In the days when Hermann Goering was to arrive at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris for his private exhibitions, Bruno Lohse made sure that champagne was always on ice.
Lohse, a 28-year-old Nazi soldier with an athletic background and a doctorate. In art history, he was the art dealer for Goering, the second most powerful man of the Third Reich. Brash and ambitious, Lohse had “amazed” Goering with his knowledge of seventeenth-century Dutch painting at their first meeting on March 3, 1941.
For Goering, Lohse was an invigorating change from the lackeys who usually surrounded him. A good living and feminine woman, Lohse once proclaimed himself “king of Paris.” For the Nazi elite, he was better known as Goering’s personal “blood dog,” who satisfied his boss’s reckless lust for the world’s greatest treasures, writes Jonathan Petropoulos, author of Goering’s Man in Paris. : The Story of a Nazi Art Robber and His World ”(Yale University Press), now out.
Goering was an obsessive collector, a lover of old masters and Nordic landscapes, whose lust for art became even more frantic after the Nazis invaded France in the summer of 1940. He has already acquired some of the greatest treasures in the Netherlands. Czechoslovakia and Poland, but France offered the biggest temptations.
During the war, Lohse collected the most valuable paintings that had been stolen by Jewish collectors and ostentatiously placed them before Goering during his visits to the Jeu de Paume, which was used at the time as a repository for stolen art.
Although Lohse knew how to reserve the most important treasures for Adolf Hitler’s private collection, Goering also won top choices in 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 marked Rembrandt’s “The Boy with the Red Cap” the following year. Both paintings were stolen from the Rothschild banking family, who fled France after the Nazis stormed Paris.
An elite Nazi unit was accused of robbing Jewish homes, confiscating art directly from the walls. But worried that the robbers did not appreciate the art and damaged some of the most valuable works in the process, Lohse regularly volunteered for those violent night outs. Armed with a letter of introduction from Goering giving him a white paper with Nazi officials, Lohse chose the paintings for his boss, while many families were beaten and forced out of their homes before they were finally shipped to Auschwitz.
But according to Petropoulos, Lohse claimed that the Holocaust never happened. This selective amnesia took place only after the war, when he tried to avoid going to prison, writes Petropoulos, who spoke to Lohse several times about his book.
In 1943, during the height of the atrocities, Lohse was an “unscrupulous man” who boasted with a German army officer that he was personally involved in violent acts.
He said he killed Jews. With “empty hands”.
Bruno Lohse was born in Duingdorf bei Melle, a village of 20 houses in northwestern Germany on September 17, 1911. The family – his parents and two brothers – did not stay there long, moving to Berlin, so his father , August Lohse, a collector and musician passionate about art, could take a job as a percussionist at the city’s philharmonic.
A rising figure at the height of 6 feet and 4 inches, Lohse qualified as a gymnastics teacher after graduating from high school, also pursuing a degree in art history and philosophy. He took over the leadership of his older brother Siegfried in joining the Nazi party, in flagrant opposition to their father, a hot anti-Nazi. Later, Lohse claimed to have joined the Nazi storm soldiers SS in 1932 “for sport.” He helped his SS teammates 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, a well-known eighteenth-century German painter. for landscapes.
After completing his doctorate. In 1936, Lohse began selling art from his family’s home in Berlin, and although he was never named one of the city’s foremost art dealers, he managed to make a decent living.
Lohse chose the paintings for his boss while the families were beaten.
Bruno Lohse, Goering’s art thief
When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, Lohse was sent to the front lines as a corporal and worked as an ambulance driver in a medical unit. It was a brutal campaign in which the Germans suffered more than 50,000 casualties, and Lohse was eager to leave the fighting and pursue his vocation. When an elite Nazi unit launched an urgent call for art experts to help its top-secret mission locate and then catalog the art they had robbed in France, Lohse jumped at the chance.
While Goering and Lohse sipped champagne and discussed art, French curator and Resistance member Rose Valland spied on Lohse’s movements and kept a secret list of all the arts – 30,000 works in total – that the Nazis had plundered from France. . Meanwhile, Goering had personally collected 4,263 paintings and other objects from Europe, including masterpieces by Botticelli, Rubens and Monet.
In all, “the Germans took a third of private art from France,” Valland told investigators.
At the end of the war, Lohse was arrested for his links to the Nazi party and spent several years in prisons in Germany and France. But he was never convicted of 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 robbery of art, and sentenced to be hanged. He committed suicide in 1946 by swallowing a capsule of potassium cyanide that was smuggled into his cell.
In 1950, Lohse was acquitted of looting art and then settled in Munich, where he revived his connections with the Nazi art world. He continued to buy and sell stolen art and amassed his own private collection of works by Monet, Sisley and Renoir. According to Petropoulos, the art was stored in a Swiss bank safe and on the walls of his modest apartment.
Not only did Lohse succeed in rebuilding his career after the war, but he expanded his business relations in the United States. He had no doubt looking for Theodore Rousseau, art curator and deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had questioned Lohse when he was captured at the end of the war.
Rousseau had been part of the Monuments Men, an American military unit tasked with rescuing European art from the Nazis. According to Petropoulos, the two art lovers quickly became friends. Although Lohse remained on the UN list of war crimes for most of his life, he traveled frequently to New York in the 1950s and 1960s and stayed at the elegant St. Louis Hotel. St. Moritz from Central Park South and dined with Rousseau at the city’s best Frenchman. restaurant. Rousseau also traveled to Munich to see Lohse, and the two frequently retired to Lohse’s country, staying late to drink wine and discuss art, says Petropoulos.
Lohse turned his post-war art career into a for-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 moved to a new level in the 1950s,” Petropoulos said. “He had been a small chicken dealer in Berlin before the war, and now he offered photographs of Botticelli and Cezanne. Running 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 embarked on one of their art tours around New York City in a Bentley owned by David David-Weill. David-Weill – President Lazard Freres, who was part of a French Jewish banking family from which Lohse had stolen dozens of paintings when he was Goering’s man while in Paris.
Meanwhile, dozens of paintings manipulated by Lohse went to museums in New York, Petropoulos said. When the author asked the Metropolitan Museum of Art to verify their records of origin for Lohse during his research, nothing came up 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, Petropoulos said.
Lohse died in Munich in 2007 at the age of 96. Of the 40 paintings he left behind after his death, only one – “Le Quais 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 auction in New York for just under $ 2 million.