Otto Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser (1884 - 1965)

Otto Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser

Otto Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser was a German portrait and documentary painter.

He studied at art academies in Kassel, in Berlin and Weimar, where he became a member of the Weimar Association of Etching Artists, and co-founded the Rotary Club of Görlitz in 1930. In 1933, Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser joined the NSDAP and began to work at the request of National Socialist propaganda: he painted many war pictures and portrayed several party leaders.

In January 1940, he accompanied a group of Volksdeutschen (Volksdeutschen) returning to Germany from Galicia and Volhynia at Himmler's behest, and documented the trek with numerous sketches and drawings, which were then exhibited in Berlin and published in the "Book of the Great Trek." In 1941, Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser was a consultant for Gustav Utsitsky's Nazi propaganda feature film "Homecoming" and illustrated the book "Homecoming from Volhynia".

In 1944, Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser was enrolled in the so-called "God Blessed List," a list of German artists compiled during the final phase of World War II by the Imperial Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda under the leadership of Joseph Goebbels.

By the end of the Second World War, Otto Engelhardt had settled in Göttingen and worked mainly as a portrait painter until the end of his life.