THE MUNICH PACT DESK SET PART #2

AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THOSE OF YOU TRYING TO FIND WAYS TO GET THIS BLOG PULLED: THE IMAGES USED IN THIS ARTICLE AND ELSEWHERE IN THIS BLOG ARE EITHER IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR REPRODUCED IN ACCORDANCE WITH 'FAIR USE' PROVISIONS WRITTEN INTO INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT LEGISLATION.

In this shot of Hitler's office in the Führerbau published in the 1942 issue of Die Bauten der NSDAP, the large bronze desk set has been replaced by a more modest set in red marble, matching the desk lamp. The rocking ink blotter is smaller than the one seen in the 1938 and 1940 photographs. Where was the large bronze desk set? In the basement, where it would allegedly be found in the summer of 1945? 

Copyright © Associated Press (Fair Use)

On 6.2.2011, The San Diego Union Tribune broke the news that local militaria dealer Craig Gottlieb had been appointed to broker the sale of Mr McConn's Munich Pact Desk Set. Other newspapers, television channels and news agencies, including Associated Press, around the world followed the story. Mr Gottlieb told members on the Wehrmacht-Awards Forum website: "I really do hope (for the McConns and for world posterity) that this piece ends up in a major museum. Ideally, a wealthy benefactor/collector should buy it and donate it. The tax write-off would be enormous, the benefit to history would be great. I'm setting appointments with West Point and with the WWII Museum in New Orleans for March." 

On 14.2.2011, The Daily Mail newspaper in Britain ran an article about the desk set, from which this extract is taken: "Memorabilia dealer Craig Gottlieb of Solana Beach acquired the inkwell from a Houston man, who claims he took it as a souvenir while serving in Munich in the final days of World War II. Former U.S. Army lieutenant Jack McConn had been stationed in Munich during the occupation of Germany and lived with his unit in the house of Hitler’s lover Eva Braun for several weeks. While resident in the building, Mr McConn and his fellow soldiers discovered an underground tunnel leading to Hitler’s office, also known as the Fuehrerbau. The lieutenant found the swastika-emblazoned inkwell and then sent it to his family in Texas. Years later, he was watching a documentary on the History Channel and was stunned to see the desk set being used to sign the Munich Pact.

"I got a pretty clear look at it and immediately thought, 'Good Lord, that’s the one I’ve got'”,’ he told the Daily Mirror. Collector Mr Gottlieb, who is offering the set for sale, added: "It’s basically the surface upon which the fate of the world was decided." Antiques dealer Stephen Wolfe of Wolfe-Hardin Finest Quality Military Antiques in Long Beach, who plans to bid for the desk set, said he has no doubts about its authenticity: "It's absolutely 100 per cent authentic," he told the North County Times, "I know the piece intimately." Mr Wolfe added he had checked Mr McConn's military records and the Houston soldier was indeed stationed in Munich at the time the desk set was taken from Germany."

As soon as anyone familiar with Munich worked out just how long such a tunnel would have been, had it existed in the first place, Mr Gottlieb started saying that the media had "got the story wrong". All references to tunnels between the Führerbau on the Königsplatz and Fraulein Braun's house at Wesserburgerstrasse 12 disappeared quite rapidly from any website over which Mr Gottlieb exercised any control. However, the tunnel story would continue to haunt the alleged Munich Pact Desk Set. In the meantime, Mr Gottlieb's tendency to become embroiled in controversy over some of the pieces on his sales lists returned to haunt him, doubtless making it hard to focus on selling the Munich Pact Desk Set despite the extensive media coverage and all of the alleged interest in this remarkable artefact. On 7.11.2011, Mr Gottlieb announced that he had returned the desk set to the McConns, stating that they had compensated him for his expenses and that the desk set would be consigned to Alexander Historical Auctions. Mr Gottlieb then stated that he and the McConns had been unable "to  reach an accord about the reserve price that they wanted to put on the piece" and that the desk set had been consigned to "Alexander Autographs" of Stamford, Connecticut. By this stage, Mr Gottlieb had been in possession of this piece for the best part of a year without apparently agreeing on a sale price with the owner. West Coast dealer Steve Wolfe had authenticated the piece in 2007 and expressed the intention to bid on it when it came up for auction in 2008, yet it remained unsold. The lack of success was attributed to the economic downturn, which seems strange, given there seems to be no lack of buyers for very expensive Third Reich personality memorabilia. 

AHA President Basil Panagopulos  on the right (Image Public Domain)

On 15.11.2011, Mr Basil A Panagopulos, President of Alexandra Historical Auctions of Stamford, Connecticut announced on his Autograph Magazine Live! web log that the Munich Pact Desk Set had been consigned to his auction house. Mr Panagopulos wrote: "The other day, the following walked into our office. Thought this might make an interesting diversion from signed photos of Snookie  and "The Situation". Basil Panagopulos, known as Bill, then thanked one John Reznikoff for putting the desk set's owner in touch with Alexandra Historical Auctions. How the noted celebrity hair collector and autograph consultant of nearby Westport, Connecticut is linked with the McConn family of Houston, Texas remains to be clarified. More questions about the tunnel anecdote as recounted in various leading newspapers and other media provoked a testy response from Basil Panagopulos on the Wehrmacht-Awards Forum website: "After a little research, it turns out our 88 year old veteran confused "Eva Braun's house" (miles distant, as I recall) with the Braune-haus [sic], which indeed has a tunnel to the Fuhrer-Bau. If you were a 20 year old GI from Texas who didn't know "Germany" from "Germination", with rumors abounding, you'd make the same mistake at the time as he did. As for "room decor", your proposition is, frankly, fantastic. We have purchased images from the Bundesarchiv (copyrighted) that CLEARLY show this desk set used in the signing, as do the LIFE images. I'm simply not going to react to any more such nonsensical allegations. Last word: if you go to Youtube and watch the videos there, you'll see the same desk set. This was no 'prop', it's 100% "right". Simply put: if you don't like it, don't bid on it. Case closed." 

In other words, the media had not exactly "got the story wrong", as Craig Gottlieb had previously asserted. The story recounted to them by Jack McConn was accurately reported but, according to Basil Panagopulos, the octogenarian veteran was "confused" and, in any case, as a twenty year old GI from Texas, "didn't know Germany from 'Germination'". John L McConn was a high school graduate from a good family. His brother was mayor of Houston at one point. The McConn family were from Tulsa, Oklahoma and had moved to Houston in 1939. After the war, John McConn attended university and earned a law degree and was head of the Houston Bar Association. Moreover, John McConn was commissioned from the ranks in December 1944 and was serving as a 1st Lieutenant and platoon commander with Company G, 179th Infantry when the regiment entered Munich at the end of April 1945 after participating in the liberation of the Dachau camp. He was also a Silver Star winner. So Mr McConn was hardly the uneducated Texas hayseed to whom Basil Panagopulos seemed to be referring with a breathtaking lack of respect for the client whose consignment he had not only failed to push beyond the low reserve figure but had then sold for less to one of his regular customers after the auction. Even assuming that the desk set might be the one photographed and filmed in 1938, the two self-styled, media-savvy specialists in whom Mr McConn had apparently placed his faith had failed their client dismally. The only conclusion to be drawn is that Messrs Gottlieb and Panagopulos are professionally incompetent or that serious potential buyers had already considered the desk set and felt unable to make offers for it for the reasons explored in this article and suggested by Mr Panagopulos as quoted: namely that if they did not like the look of the desk set, they should not bid on it. And as the record shows, those "with the coin", as Mr Gottlieb put it, did not bid on the desk set in 2008, in 2010 and in 2011. 

McConn states that he was ordered to guard the Führerbau with his men to guard artworks and other valuables. McConn is also reported as saying he was sent to the Führerbau with a detachment to guard artworks and remained there until the end of August, at which point he sent the desk set home to his father in Houston, Texas. On 6.5.1945, McConn sent a note to his family on a card bearing Hitler's monogram, indicating that he was indeed in the Führerbau at the end of or just before the end of the war. Interestingly, he spelt Hitler's forename in the German rather than the American style. Even more interestingly, McConn was able to acquire normal writing paper and US Airmail stamps in Germany a couple of days before the surrender. This letter home would be far more convincing were it a V-Mail communication, US postage stamps being a low priority item until months after the end of the war. But then, V-Mail would be harder to forge than something like this. 

Various media articles about the desk set in 2008 report that McConn sent the desk set home to his father in August 1945. In more recent versions of the story, McConn describes arriving at the Führerbau at the end of the war and meeting a corporal ascending from the basement with a number of Hitler's personal effects. The corporal told McConn about the desk set and McConn appropriated it and sent it home to his father in Houston. Yet there is no mention of the desk set in the note McConn sent his father and mother on Hitler's stationery on 6.5.1945. All of this is quite possible. However, Hitler's Adjutant Julius Schaub had visited Munich a few days before to remove and destroy any of Hitler's personal belongings and effects he could find and he is known to have fulfilled his late Führer's orders quite thoroughly. One thing is clear: the desk set first offered for sale by John L McConn in 2008, complete with a 2007 authentication from Steve Wolfe, does not seem to be quite the same as the desk set photographed on Hitler's desk in the Führerbau in 1938.

Offered by Alexandra Historical Auctions early in December 2011, the "Munich Pact Desk Set" became a Three Time Loser as bidding failed to reach the low reserve of $500,000. On 8.12.2011, the omnipresent Craig Gottlieb told members of the Wehrmacht-Awards Forum website that the bidding for the desk set had stopped at $380,000. And then WAF member Elmer Chen, the Hong Kong collector who reportedly paid Steve Wolfe $1 million for the unique Hermann Göring Großkreuz formal document, announced that the new owner was a West Coast collector. Confirming this, Alexandra Historical Auctions then announced that the highest bidder had secured the desk set for $423,000. Basil Panagopulos told journalists: "For all intents and purposes the desk set was sold to a longtime customer and devoted autograph collector". One is prompted to wonder what Mr Panagopulos meant by "for all intents and purposes". One is also prompted to wonder why the McConn family did not recover the desk set and entrust it to agents or auctioneers with a better track record than Messrs Gottlieb and Panagopulos. Again, the McConn family are not exactly desert scrub rednecks sharing a single set of dentures in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere, which in itself raises the question of why they did not simply contact serious auction houses in the first place. John McConn has been described as having wished to auction the desk set himself, hence the promotional website set up on 19.3.2008. However, this website was not quite the down home affair some observers assumed it to be. It is a slick production and the record shows that it was set up jointly by Mr McConn's legal firm and Magnet Media Group, a movie production company with offices in Los Angeles, Cologne and London. MMG CEO Jeanette Buerling has not responded to questions about her company's involvement with Burke McConn and the Munich Pact Desk Set. 

Once again, Craig Gottlieb popped up again on the Wehrmacht-Awards Forum website, of which he is said by former moderators to be one of the hidden owners, this time telling readers that he had initially offered John McConn $250,000 for the desk set. Yet on 10.11.2011, Mr Gottlieb had claimed that he had been unable to sell the desk set because Mr McConn insisted upon placing too high a price on on it: "...they've been told so many things about its value early on, that I think their expectations were too high (think millions). But, I think if Bill [Panagopulos] can get them to agree to a low starting bid, with no reserve, it will give those with the coin to compete for it, something realistic to shoot for". Mr Panagopulos certainly persuaded the McConns to agree to a low starting bid as well as a reserve well under the "millions" cited by Mr Gottlieb but having failed to stimulate the bidding, then sold the desk set for even less than the low reserve to a "longtime" and "devoted" customer. 

Some pundits have floated the theory that while the desk set introduced to the marketplace in 2008 visibly seems to differ to the one in the 1938 and 1940 photographs, it could be a period piece, a copy made by one of the various German arts and crafts guilds of the time as a gift for the Führer, perhaps for the study of his Munich flat in the Prinzregentenstrasse so that he could have a personal desk set like the one in his official Munich office. This is quite possible, of course, but again, it seems odd that this desk set bears no signature or maker's mark of any kind, nor even the foundry marks one normally expects to find on objects of this kind, especially as it would, hypothetically speaking, have been intended as a gift for the Führer and as an exercise in commercial promotion for the makers. Meanwhile, Basil Panagopulos continues to rant and rave in emails and on internet forums about the W C Stump blog, hurling accusations of racism and anti-Semitism and threatening those he suspects of being behind the pseudonym with legal action or smearing campaigns while Craig Gottlieb finds himself embroiled in yet another controversy involving questionable Nazi VIP memorabilia, in this case a school copybook purporting to have belonged to Heinrich Himmler. 

For the time being, nothing more has been heard of the desk set produced by John McConn just in time for the 70th anniversary of the Munich Pact. It is said to be somewhere in California and some pundits are running a betting book on whether it will reappear in one of the European auction houses in due course or whether it will be quietly smelted and turned into another Nazi VIP relic for the collectors who buy such memorabilia without, it seems, doing any basic research beforehand. On the other hand, such artefacts, real or fake, offer a way of moving five, six and seven-figure sums around in a form that is hard or even impossible to tax, because taxing collectibles - a fervent desire of taxmen and governments throughout the civilised world - is a serious vote-loser. Collectibles also offer a useful means of laundering money one might not be able to explain to the taxman, which might  explain, on the other hand, some of the astonishing and unjustified prices we have being seeing in recent years in spite of the worldwide economic crisis. 

To be continued…