In the days when Hermann Goering had 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 storm soldier with an athletic build and a doctorate. in art history, he was the art dealer of Goering, the second most powerful man of the Third Reich. Ambitious and ambitious, Lohse had “dazzled” Goering with his knowledge of seventeenth-century Dutch painting at his first meeting on March 3, 1941.
For Goering, Lohse was a refreshing change from the footmen who normally surrounded him. Lohse, a good living and loving woman, was once proclaimed “king of Paris.” For the Nazi elite, he was best known as Goering’s personal “artistic hound,” who satisfied his head’s insatiable appetite for the world’s great treasures, writes Jonathan Petropoulos, author of “Goering’s Man in Paris: The story of a Nazi art looter and His World ”(Yale University Press), now out.
Goering was an obsessive collector, a lover of old masters and northern landscapes, whose will to art became even more frantic after the Nazis invaded France in the summer of 1940. He had already acquired some of the greatest treasures in Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, but France offered the greatest temptations.
During the war, Lohse collected the most valuable paintings that had been stolen from Jewish collectors and ostentatiously placed them before Goering during his visits to the Jeu de Paume, which was then used as an art store. stolen.
Although Lohse knew how to reserve the most important treasures for Adolf Hitler’s own private collection, Goering also obtained the best options during his 20 visits to the French museum. Thanks to Lohse, Goering loaded his private train with Van Gogh’s “Langlois Bridge” in 1941 and won the title of “Boy with a Red Cap” by Rembrandt 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 looting Jewish homes and seizing art directly from the walls. But worried that the thugs would have no appreciation for the art and spoil some of the most valuable works in the process, Lohse volunteered for those violent night outs. Armed with a letter of introduction from Goering giving him carte blanche with Nazi officers, Lohse chose the paintings for his head while many families were beaten and forced to leave their homes, before finally being sent to Auschwitz.
But, according to Petropoulos, Lohse claimed that the Holocaust never happened. This selective amnesia occurred 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, in the midst of the crisis, Lohse was “an unscrupulous man” who had once boasted to a German army officer who had personally taken part in violent acts.
He said he had killed Jews. With his “bare 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 his two brothers) did not stay there long, moving in Berlin because his father, August Lohse, an avid art and musician collector, could work as a percussionist in the city’s philharmonic.
An imposing figure of 6 feet and 4 inches tall, Lohse qualified as a gym teacher after graduating from high school, while also pursuing a degree in art history and philosophy. He took the initiative of his older brother Siegfried by joining the Nazi party, in flagrant opposition to his father, a fervent anti-Nazi. Lohse later claimed that he had joined the SS, the Nazi storm soldiers, in 1932 “for sports.” 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, an 18th-century German painter known for his landscapes.
After completing his doctorate. in 1936, Lohse began selling art outside his family home in Berlin and, although he was never counted among the most important art dealers in the city, he was able to make a decent living.
Lohse chose the paintings on his head while the families were beaten.
to 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 abandon the fighting and continue his vocation. When an elite Nazi unit made an urgent call for art experts to help with their top-secret mission to locate and then catalog the art they looted in France, Lohse jumped at the chance.
While Goering and Lohse drank champagne and chatted about art, French curator and Resistance member Rose Valland spied on Lohse’s movements and kept a secret list of all the art – 30,000 works in total – that the Nazis looted from France. Meanwhile, Goering had personally amassed 4,263 paintings and other objects in Europe, including masterpieces by Botticelli, Rubens, and Monet.
In all, “the Germans had taken a third of private art in 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 about the high 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 capsule of potassium cyanide that was smuggled into his cell.
In 1950, Lohse was acquitted for looting 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 stack his own private collection with works by Monet, Sisley and Renoir. According to Petropoulos, the art was kept in a Swiss bank vault and on the walls of his modest apartment.
Lohse not only managed to rebuild his career after the war, but extended his shady business to the United States. He had no hesitation in looking for Theodore Rousseau, art curator and deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had interrogated 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 saving Nazi art in Europe. According to Petropoulos, the two art lovers quickly became friends. Although Lohse remained on the United Nations war crimes watch list for most of his life, he traveled frequently to New York in the 1950s and 1960s and stayed at the elegant St. Louis Hotel. . Moritz in Central Park South and had dinner with Rousseau at the best French restaurants in town. restaurants. Rousseau also traveled to Munich to see Lohse, and the two frequently retired to Lohse’s cottage, staying up late to drink wine and discuss art, Petropoulos says.
Lohse turned his postwar artistic career into a winning 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 took it to a new level,” Petropoulos said. “He had been a small French fries seller in Berlin before the war, and now he offered pictures of Botticelli and Cezanne. Operating in the shade was very profitable for him ”.
As a testament to the opportunism that marked the post-war art world, Rousseau and Lohse embarked on one of their artistic excursions around New York City in a Bentley owned by David David-Weill. David-Weill, the president of Lazard Freres, who was part of a French Jewish banking family to which Lohse had stolen dozens of paintings when he was Goering’s man while in Paris.
Meanwhile, dozens of paintings Lohse handled probably went to museums in New York, Petropoulos said. When the author asked the Metropolitan Museum of Art to check his records of Lohse’s provenance during the course of his investigation, 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 expected to open until 2050, Petropoulos said.
Lohse died in Munich in 2007, at the age of 96. Of the 40 paintings he left after his death, only one – “Le Quais Malaquais, Printemps” by Camille Pissarro – has been returned to the heirs of the original owners with the help of Petropoulos. In 2009, the painting was sold at a New York auction for just under $ 2 million.