Chris Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images
- Real estate magnate Harlan Crow has come under scrutiny over his dealings with Clarence Thomas.
- Questions have been raised about his unusual collection of Nazi and dictator memorabilia.
- But one of his supposed Hitler paintings appears to be fake, two experts told Insider.
Conservative political donor Harlan Crow's lavish gifts to his friend Clarence Thomas have put his collection of Nazi memorabilia in the spotlight — and one of its key pieces might be fake, Insider has learned.
A painting that apparently hung in Crow's library for at least three years, with the signature "A. Hitler" scrawled in the lower-left corner, is "definitely not an authentic Hitler painting," according to Bart FM Droog, a Dutch journalist and researcher who has written widely about Hitler forgeries.
And Bill Panagopulos, whose firm Alexander Historical Auctions has sold some Hitler sketches, said in his opinion there's "no chance" Hitler actually painted the work.
Crow's dealings with Thomas, including a real-estate deal and luxury vacations on Crow's dime that Thomas didn't disclose, have been criticized by Democrats and defended by Republicans.
The attention has also renewed scrutiny of Crow's large collection of artifacts, which includes a garden of dictator statutes and swastika-emblazoned napkins from the Third Reich.
A spokesperson for Crow Holdings, Crow's commercial real estate company, said he forwarded Insider's questions to "people who have more direct access to Harlan," but did not respond to a question about who they are. Crow has defended his relationship with Thomas and said his collection commemorates the good and the bad parts of history. He rejected any suggestion that he has authoritarian sympathies.
"My mom was on a ship that was sunk by Germans during World War II. If you try to kill my mom, I don't like you," he told the Dallas Morning News on April 16. "I mean, that's reasonably obvious. And so the idea that I could have sympathy for Nazism is insane."
Harlan Crow's little-seen Hitler art collection
Little is known about Crow's collection. Mother Jones described a 2019 event where some visitors wandered out of the main area of Crow's library and were upset to find his collection included "two Hitler paintings, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and swastika embossed linens."
Crow has opened his doors to many visitors over the years. Some have shared photos of his collection on social media: a Stradivarius violin, a waxwork of Winston Churchill, Eisenhower's putter, a silver soup tureen that belonged to Saddam Hussein, and the purported Hitler watercolor.
Insider spoke with a person who attended a 2014 tour of Crow's library, led by Crow's personal librarian, who confirmed that he saw the Hitler watercolor in Crow's collection. Insider also found three photos of the same painting on Facebook and Instagram, posted in 2014, 2015 and 2016. One of those photos was reposted by the Twitter account @PatriotTakes on April 9. Insider was able to confirm that photo was of the watercolor attributed to Hitler in Crow's collection.
—PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) April 9, 2023
The painting appears to be of Vienna's old Carolinian Gate, which was demolished before Hitler was born. Several people are passing in and out, and buildings are visible over the wall. The painting bears a striking resemblance to an illustration that appeared in an 1883 book about Viennese aesthetics – but Crow's watercolor is signed "A. Hitler."
A market for Nazi memorabilia flooded with fakes
The market for Nazi memorabilia and so-called "Hitlerania" is niche, but significant, with buyers from as far afield as China willing to pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for guns, daggers, coats, and carvings, according to a 2019 story in ArtNet. It is also flooded with fakes.
After World War II, many American soldiers came home with Nazi pins, helmets, and weapons they'd taken as military trophies. The US Army has four Hitler paintings in storage, Renee Klish, a retired Army curator, told Insider. Some European countries restrict the sale of Nazi paraphernalia, but others, like the Netherlands and Denmark, display it in dozens of private and public museums.
Goods connected to Adolf Hitler, who spent some of his late teens and early 20s trying to make it as an artist in Vienna, are especially valuable to some collectors. For decades after the war, a handful of Nazi loyalists and petty criminals who were close to Hitler sought to cash in, hawking sketches and memorabilia whose origins were difficult or impossible to confirm.
The infamous forger Konrad Kujau, who died in 2000, was a source of many of the works. Kujau also created phony versions of "Hitler Diaries" that German magazine Stern paid the equivalent of millions of dollars to obtain.
"One should look at any work of Adolf Hitler, either in writing or watercolor, with great suspicion," said Frederic Spotts, a former diplomat and historian who has written a book about Hitler's art. "Old Nazis wanted to have them, in the way that people around here — some people around here — want a photograph of Donald Trump."
'He was a better artist than this'
Some people familiar with Hitler's artwork said they couldn't be sure if the photos were of a real Hitler painting. Christian Fuhrmeister, an art historian has co-authored papers about Hitler's art with Droog, said the image from Instagram was simply too low-resolution.
Klish, the retired Army curator, said she also couldn't be sure. She said Hitler typically focused on architectural details, and the people in his paintings are typically dwarfed by the buildings, unlike the full-size human figures in Crow's piece.
But Droog, the Dutch researcher, was confident. He told Insider in an email that the piece is among many fakes that were featured in a monograph published by Billy F. Price, a now-deceased Texas businessman who spent years amassing a large collection of supposed Hitler artworks that's viewed with skepticism by Hitler painting experts. Droog shared a scanned page from Price's book that included Crow's painting, one of four paintings on the page that he said he believes are "all forgeries."
Droog also said the painting was likely a forgery because the people in the painting were rendered too well for it to be an authentic Hitler – who, Droog said, never advanced beyond "stick figures."
Panagopulos of Alexander Historical Auctions, who has often disagreed with Droog, also said it was doubtful that Crow's painting was genuine.
While he cautioned that it's impossible to be sure without inspecting the work up close, he said the artist seemed to struggle with perspective — painting far-away figures as tall as close-up ones, for example — in a way that Hitler didn't.
"He was a better artist than this," Panagopulos said.