Führermuseum
The Führermuseum or Fuhrer-Museum, also referred to as the Linz art gallery, was an unrealized art museum within a cultural complex planned by Adolf Hitler for his hometown, the Austrian city of Linz, near his birthplace of Braunau. Its purpose was to display a selection of the art bought, confiscated or stolen by the Nazis from throughout Europe during World War II. The cultural district was to be part of an overall plan to recreate Linz, turning it into a cultural capital of Nazi Germany and one of the greatest art centers of Europe, overshadowing Vienna, for which Hitler had a personal distaste. He wanted to make the city more beautiful than Budapest, so it would be the most beautiful on the Danube River, as well as an industrial powerhouse and a hub of trade; the museum was planned to be one of the greatest in Europe.
The expected completion date for the project was 1950, but neither the Führermuseum nor the cultural centre it was to anchor were ever built. The only part of the elaborate plan which was constructed was the Nibelungen Bridge, which is still extant.
History and design
As early as 1925, Hitler had conceived of a "German National Gallery" to be built in Berlin with himself as director. His plan, drawn out in a sketchbook, may have been influenced by the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, and consisted of a building with two sections, one with 28 rooms and the other with 32. Hitler denoted which of his favorite 19th-century German artists were to be collected, and in what rooms their work would hang. Among his favorite painters were Hans Makart, Franz Defregger, Eduard Grützner, Franz von Stuck, Franz von Lenbach, Anselm Feuerbach, Heinrich Zügel and Carl Spitzweg, and he had extolled "Aryan art" by Moritz von Schwind and Arnold Böcklin in Mein Kampf. At one time in his planning he dedicated five of the rooms in the museum to the work of Adolph von Menzel and three rooms to both Schwind and Böcklin. Carl Rottmann, Edouard von Engerth, and Anton von Werner were to share a single room, as were Makart and Karl von Piloty; Wilhelm Trübner and Fritz von Uhde; Grützner and Defregger; and the artists of the Nazarene movement. Other painters who would enjoy their own room in Hitler's original plans were Peter von Cornelius, Hans von Marées, Bonaventura Genelli, Anselm Feuerbach and Wilhelm Leibl. These choices reflected Hitler's taste at the time, which was a preference for sentimental 19th-century Germanic romantic painters, including "both 'schmaltzy' genre pictures... heroic, idyllic, allegorical. historical-patriotic themes, the visual equivalent of Wagner, without the genius."It was after the Anschluss with Austria, with the House of German Art in Munich already completed, that Hitler conceived of having his dream museum not in any of the premiere cities in Germany, where it could be overshadowed, but in his "hometown" of Linz in Austria, and discussed his plans with the director of the local Provincial Museum, Theodor Kerschner, while visiting there.
Additionally, after a state trip to Rome, Florence and Naples in 1938 – between the Anschluss with Austria and the taking of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia – Hitler, "overwhelmed and challenged by the riches of the Italian museums" expanded the conception of his planned gallery. It would now be the unsurpassed art gallery in all of Europe, indeed "the greatest museum in the world", featuring the finest of all European art. He conceived that the best of Germanic art would have pride of place in the National Gallery in Berlin, while the new museum in Linz would feature the best of the art of the Mediterranean world, especially from the nineteenth century.
The idea and overall design concept for a new cultural district in Linz anchored by the Führermuseum was Hitler's own. He intended Linz to be one of the future cultural capitals of the Reich, to have its own university, and to overshadow Vienna, a city in which he had spent some years as a struggling artist, and about which he felt considerable distaste, not only because of the Jewish influence on the city, but because of his own failure to gain admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
envisaged Linz as the future seat of the new German Kultur, and lavished all his limited pictorial talent and architectural training on a vast project which would realize this ambition.... devoted a disproportionate amount of time and energy, for a chief of state, to the plans for Linz, personally creating the architectural scheme for an imposing array of public buildings, and setting the formula for an art collection which was to specialize heavily in his beloved, mawkish German school of the nineteenth century. His private library, discovered by the American Army deep in Austria, contained scores of completed architectural renderings for the Linz project...
According to one of Hitler's secretaries, he never tired of talking about his planned museum, and it was often the subject at his regular afternoon teas. He would expound on how the paintings were to be hung: with plenty of space between them, in rooms decorated with furniture and furnishings appropriate to the period, and how they were to be lit. No detail of the presentation of the artworks was too small for his consideration. He said of the museum in 1942 "Anyone who wants to study nineteenth-century painting will sooner or later find it necessary to go to the Linz gallery, because only there will it be possible to find complete collections."
Design and model
In Autumn 1940, Hitler commissioned architect Hermann Giesler, a devout Nazi, to be in overall charge of the rebuilding of Linz, one of the five designated Führerstädte, along with Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich, which were to be redeveloped drastically. Linz was to become a major cultural center, an art capital of Europe, a hub of trade and commerce, and the most beautiful city on the Danube, surpassing Budapest. It would have a new City Hall, new Nazi Party headquarters, a "Gau forum" featuring a massive auditorium, and a new railway station, a stadium, a community hall, a technical university, an institute of metallurgy, a planetarium, a suspension bridge, and two new towers, one of them with a carillon and a mausoleum for Hitler's parents. The city would also have Hitler's own retirement residence, designed by Giesler. In addition to all this, the Vienna facilities of the Hermann-Göring-Werks steel plant were to be moved to Linz as well, over the objections of officials of the city, the architects, and Fritz Todt, who thought the industrial facilities were incompatible with a city of art, architecture and culture. Hitler, though, wanted to provide the city with an ongoing means of income after he was dead and could no longer subsidize it.The cultural center at the heart of the redevelopment, the buildings for which were based on Hitler's ideas and rough designs, came to be referred to as the "European Culture Center". It included a monumental theatre, a concert hall, a library with over 250,000 volumes, an opera house as well as an operetta house, a cinema, a collection of armor and an Adolf Hitler Hotel, all surrounded by huge boulevards and a parade ground. Located south of the historic section of Linz, the main buildings, including the Führermuseum, were to be aligned along one main avenue, In den Lauben, which after the war was called "a typical National Socialist axis street." It would be anchored at the other end by the new railway station.
The design of the many buildings of the cultural center were assigned to various architects Hitler favored. The museum itself was designed by Roderich Fick based closely on Hitler's sketches and specifications, modeled somewhat after Paul Troost's Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich – itself strongly influenced by Hitler's participation in the design process – and would feature a colonnaded facade about 500 feet long. It would stand on the site of the Linz railroad station, which was to be moved four kilometers to the south. Should the volume of German art bought, confiscated and plundered for the museum be such that expansion was needed, an additional building could easily be integrated into the planned district.
By January 1945, Hitler became obsessed with seeing a model of the planned cultural complex; he had his adjutants and Martin Bormann, his personal secretary and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, call Giesler's office repeatedly, to ask when the Führer could view the model. Giesler's office worked around the clock to finish it. On the night of 7–8 February, Giesler brought the model to Berlin by truck and had it set up in the cellar of the New Chancellery building, where it was ready for viewing on 9 February by Hitler, Robert Ley, the Leader of the German Labor Front, and SS-Oberguppenfūhrer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Security Police, along with Hitler's personal photographer Walter Frentz and his valet, Heinz Linge. Frentz took some pictures of the event, one of which shows Hitler seated in deep contemplation of the model. Hitler was apparently entranced by what he saw:
Bent over the model, he viewed it from all angles, and in different kinds of lighting. He asked for a seat. He checked the proportions of the different buildings. He asked about the details of the bridges. He studied the model for a long time, apparently lost in thought. While Geisler stayed in Berlin, Hitler accompanied him twice daily to view the model, in the afternoon and again during the night. Others in his entourage were taken down to have his building plans explained to them as they pored over the model. Looking down on the model of a city which, he knew, would never be built, Hitler could fall in reverie, revisiting the fantasies of his youth, when he would dream with his friend Kubizek about rebuilding Linz.
Hitler visited the model frequently during his time living in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery, spending many hours sitting silently in front of it. The closer Germany came to military defeat, the more viewing the model became Hitler's only relief; being invited to view it with him was an indication of the Führer's esteem.
Near the end of the war, when American forces overran Hitler's private library, which was hidden deep in Austria, it contained "scores" of plans and renderings for the museum and the complex. They also found The Future Economic Status of the City of Linz a 78-page bound volume prepared for Hitler by the Economic and Research Section of the Oberdonau Department of the Interior, which outlined in detail how the revitalization of Linz would take place. The entire Linz project was treated as a state secret on Hitler's order.