Karl Haberstock


Karl Haberstock was a Berlin art dealer who was a member of the degenerate art Disposal Commission. Haberstock's name appears 60 times in the Art Looting Investigation Unit Reports 1945-1946 and ALIU Red Flag Names List and Index.
Among Haberstock's many spoliation activities documented by the ALIU was the aryanization, with the assistance of Baron von Poellnitz and Roger Louis Adolphe Dequoy, of the Wildenstein firm which then continued to trade.
According to historian Jonathan Petropoulos "Haberstock, despite selling works to Göring and other Nazi elite, owed his status to Hitler alone."
At the end of World War II Haberstock was arrested for his Nazi art looting activities, however he testified against Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg Trials and was subsequently released. In the 1950s he opened a gallery in Munich living in the apartment below that of the director of Göring's art collection, Walter Andreas Hofer.
None of this history has interfered with the reverence that his home city of Augsburg still holds for Haberstock. The portrait shown in this entry hangs prominently in the city's leading Art Museum, the Schaezlerpalais, and a minor residential street bears his name.