This is photo of Model of Haus Der Kunst, Munich and/or planned Fuhrermuseum, Linz Munich at the Nazi era Parade for the Day of German Art in Munich in 1938.

The original programme from the procession, which HALLE13 acquired to research this image, provides a unique insight into the very little-known celebrations, which took place at each opening of the annual Great German Art Exhibition from 1937 to 1944.

This visitor programme booklet, which comes with the lot, provides a comprehensive listing of all parts of the procession including descriptions, images and a map showing the route of the procession. The Day of German Art usually took place in July and celebrations lasted three days, starting on a Friday. The Sunday marked the climax with the official opening of the exhibition in the House of German Art and a large procession entitled '2,000 Years of German Culture' moved through the streets of Munich. The procession illustrated German history, legends, and myths and how they were linked to the Third Reich.

The whole point of the exercise was to contort art history into the image which suited the perverse socio-cultural agenda Nazis and specifically. The pagentary, ethos and architecture of the setting provided much of the conceptual and practical scaffolding for Hitler’s grand folly – the Fühermuseum. The design of the Führermuseum was based in part on the Haus derDeutschen Kunst in Munich, shown above. Built in 1933–1937 and designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, with considerable input from Hitler, the Haus was one of the first monumental structures built during the Nazi era.

It was after the Anschluss with Austria, on March 12, 1938, with the House of German Art in Munich already completed, that Hitler conceived of having his dream museum not in any of the premiere cities in Germany, where it could be overshadowed, but in his "hometown" of Linz in Austria, and discussed his plans with the director of the local Provincial Museum, Theodor Kerschner, while visiting there.

After a state trip to Rome, Florence and Naples in 1938 – between the Anschluss with Austria and the taking of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia – Hitler, according to Joachim Fest in his 1975 biography, Hitler, was, "overwhelmed and challenged by the riches of the Italian museums" and expanded the conception of his planned gallery. It would now be the unsurpassed art gallery in all of Europe, what he intended to be "the greatest museum in the world”

The idea and overall design concept for a new cultural district in Linz anchored by the Führermuseum was Hitler's own. He intended Linz to be one of the future cultural capitals of the Reich, to have its own university, and to overshadow Vienna, a city in which he had spent some years as a struggling artist,] and about which he felt considerable distaste, not only because of the Jewish influence on the city, but because of his own failure to gain admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, which today remains one of the worlds preeminent centres for art education one hundred meters from where HALLE13 sits.

The continued success of the Academy of Fine Arts is emblematic of Hitler’s ultimate failure. As James S. Plaut notes in an October 1946 edition of the Atlantic –

[Hitler] envisaged Linz as the future seat of the new German Kultur, and lavished all his limited pictorial talent and architectural training on a vast project which would realize this ambition.... [He] devoted a disproportionate amount of time and energy, for a chief of state, to the plans for Linz, personally creating the architectural scheme for an imposing array of public buildings, and setting the formula for an art collection which was to specialize heavily in his beloved, mawkish German school of the nineteenth century. His private library, discovered by the American Army deep in Austria, contained scores of completed architectural renderings for the Linz project...

According to one of Hitler's secretaries, he never tired of talking about his planned museum, and it was often the subject at his regular afternoon teas. He would expound on how the paintings were to be hung: with plenty of space between them, in rooms decorated with furniture and furnishings appropriate to the period, and how they were to be lit. No detail of the presentation of the artworks was too small for his consideration. He said of the museum in 1942 "Anyone who wants to study nineteenth-century painting will sooner or later find it necessary to go to the Linz gallery, because only there will it be possible to find complete collections."

The artworks collected for the Führermuseum were originally stored in a number of places. The purchases were mostly kept in the air raid shelters of the Führerbau in Munich – one of a number of large buildings Hitler had built in the birthplace of the Nazi Party – where they were under the control of the Nazi Party Chancellery. According to Fest in 1975 Hitler would often come to visit them and indulge in long discussions on art as one of the first tasks when coming to Munich, even during the war. Confiscated artworks were stored in deposits in the area of Upper Austria, located in the middle of forests or in the mountains. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg alone requisitioned six estates for storage, including Neuschwanstein Castle in the Bavarian Alps, in which items from France were stored; the Benedictine monastery on the island of Frauenchiemsee in the Chiemsee lake, halfway between Munich and Salzburg; an estate in the Salzkammergut hills, which had been a summer residence for the Austrian royal family; and the Grand Duke of Luxembourg's hunting lodge.

Even though the original storage locations, which had no military purpose and were culturally important in any case, would have been extremely unlikely to have been the subject of an Allied air attack, in 1943 a probably paranoid Hitler ordered that these collections be moved. Beginning in February 1944, the artworks were relocated to the 14th-century Steinberg salt mines above the village of Altaussee, in which the holdings of various Viennese museums had earlier been transferred.

The transfer of Hitler's Linz collection from the repositories to the salt mine took 13 months to complete and utilized both tanks and oxen when the trucks could not navigate the steep, narrow and winding roads because of the winter weather. The final convoy of purloined art arrived at the mine in April 1945, just weeks before the end of the war in Europe.

The labyrinthine salt mine has a single entrance, and a small gasoline-powered narrow-gauge engine pulling a flat car was utilised to navigate to the various caverns created by centuries of salt mining. Into these spaces, workmen-built storage rooms which boasted wooden floors, racks specifically designed to hold the paintings and other artworks, up-to-date lighting, and dehumidification equipment. Mining operations continued as the artwork was loaded into the mines, with the miners occasionally helping to unload.

According to James S. Plaut, who from November 1944 to April 1946 was Director of the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the salt mines held:
6755 old master paintings, of which 5350 were destined for Linz, 230 drawings, 1039 prints, 95 tapestries, 68 sculptures, 43 cases of objects d'art, and innumerable pieces of furniture; in addition, 119 cases of books from Hitler's library in Berlin, and 237 cases of books for the Linz library.

The looted Ghent Altarpiece arrived in the salt mine from Neuschwanstein in the autumn of 1944, and Michelangelo's BrugesMadonna in October of that year. Also in the Altausee repository was The Plague in Florence by Hans Makart, a favorite of Hitler's It had been given to him by Mussolini after Hitler had asked for it numerous times.

In many ways the construction of the super-museum became Adolf Hitler’s ultimate obsession – this absurd drive to assert some belligerent cultural and artistic supremacy, in many ways, overtook many of his obviously squalid and bellicose ethnic, economic and nationalistic posturing. Indeed according to Ian Kershaw in, Nemisis (2000) even in the period around Hitler's 56th birthday in 1945, which was a private celebration held in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, as the Soviet Red Army battled to take the city; Hitler would frequently spend hours in the basement of the Chancellery looking at the scale model of the proposed rebuilding of Linz, which centred on the cultural district around the Fŭhrermuseum.

Nine days after his birthday, Hitler married Eva Braun, and they committed suicide together the following day. Even when everything seemed lost Hitler’s obsession with breaking ground and asserting some perverse artistic supremacy through the Supermuseum was all consuming.