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.
For a closer look, I would direct the reader to the section on the relationship between Theodore (“Ted”) Rousseau and Bruno Lohse. Rousseau, the former OSS officer who interrogated Lohse for several months in the summer of 1945, continued to stay in touch with the Nazi plunderer, despite the fact that Rousseau became a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and later, Deputy Director under Thomas Hoving. I don’t know what is more extraordinary: their relationship, or the fact that Rousseau kept so many of Lohse’s letters in his files. Their correspondence is in the Met Archives and was made accessible to researchers in around 2015, although some of Rousseau’s papers remain closed until 2050 and beyond.The letters between Ted Rousseau and Bruno Lohse show the two men trading information about artworks for sale. The letters also attest to many visits: Lohse coming to New York to see Rousseau, his former captor, at the Met, and Rousseau meeting Lohse not just in Munich, but also in Paris and Zurich, among other locales. Lohse offered Rousseau many fine paintings by the likes of Botticelli, Monet, and Cezanne, but there is no evidence of the Met acquiring works from him. The question remains: did the former Nazi plunderer use cut-outs (intermediaries who obscured his role), as he did in other instances, including selling two pictures attributed to Albrecht Dürer to the German Historical Museum in Berlin in the early 2000s? Years earlier, Lohse had bragged in one letter to Rousseau from 1959 that he was very successful selling to other American museums, yet he intentionally tried to cover his tracks, and there is a great deal he successfully concealed.Ted Rousseau was a swashbuckling curator: he was sophisticated (educated at Eton, Harvard, and the Sorbonne), spoke many languages, and was a spy in the Far East before joining the OSS’s Art Looting Investigation Unit. Rousseau was competitive and took chances (his regard for European export laws was notoriously suspect), so it is not surprising that he would turn to a Nazi art plunderer as a source of information and perhaps artworks themselves. There is no doubt that Rousseau understood that a large number of Nazi looted artworks had never been restituted, and he knew exactly who Lohse was, having helped pen the OSS reports on him. But Rousseau wanted to build the Met’s collections and if Lohse could be helpful…I think the book has many implications—about the nature of the art world, about the nexus of culture and barbarism (the Nazis devoted so much time to art and yet murdered systematically), and about the fate of Nazi looted artworks after the war; but the point I would emphasize here is that there is still so much to uncover. History is accretional, and while I have made my contribution here, I look forward to others continuing to add to the story.To begin writing this story, it was important that I go and meet Bruno Lohse in 1998, and that I continued to interview him right up until his death in March 2007. Lohse agreed to meet with me for a number of reasons. I had done a Ph.D. at Harvard University and had come to know two of the other OSS officers who had interrogated Lohse at war’s end (Rousseau died in 1973 and I never met him). The two OSS officers had also attended Harvard and Lohse held them (and the university) in particularly high regard. The fact that I could speak and correspond with him in German was critical. Over the years, Lohse became more relaxed and expansive when telling his stories, and these stories served as one of the pillars of this book. I could check them against the extant documentation and talk to those in his circle in order to form a picture of his postwar career.Lohse sold valuable paintings to museums in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. In the last years of his life, around 48 pictures that he owned, including works by Monet, Renoir, Nolde, and Albrecht Dürer, were found. These works were worth millions of dollars. How he became such a wealthy individual and established networks that spanned Western Europe and North America is a big part of this story.I don’t have all the answers, but I think I was able to frame the story and fill in some of the gaps. There is still more work to be done.
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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