From The Dublin Review of Books, July 22:
The postwar networks of the Nazi art plunderers and their facilitators
Students were enjoying themselves at the 1950 Oktoberfest in Munich when Bertolt Brecht’s face went purple. A case of apoplexy, the playwright’s friends thought. No. He kicked over his bench and stormed out of the beer tent. One of his two companions, Eric Bentley, thought they were listening to traditional German “student tunes” at the nearby table. But Bentley, Brecht’s English translator, had not caught the words that pushed his friend into a rage: “Saujud” or “Jewish swine”. The students were belting out an antisemitic song. When Brecht calmed down a little, he exclaimed: “And they say these people have changed! Good liberals now, are they? I know this sort! They will never change! And in the East, they know this! Over there these hoodlums would be behind barbed wire! And never, never would they be let out.” Bentley later wrote that the thought that “the Nazis were in our midst, and that we were in the midst of Nazis, remained with us throughout our stay in Munich …”
Brecht had a point about the toleration of neo-Nazis in Bavaria after the Second World War. Most Germans believed they had done nothing wrong under Hitler; in establishing the criminality of the Nazi leadership, the Nuremberg trials strengthened the view among the population at large that they, the vast majority, were innocent. In 1946, on two occasions, West Germany’s future chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, spoke out against denazification measures, such as removing Nazi teachers from their posts, restocking libraries and compelling people to watch films documenting the horrors of the concentration camps. Adenauer feared the denazification process would provoke a nationalist backlash and therefore prove counterproductive. Nazi-like attitudes, in this argument, had been around for a long time, and it was better to remain silent: let sleeping dogs lie.
But Brecht in 1950 was being simplistic, if not disingenuous, about the official communist approach to Nazi attitudes in East Germany. The Soviets fired more than 500,000 ex-Nazis from administrative positions in their zone of occupation after the war, only to allow the German communist authorities to take them back if their public record wasn’t too awful. Overt Nazi sentiments were not tolerated in the East, but the state apparatus there had plenty of ex-Nazi personnel. It could not function without them.
In West Germany a lot of former Nazis quickly returned to their old jobs. About half the secondary teachers in Bavaria had been dismissed by1946, only to be restored to their jobs two years later. In 1951, 94 per cent of judges and prosecutors in Bavaria were ex-Nazis. In Bonn, by 1952 one in three foreign ministry officials had been a member of the Nazi Party. Businessmen were treated leniently. Friedrich Flick, convicted of war crimes in 1947, was released three years later and went back to his old company, Daimler-Benz, as the principal shareholder. In the American-dominated West, as in the Soviet-dominated East, the intelligence services recruited experienced and well-informed ex-Nazi operatives. The US authorities even spirited Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”, to South America, where he lived as a businessman until his extradition to France in 1987 to face trial for war crimes. In relation to Germany’s Nazi past the Cold War between the communist East and the capitalist West changed everything. Forgetting, for political purposes, became the order of the day.
Bruno Lohse, the notorious wartime art plunderer in Paris, was one of the Nazis held in Nuremberg, but he was not called as a witness by the lawyers representing his patron, Hermann Göring, who escaped the hangman’s noose by committing suicide. Göring kept a close eye on Lohse and his operation in Paris. On one visit in November 1940 he spelled out who should get the largely Jewish-owned art: first, Hitler, then Göring himself, then Nazi “ideological schools”, and then German museums. In 1946 an art looting investigator wrote:...
....MUCH MORE
As noted in the outro from "Will a Looted Pissarro End Up in Oklahoma, or France?":
We have been waiting for a final inventory of paintings looted by the Nazis but the lists keep expanding and expanding. For example, the first inventory of the stolen merch that ended up in Göring's hands was 1736 items valued at $200 million in 1945 (multiply by 100 to 1000 to get current valuations). The current count of the artworks that ended up in Fat Hermann's "collection" is up to 4000 pieces.
And that's just one of the gangsters.
If interested see also: "Meet the Art World’s Most High-Profile Detective"
And oddly, a mashup of the DRB's home and the Nazis: "Loot From World's Biggest Art Heist Probably In Ireland-Investigator (plus the 'catalogue' of the Hermann Göring collection)"
And Ireland without Nazis:"The Greatest Unsolved Heist in Irish History"
One more Irish story.
"Rose Dugdale, The Woman Who Stole Vermeer"
