Unterstand in Fournes

Where Fournes is

Fournes-en-Weppes is a commune in the Nord department of northern France, about fourteen kilometres from Lille. The Weppes is flat farmland of brick villages and small holdings between Lille and the Lys, and in 1914 the front line settled a few kilometres west of it, through Fromelles and Aubers.

The village sat behind that line for most of the war, which is why a German regiment could keep an office, a billet and a yard full of building timber there. The Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 had its headquarters at Fournes-en-Weppes in 1915 and 1916, and Hitler spent a large part of his service at it.

Other drawings from the same album are titled for places within a short walk or ride of it: Fromelles, dated 1915, and Haubourdin, dated 1916.

What a regimental runner did

Adolf Hitler enlisted in August 1914 and served with the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16, the List Regiment, in France and Belgium until the end of the war. He first went into action at Ypres in October 1914. In November he was promoted to Gefreiter and assigned as a regimental message-runner.

The job was carrying orders and reports between regimental headquarters and the battalion and company staffs forward of it. Historians distinguish it from the company runner's job: regimental headquarters stood several kilometres behind the front, and a runner attached to it was not in the forward trenches for most of his service.

• Iron Cross Second Class, 2 December 1914.
• Wounded in the left thigh in October 1916 on the Somme, when a shell burst at the entrance to the dispatch runners' dugout; about two months in hospital, and back with the regiment in March 1917.
• Bavarian Cross of Military Merit, Third Class with Swords, September 1917.
• Wound Badge in Black, May 1918.
• Iron Cross First Class, 4 August 1918.
• Temporarily blinded by British gas on 15 October 1918, and in hospital at Pasewalk when the war ended.

He drew throughout. The standard account of the service records that he carried paper with him to the front and used leave time to draw and paint, and that at headquarters he produced cartoons and drawings for an army newspaper. The subjects named in that account are the ordinary fabric of the sector: farmers' houses, the dressing station. In August 1917, when the regiment moved to a quiet stretch of the line in Alsace, his portfolio of sketches and paintings was stolen during the transfer.

The 1936 album that printed it

The picture is known from Adolf Hitler: Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers, issued in 1936 by the Cigaretten-Bilderdienst at Hamburg-Bahrenfeld. This was a propaganda publication, and its format was a sales promotion: the buyer got a bound volume with blank spaces, and collected the photographic cards to paste into them from packets of cigarettes. Joseph Goebbels wrote the foreword, and the texts came from Hitler's circle. More than two million copies had been printed by 1940.

The album was made to sell cigarettes and to build the leader's public image. It carries no catalogue information about the drawings, meaning no medium, no measurement and no owner, and it printed them under a heading identifying them as the work of the front-line soldier. That heading is the only attribution the picture carries.

Its publication date is also what makes the picture usable. A work printed in Germany in 1936 as Hitler's cannot have been made by any of the postwar forgers whose output fills the present market. That rules out a large category of fakes. It does not establish that he drew this sheet.

The copying trade, and the pictures made at the front

From about 1909 Adolf Hitler earned money in Vienna by making small watercolours of buildings and city landmarks, which he copied from postcards and sold through an agent to tourists and frame-sellers. Reinhold Hanisch, a fellow resident of the men's home, acted as that agent in 1910 until the two fell out over money. The art historian O. K. Werckmeister estimates two to three thousand works made between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, when painting was his occupation.

Art historians describe that body of work as copying rather than composition. Birgit Schwarz, who has written on Hitler and art, has said that he had no distinctive artistic style and generally just copied, and that watercolours by other Viennese painters of the same years look much the same.

The front-line pictures take different subjects. They are not tourist landmarks but the places the regiment was posted to: a shelter at Fournes, Fromelles in 1915, Haubourdin in 1916. The account of the war service also records that he carried paper to the front and drew there. What no source establishes is whether any particular sheet was drawn in front of its subject, and this one carries no evidence either way.

The firmer difference is provenance. The Vienna and Munich watercolours mostly reach the present through the auction market, which is where the forgeries are. Several of the front-line pictures reach it through publication in 1935 and 1936, or through collections seized and catalogued by the United States Army in 1945.

Seventy years of Bavarian copyright, and its expiry

Hitler left no valid heir. A Munich court declared his will void, no death certificate had been issued, and his sister Paula's claim failed. Because he had been registered as resident in Munich, the estate passed to the Free State of Bavaria through denazification proceedings held in the autumn of 1948, and Bavaria took the copyright in everything he wrote and made.

Bavaria used it as a power of refusal for the next sixty-seven years rather than as a source of income. It permitted no German reprint of Mein Kampf. It acted against a publisher issuing facsimiles of Nazi-era newspapers with critical commentary, and more than 3,200 copies of one facsimile were confiscated before the Regional Court Munich I partly rejected that use of copyright.

The German Copyright Act sets the term at seventy years after the author's death and starts the clock at the end of the calendar year in which the death occurs. Hitler died on 30 April 1945, so the term ran out at the end of 2015 and the works entered the public domain in Germany and Austria on 1 January 2016. The same date governed Mein Kampf, and the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich published its annotated edition that January. Bavaria's veto ended with no successor right and no extension.

The United States position is less settled, and it is the reason the licence on the Wikimedia Commons file is worth reading twice. The file claims two grounds. One is that the copyright was never renewed, which applies to works that had a United States copyright to renew and is overridden for foreign works by the Uruguay Round Agreements Act. The other is an exception for copyrights once held by the Alien Property Custodian, whose documented seizure covers Mein Kampf and not the paintings. Neither ground supports the file. The German expiry is what actually makes the work free of copyright, and a work first published abroad in 1936 may carry a restored United States term to the end of 2031, so the reproduction here is published as editorial commentary.

German criminal law does not restrict the picture either. The provisions on symbols of unconstitutional organisations cover swastikas, runes and party insignia, none of which appear in a drawing of a farmyard, and the sale of Hitler's paintings is permitted in Germany.

Why most pictures signed A. Hitler cannot be trusted

The market in fakes is older than the Second World War. Reinhold Hanisch, who had sold the real watercolours in Vienna, was manufacturing false ones from 1933; he was arrested in November 1936 and died in custody the following year. Birgit Schwarz calls him a shady figure and a notorious liar who ran what amounted to a forgery centre in Vienna.

The standard reference for the field does not hold up. Billy F. Price published Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist in 1984, a self-funded catalogue of 723 numbered entries, at a time when he was among the largest private owners of the work. Schwarz calls the book catastrophic. The historian Hermann Weiss identified several of its entries as forgeries by Konrad Kujau, who forged the Hitler Diaries. Price dedicated it to August Priesack, the first historian to authenticate those diaries, whose signature also appears on certificates of authenticity sold with paintings.

German prosecutors have twice emptied auction rooms. In January 2019 Berlin police seized three watercolours from an auction house on a court order for suspected document forgery and fraud. In February 2019 prosecutors at Nuremberg-Fürth seized sixty-three paintings, watercolours, drawings and pastels from Auktionshaus Weidler, which had intended to sell twenty-six of them; the lots that did go under the hammer failed to sell. The proceedings were opened against persons unknown, and no outcome has been reported.

“No one has really conducted any serious comprehensive research into Hitler's art.”

Connoisseurship is the usual way to catch a fake, and here it has little to work with, because the work has no style of its own to imitate badly. One bright line does hold: there is no record of Hitler painting in oils, so an oil carrying his signature is a fake. Beyond that, an attribution is worth what its paper trail is worth, which is why publication in 1936 matters and a certificate of authenticity does not.

What is not established about this sheet

• The date. Wikimedia Commons gives circa 1917; Calvin University's German Propaganda Archive dates the same image probably 1915. Both take it from the same 1936 album, which is the only publication either cites.
• The medium and the size. Neither is recorded anywhere, and the only version available is a printed page.
• Where the original is. No museum, private collection, exhibition or sale of this sheet is on record. The four watercolours in United States Army custody at Fort Belvoir, the best-documented group anywhere, are described as other subjects, and the two published descriptions of them do not agree with each other.
• The attribution. It rests on a heading in a 1936 propaganda album, printed while Hitler was in power. No curator or conservator has examined the sheet on the record.

Closing any of these would mean a records search rather than a reading: the Cigaretten-Bilderdienst album's own picture credits, the case files of the Nazi Party archive that bought up work attributed to him, and the catalogue of the German War Art Collection compiled by Gordon Gilkey's team in 1945.