Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Little suspecting the potential for chaos they had left behind them, the two Germans returned to Hamburg. They remained supremely confident that within a month they would have proof that the diaries were genuine. Once that was in their hands, plans could at last be drawn up for publication.

AT THE SAME as Walde and Sorge were landing in Hamburg, August Priesack and Billy F. Price arrived in London. They made an odd couple: the impoverished, white-haired Nazi ‘professor’, and the rich, barrel-chested, aggressive Texan, drawn together by a shared obsession for the paintings of Adolf Hitler.

When Price was not in Europe, searching salerooms and private collections for Hitler’s art, he could generally be found in his native city of Houston, pounding round the artificial-grass running track in the grounds of the Houstonian Country Club, or driving across his farm taking pot shots at squirrels with a Magnum from his convertible Cadillac El Dorado, ‘custom built for Mr Billy F. Price’. (‘Did you give them your design?’ ‘Hell no, boy, I gave them my cheque.’)

At first sight, Price seems a bizarre figure, but he is not unique. It has been estimated that there are 50,000 collectors of Nazi memorabilia throughout the world, of whom most are Americans, involved in a business which is said to have an annual turnover of $50 million. In the United States a monthly newsletter, Der Gauleiter, published from Mount Ida in Arkansas, keeps 5000 serious connoisseurs and dealers informed of the latest trade shows and auctions. Prices increase by 20 per cent a year. ‘In the States,’ according to Charles Hamilton, ‘the collectors of Hitler memorabilia are 40 per cent Jewish, 50 per cent old soldiers like me and 10 per cent of them are young, fascinated by people like Rudel.’ In Los Angeles, a collector enjoys himself in private by donning Ribbentrop’s overcoat. In Kansas City, a local government official serves drinks from Hitler’s punch bowl. In Chicago, a family doctor has installed a reinforced concrete vault beneath his house where he keeps a collection of Nazi weapons, including Hermann Goering’s ceremonial, jewel-encrusted hunting dagger. In Arizona, a used-car salesman drives his family around in the 1938 Mercedes which Hitler presented to Eva Braun; it cost him $150,000 to buy and he expects to sell it for $350,000.

In 1982 Billy Price was fifty-two and a multi-millionaire. (‘Hell, if you can’t become a millionaire in Houston, you’re an asshole, boy.’) His money was derived from his ownership of the Price Compressor Company Incorporated, manufacturers of nine-tenths of all compressors used in undersea oil exploration. Like Fritz Stiefel – whom he had met in Stuttgart – Price was a wealthy engineer, no scholar, whose success had given him the means to indulge his interest in Adolf Hitler. He had first become fascinated by the Nazis in the 1950s during his service with the US Army in Germany. While he was stationed in Europe he sought out former Nazis and witnesses from the Third Reich, including Rommel’s widow. In the early 1970s, having made his fortune, he returned to begin buying memorabilia, particularly Hitler paintings, paying between $2000 and $12,000 for each one.

Hitler seems to hold a special interest for businessmen, particularly when – as in the case of Billy Price and Fritz Stiefel – they are self-made men. Hitler’s career represented the most extreme, as well as the most monstrous, example of what an individual can do if he dedicates himself to the exertion of his will. ‘People say Hitler couldn’t have kept diaries,’ said Price after the forgery had been exposed. ‘They say he couldn’t have done this, he couldn’t have done that – shit, Hitler could paint paintings, he could write operas. Hell, he controlled more real estate than the Roman Empire within three years. There’s nothing Hitler couldn’t have done if he set his mind to it.’ The years of Hitler’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ coincided with the years when the philosophy of self-help was at its height – the Depression was an era of personal improvement courses and guides to success which culminated in 1938 with the appearance of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People . Everything was possible, given the drive to achieve it. ‘A man is not what he thinks he is,’ wrote the American clergyman Norman Vincent Peale, ‘but what he thinks he is.’ ‘My whole life’, said Hitler in 1942, ‘can be summed up as this ceaseless effort of mine to persuade other people.’ With his studied mannerisms, his cultivated habit of staring into people’s eyes, his hunger to read manuals and absorb technical data, Hitler was self-help run riot. ‘I look at that picture,’ said Price, staring at one of his Hitler paintings, of flowers in a vase, ‘and I just can’t imagine what was going through the man’s mind when he did it .’

The gates to Price’s farm are thirty feet high and topped by stone eagles – scale replicas of a set of gates designed for Hitler by Albert Speer. Beyond them, on the lawn outside his house, stand a tank and a piece of field artillery. The bulk of his collection is housed in his company’s headquarters close to Houston’s Hobby Airport. On one wall is a portrait of Rudolf Hess in Nazi uniform. In the lavatory is a painting of Hitler. In glass frames are a few small souvenirs – the bill of sale for the first automobile Hitler bought for the Nazi party; a laundry note in Hitler’s handwriting; a letter, on prison stationery, from Goering to his wife at the time of the Nuremberg trial; and a letter from Goering to Field Marshal Milch. On a side table stands a large picture of Goering in a swastika-decorated silver frame. Next to it is a heavy, vulgar birthday card sent by Hitler to SS General Sepp Dietrich. There are busts of Hitler. There are two of Hitler’s wartime photograph albums – silverbound with SS flashes and swastikas in the corners and a large eagle on the cover; as one opens a bookplate flutters to the floor: ‘Ex Libris Adolf Hitler’. An ornate cabinet houses Hitler’s cutlery and napkins. Price likes showing off his souvenirs but is anxious not to offend visitors. ‘I do a lot of business with Jews,’ he says. ‘When Jews come I put it all away.’

The pride of Price’s collection, the fruit of a decade’s labour, takes up an entire wall at the end of his conference room: thirty-three Hitler paintings, insured for more than $4 million, arranged in an illuminated display behind armour-plated glass, protected by a sophisticated array of burglar alarms. The pictures are lifeless and uninspired: clumsy landscapes, fussy reproductions of Viennese buildings, a couple of paintings of flowers, two crude architectural sketches, scrawled in pencil, bought by Price from Albert Speer. The Texan’s favourite is a watercolour of the Vienna City Hall, completed in 1911. ‘Most knowledgeable people say he was not the best artist in the world, but I think he was certainly a good artist considering the amount of training he had.’ Price claims to have bought the paintings ‘in the interests of history’: one day, he thinks, given current advances in technology, ‘it might be possible to feed them into a computer to get a read-out on Hitler’s brain’.

Price’s dream, for the sake of which he had gone into partnership with August Priesack, was to track down every extant Hitler painting and drawing in order to catalogue them in a book which he would publish himself. Price had no personal liking for his companion: it was a relationship founded on necessity. ‘Sure, I know Priesack’s a Nazi. But if you want to know about Hitler, you have to hire Nazis. Hell, if I was going to investigate cancer, you wouldn’t start saying to me, “Why are you hanging around all those cancer victims?” would you?’ Together the two men had done the rounds of the private collectors in America and Germany. It was this mission which in the spring of 1982 brought them to Britain.