Hitler forbade any publication of or commentary about his work as a painter. Also in 1935, for Hoffmann's 50th birthday, Hitler gave the photographer one of his own paintings of the courtyard of the Alte Residenz ("Old Royal Palace") in Munich, a favorite subject of Hitler's, and one he had painted many times when he was a struggling artist. Hoffmann came to own at least four of Hitler's watercolors. One was purchased in 1944, which provoked Hitler to remark that it would have been "insane" to have paid more than 150 or 200 marks for it, at most. The pictures were seized by the U.S. Army at the end of the war, and were never returned to Germany. In 1937, after the selection jury had outraged and angered Hitler with their choices for the first Great German Art Exhibition to inaugurate the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, he dismissed the panel and put Hoffmann in charge. That dismayed the artistic community, who felt that Hoffmann was unqualified for the role. Frederic Spotts, in Hitler and the Aesthetics of Power, reports that Hoffmann was "an alcoholic and cretin who knew little more about painting than did the average plumber". Hoffmann's answer to his critics was that he knew what Hitler wanted and what would appeal to him. Nevertheless, even some of Hoffmann's choices were dismissed from the exhibition by Hitler. A room full of somewhat more modern paintings which Hoffmann had selected as possibilities were angrily dismissed by Hitler with a gesture. Hoffmann remained in charge for subsequent annual Great German Art Exhibitions, making the preliminary selections which were then hung for Hitler to approve or veto. Hoffmann preferred the conventional work of painters from southern Germany, what Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels called in his diary "Munich-school kitsch", over that of the more experimental painters from the north. In May 1938, when Hitler decreed the "Law for the Confiscation of the Products of Degenerate Art" – which retroactively justified the Nazis' confiscation, without payment, of modern art from museums and galleries for the exhibition of "Degenerate Art" mounted in Munich in July 1937, and allowed for the further unpaid removal of such art from institutions and individuals – Hoffmann was one of the commissioners named to centralize the condemnation and confiscation process, along with chairman Adolf Ziegler, President of the Reich Chamber for Visual Arts, the art