The German tabloid Bild just broke a story about the huge statues of horses made for Hitler by the sculptor Josef Thorak. I’d just come across Thorak’s work while looking into the symbolic role of horses under the Nazis, and seen images of his workshop, and the hefty Aryan steeds he turned out. Thorak was the sculptor chosen by Albert Speer and Hitler to decorate their gross new capital city of “Germania” with its colossal domed hall and endless triumphal avenues.
I didn’t know that two bronze “Pacing Horses” by Thorak used to stand in front of the Hitler’s chancellery in the centre of Berlin, in a place now given over to DDR-era housing and a brand new shopping mall. Bild found an image of one of the statues in place, here, with the original piece in German. Getty has a shot of the Austrian sculptor in 1942, sketching a horse from life.
According to Bild, after the fall of Berlin and the destruction of the chancellery, the horses were taken to the small town of Eberswalde, just up the road from me. At least, this is where they were next seen, in 1950, on the playing field of the local Russian barracks. Over the years they were climbed on by kids, painted gold, shot at with guns, lost their tails and had them fixed again.
They were officially re-identified by the art historian Magdalena Busshart in 1988, but weeks after she published her findings in early 1989, they disappeared. Bild speculates that the sculptures were sold by either the Russian Army or the DDR authorities (or both, working together) in order to raise some desperately needed hard Western currency. Nobody heard anything of them until two years ago, when Busshart was told that if she paid a large amount of money, she would be told their whereabouts.
This week police busting an art-theft ring found the pacing horses in a warehouse in Bad Dürkheim in western Germany – a long way from Eberswalde. They were accompanied by two Klimsch sculptures from the Reichs Chancellery gardens and a four-story high granite relief by Arno Breker. Apparently the horses have been on offer on the blackmarket for between 1.5 and 4 million euros in recent years. Now a decision has to be made as to whether they belong to the federal government or to Thorak’s estate.
Poor old horses. The horrors of the suffering of real horses in war is just so awful. I was reading about how horses drowned in mud during WWI. So sad.