A bunker and the journey of 'Girl with a Pearl Earring': how the Mauritshuis museum was protected from the Nazis

House in the Storm is an almost novelistic title for an exhibition, but the Mauritshuis art gallery in The Hague is accompanying it this February with a clarifying support: Museum in times of war. The room, home to Vermeer's painting Girl with a Pearl Earring , is commemorating until June 29 the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands with an exhibition on its period during the German occupation. It was the only Dutch museum with a bomb-proof bunker, and its director at the time, Wilhelm Martin , protected the collection and its employees despite the Nazis' insistence on propaganda to exalt nationalism. The building also served as a hiding place for a group of citizens who thus avoided being forced into labor for the Third Reich .

The Mauritshuis, its official name, stands next to a pool of water called the Hofvijver (court pond). It was a former lake in the dunes where Johan Maurits , Prince of Nassau-Siegen, had a city palace built in the 17th century. In 1820, the building was acquired by the state, which devoted it mainly to Golden Age paintings – a period and style that Nazi Germany would consider worthy of preservation . “The Germans perceived the Dutch as a similar people, so they did not steal the art collections,” explains Martine Gosselink , director of the Mauritshuis. “It is a completely different story from other European countries where the Nazis raided and attacked museums ,” she adds, during the presentation of the exhibition. In fact, the occupying forces believed that the local population “should shake off their enthusiasm for their kings and queens [of the House of Orange] and turn Rembrandt's birthday [15 July 1606] into a national holiday.” The artist seemed “super-Germanic” to them.

On 25 August 1939, due to the threat of war, the museum closed its doors and the paintings were distributed to safe locations in The Hague . On 10 May 1940, the invasion of the Netherlands began and the city was hit by bombs. The works were then returned to the museum and stored in a bunker beneath the building. On 14 May 1940, Rotterdam was bombed and, within a week, the government surrendered to Nazi Germany to prevent other places from suffering the same fate.

In the first room of the exhibition there is a model of the art gallery in a hanging urn on a map of The Hague . This way you can see that during the war it was surrounded by buildings taken over by Nazi officials for their operations and also to organise the persecution of the Jewish population. “Wilhelm Martin, the director, did everything possible to keep the collection safe and the masterpieces were stored in the bunker at night. Some were brought up during the day,” says Gosselink. The paintings were catalogued according to their value to facilitate their possible evacuation, and these marks, triangles, are still engraved on the back of the frames. Red was for the masterpieces, white for those of great importance, and blue for those that could be replaced by others if they disappeared. Other Dutch museums did something similar.

During the war, Girl with a Pearl Earring was moved several times for safekeeping. It was in Zandvoort (in the west), Amsterdam and Maastricht (in the south) before returning to The Hague in November 1945, when the country had already been liberated for six months. “The Germans knew that the paintings were taken, but they thought it was to protect them from the bombs,” says the director. “They did not confiscate them because they saw them as part of their own culture.” A life-size photo has been installed on one of the walls, like a mural. It shows the rooms lined with empty frames during the war, a gap that the German occupiers tried to fill with propaganda exhibitions. One was entitled The German Book of Today , and featured Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Another praised Amber: Gold of the Sea, with huge pieces of fossil resin that symbolised “Germanic values ​​as a pure Aryan race.” Another included the painting Three Peasants in a Storm (1938) , by the painter Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück , brought from Hitler's own private collection.

Wilhelm Martin ’s efforts to prevent the occupiers from taking over the museum were compounded by the plight of those who hid within its walls. “There were people hiding, trying to escape forced labour in Germany, while a German officer was giving speeches upstairs in the gold room, next to a large swastika,” Gosselink explains. She admits that as they prepared the exhibition they felt tangibly “the dilemmas that the director faced during the war.” “You only have to look at what is happening now in the United States with the pressures that some cultural institutions are receiving,” she adds.

From 1942, Mense de Groot, the administrator, moved into the basement with his wife and five children. It was a way of always having someone watching, and the “logbook” he kept has been preserved. It includes things like the bombing of Rotterdam, which he was able to see from the roof of the building. The family emigrated to Canada after the war and one of his sons, Menno, now in his nineties, recalls in a video his childhood there. He once saw an unknown man who suddenly disappeared, and perhaps he was one of the refugees. Kella, his granddaughter, has been living in the Netherlands for two years, and remembers the stories he told her as a child in a setting that now seems familiar to her. “In here, the memories are authentic and I see what they mean,” she says. The grandfather has not been able to travel for health reasons, and when asked what the exhibition meant to him, “he said it is important that his stories have had an impact on the history of the Netherlands,” says Kella. The bunker was destroyed in 1984 during the restoration of the building and the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Cabinet is no longer under threat. But there are other wars. Like the one in Ukraine , where UNESCO is working hard to protect and restore cultural heritage.