. Goodman’s father and great-aunt had then spent the better part of their adult lives trying to find what their father had fought so hard to protect.
Fritz Gutmann’s father, a German Jew who later converted to Christianity — something of a trend during a wave of anti-Semitism after World War I — had built his fortune as a banker. Included in his collection was a 16th-century clock decorated by German goldsmith Wenzel Jaminitzer.
“If one can visualize the chronometrically perfect components rendered in gilt brass,” writes Goodman of his great-grandfather’s prized possession, “with a case of gold and bronze covered with intricate high-relief depictions of scenes from the legend of Orpheus in the Underworld, one has an idea of the mechanical mastery and artistic genius of this clock.”
By the time Hitler came to power, Fritz Gutmann’s father had died, but his collection, to which Fritz had added copiously, now filled the halls of the mansion he shared with his wife, Louise, and two children in Amsterdam. It was breathtaking. It included work by the Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch, a rare Degas landscape and a stunning nude by Franz von Stuck.
Oddly, Nazis insisted on wrapping “even their most heinous crimes in a cloak of technical legality,” Goodman writes. They were going to force the Gutmanns to give them their collection, but they were going to make it look legal. “It was a kind of small madness within the greater madness.”
By the time Gutmann and his wife were shipped off to their first concentration camp, Fritz had been forced to sign away much of his art. But he refused to give up his claim to the prized Orpheus Clock. Whether the decision was greedy, sentimental or just plain stubborn, it probably ended up costing him his life.
Fritz Gutmann was beaten to death in April 1944 in a ruthless prison called the Little Fortress near the Theresienstadt concentration camp in today’s Czech Republic. Several weeks later, wife Louise was gassed at Auschwitz.
Fritz’s son Bernard anglicized his name to “Goodman” and settled in London. He would spend the rest of his life seeking his family’s collection.
Much of the Gutmann collection had actually been recovered by the Monuments Men and returned to the Netherlands. However, getting it back in Gutmann family hands was the difficult part. Heirs had to file official claims with the government, describing the lost work in detail. They also needed proof of ownership. This Catch-22 ended many searches before they began. Goodman points out that the proof itself “had been dispersed, destroyed or taken by the very people who stole the paintings in the first place.”
What began with a lot of pushback from the art world ended with the remarkable return of 255 pieces to the heirs of Fritz Gutmann.
But Goodman still sought his great-grandfather’s legendary Orpheus Clock.
First, he tracked down a catalog kept by his great-grandfather and remarkably found a letter made out to the general who robbed them — a testament to notorious Nazi record-keeping. He traced the clock from that general to a collector, and finally to the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart.
The museum’s providence expert, Dr. Anja Heuss, worked with Goodman and eventually agreed the clock belonged to the family. Goodman and the Landesmuseum struck a deal to keep the clock in the museum for an undisclosed sum.
“The scale of the Nazi art looting of Europe in World War II,” writes Goodman, “beggars the imagination. Hundreds of thousands of pieces — paintings sculptures, antiquities — were stolen outright or ‘purchased’ under duress.”
For Goodman, it isn’t just about the lost treasure, it’s about gaining some kind of justice on behalf of the ghosts who cannot rest.