Germany’s National Socialists, call them Nazis, wanted to expand the country’s lebensraum, its living space, by crushing other nations and murdering Jews, Slavs and Bolsheviks supposedly inferior to their “superior” Aryan selves. And, of course, there were lots of nice paintings and other objets d’art to be picked up along the way, so those were fair game too.
Biographer Jonathan Petropoulos writes of a prominent offender, Bruno Lohse, and doesn’t directly raise the incongruity that while many milllions of soldiers and civilians were being slaughtered in the combat zones, there was a parallel murky world of greed and corruption where the prevailing environment was simply profiteering from persecution and theft.
Readers will surely pause to see the parallel themselves. And there was a pecking order for the spoils. Naturally, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, had first choice, for his planned monumental Führermuseum in Linz, his boyhood town in annexed Austria. Second dibs went to Hermann Wilhelm Göring, Hitler’s most loyal supporter, then to ideological schools and museums.
It was shocking criminality, and Nazi art agents sometimes competed with each other, while some “filthy” Jewish families were less “filthy” than others if they had collections and wealth enough to allow them to bargain their way out of the cattle trucks and Zyklon B. And German agents were not above trading “degenerate” modernist art, for more-prized Old Masters.
Göring (1893-1946) was an all-powerful figure in the Nazi Party, having established the Gestapo secret political police and concentration camps for the “corrective treatment” of undesirables. He headed the Luftwaffe, the air force, and was Reichsmarschall, highest rank in the Wehrmacht armed forces. Göring often dressed in hunting costume, to link himself to landed society in particular and country life in general. And he was especially keen to project himself as a kind of Renaissance man, a collector not only of hunting trophies but also of art.
He began collecting in a modest way in the 1920s and more ambitiously in the mid-1930s, but the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 and the conquest of much of Europe and a large swathe of the Soviet Union, offered the possibility of almost limitless acquisition.
Insatiable, he used his impregnable position to enrich himself and build what he boasted after his capture in 1945 was the finest private collection in Europe (a disputed claim). He had a vast forest estate in the Schorfheide, north of Berlin, where from 1933 he developed a baronial set-up named Carinhall, and it was here that he kept the bulk of his hoard.
Göring could not tell a good painting from a bad one, but he employed professional experts to scour Europe for paintings, sculptures, tapestries, jewellery, carpets, fragments of Roman buidings; all he could lay his hands on. Much enrichment came from Jewish collections in the occupied countries, and many gifts from those who sought his favour.
By the end of the war he had, besides some 1700 paintings, 250 sculptures, 108 tapestries, 200 pieces of antique furniture, 75 stained-glass windows, 60 Persian or French rugs and 175 other various pieces. The pictures included many by Brueghel, Cranach, Rembrandt, Rubens, Ruysdael, Tintoretto, Titian and Van Dyck. He went to great lengths to avoid being considered a looter. But behind the scenes he used currency manipulation and pressure of various kinds to effect gifts and purchases at the lowest prices. He carried devalued Reichsmarks.
Göring’s bloodhound in occupied Paris was Dr. Bruno Lohse (1911-2007), the deputy director of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the ERR, a new and secretive Nazi organ tasked with looting Jewish-owned cultural property. Lohse initially was conscripted into the German Army to fight in Poland, but he had a PhD in art history was approached by the ERR.
Its sole purpose was to plunder Europe, though it had tentacles, basically following the German Army. When Lohse arrived at the ERR headquarters in Paris he found art looting on an industrial scale. The organisation stole whatever it could lay its hands on, whether a painting of really no value except to the family, furniture, tables, plates, cutlery, candlesticks.
And France was the place for art — or more valuable art – more so than any other part of Europe. One estimate is that the ERR stole one-third of all the art in private collections in the country; the Rothschilds, Alphonse Kann, David-Weills and other great Jewish families. The machinations to grab the Schloss family artworks make particularly eye-opening reading.
The Göring connection made Lohse among the most promient individuals in the ERR. He felt he was king of Paris, armed with a pass from the Reischmarschall that allowed him to travel freely and buy what he wanted. Lohse helped his patron commandeer some 700 pictures from ERR in Paris, with Göring never parting with a pfennig.
Petropoulos, who is a European history professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, US, ranks Lohse in the top five of history’s all-time art looters. The author met him for the first time in Munich in 1998 after writing to seek an interview for a book he was writing about the complicity of art experts in Nazi plundering (“The Faustian Bargain. The Art World in Nazi Germany” published in 2000).
By the late 1990s, most of the Nazi art experts who helped loot European Jews were either dead or living quiet lives under the radar, but not so Lohse. Over the next nine years, he and Petropoulos met more than two dozen times, and the author was invited to Lohse’s Munich flat, where he saw on the walls Expressionist works and Dutch Old Masters worth millions.
Lohse would often pull out a box of old photographs and mementos, allowing Petropoulos to peer over his shoulder and to pepper him with questions. Lohse died in 2007 and bequeathed the box to Petropoulos, who used it as source material for the new “Göring’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World”.
Lohse’s large walk-in bank vault in Zurich was found to hold works by Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Corot and Wouwerman, confirming suspicions that at the ERR he slyly siphoned off pieces to sell or keep for himself. Petropoloulos tackles the questions of how Lohse amassed such works, what do we learn about the nexus of culture and barbarism, and what of the post-war networks that grew and the fate of much Nazi-stolen art?
There were challenges in writing about Lohse, such as separating his stories from the truth, the dearth of archival sources, the culture of silence among the participants and their general desire to conceal this history. The author determines that the physically imposing Lohse was personally involved in emptying Jewish homes and boasted to a German officer that he had beaten Jewish owners to death “with his own hands”.
The biographer learned that the wartime networks of Nazi dealers did indeed persist into peacetime, individuals such as Lohse growing prosperous selling to museums and collectors, often cashing in on goods with complicated wartime pasts. Lohse was jailed at the end of the war and investigated. He was tried and acquitted in France in 1950 then returned to the art trade from his new base in Munich, where other former Nazi art experts had also gone back to work, trading mostly within a “circle of trust” in Germany and Switzerland.
Göring avoided being hanged as a war criminal by taking poison. Lohse was imprisoned in France for about two and a half years and faced charges of pillaging but was unexpectedly acquitted in 1950, perhaps due to poor prosecuiton, good defence and other vague factors. Some 20 percent of items stolen in France remain out there somewhere. It’s all quite a story.
