“They’ve been had! The Monuments Men were had!” exclaims Emmanuelle Polack, the art historian in charge of World War II provenance inquiries at the Louvre, in Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief. The new documentary, directed by Hugo Macgregor and currently streaming on pbs.org and the PBS app, unravels the past and present tentacles of a key Nazi art looter, Bruno Lohse, who was in charge of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), Alfred Rosenberg’s special looting task force, in Paris during WWII. Plunderer asks us to rethink what we know about looting, art restitution, the art market, and who the war’s heroes and villains really were.
The practice of WWII art restitution considers the crime of art looting as specific to the wartime years. It is an investigation into actions taken in the distant past by Nazi operators and middlemen who have been relegated in history as the enemy. But what Plunderer shows is that many of those players returned to the art world without serving time for their crimes, and continued to operate in the legitimate art trade after the war. Bruno Lohse and others went to great lengths to conceal their wartime pasts, as well as art they still possessed after the fall of the Third Reich, and continued their devious trade into the 21st century. Many art dealers during and after the war were knowingly complicit in the sale of looted art.
Another key player in Plunderer is historian and professor Jonathan Petropoulos, author of Göring’s Man in Paris, who found himself unwittingly in the center of one of Lohse’s elaborate schemes. Petropoulos is just one of many who, despite best efforts, was ensnared by the Nazi’s cunning.
The first episode of Plunderer introduces the audience to Lohse and shows how the Nazis systematically looted Jewish-owned art, particularly in France, and how this process was tied directly to the deportation and extermination of the Jewish population. Most effectively, the film demonstrates how Lohse took advantage of the power struggles among the Nazi hierarchy to ingratiate himself with someone like Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man and designated successor.
While he was initially sent to Paris to create an inventory of looted art, Lohse became Göring’s personal art dealer in France. He was given a nearly unlimited line of credit at the bank, a private car, and a direct phone line to reach Göring at all times. To secure art, he became involved in the dangerous criminal underworld in France and, as the documentary asserts, was personally involved in the interrogation and deportation of at least one Jewish art dealer and his wife to Auschwitz. His boss at the ERR, Colonel Kurt von Behr, operated a prison campin Paris for Jewish detainees.
This episode also introduces Rose Valland, the art historian and Resistance spy who worked in the Jeu de Paume museum, which had been taken over by the ERR. Valland documented the numerous works of art Lohse stole from the Jewish-owned collections, and would become his lifelong nemesis.
After the fall of Germany, Lohse was only lightly interrogated by the American OSS’s Art Looting Investigation Unit, and eventually exonerated in a French war crime trial. Later, he remained close with several of his American interrogators, including James Plaut, Theodore Rousseau, who became the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chief curator and deputy director, and S. Lane Faison, a professor at Williams College. Lohse tried to sell art to The Met multiple times. Although no sales were concluded, Petropoulos believes that he likely sold art to other American museums through middlemen.
Documents in The Met archives, which I found through the research for my book, The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, show that Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives officer James Rorimer, the director of The Met Museum, was horrified at the willful “whitewashing” of Lohse’s wartime actions by his own military colleagues. Rose Valland, along with Rorimer, continued to try to hold Lohse accountable, hoping for a retribution that never materialized. “I think [Rose Valland] really is enemy number one of Bruno Lohse,” states Emmanuelle Polack in the documentary.
The second episode of Plunder takes a deep dive into one of Lohse’s most devious postwar plots. Petropoulos, who became acquainted with Lohse in preparation for his books on Nazi looting, is led to believe that the famous “Fischer Pissarro” painting, looted from Gottfried Bermann Fischer during WWII, had been located and that the heirs of the most recent owner wanted to restitute it. Petropoulos attempts to navigate a complicated spiderweb of international organizations, including a Swiss bank where the painting was stored in a vault, an art foundation in Luxembourg, and a series of tax shelter entities mentioned in the Panama Papers with connections to Russian oligarchs and nuclear arms smuggling.
A subsequent media controversy led to Petropoulos’s resignation as director of the Center of the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna University. (He remains a professor and the university’s investigation determined that he had “adhered to applicable contractual and legal obligations in attempting to arrange return of the painting.”) As he states in the documentary, “One does not trifle with Lohse without consequences.”
As Plunderer clearly demonstrates, the actions of Nazi art looters were not isolated to the 1940s. A continued opaqueness in the art market and a convenient haplessness on the part of some American investigators allowed Nazi art dealers, whose networks only expanded during the war, to peddle in art of questionable provenance for decades after the war. “The crime of plunder pays for itself,” says provenance expert Marc Masurovsky, “If I’m going to recommend any crime against humanity, it’s the crime of plunder.” Plunderer seems to suggest that Nazi-looted art is undoubtedly among us, even in the most esteemed art institutions, and that it is time for a real reckoning in the art world.
Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief is available to stream on pbs.org and the PBS app.
