World War Two led to the destruction of too many monuments or artifacts of great historical interest; however, some people played important roles in keeping many such artifacts safe. Here, Charlotte Davies explains how Kurt Seeleke (1912-2000) helped to keep thousands of pieces of art safe in the north German city of Braunschweig in World War Two.
The devastation from World War Two: Braunschweig on May 12, 1945.
The other day I was sitting on a bench in a little square in Braunschweig, Germany, where I live, attempting to do a watercolor painting of a romantically ruined old building. A well-turned-out older lady walked past and I smiled at her, and then immediately thought better of it, since smiling at strangers isn’t really the done thing here. But the next thing I knew, she had stopped and said “Braunschweig hat schöne Ecken”, nodding towards the scene – Braunschweig has its nice little corners. I agreed and pointed out the ruined building. This prompted the lady to begin recounting her wartime memories: she told of how her family’s house in the city center had been destroyed by a bomb, an incident which she could remember despite being only three years old at the time. I was all ears, particularly because I had been doing the research for this article and had wartime Braunschweig on the brain. Now here was someone in front of me who had actually experienced those times. We chatted for about 15 minutes, and when I thanked her for sharing her memories with me, she said in rather heartfelt tones that no one had ever asked them, meaning her generation, about their experiences. I was glad to have been an interested audience for her story.
Wartime destruction and post-war rebuilding
Braunschweig was once the largest half-timbered town in Germany, but lost 90% of its city center to bombing raids in 1944. A list of the German cities that were bombed shows that destruction of this magnitude was fairly common, with many town centers being all but wiped out. This obviously had long-term consequences for the appearance of German townscapes. If I go down the hill into the town center from where I live, I come to a Bohlweg, where the unfortunate aesthetic choices of post-war architects are all too apparent – what used to be a street of timber-framed buildings is now lined with drab blocks, including some real eyesores. Thankfully, however, not all of the city center looks like this. There are several squares surrounded by pretty buildings that evoke times of yore, including the Burgplatz with its medieval-style castle, or the cobbled expanse of the Altstadtmarkt bordered by the atmospheric arches and turrets of the gothic town hall.
Whether or not they are aware of it, all Braunschweigers owe a debt of gratitude to the subject of this article, Kurt Seeleke, for the fact that their city contains these pockets of quaintness. In his position as Head of Conservation for the region and together with the architect Friedrich Wilhelm Kraemer, he developed a plan to preserve and restore buildings after the Second World War. The aim was to create five heritage areas, each centered around one of the city’s churches. He called these areas the Traditionsinsel. In some cases, buildings were moved from other locations to fill gaps and thus create a unified whole.
Seeleke’s vital influence on shaping the post-war cityscape was something I had been aware of for a while. But when I started looking into him a bit more, I discovered that, prior to this, he had achieved other great feats of preservation, getting into some dramatic situations in the process: whether that was watching bombing raids from the top of a church tower, or pleading with a Wehrmacht general who apparently threatened to have him shot. I soon realized I had to dedicate an article to this remarkable man.
Saving art and cultural heritage from the firestorms
Kurt Seeleke came from a Braunschweig family who ran a long-established business producing gingerbread and honey cake. The young Kurt showed an aptitude for cultural conservation work, possessing a combination of practical skill and an artistic sensibility, and went on to study art history in Berlin and Munich, before being put in charge of monument preservation in Braunschweig. However, he had only been in the role a short time when the Second World War broke out. By the end of 1939, the museums had been closed and the collections moved to the cellars for safety. These included the renowned collection of the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum which included works by many big names including Cranach, Rembrandt, van Dyke, Rubens, and Vermeer.
Seeleke was called up in early summer 1940 and sent to France, only to be discharged due to illness in 1941 and sent to Italy to teach at German academies there. He was ordered to return to Braunschweig in August 1943 amidst growing concern for the safety of Germany’s cultural heritage following the bombing of Lübeck in March of that year. It was the first German city to be heavily bombed by the RAF, with the resulting firestorms wiping out large parts of the town’s historic center. Back in his home city, he returned to the task of getting as many movable art treasures as possible out of the city center and into underground storage, in case a similar fate awaited Braunschweig.
On February 10, 1944, heavy bombing raids did indeed reach Braunschweig. When Seeleke came out of the bunker he had been sheltering in, he discovered that one of the city’s historic buildings was burning to the ground. He decided that on future occasions, he could not wait around in an air-raid shelter whilst irreplaceable cultural heritage was destroyed. Instead, he would climb up to the top of the spire of the St. Martinikirche, which gave him the best vantage point to watch for fires. When he saw flames, he would race down to get in his car or on his bike so that he could reach the scene and support the small voluntary fire service in trying to put out the fire. In order to be better prepared for this role, he got himself trained up as a fireman. Poignantly, it was from his high vantage point that he saw the timber-frame headquarters of his family’s honey cake business be blown to pieces.
The moving of paintings and other works of art continued in this period when possible. But the bombs were falling more and more frequently. The worst night came on October 15, 1944. Seeleke wrote simply “destruction of Old Braunschweig at 2:30 by English planes” (1). The firestorm lasted two and a half days, and afterwards, the city was a wasteland, with church towers rising up out of the smoldering ruins.
Devastating as this must have been for him, Seeleke at least had the comfort of knowing that the city’s most valuable paintings were still safely in the bunker where they had been stowed at the start of the war. But then came the order from the local chief of police to remove these artworks in order to free up the space for civilians. Appalled at the thought of exposing the paintings to danger, he initially ignored the order, which was of course a dangerous business in Nazi Germany. Finally, he arranged to have the bunker emptied, and the paintings transported to the cellars of Blankenburg Palace in the Harz mountains – although due to the risky nature of these trips and a lack of transport vehicles, Seeleke secretly left the most valuable paintings in the bunker.
A visit to the Wehrmacht general
Shortly afterwards, it emerged that he could not have picked a worse place to move the artworks to. In early April 1945, Heinrich Himmler declared Blankenburg to be the center of the "Harz Fortress", which would be defended to the last man against advancing Allied forces. The artworks would surely not survive. Seeleke was almost in despair. But he wasn't prepared to give up yet. A delegation including Seeleke went to the local mayor to plead for a change of plan. Seeleke then proposed that they go directly to the general in charge to plead their case. But the others in the delegation were aware that any attempt to persuade a military commander to be “unfaithful to his duty” could be punishable by death. The next morning, Seeleke set off accompanied only by Prince Welf Heinrich, son of the former Duke of Braunschweig, apparently encouraged by the latter’s “youthful foolhardiness” (2). Both men took leave of their families in case the worst happened.
When the two men entered the general’s office, Seeleke was carrying a curious object. It was an onyx vase from the museum collections. Ingeniously, he had invented a history for it that was designed to target the pompous nationalistic pretensions of a Nazi general: he claimed that for a thousand years, it had held a balm used to anoint the German emperors. It is said that he challenged the general to “hold it, hurl it against the wall! If you’re certain of winning this war, then everything must be sacrificed. But if you aren’t…” (3), at which point he trailed off, and there was an oppressive silence. The general is supposed to have told them during this meeting that he “could have them shot on the spot” (4). But he didn’t carry out his threat. The men were told to leave, and that they would get an answer the following day.
Whether it was the onyx vase that tipped the balance, we will never know, but on April 13, 1945, the German troops did indeed move out of Blankenburg and form a new front deeper in the Harz mountains. The thousands of paintings and objets d’art were safe. Seeleke must have breathed an almighty sigh of relief. But that still wasn’t the end of the story. After the war was over, Blankenburg was made part of the Soviet occupation zone, and once again, the paintings had to be saved, this time from the clutches of the advancing Red Army; British troops provided assistance.
The Braunschweig lion. Source: Heribert Bechen/HerryB, available here.
The Braunschweig lion
There is another of Kurt Seeleke’s daring feats that should be mentioned, and that concerns the Braunschweig lion, symbol of the city since Henry the Lion’s time. In 1943, in the midst of the war, the bronze statue from 1166 was still standing unprotected at the center of the Burgplatz. Seeleke then received orders to have it sent away to safety. But there was no way he was allowing this iconic creature to be transported to far away Silesia, perhaps never to return. So he mounted a top-secret operation to have the original statue replaced by a copy that had been created a few years earlier. He successfully hoodwinked his Nazi superiors – the original lion was spirited away to a mine tunnel in the region.
Following the end of the war, Braunschweig became part of the British occupation zone and a British army captain was installed in the city to assist in the task of retrieving and restoring artworks. Robert „Rollo“ Lonsdale Charles was one of the “Monuments Men”, a group of volunteers (both men and women) who took on the mission of “saving cultural treasures from the destructiveness of war, and theft by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis” (4). Rollo and Seeleke got on well and formed a close working relationship. In the diary he kept at the time, Rollo recorded the retrieval of the lion as follows (not his exact words as I only had access to a German translation):
Tuesday, 23. October 1945. Went to Goslar with Seeleke and Kump to get the lion… the workers in the fields uncovered their faces as we drove past, and I could see their lips moving as they pointed towards us, laughed and cried “Der Braunschweiger Löwe!”. Around five o’clock, we arrived in Braunschweig… a crowd of people gathered around him and stroked him, mothers held up their children so that they could see… it was all very touching … an excellent animal. One feels like he might wag his tale at any moment!” (5)
Seeleke had many successes, but there was one thing he didn’t manage to save, despite his best efforts, and that was the Braunschweiger Schloss. The former ducal palace was demolished in the summer of 1960, following which Seeleke left Braunschweig in disgust and took up a post in Berlin. He didn’t return until his retirement in 1990, and was awarded a Citizen’s Medal for his services to conservation and historical restoration. Kurt Seeleke lived to be a ripe old age, dying in 2000.
The next time I go into a museum and look at paintings, I will try to bear in mind that their survival over the centuries is by no means a given. It requires the knowledge and dedication of experts who conserve and restore, it requires societies that deem their cultural heritage to be important and worthy of preserving, and governments that allocate funding accordingly. And sometimes, in the worst times when war is raging and reeking destruction on all sides, it requires great ingenuity, resourcefulness and astounding acts of bravery.
Charlotte Davies writes the blog https://braunschweigportraits.blogspot.com/ which takes a light-hearted look at various characters from German history.
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1) Quoted in Friemuth, Cay, Die geraubte Kunst. Der dramatische Wettlauf um die Rettung der Kulturschätze nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, 171
2) Quoted in ibid., 174
3) Quoted in ibid.
4) https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronologie/kriegsende/Kunstretter-mit-Loewenherz-trotzt-selbst-Bombenhagel,seeleke100.html
5) https://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/
6) Quoted in Friemuth, Cay, Die geraubte Kunst. Der dramatische Wettlauf um die Rettung der Kulturschätze nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, 279–281
Sources:
https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronologie/kriegsende/Kunstretter-mit-Loewenherz-trotzt-selbst-Bombenhagel,seeleke100.html
Friemuth, Cay. Die geraubte Kunst. Der dramatische Wettlauf um die Rettung der Kulturschätze nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Georg Westermann Verlag GmbH, 1989)
