The surreal true mystery of Hitler’s missing bronze horses
When discussing the art world, we rarely peel back the curtain and peer at the darker side of the coin. This is a wonder, given that the criminal art underworld has an estimated turnover of roughly £6.2billion a year, an insane amount by anyone’s standards. Per the CIA, fake art is the fourth largest criminal enterprise, following drugs, money laundering and weapons.
One area both sides of the art world are concerned with is that produced or associated with The Third Reich, Germany’s bloodstained Nazi period. Whether this be Nazi artworks favoured by Adolf Hitler and his inner circle or famed pieces that went missing during the Second World War, it’s a subject that has long been the source of intrigue, excitement, and on occasion, the odd great discovery. The latter was something that came to the fore in 2015.
Given its distinctive look, the art commissioned by the Third Reich remains among the most fascinating out there. Adding extra flavour to the topic is that some of the most notable works of the period went missing during the destruction of the Third Reich in 1945. These include sculptor Josef Thorak’s 16ft high and 33ft long bronze sculptures, dubbed the ‘Walking Horses’. These two imposing giant steeds once guarded the New Reich Chancellery, Hitler’s Nazi headquarters in Berlin. They sat on either side of the stairs to the dystopian-looking building, the kind of architecture you’d expect to see in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Although most of Thorak’s most notable work is absorbing, the ‘Walking Horses’ were, for a long time, the most bewitching of his output, as their whereabouts remained a mystery for decades. The story goes that towards the end of the war, the pair of steeds were relocated and, for a period, went off-grid. Then, in the 1950s, they were spotted on the sports grounds of a Red Army barracks in Eberswalde, a town to the northeast of Berlin, when the country was split into two, and the area fell under the remit of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR).
They stayed in the town for 38 years, with the elements taking their toll on what were once commanding manifestations of a dream. The local populace thought nothing of them, just that Stalin must have commissioned their construction.
As well as time eroding Thorak’s work, children played on them, and at one point, their tails were broken and then roughly fixed. Later, after an art historian discovered the sculptures and published a newspaper article about them in early 1989, they were gone. At the time, the GDR was collapsing, with the fall of the Berlin Wall arriving in November. This led to claims that the GDR sold the horses to raise funds.
The horses were then unearthed in 2015 after an extensive search when it was found that a mysterious Nazi-linked vendor was attempting to sell them for $5.6million on the black market, per a Bild report. During their investigation, German police targeted eight suspects in an illegal art trafficking ring, as Berlin police spokesperson Thomas Neuendorf said.
As part of their investigation, in May 2015, the Bundespolizei raided properties in Bavaria, Berlin, North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein and eventually discovered the horses. They also seized a handful of other pieces of famous Nazi art, including a giant granite relief by Arno Breker, the other favoured sculptor of Hitler and his inner circle. This work depicted muscled fighters wielding swords in what the police described as “typical Nazi style”.
The police found the horses after they raided the home of a man named Rainer Wolf in Bad Dürkheim, a spa town in Germany’s wine-growing region. After consulting with his legal representatives, Wolf led them to a warehouse in a business park near his house. Here, the horses lay in wait, ready to see the light once again. In 2021, the giant steeds became German government property in a legal settlement. The agreement saw the other pieces of Nazi artwork found in the raids retained by Rainer Wolf.
It was reported that Wolf found out about the horses from the 1989 newspaper article, as The Art Newspaper registers. Helped by middlemen, he acquired the sculptures from the Soviet military authorities. They were smuggled out of East Germany in pieces disguised as scrap metal only months before the Berlin Wall fell. Wolf is a collector of Nazi memorabilia and maintains his purchase was legally valid.
Whilst this is an intriguing enough account, it only tells part of the story. Enter Arthur Brand. Dubbed the ‘Indiana Jones of the art world’, he has recovered over 200 pieces of art in his time, including Salvador Dalí’s Adolescence, Picasso’s Buste de Femme, and Oscar Wilde’s ring for Oxford University’s Magdalen College.
The Dutch art crime investigator’s life reads like a work of fiction, and he’s an aptly fascinating character. Brand also believes that 10% of the art displayed in museums is fake. “The criminal art world is like a pyramid,” he told the BBC. “At the bottom of this pyramid, you have hundreds of thousands of people, but when you come to the top of the pyramid, you have 30, 40 persons who more or less control the whole illegal art market.”
Whilst I could spend hours recounting some of the anecdotes from Brand’s career, his crucial involvement in the discovery of Thorak’s ‘Walking Horses’ is the juiciest of the bunch. It involves a ‘Nazi princess’, the criminal underworld, and other ghosts of Germany’s past that might not be as dead as is widely believed. He told his tale in the 2021 book Hitler’s Horses.
In his book, Brand states that everything started with a 2014 phone call from an associate, Michel van Rijn, once a major player in the criminal art world who had supposedly gone straight, a metamorphosis he was never entirely sure of. “I’m on to something amazing. Really mind-blowing. Take it from me — it’ll never get any bigger than this,” he told Brand, insisting that they meet in person.
Perplexed at van Rijn’s intentions, he soon found out from a slideshow he showed him that Thorak’s horses seemed to have re-emerged after all these years. At this point, Brand assumed they must have been forgeries, as they were thought to have been destroyed by Russian artillery during the capture of Berlin in April 1945. All van Rijn could tell him was that he was also unsure of their origin and that the only information he had was from an art dealer named Steven, known in their world for only dealing with billionaires. Steven was looking to sell the horses on behalf of the mysterious client.
Steven maintained that the deal would have to be completely secret because, technically, the horses belonged to the German state, the legal successor to the Third Reich. More interestingly, the high-end art dealer told van Rijn that the mysterious owner of the horses was from a family infamous for harbouring Nazi sympathies and now wanted to cash in on what the black market offered.
Brand reluctantly took the job, leading him on an adventure that saw him discover, via a Belgian collector of Nazi artwork, that the horses were real. Alongside this breathtaking revelation, he ventured close to Germany’s relationship with Nazism, past and present, meeting prominent members of the scene and the elderly Gudrun Burwitz, the daughter of none other than Heinrich Himmler, the so-called ‘Nazi princess’. The lifelong defender of her father’s honour – despite him being the chief architect of the Holocaust – had close links to Silent Assistance, a secretive Nazi and Neo-Nazi-linked organisation he believed might have had something to do with the sale of the horses. Brand thought the sale of the horses might have been to fund their cause.
Elsewhere, Brand travelled to the heart of East Germany and unveiled the Red Army’s role in saving Thorak’s work from destruction as well as how they came to be in the possession of the elusive seller Steven was working with.
In attempting to discover the seller’s identity, he also came across a man called Klaus-Dieter Flick, an elderly German lawyer and former financial broker, now known as a convicted Nazi art and military equipment collector from northern Germany. He gained international notoriety in 2015 after a working Wehrmacht tank was found on his property as part of the raids. Following the discovery, a picture emerged suggesting that ownership of the horses switched between Flick and Wolf since they were smuggled out of East Germany. At one point, they then settled with Wolf.
As we know, the horses were eventually discovered near Wolf’s home in 2015 as part of the raids, with him maintaining that his purchase was legally valid. So why was he selling the horses? Brand told Town and Country Magazine in January 2022 that Wolf’s children didn’t want to inherit the controversial artworks and had threatened to blow them up with dynamite when he died, so he put them up for sale on the black market.
It will never be clear what role, if any, Silent Assistance played in the horses’ tale. Yet, a lawyer known for defending Holocaust deniers on behalf of the organisation turned up at Wolf’s property after the raid burst onto his property. As for Gudrun Burwitz, she passed away aged 88 in 2018.
Arthur Brand is still working in art, with 2021’s Hitler’s Horses a must-read. It tells a much more detailed story than the one I recounted here. It’s breathtaking stuff.