Kurt von Behr

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Kurt von Behr (born March 1, 1890 in Hanover , † April 19, 1945 in Kloster Banz ) was a leader in the Nazi art theft in the task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and was involved in the M-Action . He died by suicide with his wife .

Life

Baron von Behr from the Mecklenburg nobility was Oberführer of the German Red Cross , whose uniform he always wore because he did not hold any military rank. On August 7, 1924, he married the Australian Joy Guzman Clarke (born May 16, 1896 in British India ). From 1932 to 1934 he headed the NSDAP organizational structure in Italy from Venice . In 1936 Behr worked for the Rosenberg Foreign Policy Office in Palma . He may have been a Gestapo agent and a contact to General Franco's fascists .

House numbers 56 (front) and 54 (back) Avenue d'Iena, Paris. Building no. 54 hosted from 1941 the APA assumed office west of the ERR. In 1942 it gave way to the newly established West Department , which was subordinate to the RMfdbO and whose task it was to carry out the M-Action

After the French campaign in 1940 he was employed by Alfred Rosenberg in Paris to steal “abandoned cultural property of Jews” as head of the main organization and personnel department in the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), West Department , and he was also the deputy chief of the task forces Gerhard Utikal . In fact, he soon served Hermann Göring's requests for stolen works of art. From July 17, 1940 to February 20, 1941, he headed the special staff for the fine arts , which deported numerous pictures from France to the German Reich . Subsequently, from January 1942 in Paris he headed the M-Aktion , the robbery of furniture in France for German purposes (enrichment, replacement for bombed out, etc.), which lasted until August 1944. Behr boasted that he had the idea for it himself.

On August 8, 1944, Behr listed which furnishings and valuables from Jewish property had been recorded and stolen since 1942.

The couple committed suicide with hydrogen cyanide on April 19, 1945, eight days after the arrival of the Allied troops.

In von Behr's residence, Schloss Banz, the US armed forces found not only large holdings of booty books from Western and Eastern European libraries, but also essential holdings of the ERR files that had been relocated there, from the Art Looting Investigation founded in 1944 within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Unit (ALIU) and were the basis of the Nuremberg trial against Rosenberg.

literature

Ordered chronologically:

  • Léon Poliakov , Joseph Wulf : The Third Reich and the Jews. Wiesbaden 1989, ISBN 3-925037-44-6 .
  • Ulrike Hartung: Deported and missing. A documentation of German, Soviet and American files on Nazi art theft in the Soviet Union (1941–1948). Temmen, Bremen 2000, ISBN 3-86108-336-1 .
  • Götz Aly : Hitler's People's State. Robbery, Race War and National Socialism. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 142–146 (with photos).
  • Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 37 f.
  • Heinz Pfuhlmann: The task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg in Banz 1944/45. In: Banz ..45. A monastery at the center of major war events. Banz Monastery, 2017, ISBN 978-3-88795-538-0 , pp. 58–71.
  • Hanns Christian Löhr: Art as a weapon - The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, ideology and art theft in the “Third Reich”. Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-7861-2806-9 .

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ Death certificate No. 4 c, issued on April 20, 1945 by the Weingarten registry office (Lichtenfels)
  2. ↑ JS Plaut: Consolidated interrogation report No. 1 - Activity of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg in France. Office of Strategic Services Art Looting Investigation Unit APO 413, US Army, August 15, 1945; (on-line)
  3. ↑ According to JS Plaut, the West Office of the ERR, originally located in the Hotel Commodore on Boulevard Haussmann, moved from Avenue d'Iéna to Rue Dumont d'Urville.
  4. ↑ Ulrike Hartung: Deported and missing. 2000, p. 64.
  5. ↑ Document VEJ 11/158 in: Lisa Hauff (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (source collection), Volume 11: German Reich and Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia April 1943–1945 . Berlin / Boston 2020, ISBN 978-3-11-036499-6 , pp. 448–454.
  6. ↑ Ulrike Hartung: Deported and missing. 2000, p. 267.
personal data
SURNAME Behr, Kurt von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION National Socialist German functionary
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover
DATE OF DEATH April 19, 1945
Place of death Banz Monastery