On the days that Hermann Goering would arrive at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris for his private exhibitions, Bruno Lohse made sure the champagne was always on ice.
Lohse, a 28-year-old Nazi storm trooper with an athletic build and a Ph.D. in art history, was the art dealer of Goering, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Strikingly and ambitiously, Lohse “blinded” Goering with their knowledge of 17th-century Dutch painting during their first meeting on March 3, 1941.
For Goering, Lohse was a refreshing change from the lackeys that usually surrounded him. Lohse, who is a living woman and woman, once declared himself ‘King of Paris’. To the Nazi elite, he was better known as Goering’s personal ‘art dog’, which satisfied his boss ‘insatiable appetite for the world’s greatest treasures, writes Jonathan Petropoulos, author of’ Goering’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World ”(Yale University Press), now out.
Goering was an obsessive collector, a lover of Old Masters and northern landscapes, whose lust for art became even more grim after the Nazis invaded France in the summer of 1940. He has already acquired some of the largest treasures in Holland, Czechoslovakia and Poland. but France offered the greatest temptations.
During the war, Lohse collected the most valuable paintings stolen from Jewish collectors and apparently presented them to Goering during his visits to the Jeu de Paume, which at the time was used as a warehouse for stolen art.
Although Lohse knew how to preserve the most important treasures for Adolf Hitler’s own private collection, Goering also had the best choice during his 20 visits to the French museum. Thanks to Lohse, Goering uploaded his private train with Van Gogh’s “Pont de Langlois” in 1941 and achieved Rembrandt’s “Boy with a Red Cap” the following year. Both paintings were stolen from the Rothschild bank family, who fled France after the Nazis stormed Paris.
An elite Nazi unit is accused of looting Jewish homes and taking the art straight off the walls. But, worried that thugs had no appreciation for art and damaged some of the most valuable works in the process, Lohse regularly offered him up for the violent nightmare. Armed with an introductory letter from Goering giving him a carte blanche with Nazi officials, Lohse selected the paintings for his boss while many families were beaten and forced out of their own homes, before finally being sent to Auschwitz after their deaths. .
According to Petropoulos, Lohse claims the massacre never took place. This selective memory loss only occurred after the war when he tried to go to jail, writes Petropoulos, who spoke to Lohse several times for his book.
In 1943, at the height of the atrocities, Lohse was “a man without scruples” who once boasted to a German army officer that he had personally participated in violent acts.
He said he killed Jews. With his ‘bare hands’.
Bruno Lohse was born on September 17, 1911 in Duingdorf bei Melle, a town with 20 houses in northwestern Germany. The family – his parents and two siblings – did not stay long there and moved to Berlin so that his father, August Lohse, a passionate art collector and musician, could take a job as a percussionist at the city’s philharmonic.
Lohse was a tall figure 6 inches tall and qualified as a high school teacher after high school, while also earning a degree in art history and philosophy. He took the lead of his older brother, Siegfried, by joining the Nazi party, in blatant opposition to their father, an ardent anti-Nazi. Lohse later claims that in 1932 he joined the SS, the Nazi stormtroopers, ‘for the sports’. He helped his SS teammates in 1935 win a national handball championship. In the same year he was able to spend four months in Paris on his dissertation on Jacob Philipp Hackert, an 18th-century German painter known for landscapes.
Upon completion of his Ph.D. in 1936, Lohse began selling art from his family home in Berlin, and although he was never considered one of the city’s leading art dealers, he was able to make a decent living.
Lohse picked out the paintings for his boss while families were beaten.
about Bruno Lohse, Goering’s art thief
When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, Lohse was sent to the front line 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 profession. When an elite Nazi unit urgently appealed to art experts to help their secret track down the art they had looted in France and then catalog it, Lohse took the chance.
While Goering and Lohse sipped champagne and talked about art, French curator and member of the Resistance Rose Valland spied on Lohse’s movements and kept a secret list of all the art – a total of 30,000 works – that the Nazis France looted. Goering has meanwhile personally collected 4,263 paintings and other objects in Europe, including masterpieces by Botticelli, Rubens and Monet.
In total, “the Germans took a third of the art in private ownership 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 convicted of his role in stealing art. In Nuremberg, the Allies were more concerned about the high-ranking Nazis who organized and participated in the massacre of millions of Jews. Goering was convicted of war crimes, including looting art, and sentenced to be hanged. He committed suicide in 1946 by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule smuggled into his cell.
In 1950, Lohse was acquitted of looting art and then settled in Munich where he revived his Nazi art world connections. He continued to buy and sell stolen art and piled up his own private collection with 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.
Lohse not only succeeded in rebuilding his career after the war, but also expanded his shady business transactions to the US. He had no doubt looking for Theodore Rousseau, an art curator and deputy director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who interviewed Lohse when he was captured at the end of the war.
Rousseau was part of the Monuments Men, an American military unit responsible for rescuing the art of Europe from the Nazis. According to Petropoulos, the two art lovers quickly became friends. Although Lohse remained on a United Nations watch list for most of his life, he traveled extensively to New York in the 1950s and 1960s, staying in the posh Hotel St. Louis. Moritz stayed in Central Park South and ate with Rousseau at the best French French city. restaurant. Rousseau also traveled to Munich to visit Lohse, and the two regularly returned to Lohse’s country house and stayed late to drink wine and discuss art, Petropoulos said.
Lohse turned his post-war art career into a profit machine and, through a series of intermediaries, sold art of suspicious origin, 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,” Petropoulos said. ‘Before the war he was a small braai merchant in Berlin, and he now offered photographs by people like Botticelli and Cezanne. It was very profitable for him to work in the shadows.
In a testament to the opportunism that characterized the art world after the war, Rousseau and Lohse embark on one of their art outings in New York City in a Bentley owned by David David-Weill. David-Weill, the chairman of Lazard Freres, who was part of a French Jewish banking family from whom Lohse stole dozens of paintings when he was Goering’s husband while in Paris.
Meanwhile, dozens of paintings that Lohse handled probably moved to New York museums, Petropoulos said. When the author asked the Metropolitan Museum of Art to check their ancestry records for Lohse in the course of his investigation, nothing came up with his name or that of his Swiss lawyer. Many of the archives at Rousseau have been closed to researchers and will not be opened until 2050, Petropoulos said.
Lohse died in 2007 at the age of 96 in Munich. 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.