AIFF2025: The Nazi's Massive Thefts Of Art During WW II

[Note:  This is an AIFF2025 (Anchorage International Film Festival) post because I will discuss below Plunderer:  The Life And Times Of A Nazi Art Thief, a film shown at the festival.]

[Note 2:  This post has taken on a life of its own as I've been writing it.  It now seems to be about the role of art as a commodity in the Holocaust, but on a higher level, as what one of the interviewees in Plunderer said:  Art is one of the three major unregulated industries in the world:  art, arms, and drugs.  As I write this, I keep uncovering new twists and turns.  It's taking me a while to post this because I'm trying to articulate the most important of the twists and turns clearly.  I'm sure I'm muddling some and missing others.  But there is a lot to learn from studying how the Nazis systematically stole art during their rule over Germany and how the world has, for the most part, let it slide.  There are also lessons for today.]

The Beginning - Let's just assume there is no beginning.  We simply have to jump in somewhere and start discovering things.  And if we're observant, remember enough details,  and are lucky, we'll start to see how everything is connected.  If not, we'll end up with random facts and impressions which are too vague and disconnected for us to take any lessons from.

• I knew that the Nazis stole art.  What I didn't realize until recently, as I'm reading Susan Ronald's Hitler's Art Thief, is

how massive this undertaking was.  This was not simply incidental, opportunistic looting.  It was a highly organized, preplanned effort to scoop up all the great art held by European museums and by private collectors, particularly Jewish families with art collections.  

Organized at the highest level, under the auspices of the RBK (Reichskammer den Bildenen Kunst - or Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts), art dealers were sent across Europe to compile an inventory of artwork in museums but also in the private collections of wealthy Jews - paintings, sculptures, drawings - and other valuables including jewelry, tapestries, and even church altars.  And once the Germans occupied a country, these agents of Hitler and Göring went out like art vacuum cleaners to suck up the best items and send them back to several repositories. - for the private collections of people like Göring and Hitler and for great German museum Hitler was planning for his thousand year Reich. 

Art had already been on the German leaders' menu during in WW I.  After his victory, Hitler planned to open a museum in Linz, Austria, his home town, that would have the world's most spectacular collection of art.  But some was also for Hitler's private collection and also for Göring's.  And much was also used to raise needed foreign currency to fund Hitler's war.  There were elaborate work-arounds set up to overcome the Allies' official bans on looted art.  Some pieces were sent directly to dealers in England and the US, but much, maybe most, went through auction houses in neutral Switzerland.  

There were also issues with currency - the German Mark not being worth much in the Allied countries.  And conflicts with Hitler's edicts condemning degenerate art - modern, abstract works which included artists like Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall.  But the work of these artists commanded high prices and, as I mentioned above, one of the objectives of this art looting was to raise foreign currency.  So while there were symbolic burnings of such art, most of it was diverted and sold.  I'd note that author Susan Ronald questions how many pictures of value were actually burned.

But as organized as this all was, the art historians/dealers who located and confiscated the art, arranged to get all the paperwork to remove the art from occupied countries, to transport it, and to get paid, found  lots of ways to divert art works to either their own private stashes or to export and sell overseas.  

There were so many items - thousands and thousands - and various destinations within the Reich hierarchy that keeping track of every item was difficult.  

Again,  because this is key: from what I can tell, there were two main objectives of the Reich's art project.  First was to gather the greatest collection of art anywhere to display when the Germans conquered the world.  (Hitler did start out as an artist.)  Second, was to raise foreign currency reserves to purchase armaments.  

There were four officially designated art dealers - Hildebrand Gurlitt (the main subject of Ronald's book); Karl Buchholz; Ferdinand Möller; and Bernhard A. Böhmer - who worked, nominally, under the RBK.  And they worked with many other art dealers and art historians to locate, confiscate, and fence art.

Pause to take a breath and figure out where we are

I'm telling you all this because until I started reading Hitler's Art Thief I didn't realize how organized and all encompassing this Nazi art theft was.  I probably should have.  Basically, I'd known that various heirs (generally Jews, or the heirs of Jews who had been send to death camps or forced to flee) had sued to get back individual works of art after (I believe) the piece showed up somewhere - generally in an auction catalogue or a museum.  

The Reich  had designated huge warehouses to store work.  And they even used salt mines toward the end of the war to store art works to keep the winning Allies from finding them.  And individuals involved often stored their plunder in Swiss bank vaults, protected by the super strict Swiss secrecy laws. 

Most notably among movies about getting back stolen art, there was Woman in Gold about the Beverly Hills dress shop owner who sues Austria to get back a painting stolen by the Nazis from her family in Vienna.  I've written about this film and personal connections to the main character.  Woman in Gold, as I recall it, focused mainly on the legal and political battle to get back that one painting.  I certainly did not get from that film a sense of the level of art plundering the Nazis did.  It may have been there, but it wasn't the focus of the film.  I did get a sense of how difficult it was to fight to recover family property after the war.  How expensive the fight was and how long it took,  And how difficult it is to prove your family owned something when all your possessions were confiscated or you are forced to flee with just what you can carry.  

Another hint of this was in Anthony Doerr's book, and then the Netflix series, All The Light We Cannot See - includes

"A sergeant major in the German army who certifies and evaluates art, jewelry, and gems, Reinhold Von Rumpel is major figure in the novel."  (From Fandom)

The movie is about a museum worker who takes a famous diamond to keep it safe from Nazi plunderers and Von Rumpel's persistent pursuit.   

We even watched The Monuments Men, though I really don't remember much about it.  This was about the American art historians who came as government officials right at the end of WWII to find the art looted by the Nazis.  Ronald discusses this group and the limits on their investigations and abrupt cancellation of the project.  One of them is featured (not positively) in Plunderer - Theodore Rousseau, a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of art.

The Anchorage International Film Festival in December of last year (it's January 1, 2026 as I write, 'last year' for the first time referring to 2025 [It's January 4 as I continue to review and revise this post]) showed the film  Plunderer:  The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief.   This film focused on one particular art dealer, Bruno Lohse, who does appear in Susan Ronald's book, but plays a much lesser role.  While Plunderer shows us at the end the seven or eight pieces Lohse had hidden in a Swiss bank vault worth perhaps $100 million, the focus is on Lohse,  who was not one of the four official Nazi art thieves, and not on the bureaucratic machine the Nazis created to steal the greatest artworks in Europe.  

[NOTE:  The movie PLUNDERER IS AVAILABLE ON PBS PASSPORT in two parts as part of the Secrets of the Dead series.] 

Plunder  came about, it appears, because the historian - Jonathan Petropoulus - who is both the narrator and a key figure in the documentary - learned the Lohse was still alive and tracked him down and interviewed several times.  He concludes that Lohse was using him to find out what he (and others presumably) knew about Lohse.  He also concluded that Lohse lied to him regularly and with great charm. The film is probably an important piece of evidence that others can use as they paint the whole picture of this operation.  I doubt this movie would have been made if Petropoulus had not had his conversations with Lohse.  

Similarly, Hitler's Art Thief got written, according to the author, by accident.  

"I was an investment banker specializing almost exclusively in the restoration of historic buildings and landscapes and their conversion to alternative use." (p. xv)   

As an investment banker she took a trip to Zurich to meet a

"prospective investor and his personal bank manager . . .it was necessary to go to the bank's vault to verify the share certificates, certificates of deposit, jewels, and art." 

While in the vault, 

"I noticed that a sliding wall was slightly ajar.  I saw the fringes of what I believed was a nineteenth-century landscape painting and the letters "RLITT" labeled beneath the frame.  Rlitt?  Gurlitt? Could that be a painting by Louis Gurlitt, the nineteenth-century landscape painter?  I wondered aloud without realizing it.  The bank manager swiveled around suddenly and glowered at me, pushing the wall shut.  "No, That's the twentieth century Nazi art dealer," he huffed. (p.2) [Louis was the grandfather of the Nazi art thief Hildebrand Gurlitt.]]

The manager realizes he's committed a serious blunder in the super secretive world of Swiss banking and blames Ronald for looking where she shouldn't be looking.  But at lunch, where the bank manager had a bit too much wine, he apologizes profusely for how he had behaved.

"The bank manager's groveling became so overwhelming that I couldn't help but feel sorry for him.  It's not often a Swiss bank manager makes such a faux pas. 

So, I was mischievous and played on his sudden change of heart helped along by his nervous drinking.  I popped the searing question, mustering my best innocent voice, and asked if there was a twentieth century dealer called Gurlitt.  Was there ever! the bank manager exclaimed.  He wasn't just any art dealer - he was Hitler's art dealer.  Hildebrand Gurlitt was his name."

That's how the author, a woman specializing in appraising art, learned about Gurlitt.   There was another trigger for her - she inherited several items of looted Nazi art as well. 

I'd note, before moving on, that I find the title, Hitler's Art Thief, a bit misleading, because there were, as I mentioned above, four officially designated Nazi art thieves and many, many others who worked with or for those four. Bruno Lohse was one of the others.  

Another pause, to catch up on details to get a sense of the magnitude. 

It says 'Massive Thefts' in the title of this post.  How massive are we talking about?

Let's just look at the value of the stash of looted paintings the heir of Hildebrand Gurlitt still had in 2013, almost 70 years after the end of WWII.  

But first a bit about Hildebrand Gurlitt's family so this makes a bit more sense..

Hildebrand Gurlitt had two children, Cornelius (born 1932) and Benita (born 1935).  They both were children during WWII while their father was traveling Europe collecting paintings and they grew up with great art.  They both were told a story about their father that made him a hero saving art from the Nazis.  Ronald paints Cornelius, who was his father's heir, as a bright, but odd child and adult. Possibly on the autism spectrum. Hildebrand died in a car crash in 1956 without having passed on to his wife or his children his secrets for how to liquidate the paintings when they needed to. Cornelius lived in his mother's Munich apartment  for 40 years after her death in 1968 with the paintings stacked in the apartment.  He never changed the name on the ownership, never paid income taxes, and never had a computer or used the internet.  And he paid everything in cash, 

The magnitude.  Ronald writes:

"There were the original 1,407 artworks found in Cornelius's Munich flat, followed by some twenty-two further paintings in the possession of his brother-in-law, followed by another sixty-odd in Austria that burgeoned to over 250 fifty [sic] artworks.  Then, belatedly, there was the Monet found in Cornelius's hospital bag after his death.  By anyone's reckoning, the looted portion of the find must be worth somewhere around a billion dollars." (pp. 319-320) (emphasis mine)

This does not include other works that Gurlitt had stashed away in Swiss bank vaults like the one that Ronald stumbled upon accidentally that got her started writing this book.  

Nor does this count what the other three official Nazi art thieves managed to run off with. Or the other art dealers who worked with them. Nor the art work in Göring's and Hitler's collections or the works.  Nor the works they managed to export and were sold in auction houses or directly to collectors.  

Ronald suggests that getting valuable paintings was an underlying motive to send Jews to death camps

I hadn't thought about this.  Probably it went well beyond the paintings.  In the book and movie Lady In Gold, if I recall correctly, we see the Nazis take over not just the art, but everything including the apartment itself.  This is mentioned also in Plunderer.  

The belongings of Jews were confiscated, in many cases, well before they were carted off to concentration camps.  Jews were forced to sell their household goods at very low prices.  I knew this in part because letters from my grandfather in Germany in the early 1940s to my father who had gotten to Chicago told of having to sell their furniture at pennies to the dollar.  In other cases, as with my step-mother, when she got out of work camps after the war and returned to her family home in Bratislava, neighbors were living in her family home and other neighbors had different pieces of furniture and silverware. They said they thought everyone was dead.  In fact my stepmother was the only survivor in her family, but it also shows that people of Bratislava had a good idea of what happened at the camps.   

It was then my stepmother decided she needed to make her way to England.  And eventually the US.

This is some of the background I already knew when I read the following in Hitler's Art Thief:

"I want to impress on the reader that it is a gross misapprehension to believe that looted art is somehow a lesser crime of the Nazi era.  Attached to each artwork is at least one human tragedy and death.  Art is intended to unite people of disparate backgrounds in a combined cultural heritage that transcends national boundaries.  It takes many forms, as literature, music, fine art, film, and more.  It connects our souls.  The wholesale theft of art from museums, private individuals, libraries, and archives was highly calculated and well organized by the criminal regime of the Third Reich." (p.5)

She comes so close to articulating that the loss is not merely the personal loss of the owners, but the loss of cultural heritage of all humans.  She continues:

"Many Jews, Christians, atheists, and political opponents lost their lives because of their collections.  Those who somehow survived never recovered the bulk of their possessions - be they artworks, real estate, stocks, jewels, cash, or gold - giving rise to new laws, restitution departments at auction houses, and an entire insurance industry." (p.5)

Again, on a personal note, my mother, after filling out extensive paper work, eventually received Wiedergutmachung  payments.  The closest English word is reparations.  The German word literally means "make good again".  I didn't know anything about this when I was young and believe that there was some token compensation for the loss of the family house and business (a mens clothing store) and I understand there was something to compensate my mother for the loss of opportunity when she was no longer allowed to go to school and the further education she would have gotten.  She did get monthly checks until she died.  

I include this because unlike most countries that have committed heinous crimes against humanity, the German government did make attempts to acknowledge what had been done, to include the Holocaust in school curricula, and in some way to compensate those who had everything taken from them.  But, of course, the millions who died in concentration camps never had the chance to apply for any compensation.  

I include this also to point out that I had personal family experiences that gave me more awareness of the holocaust than most people might have had, but I had never put so many of the pieces together to begin to understand the role that confiscating art and other property played in the Third Reich.  

Ronald goes on:

"Some artworks now reside as ill-gotten gains in museums across the world - perhaps in a museum in your hometown or where you live.  Much lingers beneath Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich [the street that holds Swiss banks with vaults protected by secrecy laws including the one vault where she first encountered the name of Hildebrand Gurwitt] and elsewhere in Switzerland.  Those who salvaged some of their heirlooms or riches remained deeply scarred, afraid, and guilty that they'd somehow survived.  Few returned to Germany, some returned to France.  They often passed on this guilt and shame to their children.  The looting of art deprived these families of a crucial link to their personal histories;  memories that remain dear beyond the value of the paintings - often mental pictures of the last time the dispossessed saw their loved ones alive." (p.5)

Other lingering issues raised:

Lack of accountability - most of the art dealers had few to no negative consequences.  Some, like Gurwitt spent time in detention while his case was examined.  But the American interrogators had various obstacles in Ronald's telling -  poor translators, no access to critical files, limited time, and the State Department's loss of interest. They had way too many cases to handle each well.   Gurliff was eventually let go. and as was made clear above, he retained an enormous fortune in stolen art.  Ronald writes that that is also true of the other art dealers.  It was also true of Bruno Lohse (from Plunderer).  The focus went to Nuremberg and those involved in killing Jews (and others) in the concentration camps.  But even that tended to be focused on the top tier.  In a footnote on page 299, Ronald writes:

"Karl Wolff was rearrested in 1962 when the trial of Adolf Eichmann presented evidence that he was responsible for the deportation of Italian Jews to concentration camps.  In 1964, he was found guilty of the deportation of Jews to Treblinka and Auschwitz and the massacre of Italian partisans.  He was released in 1969."

Getaway drivers get longer sentences than that. 

US museums and art dealers, including the biggest ones, and including Jewish dealers,  knew who they were dealing with, looked the other way, and profited from the trade of illicit art

In the movie Plunderer there's a segment on the Ivy League educated curator of the Metropolitan Museum of art, Theodore Rousseau.  

 "Rousseau began his World War II service as an assistant United States naval attaché to the American embassies in Lisbon and Madrid, Spain. At war’s end he began service with the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) and was assigned to the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU). Responsible for uncovering information regarding Nazi looting, the ALIU was formed in 1944 to function as the intelligence component of the MFAA. Also assigned to the unit were Monuments Men Lt. James S. Plaut and Lt. Cdr. S. Lane Faison, Jr. After months of interrogating hundreds of Nazi officials and collaborators on the whereabouts of looted works of art, each of the three officers submitted in-depth reports regarding the three most important Nazi looting programs: the activities of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in France (Plaut), the collection of Adolf Hitler intended for his massive Führermuseum in Linz, Austria (Faison), and the collection of Hermann Goering (Rousseau)." (From the Monuments Men and Women website)

Lohse, according to Plunderer, got out of prison in 1950.  Then he contacted the three ALIU investigators who had interrogated him.  He gained traction with Rousseau who was by then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The link goes to a PDF - which you need to download to see - of two eulogies for Ted Rousseau on his death by Thomas Hoving, the director of the Met, and a curator, Margaretta Salinger.     

Paul Lohse (the art dealer subject of Plunderer) wrote to Rousseau after the war proposing to sell him art.  Jonathan Petropoulus, in the film, pages through a thick folder of correspondence between Lohse and Rousseau.  Petropoulus quotes Met director Hoving calling the period of the 50s and 60s "the age of piracy."  As one of the ALIU investigators  who interrogated Lohse  - who spent time in prison for his Nazi era art wheeling and dealing - Rousseau knew that the art he got from Lohse was, at best questionable and at worst stolen.  Petropoulous asserts Rousseau knew he was buying stolen art.  Lohse's name was never or rarely in the paperwork of paintings he sold, but the film makes it clear that he was skilled at hiding behind middlemen. 

Petropoulus mentions  two top art dealers in New York - Rosenberg and Stiebel and Wildestein and Company - who dealt with Lohse. They assert that the Met has 44 rooms that have at least one painting purchased from the Wildesteins.   Looted paintings were scrubbed clean on the back so the ownership couldn't be found.  

Everyone stalled, for decades and even forever, the return of artworks to their original owners

This is clear if you follow any story of a family trying to retrieve stolen art.  The film Lady in Gold is a good example.  

NOTE:  I've reread lot's of Hitler's Art Thief several times.  And watched the Plunderer again.  Each time more things fall into place.  So I don't expect too many folks to 'get' this post.  But at least maybe there will be a heads up note where you keep the Nazis and the Holocaust in your brain.  

And if you're a member of PBS - Watch Plunderer Parts 1 and 2.  

Why does this matter today?

Given that we now have a president, whose ex-wife said he kept a copy of Hitler's speeches next to his bed, and White Nationalists with swastikas rubbing elbows with the highest levels of government, we should pay attention.  Not necessarily about art.  Hitler was a would be artist.  Trump's career has been about putting up buildings with his name on them, and the schemes he uses to fund and build these edifices. He's also a master con artist and law avoider.  Characteristics he has in these conman skills in common with the Nazi art dealers who stole fortunes worth of art.  

But this is also about our inability to know everything and that's a big issue now.  Trump has broken so many norms, rules, laws, and articles of the constitution, it's hard to know where to begin.  Is there a hierarchy of sins?  

In this story there are so many issues and so many details to track down, that rumors and fantasies fill the spaces between the lines.  And often the truth, when we glimpse it, is worse than those rumors.  Where to begin?  Will only the most outrageous infractions get attention and the others slide?

For those who know little, read little, are not careful about their sources of information, it's easy to take a few stray facts and come to conclusions.  Conclusions that at best grossly simplify things.  At worst miss the truth by a wide margin.  

This whole exercise reminds me once again to be humble about what I know, to be careful about what I claim, and to let my readers know the sources of information I'm using.  

* For those who might question that statement, there's so much evidence you simply have to willfully disbelieve it. His biggest financial backer (to my knowledge) gleefully gave a Nazi salute on stage, and swastika adorned White Nationalists, regularly pledge their support for Trump.  

And a side note:  Two pages (that comes to four sides) were torn out of the index of the copy of Hitler's Art Thief I got from the library.  Who does that?  Did they want the info on those pages?  They have a camera on their phone.  Did they need paper for something?  There wasn't toilet paper in the library bathroom? I'm sure there was something else they could have used.  Is this a plot by someone named in the book to hide something?  Check the book in your library to see if pages 369-70 and 377-8 are missing.  Probably not, because then they would have taken out the pages referred to in the index.

I'm going to post this, but I may proof it one more time in the next week to edit errors and typos, and to make points more clearly.  [Tuesday January 6, 2026 - I've gone through this and made edits to make things clearer, to eliminate unnecessary duplications, fix commas.  I don't think I changed anything substantive.]