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December 11, 2020 - Droog Magazine periodical for investigative journalism

The Hitler Forgery Industry

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1933 | Certificates of Authenticity

The strange business of selling fakes, forgeries and other concoctions attributed to Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and other Nazi criminals.

Introduction

In the 1930's the Hitler forgery industry was in full swing. In 1933 Reinhold Hanisch was arrested in Vienna for the first time, on suspicion of forging Hitler watercolors. The case was dropped, because of lack of evidence.

The first appearance of the forged Hitler watercolors
A fake Hitler baby photo

The first appearance of the forged Hitler watercolors

In the spring of 1933 the artist and petty criminal Reinhold Hanisch (1884-1937), who had been for half a year Hitler's business associate in 1910, and knew what kind of works Hitler made in 1910-1913, was arrested in Vienna. This happened after Franz Feiler,(1914-1992), a young Austrian tramways employee and probably a Nazi, reported him to the police, on the allegation that Hanisch had tried to sell a forged Hitler watercolor, titled “Adolf Loos-Haus am Michaelerplatz”. Feiler did this on behalf of Hitler, after he had shown the work to Hitler, who denied he had painted it.

It has never been established how Feiler, then aged 18 or 19, got access to Hitler. The most likely explanation is that he was mere errand boy, ordered via-via by Hitler to get hold of a Hanisch “Hitler”. The truth will however never be known: in his statements to the NSDAP Hauptarchiv in 1938, Feiler didn't mention this first incident. After the war he remained silent about it too.

In early July 1933, judge Dr. Scholz of the Vienna Strafbezirksgericht 1 (Criminal District Court 1), presided the trial against Hanisch. Hanisch declared that he was innocent, that the work was not a forgery but painted by Hitler himself, and that he had sold it on behalf of a man called Schwertfeger.

Dr. Scholz then adjourned the trial, to have the police search for Schwertfeger. As he couldn't be found, the case was dropped.

According to Hanisch in later years, Schwertfeger was a frame maker, who had been in 1910-1913 among Hitler's clients. Yet in the Viennese address books from this period and from 1933 no framemaker by this name can be traced, which gives strong reasons to suspect that this man never existed but in Hanisch's statements.

The forger forged: left Reinhold Hanisch, on a photograph published in the Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, 1933. At right an oil painting, depicted in Price (1983), allegedly depicting Hanisch and allegedly made by Adolf Hitler in 1910. In reality it is a Konrad Kujau contraption. The true identity of the depicted man and of the artist are unknown; the Hitler signature on it is a forgery, added by Kujau in the 1970s or early 1980s.

This trial had for Hanisch a positive effect: he became known as one of the few persons who could give a first hand account about the young Hitler in Vienna. In August 1933 the Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung published a long interview with Hanisch. What he told in it was a mix of some factual information and many concoctions, some of which originated from Hitler himself, for Hanisch obviously used parts of Mein Kampf as inspiration for his own concoctions.

A summary of the August 1933 interview was published by the French newspaper Le petit Journal. It must also have been read by the exiled German journalist and fervent anti-Nazi Konrad Heiden, who hired Hanisch in 1935 to gather information about Hitler's time in Vienna for his Hitler biography 9published in 1936-1937). Heiden probably arranged the publication of Hanisch' memoirs in the USA too, in 1939.

Hanisch used these interviews to exaggerate the number of watercolors Hitler allegedly had made in Vienna – this allowed him to sell a large number of forgeries. How much he made has never been established, though; when he was finally arrested in November 1936, he denied that he ever forged a single “Hitler”, even though there was overwhelming evidence for him doing so.

In February 1937 Hanisch died in a Viennese prison cell, whilst in detention on remand, probably of natural causes.

Unfortunately, only some descriptions of the works which were allegedly forged by Hanisch have survived. Hanisch's own descriptions of works that Hitler would have made, inspired proba-bly other forgers to produce just such works - a number of which are depicted in Price, as numbers 318-320. But if these are Hanisch's forgeries or works of other forgers is impossible to say.

Sources

Hitler als Aquarellmaler. Österreichisches Abendblatt, Wien, 05-07-1933.
http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=oab&datum=19330705&seite=5&
zoom=33&query= %22hanisch%22%2B%22hitler%22&ref=anno-search
Adolf Hitler als kunstschilder. Een interessant oplichtingsproces. Westfriesch Dagblad, Hoorn (NL), 11-07-1933.
https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=MMWFA01:000296009:mpeg21:a00032

Was Hitler schilder? De Tĳd, 's-Hertogenbosch, 12-07-1933.
https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010535381:mpeg21:a0144 Hitler als Bettler in Wien. Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, Wien, 21-08-1933.
http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=wsz&datum=19330821&seite=7&zoom=33
Jean Guignebert. Ce qui Hitler na raconte pas dans “Mein Kampf”. Un ami de jeunesse du Führer évoque des souvenirs pittoresques. Le petit Journal, Paris, 27-08-1933.
https://www.retronews.fr/journal/le-petit-journal/27-aout-1933/100/406355/1?from=%2 Fsearch%23allTerms%3Dhitler%2520aquarelle%26sort%3Dscore%26published
Bounds%3 Dfrom%26indexedBounds%3Dfrom%26page%3D1%26searchIn%3Dall%26total%3D3620&
index=3
Oberpolizeirat Dr. Spring. Bundes Polizeidirektion Wien, Sicherheitsbureau, s.B. 17105/36, November-December 1936. NSDAP Hauptarchiv NS 26/2599; Bundesarchiv Berlin.

Reinhold Hanisch. 'I was Hitler's buddy'. The New Republic, 05-04-1939.
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/projects/hitler/sources/
30s/394newrep/394NewRepHanischHitlersBuddy.htm

Billy F. Price [= August Priesack and Peter Jahn]. Adolf Hitler als Maler und Zeichner. Ein Werkkatalog der Ölgemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen und Architekturskizzen. Gallant Verlag, Zug, 1983. Pages 92 and 161.
https://www.bartfmdroog.com/droog/niod/price.html

A. Joachimsthaler. Korrektur einer Biographie. Adolf Hitler 1908-1920. Mit 67 Textabbildungen und 69 Fotos. Herbig, [München], [1989]. Page 268.

Frederic Spotts. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Arrow Books, London, 2002. P. 142.

http://www.bartfmdroog.com/droog/niod/spotts.html#142

Jaap van den Born & Bart FM Droog. Reinhold Hanisch. de eerste Hitler-vervalser. Droog Magazine, Eenrum, 30-12-2018.
https://www.bartfmdroog.com/droog/niod/hanisch.html

Bart FM Droog. 'Heuse Hitlers'. Mythe en werkelijkheid over de jeugdjaren van de latere Führer. [Article about Reinhold Hanisch]. Geschiedenis-magazine, Zeist, #6, september 2019.
https://www.droog-mag.nl/hitler/2019/droog-reinhold-hanisch-geschiedenismagazine-september-2019.pdf

To top of page.

Fake Hitler baby photo

The Chicago Tribune published on October 22, 1933, a photo of a monstruous baby, allegedly being Hitler-the-baby. According to The Tribune the photo, which was later published in many newspapers and magazines all over the world, originated from Acme Newspictures, a news agency active in the 1920s-1940s. Acme stated that it had received the photo from its London office; the London office claimed it originated from Austria.

John May Warren, 1931 (courtesy Warren family collection) and the fake baby Hitler photo (public domain).

But the only existing negative of the photo was owned by Mrs. Harriet M.W. Downs, Lakewood, Ohio. And the baby on the photo was her son, John May Warren.

In a letter to the newspaper Mrs. Down stated:

“They've made a sourpuss out of my son by fiendishly changing his mien, refute, I pray, this heinous one, let his cherubic likeness be seen.” (quotation reprinted in the Dutch East Indies newspaper De Indische Courant, 1938).

Until this very day it is unknown who doctored the photo.

The authentic Hitler the baby, circa 1890, and the fake baby Hitler photo (both public domain).

In 2017 Jeffrey Davis, a nephew of John May Warren, gave the family's version of the story:

“One sunny day in 1931, Harriet May Warren plunked her chubby two year-old son on a blanket outside their home for a photo shoot, out of which several adorable photos emerged.

Seven years later, having relocated to Lakewood, Ohio, Harriet was thumbing through a copy of Life magazine and saw a likeness she recognized, but which had been grotesquely altered.”

According to Davis the photo was first printed by a Dutch newspaper, and reached America via the London Daily Herald. The first part of this story is probably not true: because of the neutral status of the Netherlands in the 1930's, it 's hard to imagine that any Dutch newspaper would have published such a photo.

The first publication of the photo we have seen with our own eyes, was in the Australian Sun, November 3, 1933. Shortly after the alleged publication in the Chicago Tribune. Anyway, this is the least interesting aspect of the story.

John May Warren, shortly before his death in 1938 (courtesy Warren family collection).

Davis: “I never knew my Uncle Johnny. He died, tragically, years before my mother was born, after taking a spill on his bike while riding home with a bottle of milk. The shattered glass pierced his heart. He was eight. Despite being merely a typical baseball-loving boy growing up in the Midwest, Time magazine noted his passing in the “Milestones” section of the August 1938 issue, just months after his identity as the real boy in the mythical picture was revealed. ”

Sources

When Hitler Was a Baby Chancellor's Narrow Escape. The Sun, Sydney, NSW). 03-11-1933.
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article230192818

Tooverlantaarn. De Indische Courant, Soerabaja (Dutch East Indies), 08-07-1938.
https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010286073:mpeg21:a0061

Photographers' Identities Catalog. The New York Public Library, New York, [seen 11-12-2020].
http://pic.nypl.org/constituents/9724

Jeffrey Davis. The true story of Hitler's fake baby photo. Atlas Obscura.com, 14-03-2017
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hitler-baby-photo-fake