deal Karl Haberstock, and others. A year later, Josef Goebbels, the Reich Propaganda Minister, brought the commission into his Ministry and restaffed it to include more art dealers, since the sale of the confiscated works internationally was a source of hard currency for the Nazi regime – although not as much as was expected, since the knowledge that the Nazis were putting large numbers of the artworks up for sale depressed their market value. When auctions were halted as war approached, there were still over 12,000 works stored in warehouses which the commission Hoffmann sat on had condemned as artistically worthless. Hitler personally inspected these, and refused to allow them to be returned to the collections from which they had been confiscated. The result was the burning of 1,004 oil paintings and 3,825 other works in the courtyard of Berlin's central fire station, on 20 March 1939. Along with sculptor Arno Breker, stage designer Benno von Arent, architect Gerdy Troost, and museum director Hans Posse, Hoffmann was one of the few people whose artistic judgment Hitler trusted. He bestowed the honorific title of "Professor" on Hoffmann in 1938, something he did for many of his favorites in the arts, such as Leni Riefenstahl, the actress and film director, architects Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler, sculptors Breker and Josef Thorak, Wilhelm Furtwängler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and actor Emil Jannings, among others. Hoffmann accompanied Hitler on his state visit to Italy in 1938, in which the Führer was much taken by the beauty of the Italian cities of Rome, Naples and Florence and the artworks and architecture they contained. Hoffmann (with von Ribbentrop's photographer Helmut Laux) were in the party that went to the Soviet Union when Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop secretly negotiated the Non-Aggression Treaty with Vyacheslav Molotov in 1939, which enabled Hitler to invade Poland. Hitler specifically asked Hoffmann to take a close-up photograph of Stalin's earlobes, by which he thought he could determine if the Soviet leader was Jewish or not. Earlobes that were "attached" would indicate Jewish blood, while those that were "separate" would be Aryan. Hoffmann took the requisite image, and Hitler determined, to his own satisfaction, that Stalin was not Jewish. Hitler would not allow Hoffmann to publish photographs of Stalin if he was smoking a cigarette, deeming it inappropriate for a leader of Stalin's status to be shown in that way. Besides