July 27, 2020 - Droog Magazine periodical for investigative journalism

The Huy Hitlers

A “Hitlers” production plant in Belgium?

to Hitler Forgery Industry main page - to Droog Magazine



1986  |

Introduction

Research of an old catalog of Jefferys, an UK based auction house, has revealed the existence of a “Hitlers” production plant in Belgium, first part of the 1980's.

2006

In 2006 Jefferys auctioned twenty-one watercolors and drawings allegedly made by Adolf Hitler. The auctioneers stated that the works were “probably made by Hitler”and that in their opinion the signatures were authentic.

Two of the “Huy Hitlers”

Two authentic Hitlers, from 1912 and 1914 (courtesy US Army Center for Military History)

Even though a child could see that the works as well as the signa-tures were fakes, resembling in nothing the thought to be authentic Hitler watercolors and signatures, the world press got berserk and reported almost uncritical about this spectacular hoard of “authentic Hitlers”. Almost – only Jonathan Jones of the Guardian warned that the Hitlers were obvious forgeries. But to no avail: the works were sold for for £118,000 (in 2006 the equivalent of $223,000 or €176,000).

In the auction catalog all works were depicted, as well as four reports on the works, written in 1986 by Belgian and French “experts”. Two of them, the Frenchmen Jacques de Launay and the Belgian Paul de Saint-Hilaire had published in the same year a book, in which the alleged provenance of these “Hitlers” was described.

That story is so weird, that is a miracle that nobody was alarmed by their concoctions. According to them in either 1980 or 1985 on a dusty attic in a Libois-Evelette, a tiny village near Huy (Belgium), a sealed box was discovered, which contained thirty-two Hitler watercolors, paintings and drawings, as well as documents and a bundle of bank notes, dating from 1913-1919.

The box, claimed De Launay and De Saint-Hilaire, was left in 1919 in the village by two French women, “Marie Vanesse, 32 years old, and Marie Nicaise, 67 years old.” One of them would have been a midwife. Allegedly they were refugees from the war-torn Le Quesnoy region in northern France. The works, according to De Saint-Hilaire, depicted buildings and landscapes from the Le Quesnoy region.

Both authors claimed that Hitler had been a regular visitor of the area in 1916-1918, and thus could have painted the works in the box. They theorized that the midwife had received the watercolors as a kind of payment, for the assistance the midwife had given when the French woman Charlotte Lobjoie had given birth to Jean Loret, one of the many of Hitler's alleged children, March 1918.

As De Launay and De Saint-Hilaire dedicated many pages of their book to similar idiotic stories as “Hitler and the Holy Grail”, “Hitler and Nostradamus” and “Hitler and astrology”, one realizes that these men are not necessarily trustworthy historians. The same goes for Werner Maser, the pseudo historian who launched in 1977 this particular “son of Hitler” myth – a myth longe since debunked by serious historians.

"Hitlers" offered to Yad Vashem for one million guilders

Anyhow: nothing was heard of the “Hitlers" described by De Launay and De Saint-Hilaire, until 1992, when Tjeu Korenman, a Dutch businessman tried to sell eightteen of the “Huy Hitlers“ to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, for one million guilders – what nowadays, with inflation correction, would amount to some three quarters of a million euro). Not surprisingly, Yad Vashem refused this “generous”offer.

To make it all even weirder: Korenman said in a 1992 tv interview: “I've received the works via a business relation who got them from a man who claimed to be Hitler's son. Claimed to be, as he died two years ago. I've contacted this man. He lived in a village near Huy.”

Now Jean Loret had died in 1985. Which means that somebody else than the then already deceased false son of Hitler pretended to be Hitler's son too!

Korenman claimed to have bought fourty-one “Hitlers” from this mysterious man. Five of them were shown in the tv interview. It were different works than the ones auctioned in 2006, but painted in the same, ugly amateurish style.

What exactly happened Korenman's to “Huy Hitlers” is unknown. It seems that twenty-one of them were auctioned by Jefferys in 2006 – which leaves twenty unaccounted for. The ones sold in 2006 are likely to reappear as “authentic Hitler works” at future auctions, and they are bound to cause new uproar – as “Hitlers ” always do.

Read the full story in: Report on the Huy Hitlers (pdf, 5 MB).

© Compilation Bart FM Droog, 2020.

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