The Führer’s “Haus der Deutschen Kunst” (House of German Art) in Munich was intended to showcase what Adolf Hitler regarded as the best and finest of German art. The inaugural exhibition was titled the “Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung” (Great German Art Exhibition), and was intended by the Nazis to demonstrate what is “proper art” in contrast to the condemned modern art on display in the concurrent “Entartete Kunst Ausstellung” (Degenerate Art Exhibition). Heinrich Hoffmann published a photo book in 1937 documenting the construction of the museum, from Hitler laying the first cornerstone to the grand opening that occurred on 18 July 1937. The other photos include Adolf Hitler examining a maquette of the building, the ground-breaking ceremony and building under construction, topping out ceremony, as well as various exterior and interior scenes of the exhibits that are included below.

“The art of the Führer is that he assembles the individual mosaic stones.”

– Adolf Hitler, speech at the Führertagung of the NSDAP in Plauen on 12 June 1925

The Nazis, in their typical flamboyant fascist fashion, put on a lavish grand opening ceremony for the art museum, which included an historical pageant and military parade along with speeches by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and of course Hitler himself. Goebbels had also assembled an exhibit of “degenerate art” which premiered simultaneously, in another gallery located nearby at the Hof Garden. While 420,000 people visited the inaugural “Great German Art” exhibit at the new Nazi art museum, over 2 million people attended the defamatory “Degenerate Art” show. Intended as a way to “educate” the public on the “art of decay,” the 740 modern works of art were exhibited to demonstrate that modernist tendencies, such as abstraction, were an indication of a society’s moral and cultural decline.

In September 1933, the Nazis created the Reich Chamber of Culture. The Chamber oversaw the production of art, music, film, theater, radio, and writing in Germany. Local government officials began opening so-called “chambers of horrors” and “exhibitions of shame” in an effort to make a mockery of modern art. On 23 September 1933, a local exhibition entitled “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) was opened at the Rathaus in Dresden. The exhibition then traveled through a dozen German cities (Dresden, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, etc.) over the next several years. Curators across the country began removing all avant-garde works from museums and placing them into storage. These initial assaults on artistic freedom were not centrally organized, and as a result, Nazi definitions of “good” and “bad” art remained unclear. 

By 1937, more than 20,000 modernist works, including those by Vincent Van Gogh, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso were withdrawn, sold or destroyed. Three weeks before the grand opening of the House of German Art, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made plans to show the public the forms of art that the regime deemed unacceptable. He organized the confiscation and exhibition of so-called “degenerate” art, in order to more clearly contrast and define what “truly German” art should look like. “Entartete Kunst” was the culmination of the series of infamous exhibitions held to denounce the artistic avant-garde as a threat to German “purity”, and served to escalate the methodical “purge” of German collections. 

Below are a pair of images showing Adolf Hitler inspecting confiscated works of art in the Victoria-Speicherhaus warehouse at Köpenicker Straße 24a in Berlin on 13 January 1938. Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Hoffmann oversee the process of sorting out the pieces deemed worthy of display in Hitler’s art museum and “Entartete Kunst” that is to be destroyed. Their preferred art dealers are Karl Haberstock from Berlin and dealer Maria Dietrich from Munich.

Hitler spent over four hours exploring the Uffizi Gallery on his state visit to Italy in May of 1938. Il Duce was visibly bored to death as Der Führer eagerly took in every minute detail on the considerably extended guided tour of the museum. After this trip, a greatly inspired Hitler decided to step up his game as an art collector. A special organization was formed by the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs called the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in order to acquire the treasures of the occupied European nations. Divided into four battalions of SS men, they set out to seize and confiscate historic paintings, sculptures and religious artifacts. Answering to the Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, it is estimated that they stole as much as 20 percent of the cultural treasures across nearly all of Europe.

Hitler presented the Discobolos of Myron to the Glyptothek in Munich as a gift to the German people during the Day of German Art in June 1938. The Nazis’ use of imagery from classical antiquity such as the muscular nude male encouraged a physically fit population and conveyed the state’s ideal of a disciplined and militarized masculinity. Hitler’s deep fascination with Ancient Greece and its ideals of beauty became embedded in the Nazi Party’s use of the heroic nude male body as a unifying symbol and to confer the prestige and heritage of Greece and Rome to the German people.

“What makes the Greek ideal of beauty immortal,” wrote Adolf Hitler, “is the wonderful combination of the most glorious physical beauty with a brilliant mind and the noblest soul.”