On the days when Hermann Göring would come to the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris for his private exhibitions, Bruno Lohse made sure that the champagne was always on ice.
Lohse, a 28-year-old Nazi stormtrooper of athletic build and a Ph.D. in art history, Goering’s art dealer was the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Brash and ambitious, Lohse had ‘blinded’ Göring with his knowledge of 17th-century Dutch painting during their first meeting on March 3, 1941.
For Goering, Lohse was a refreshing change from the lackeys who usually surrounded him. Lohse, a bon vivant and womanizer, once proclaimed himself ‘king of Paris’. He was better known to the Nazi elite as Goering’s personal ‘artificial bloodhound’, satisfying his owner’s insatiable hunger 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), available now.
Goering was an obsessive collector, a lover of old masters and northern landscapes, whose longing for art became even more frenetic after the Nazis invaded France in the summer of 1940. He had already acquired some of the greatest treasures in the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Poland. but France offered the greatest temptations.
During the war, Lohse collected the most valuable paintings stolen from Jewish collectors, and ostentatiously presented them to Goering during his visits to the Jeu de Paume, which was then used as a repository for stolen art.
While Lohse knew he managed to reserve the most important treasures for Adolf Hitler’s own private collection, Göring was also given top picks during his 20 visits to the French museum. Thanks to Lohse, Göring loaded up his private train with Van Gogh’s “Pont de Langlois” in 1941 and scored Rembrandt’s “Boy with a red hat” 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 charged with looting Jewish homes and confiscating the art straight from the walls. But fearful that thugs didn’t appreciate art and damaged some of the most valuable works in the process, Lohse regularly volunteered for those violent night flights. Armed with a letter of introduction from Göring that gave him carte blanche with Nazi officials, Lohse chose the paintings for his boss, while many families were beaten and driven from their own homes, before finally being shipped to Auschwitz.
But according to Petropoulos, Lohse claimed the Holocaust never happened. This selective amnesia did not occur until after the war, when he tried to avoid prison, writes Petropoulos, who spoke to Lohse several times for his book.
In 1943, at the height of the atrocities, Lohse was “an unscrupulous man” who once boasted to a German army officer that he personally participated in acts of violence.
He said he killed Jews. With his ‘bare hands’.
Bruno Lohse was born in Duingdorf bei Melle, a village of twenty houses in northwestern Germany on September 17, 1911. The family – his parents and two brothers and sisters – did not stay there long and moved to Berlin, so his father, August Lohse , a passionate art collector and musician, could take a job as a percussionist with the city’s philharmonic orchestra.
A towering figure, six feet tall, Lohse qualified as a gym teacher after graduating from high school, while also pursuing a degree in art history and philosophy. He took over from his elder brother Siegfried by joining the Nazi Party, in blatant opposition to their father, a staunch anti-Nazi. Lohse later claimed that in 1932 he had joined the SS, the Nazi storm troops, “for the 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 thesis on Jacob Philipp Hackert, an 18th-century German painter known for his landscapes.
After completing his Ph.D. In 1936 Lohse began selling art from his childhood home in Berlin, and although he was never counted among the city’s foremost art dealers, he was able to earn a decent income.
Lohse chose the paintings for his boss while families were beaten.
about Bruno Lohse, Göring’s art thief
When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, Lohse was sent to the front as a corporal and worked as an ambulance driver in a medical unit. It was a relentless 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 appeal to art experts to assist in their top-secret mission to track down and then catalog the art they had looted in France, Lohse seized the opportunity.
While Goering and Lohse drank champagne and talked 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 all – that the Nazis had looted from France. Goering had meanwhile personally collected 4,263 paintings and other objects in Europe, including masterpieces by Botticelli, Rubens and Monet.
In all, “the Germans had taken a third of the private 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 has never been convicted for his role in stealing art. In Nuremberg, the Allies were more concerned about the high-ranking Nazis who organized and participated in the mass murder of millions of Jews. Göring was convicted of war crimes, including looting of 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 looting art and then settled in Munich, where he revived his Nazi art world relations. 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 vault and on the walls of his modest apartment.
Not only did Lohse manage to rebuild his post-war career, he also expanded his shady business dealings to the US. He had no qualms about seeking out Theodore Rousseau, an art curator and deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had questioned Lohse when he was arrested at the end of the war.
Rousseau was part of the Monuments Men, an American military unit dedicated to saving European art from the Nazis. According to Petropoulos, the two art lovers quickly became friends. Although Lohse was on the UN war crimes checklist for most of his life, he traveled regularly to New York during the 1950s and 1960s, staying at the posh Hotel St. Moritz in Central Park South and dining with Rousseau at the finest. French restaurant in town. restaurants. Rousseau also traveled to Munich to see Lohse, and the two often retired to Lohse’s mansion, where they stayed up late to drink wine and talk about art, Petropoulos says.
Lohse turned his post-war art career into a profit machine by selling art of suspicious provenance through a range of intermediaries, such as his Swiss lawyer Frederic Schoni and the Wildenstein gallery in New York, Petropoulos said.
“Lohse moved to a new level in the 1950s,” said Petropoulos. He had been a small chip shop in Berlin before the war, and now he offered photos of Botticelli and Cezanne, among others. Operating in the shade was very profitable for him. ”
As proof of the opportunism that characterized the post-war art world, Rousseau and Lohse set out on one of their art trade excursions through New York City in a David David-Weill Bentley. David-Weill, – the chairman of Lazard Freres, who was part of a French Jewish banking family from whom Lohse had stolen dozens of paintings while he was Goering’s husband while in Paris.
Meanwhile, dozens of paintings Lohse dealt with have likely gone to museums in New York, Petropoulos said. When the author asked the Metropolitan Museum of Art to check their origin records for Lohse during his investigation, nothing came up with his name or that of his Swiss lawyer, he said. Many of the archives on Rousseau are closed to researchers and won’t 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 auction in New York for just under $ 2 million.