Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. He began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution in 1983 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1990; he also had an appointment as Lecturer in History and History & Literature at Harvard. He is the author of Art as Politics in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); The Faustian Bargain (Oxford University Press, 2000); Royals and the Reich (Oxford University Press, 2006); Artists Under Hitler (Yale University Press, 2014), and has helped edit a number of other volumes. From 1998 to 2000, he served as Research Director for Art and Cultural Property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report, Restitution and Plunder (2001). He has also served as an expert witness in a number of cases where Holocaust victims have tried to recover lost artworks, including Altmann v. Austria, which involved six paintings by Gustav Klimt claimed by Maria Altmann and other family members; five paintings were returned.
Göring’s Man in Paris is about the art world, and how profit is such a driving force that one of the greatest art plunderers of all time could insinuate himself in the respectable art world just months after being released from a French prison. The art world is secretive, as was the world of former Nazi art plunderers. It took over thirty years of research to write this book, and it was the interviews with Lohse and other figures in his circles that allowed me to understand the complex networks that he helped sustain.The center of the networks was in Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement. After 1945, many old Nazis settled there, including in the areas around Lake Starnberg to the southwest of the city. Individuals in the states contiguous to Bavaria (of which Munich is the capital) played a key role in these networks. It included some in Austria (which also had many former Nazis), Switzerland (with its secretive banking culture), and Liechtenstein (which featured foundations created to evade taxes). The networks extended to other parts of Europe and to the United States. The U.S. was the most important market in the art world, and it is axiomatic that art follows money. Over 90 percent of museums in the US today were founded after 1945. Lohse and his cohort helped build their collections.
Jonathan Petropoulos Göring's Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World Yale University Press456 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches ISBN 978 0300251920
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