Victims of National Socialist crimes
The Nazi persecution targeted Jewish people on an unimaginable scale. But not exclusively: other population groups such as political dissidents, queer individuals, Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, the sick and marginalised social groups were also disenfranchised, robbed, deported and murdered by the Nazi regime.
In the early days of their rule, the National Socialists took particular action against political opponents, left-wing associations and the liberal press, who endangered and opposed the establishment of the dictatorship.
The persecution was also linked to the enrichment from the victims' property. The state, institutions and private individuals profited from this. The removal of art and cultural assets from non-Jewish victims has so far only been documented in individual cases and has not yet been systematically researched.
Beginnings in Baden-Württemberg
bpk-Fotoarchiv / L. Schaller
Among the first politically persecuted people of the Nazi regime is Eduard Fuchs. Born in 1870 in Göppingen and raised in Stuttgart, he could be recognised as a Swabian by his dialect all his life.
His father is a mechanical engineering manufacturer, his mother the daughter of a confectioner. They both die young, in the years 1886 and 1888. After the death of his father, Eduard leaves school and begins a commercial apprenticeship.
bpk photo archive
Even as a teenager, Eduard Fuchs is politically active on the left. The labour movement, trade unions and social democracy are still banned at the time. Rebellious statements against the Kaiser and the state carry severe penalties. Fuchs therefore has to go to prison twice.
Initially, he is a member of the Social Democratic Party and campaigns resolutely against military means and war. When the SPD votes in favour of war bonds in 1914, thereby enabling the financing of the First World War, Fuchs leaves the party and joins communist movements. In 1918/19 he is among the founding members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
Work and family
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Public Domain Mark 1.0
In 1890 Fuchs moved from Stuttgart to Munich and worked for an SPD-affiliated publishing house, initially as advertising manager. He quickly earned himself a position as an editor and wrote articles himself.
German Historical Museum 🔍 Hover over the image with the mouse to enlarge
As an editor, including for satirical magazines, he loves working with caricatures. While searching for drawing talent, he meets the young artist Max Slevogt. The two become close friends.
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Public Domain Mark 1.0
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Public Domain Mark 1.0
Slevogt will later portray his friend and the latter's family.
In 1896 Eduard Fuchs marries Frida Schön. They have a daughter, Gertraud (Traude).
Source: Klassik Stiftung Weimar
In 1901 the young family moved to Berlin.
Eduard Fuchs continues to work there as an editor for social democratic publications. In addition, he now also writes academic books: for example, several survey works on caricatures and East Asian art, three volumes on the „History of Erotic Art“ and no fewer than six volumes under the title „Illustrated History of Morals from the Middle Ages to the Present Day“.
The books are so successful that Fuchs achieves international renown as a writer and a certain degree of prosperity. The „Sittengeschichte“ (History of Morals), which goes through multiple editions, also earns him the nickname „Sittenfuchs“ (a play on words combining his surname with the German for a prude or moralist).
The marriage to Frida breaks down in 1915. A few years later, in 1920, Fuchs marries for the second time. His new wife Margarete (Grete), née Alsberg, is Jewish and the daughter of a department store owner in the Ruhr region.
Eduard Fuchs as a collector
National Museums in Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie / Andres Kilger. Public Domain Mark 1.0 🔍 Hover the mouse over the image to enlarge
Over time, Fuchs assembled an extensive art collection. He used many of his roughly 20,000 graphic works, including drawings, posters and leaflets, as illustrative material for his books.
Above all, Fuchs is interested in impressionist works, particularly by Max Slevogt and Max Liebermann, both of whom he knows personally. He owns around 6,000 sheets by the French caricaturist Honoré Daumier alone.
Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt am Main / Rainer Drexel. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
In the 1920s, Eduard Fuchs established a new focus for his collection: he now began acquiring East Asian arts and crafts as well. He was particularly fascinated by Chinese roof figures, gathering over 100 of these special pieces made of glazed clay, which adorned the roofs of houses in traditional Chinese architecture and, according to local belief, served as protective guardians.
Ullstein Bild / Emil Leitner
Fuchs buys his art out of personal interest and for his academic work as a writer, he does not rely on later profits. He and his second wife Grete plan to make the collection publicly accessible later.
© Bodo Kubrak. Via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
„A Collector's House“
The married couple are moving into a house in Berlin-Zehlendorf. Originally built for the art collector Hugo Perls, the villa is an early work by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In 1922, the Fuchs family also acquire the neighbouring plot of land and commission Mies van der Rohe to design a gallery extension for the art collection. The extension is completed in 1928.
According to the wishes of Eduard and Grete Fuchs, the property, building and collection are to be transferred into a foundation and preserved as the „House of a Collector“.
It has been my most earnest desire for many years [...] to transfer my collections, in due course and in the form in which they have been brought together and arranged by me – that is, including my house and the associated property – into the ownership of the general public as a foundation.„
Eduard Fuchs to the Deputy Treasurer of Berlin, 1931 (Federal Archives, Fuchs Estate)
victim of the first hour
In the mid-1920s, Fuchs begins to gather material on the rising NSDAP and recognises the danger emanating from it. He becomes a target for the Nazis.
Scarcely in power, the new regime is cracking down hard on political dissidents.
Fuchs is in the spotlight in more ways than one: as a champion of the left, as an author of books that seem too disreputable to the Nazis, and with a Jewish wife whose family was dispossessed in 1933.
„Anyone who acted as a ‚left-winger“ would be hunted like a wild animal.“
Eduard Fuchs immediately after the Reichstag fire
(from: Tisa von der Schulenburg: Ich hab’s gewagt, Freiburg im Breisgau 1981, p. 106)
bpk photo archive / photographer unknown
bpk photo archive / photographer unknown
When the Reichstag burns on the evening of 27 February 1933, the Nazi regime uses it for a sweeping crackdown on communists and social democrats.
Eduard Fuchs only narrowly escapes. His house is surrounded that very same night, but following the Reichstag fire, Fuchs had foreseen the hunt for political left-wingers and did not return home. Friends help him, hide him overnight in a garden shed and get him out of Berlin in the early morning. Together with his wife Grete, Fuchs flees via Switzerland to Paris.
Just in time. Tens of thousands of opponents of the regime are arrested in the weeks following the fire and taken to protective custody camps.
SMB-ZA, I/NG 1375, fol. 180
SMB-ZA, I/NG 1375, fol. 181
SMB-ZA, I/NG 1375, fol. 182
SMB-ZA, I/NG 1375, fol. 183
SMB-ZA, I/NG 1375, fol. 184
In June 1933, Villa Fuchs is searched by the Gestapo and the graphic art collection removed, and in October all the couple's assets are confiscated as „property hostile to the state“. The villa is cleared out.
Eduard Fuchs fights back from his exile, taking legal action for the release of his property.
At first this is also successful. The Nazi authorities fear that the case could damage Germany's reputation among other civilised nations because Fuchs is quite well known as a writer and collector. They ask the director of the Berlin National Gallery for a statement. On 14 July 1934, he replies that action against Eduard Fuchs will provoke international „sharp or even spiteful criticism“ and that „idealistic damage“ will be caused to Germany.
Ullstein Bild
Finally, in February 1935, the Nazi authorities released the confiscated property of the Fuchs couple.
Eduard Fuchs, in financial difficulties in exile, instructs his daughter Gertraud, who is living in Germany, to wind up the estate and sell the returned artworks. The dream of a collector's museum for the public has shattered.
The proceeds from several art auctions in 1937 and 1938 went towards paying the Reich flight tax imposed on Eduard and Grete Fuchs in 1937.
© Polymagou. Via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The married couple live in Paris on Rue d'Auteuil, an area that still had a village feel in the 19th century and has long been very popular with artists and authors.
Eduard Fuchs dies here on 26th January 1940. A few months later, in June 1940, German troops march into Paris. Grete manages to escape to the USA, where she dies in 1953.
Restitution
National Museums in Berlin, Ethnological Museum / Claudia Obrocki 🔍 Hover over the image with the mouse to enlarge
After the war, Grete Fuchs and Eduard's daughter Gertraud try in vain to obtain compensation for the losses suffered by the family.
Decades later, from 2020 to 2024, the German Lost Art Foundation is funding a project to reconstruct the dispersed and lost Fuchs collection. As someone who was politically persecuted, the case of Eduard Fuchs is still a rarity in provenance research.
Also to be found in the collections of the National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is a work of art from the Fuchs collection: a Chinese roof tile figure made of glazed clay, half a metre high and weighing almost 29 kilograms.
Ullstein Bild / Emil Leitner 🔍 Hover over the image with the mouse to enlarge
The National Museums (East) acquired the piece in 1952 from the art trade. The seller, Ernst Fritzsche, had bought it at auction in 1937, during the liquidation of her father's art collection by Gertraud Fuchs. The monumental work stood in the garden of Eduard and Grete Fuchs, as can be seen in a photograph from the 1920s.
The ridge turret will be restituted to the rightful heirs of Eduard and Grete Fuchs in 2024.
According to Chinese belief, roof ridge figures protect a building from bad influences, evil spirits and fire. They have an important protective function for buildings and the people living in them. The individual figures each have a symbolic meaning.
National Museums in Berlin, Ethnological Museum / Claudia Obrocki
