Was the Winnipeg Art Gallery Led by a Nazi?

 

Research suggests trailblazing art gallery director Ferdinand Eckhardt may have been a supporter of the Third Reich

ON JULY 5, 1973, a German ethnographer named Karl Stumpp stood in the Winnipeg Art Gallery and delivered a lecture called “The Fate of the Russian Germans.” Stumpp was on a speaking tour across Canada, and his Winnipeg stop was highly anticipated. A key figure in “Germans from Russia” studies, he was admired by a network of North American academics and Germanophiles, many of whom treated his wartime research as foundational. The lecture’s subject—ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and their abuse at the hands of the Soviet Union—would also have struck a chord with the city’s large German community, some of whom had fled communist persecution.

The WAG advertised the free public event in its 1973 event calendar, and the city’s Canadian German newspapers promoted it. But one would be hard pressed to find mention of the lecture anywhere else. One reason might be that Stumpp, as is more widely known today, was a Nazi whose legacy is inextricably linked to the Final Solution. His authority on the lecture’s subject rested largely on surveys of German Ukrainian villages he’d overseen in the 1940s in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. This occupation gave Stumpp unique access to German communities hitherto hidden behind Soviet borders. But his studies were decidedly not of the disinterested scientific variety. After Einsatzgruppen killing squads cleansed a village of “undesirables,” Stumpp’s own eighty-man action unit moved in to determine the survivors’ racial character. Those deemed lacking sufficient “German blood” were likely murdered, helping rid the Greater Reich of what Stumpp’s diaries describe as “the Bolshevik-Jewish plague.”

It’s apparent from their writings that, by 1973, many of Stumpp’s closest North American colleagues understood his research was pursued within the Nazi apparatus, even if they were sketchy on certain details. This understanding was shared by at least one Winnipeg professor involved with organizing Stumpp’s lecture tour in Canada. Enough was also made known publicly about Stumpp’s past that a German article promoting the WAG event could advertise him as managing director of the People’s Association for Germans Abroad (1933–1938) and head of the Research Center for Russian Germans (1938–1945)—job titles, given their time frames, that practically Sieg Heil off the page.

What knowledge did WAG’s management have of Stumpp’s genocidal associations at the time of his lecture? Was his presence at the gallery, an elegant modernist space that had opened less than two years earlier, simply a matter of oversight? Posing such questions some fifty years later would seem less significant if it weren’t for another virtually unknown fact: Austrian-born Ferdinand Eckhardt, the trailblazing WAG director in charge at the time—and who, the local newspaper Courier Nordwesten reports, attended Stumpp’s lecture as an “honoured guest”—was himself a Nazi fellow traveler during the Third Reich.  (more...)

Was the Winnipeg Art Gallery Led by a Nazi?