On the days when Hermann Goering was due to arrive at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris for his private exhibitions, Bruno Lohse insisted that champagne was always on ice.
Lohse, a 28-year-old Nazi assault soldier with an athletic build and a Ph.D. in art history, was an art dealer for Goering, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Bold and ambitious, Lohse “dazzled” Goering with his knowledge of 17th century Dutch painting at his first meeting on March 3, 1941.
For Goering, Lohse was an invigorating change from the lackeys who normally surrounded him. Bon vivant and womanizer, Lohse once proclaimed himself the “King of Paris”. To the Nazi elite, he was best known as Goering’s personal “art hound”, who satisfied his boss’s insatiable appetite for the world’s greatest treasures, writes Jonathan Petropoulos, author of “Man of Goering in Paris: a story of a looter of Nazi art and His World ”(Yale University Press), now available.
Goering was an obsessive collector, a lover of ancient masters and northern landscapes, whose passion for art became even more frantic after the Nazis invaded France in the summer of 1940. He had already acquired some of Holland’s greatest treasures, Czechoslovakia and Poland, but France offered the greatest temptations.
During the war, Lohse collected the most valuable paintings stolen from Jewish collectors and displayed them ostensibly in front of Goering during his visits to the Jeu de Paume, which at the time was used as a stolen art deposit.
Although Lohse knew how to reserve the most important treasures for Adolf Hitler’s private collection, Goering also obtained the best choices during his 20 visits to the French museum. Thanks to Lohse, Goering loaded his private train with Van Gogh’s “Pont de Langlois” in 1941 and scored Rembrandt’s “Boy with a Red Bon” the following year. Both paintings were stolen from the family of bankers Rothschild, who fled France after the Nazis invaded Paris.
An elite Nazi unit was accused of looting Jewish homes, seizing art directly from the walls. But worried that the bandits would not appreciate art and damage some of the most valuable works in the process, Lohse regularly volunteered for those violent nighttime sorties. Armed with a letter of introduction from Goering that gave him carte blanche with Nazi officers, Lohse chose the paintings for his boss while many families were beaten and forced to leave their own homes, before finally being sent to death in Auschwitz.
But, according to Petropoulos, Lohse said the Holocaust never happened. This selective amnesia occurred only after the war, when he tried to avoid going to jail, writes Petropoulos, who spoke to Lohse several times for his book.
In 1943, during the height of the atrocities, Lohse was “an unscrupulous man” who once boasted to an officer in the German army that he had personally participated in violent acts.
He said he had killed Jews. With your “own hands”.
Bruno Lohse was born in Duingdorf bei Melle, a village of 20 houses in northwest Germany on September 17, 1911. The family – his parents and two brothers – did not stay there for long, moving to Berlin so that his father, August Lohse, a passionate art collector and musician, could work as a percussionist with the city’s philharmonic.
An imposing figure six feet tall, Lohse qualified as a physical education teacher after graduating from high school, while studying art history and philosophy. He took over the leadership of his older brother, Siegfried, by joining the Nazi party, in flagrant opposition to their father, a fervent anti-Nazi. Later, Lohse claimed that he joined the SS, the Nazi riot police, in 1932 “for sports”. He helped his SS comrades win a national handball championship in 1935. In the same year, he managed to spend four months in Paris working on his dissertation on Jacob Philipp Hackert, an 18th century German painter known for landscapes.
After completing his Ph.D. in 1936, Lohse started selling art from his family’s home in Berlin, and although he was never counted among the city’s most prominent art dealers, he managed to earn a decent living.
Lohse chose the paintings for his boss while families were being beaten.
in Bruno Lohse, art thief of Goering
When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, Lohse was dispatched to the front line as a corporal and worked as an ambulance driver at a medical facility. It was a brutal campaign in which the Germans suffered more than 50,000 casualties, and Lohse was eager to leave the fight and pursue his calling. When an elite Nazi unit made an urgent call for art experts to assist in its top-secret mission to locate and catalog the art they looted in France, Lohse seized the chance.
While Goering and Lohse sipped champagne and talked about art, French curator and Resistance member Rose Valland spied on Lohse’s movements and maintained a secret list of all the works of art – 30,000 works in total – that the Nazis stole from France. Goering, however, had personally accumulated 4,263 paintings and other objects in Europe, including masterpieces by Botticelli, Rubens and Monet.
Altogether, “the Germans had taken a third of the private works of art in France,” Valland told investigators.
At the end of the war, Lohse was arrested for his ties to the Nazi party and spent several years in prisons in Germany and France. But he was never condemned for his role in stealing art. In Nuremberg, the Allies were more concerned with the high-ranking Nazis who had organized and participated in the mass murder of millions of Jews. Goering was convicted of war crimes, including looting art, and sentenced to hang. He committed suicide in 1946 by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule that was smuggled into his cell.
In 1950, Lohse was acquitted for stealing art and later settled in Munich, where he revived his connections with the Nazi art world. He continued to buy and sell stolen art and stacked his private collection with works by Monet, Sisley and Renoir. According to Petropoulos, the art was kept in a Swiss bank safe and on the walls of his modest apartment.
Lohse not only managed to rebuild his career after the war, he extended his dark business to the United States. He had no qualms about looking for Theodore Rousseau, an art curator and deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who interrogated Lohse when he was captured at the end of the war.
Rousseau was part of the Monuments Men, a United States military unit charged with saving the art of Europe from the Nazis. According to Petropoulos, the two art lovers quickly became friends. Although Lohse remained on the United Nations war crimes list for most of his life, he traveled frequently to New York in the 1950s and 1960s and stayed at the elegant Hotel St. Moritz in Central Park South and dined with Rousseau in the city’s best French restaurants. Rousseau also traveled to Munich to see Lohse, and the two often retired to Lohse’s country house, staying up late to drink wine and discuss art, says Petropoulos.
Lohse turned his postwar artistic career into a profit machine, selling art of suspicious origin through a series of intermediaries, such as his Swiss lawyer Frederic Schoni and the Wildenstein gallery in New York, according to Petropoulos.
“Lohse in the 1950s moved to a new level,” said Petropoulos. “He was a small potato chip dealer in Berlin before the war and was now offering pictures of names like Botticelli and Cézanne. Operating in the shadows was very profitable for him. ”
In a testament to the opportunism that marked the art world after the war, Rousseau and Lohse set out on one of their art business tours through New York City in a Bentley owned by David David-Weill. David-Weill, – the president of Lazard Freres, who was part of a family of French Jewish bankers from whom Lohse stole dozens of paintings when he was the man of Goering in Paris.
In the meantime, dozens of paintings that Lohse manipulated probably made it to New York’s museums, Petropoulos said. When the author asked the Metropolitan Museum of Art to check his records of Lohse’s provenance during the course of his research, nothing came with his name or that of his Swiss lawyer, he said. Many of Rousseau’s archives are closed to researchers and are not scheduled to open until 2050, said Petropoulos.
Lohse died in Munich in 2007, at the age of 96. Of the 40 paintings he left behind after his death, only one – “Le Qual Malaquais, Printemps” by Camille Pissarro – was returned to the heirs of the original owners with the help of Petropoulos. In 2009, the painting was sold at an auction in New York for just under $ 2 million.