-Bruno Lohse was the last Nazi art plunderer
who was still alive.
They were hunting for the Jews, torturing, raiding, looting.
-Goering says to Lohse, "I want you to work for me."
-At war's end,
Lohse is captured by three American monuments officers.
They found Lohse sitting right on the ledge here.
-Lohse was exonerated by a French military tribunal,
and he was free to do what he wanted.
-After the war, he knew who stole paintings,
who still had paintings.
-He knows that if he's really going to realize his ambitions,
he needs to go to America.
-I didn't realize that our relationship would take me
to another world, to a Swiss Bank...
that concealed stolen pictures.
To the contemporary art world,
where Nazi looted art is still traded.
It's the greatest art scandal of the 20th century.
I had no idea what I was getting into.
♪♪
-When Lohse was released from a French prison, in 1950,
he relocated to the Bavarian capital to revive his career.
But Munich was just the starting place.
He knows that America is going to offer him
the greatest opportunities.
Lohse writes to the three former OSS officers
who interrogated him in the summer of '45,
because they've become significant players
in the art world in America.
But it's important to remember that Lohse is tainted, right?
He's a former Nazi.
He's an art plunderer.
And so they're a little careful, initially.
Rousseau responds the most warmly, right?
He's now in this very important position
as a curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
♪♪
He sees his job as a curator to obtain not just pictures,
but great pictures for the Met.
-It's a privilege to welcome you
to the renovated Metropolitan Museum.
And I'm going to ask Theodore Rousseau,
our curator of painting,
if he will show the works of art that are here in the room.
-The curators believe,
you know, this was the greatest museum in America,
which it was,
and was on its way to being the greatest museum in the world.
-The most important thing about a museum in the last analysis
is the masterpieces that it contains.
This, incidentally, is one of our greatest.
"The Harvesters" is by Pieter Bruegel.
-And in the 1950s, with the amnesia in Europe,
it gave individuals like Rousseau
an opportunity to bend the rules, to take chances,
to be extremely aggressive.
I mean, one sees his background.
He had been a spy, basically, in the Far East early in the war.
So he has this espionage background.
He had attended Eton College, Harvard University.
So he doesn't think that all the rules apply to him.
The letters between Bruno Lohse and Ted Rousseau
have been preserved in the archives of the Met,
and they're really quite extraordinary.
So, this entire folder is correspondence between Rousseau
and Lohse, and I would say it's about 70 pages,
perhaps more, of documents.
And at the beginning,
Lohse is clearly initiating the relationship.
In the spring of '53, he writes to Rousseau and he says,
"I want to come to America and see you."
But he's still on the list
of internationally wanted war criminals.
In principle, he cannot travel to the United States.
So he writes to Rousseau and he says, "I have a plan.
There's a provision that I can spend 24 hours in the airport,
in transit.
I have some pictures to show you.
Will you come and meet me at the airport?"
Yeah, it is right out of a spy novel.
Now, Rousseau doesn't go to the airport,
and maybe Rousseau is still reluctant.
But Lohse is resourceful and sends a package
of photographs of paintings to the Met.
The photos are pictures by Botticelli, Gauguin,
Picasso, Cranach.
Really, you know, first-class artists.
And it really raises certain questions.
But soon thereafter, you can see
this personal relationship develops between the two.
And in this letter,
Lohse writes to Rousseau at Rousseau's home address,
not at the museum itself.
But for me, one of the most extraordinary letters
is from the 27th of October 1959.
And Lohse wrote here about a large landscape by Cezanne
that is available, and this is where
it really gets interesting.
"The deepest of private collections."
For 1 million Swiss Francs,
which was a veritable fortune in 1959.
But, he says, "For technical reasons,
however, the owner would be interested
in selling the picture outside an auction."
Alright? So there's a telling clue
that the owner doesn't want to put it up at a public auction.
But probably even more important, he says,
"I would ask you once again to treat the matter
very discreetly, because if it came out
that I had referred you to this collection,
it would put certain people in a difficult position.
And some gentlemen would tear me into
kleine stuecke reissen --" small pieces.
It's extraordinarily fishy.
The seller doesn't want to put it up at auction.
It has to be handled within two weeks.
Quick, quick, quick.
You know, "Don't tell anyone else or I'll be torn to pieces."
[ Laughs ] Yes, this thing has red flags all over it.
-What brought them together,
you know, was their appreciation for certain works of art,
and the rest didn't matter.
-By the 1960s, Rousseau is writing to Lohse and saying,
"I'm coming to Germany.
I'm coming to Europe. Will you meet with me?"
And they end up meeting in Munich,
in Paris sometimes, and also in Zurich,
in the Swiss art market, too.
There's no doubt in my mind
that Rousseau viewed Lohse as an information broker
and that Lohse knew where a lot of the artworks
were located -- looted and legitimate.
And so I guess one can generously say of Rousseau,
he was doing his job by collecting information.
-I have a hard line towards the American position
vis-à-vis Lohse.
To me, it's aiding and abetting
and engaging in the worst kind of opportunism
that one can engage in.
-And when I was talking with Lohse,
he told me about his meetings with Rousseau
and going to a lake in the Bavarian Alps
and how they would stay up late drinking wine
and talking about art and how they would bond together.
Rousseau was a swashbuckling curator, right?
But there were many, many other curators at other institutions
who followed their lead.
And it is interesting that Tom Hoving,
who was a close friend of Ted Rousseau's
when Hoving was director of the Met,
called this period in the '50s and '60s,
"The Age of Piracy."
And that's the image, right?
That these curators are pirates,
and they're off to trying to get the swag.
And I think Rousseau -- he embraced that.
-And if you really want to understand the Lohse-Rousseau
relationship, the answer and the key
is found in America's tax system.
In the early 1950s, tax rates were insanely high.
Now, to the truly wealthy,
you needed tax breaks desperately
if you were not to lose all of your wealth.
From that time, we saw the explosion of American museums.
Because if someone donates to a museum, they get a tax break.
And the reason art is the best tax break is
because if you buy this artwork for $1,000
and the curator would say it's worth $10,000,
then, donating it to the museum, you get a $10,000 tax break.
So in this environment of Americans eager
to get tax breaks,
they were hungry for artworks
and particularly European artworks.
And in this very murky, if not black, market,
museums became filled with toxic assets.
Almost no one had a motivation to look into provenance.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Toledo Museum of Art,
the Detroit Institute of the Arts, Art Institute of Chicago,
Museum of Fine Arts Boston --
every major American institution was implicated in this scandal.
-I took my father down to San Diego,
and in the museum,
there is a wonderful Dutch painting by Frans Hals.
And I found my father transfixed in front of this painting.
So, I asked him -- I said, "What's going on here?
Are you alright?"
And he said, "Well, this painting
used to belong to my father."
-Despite my extensive efforts to find evidence
of Lohse selling to the Met and to other American museums,
I have never found an artwork
where we can link it directly to Bruno Lohse,
that he sold the work to the museum.
-I think that's one of the clever things about Bruno Lohse,
is you don't see his name on the provenance of paintings.
It's not because he's not involved in the paintings.
He may be the owner or part owner.
That's the way that ownership of art works, still works today.
You might have, you know, two or three dealers
who are co-owners of a painting,
but only one is the public face of ownership.
-Lohse's name probably will be recognized by some
who are aware of what took place in Europe
during the Second World War.
So, a man like Lohse is clever.
-You had to be discreet, so you used middlemen,
who introduced the paintings to the market.
-Lohse told me about several prominent émigré dealers,
several of them Jewish, with whom he claimed that,
you know, he did business in the 1950s and '60s.
One of them was Frederick Mont.
I think his original name was Mondschein.
Sold very high-end art.
Then there's Rosenberg and Stiebel,
absolute blue-chip gallery.
-Rosenberg and Stiebel.
-They sold masterpieces to the Met and other museums.
Well, a looted picture from the Goodman collection
was sold by them.
-£145,000.
-People are sometimes knowingly trafficking in looted art
and sometimes unknowingly, not doing the research.
-It's very hard to know
how deliberate the obscuring of provenance was,
but I think we have so much experience now
of recovering looted paintings
and looking at the back of a painting...
and discovering that there's no information there anymore.
Usually, it will have a label saying who the owner was
or it might have a number, indicating number,
in their collection,
or something that would indicate its history.
And if you look at paintings today that appear for sale,
particularly looted -- well, obviously looted ones --
they're usually scrubbed clean.
-Sometimes, works were put on new stretchers.
The Matisse that we recovered from Oslo
was squeaky clean on the back.
New stretcher, not a label, nothing.
Washed clean. There was nothing.
-The other thing, of course,
was that the published provenances were changed.
So the name of the owner would not be there anymore.
And some other fake name would be used instead.
So it became very difficult, also, to prove ownership
for families when all the evidence had actually
deliberately been obscured.
-Out of the missing works from my family's collection,
I've probably found more in the U.S.A.
than in any other country.
There was too much money to be made,
and there was no downside.
There were no consequences.
-The way in which Bruno Lohse revived his career in the 1950s
is just extraordinary.
But his greatest "accomplishment,"
I think one could say,
was the relationship he forged with the Wildenstein family.
And, you know, this was a relationship
that extended for over 50 years.
-The Wildensteins are probably the most important
art-dealing family
or art-dealing dynasty in the world.
The patriarch of the family, George Wildenstein,
fled Paris after the German invasion
in 1940 and came to New York.
They played an incredibly important role in the growth
and the development of American museums.
I mean, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,
has 81 pictures from the Wildensteins.
And the Met has 44 galleries
where at least one painting in each gallery
was purchased from the Wildensteins.
-The Wildensteins, as far as I understand,
you know, are in the category of billionaires,
ones who have reached a level where they can breed racehorses
and own a farm in Kenya,
and God knows what else they have.
-We have this strange relation between Lohse,
you know, an independent, small art dealer in Munich,
and the all-powerful Wildensteins.
But if you do any business in the art world,
you will meet the Wildensteins.
It's no surprise.
More surprising is that Lohse was on the side of the looters,
and the Wildensteins have been -- their collections
have been severely looted, you know, in wartimes.
So you may see, you have the Jewish victims,
you know, who have been looted, and the looters, you know?
And how come that they could even, you know, think of,
you know, meeting?
-The Wildensteins have denied working with Lohse.
And, you know, for the family,
for this French-American Jewish family,
it's very uncomfortable, to say the least.
We have a letter from Alec Wildenstein
saying he's known Lohse for over 60 years.
Evidence is incontrovertible.
But Lohse was an information broker.
He had connections in the networks of old Nazi dealers
that would be useful to the Wildensteins.
They could use an agent like Lohse,
who would operate in Germany and Switzerland
and other parts of the world, as well.
-It was a very complex and cutthroat business,
and the more knowledge you had, the more power you had.
The relationship between Lohse
and the Wildensteins follows a pattern.
The family has remained very secretive.
There's a code of silence, of omerta, and it's this secrecy
and the fact that they're so powerful that invites
speculation and suspicion.
Back in 1965, there were allegations
that the Wildensteins falsified information
in catalogue raisonnés,
where the published art historian Douglas Cooper
made these allegations about a Gauguin catalogue
that lists the provenance,
the ownership history, of a painting.
Those accusations have been made subsequently, right,
that the Wildensteins are not straightforward
in these catalogues.
And then, in 2011,
there was a police raid on the Wildenstein Paris bank vault,
and they found about 30 pictures
that belonged to two French Jewish families
that were not looted, but had been reported missing.
At the time, the Wildensteins said,
"Well, you know, we have so many works,
we don't know exactly what we have,"
and they kind of pleaded ignorance.
But they were found with this cache of paintings.
The Wildensteins are known for being litigious,
so this is one of the reasons
so few people want to talk about it.
-They sued me. They sued me.
They asked for $1 million and for the book
to be eliminated, to not be published again.
I fought for five years. I spent $200,000 on that.
[ Laughs ]
-Somebody like Bruno Lohse,
who prefer to keep a low profile,
to do business with a firm like Wildenstein
that has a reputation of being secretive on the one hand
and being deep-pocketed on the other hand,
is almost a perfect match.
-By the 1970s, Lohse was a very impressive, even a grand figure.
And we can see that in the way that he lives
when he comes to New York.
He stays in some of the finest hotels in the city.
He has very powerful friends.
There's one story that Lohse would tell
that captured this extraordinary rise.
And that happened in the mid-1960s,
when he was visiting with Ted Rousseau.
They were going to dinner, to the Four Seasons restaurant.
And Lohse recounted how they got into this massive Bentley,
you know, an extraordinary car.
You know, Lohse would say, "Man, was fuer ein auto?"
"What kind of car was that?"
It was an automobile that belonged to Madame David-Weill.
She was the mistress of Ted Rousseau,
but more importantly, she was the wife of Mr. David-Weill
from the very prominent banking family in Paris.
And what was so extraordinary was that during the war,
the David-Weills had had their art in Paris looted,
looted by the ERR, looted by Bruno Lohse.
So what a turn of events from,
you know, looting the David-Weills during the war
to traveling in their car in New York in the 1960s.
-Nobody's asking any questions.
He's got a lifestyle where people
don't really care, as long as you indulge them
in savvy conversation and high taste.
And if that's all he had to do, then he was in like Flint.
-When one considers, you know,
all the people who had wanted to bring Lohse
down in the late 1940s,
the fact that he's now enjoying this kind of lifestyle,
I think for him, you know, is his victory.
He once said to me,
"Living well was the best revenge."
-The breakthrough came last night
as the first concrete block was removed by East German workers.
[ All cheering ]
Frontier police from the two sides of the wall
met in a moment which symbolized this healing
of Germany's psychological wounds.
-I think, you know, what happened after 1989,
Lohse was blindsided.
He never saw it coming.
The fall of the wall changed everything.
At the end of the Cold War,
archives opened up in the former Communist East Germany.
New questions were asked, questions about what happened
to Jewish property in the East.
What did Swiss banks do during the war?
-There was a new understanding of complicity,
of participation in the Holocaust that extended out,
you know, beyond the killing centers to the broader society
and even to the art world
and the importance of looting and greed
as a motivator for the Holocaust.
-It was particularly inspiring
to the heirs of certain families,
who renewed their efforts to claim things
and try to find out where they were.
-I was probably the first person
to have a looting case settled in the U.S.
Then lots more families came forward.
And so the world had changed very dramatically
just in a few years.
-I was looking to see if I could find any of the Nazis
who'd actually been involved in the looting.
And, to my astonishment, I found, hiding in plain sight,
so to speak, was Bruno Lohse.
-The first time I learned about Lohse being alive in Munich,
Anne Webber and I were having a drink after a long day
at a conference, and she told me about him.
And I remember scribbling a note to myself, I think,
on a napkin, like, "Bruno Lohse, in Munich."
-And he didn't know he was still alive.
-And she told me, "Well, look him up in the telephone book."
And I took Anne's advice, and there he was.
And I arranged to have lunch together.
Now, looking back on this first meeting,
I can see that he was meeting with me
because I could be useful to him.
I think he sensed
that we were entering a more dangerous period,
as far as he was concerned,
that it was going to be possible to do some research
and discover some of his secrets.
So, I think he met with me to feel me out
and see what I knew already.
I realized later, he had completely
stage-managed the event.
The chauffeur and the grand car
is clearly a kind of staged scene to impress me.
And, as I learned later, the driver was not a chauffeur.
His name was Peter Griebert,
and it turned out that he was another art dealer and Lohse's
business manager.
I realized it then, and looking back on it now,
one doesn't go in and trifle with Lohse without consequences.
If you get close to him,
you're going to get bruised and you're going to feel
the effects, as I was about to find out.
[ Telephone rings ]
In the fall of 2000, I received a call from Sarah Jackson,
who worked at the Art Loss Register.
And Sarah and the Art Loss Register
were working for the Fischer family,
trying to track down artworks looted by the Nazis.
Sarah had found some crucial evidence in her research.
She was looking for a painting by Camille Pissarro
and had discovered it had been exhibited
in Switzerland in 1984.
-Samuel Fischer was one of the most important publishers
in pre-war Germany.
The Fischer family moved to Vienna.
But when the Nazis took over Austria,
the so-called "Anschluss," the Fischer family went into exile
and had to leave everything behind.
So, the works of art there,
amongst them the Pissarro painting,
have been seized by the authorities.
After the war,
the son of Samuel Fischer tried to locate that painting.
There was a kind of brochure to search for it,
but without any success.
Gisela Fischer, the daughter of Gottfried Bermann Fischer,
continued the search.
-The family was really obsessed with this picture.
It had the qualities almost of a talisman, one could say,
but it had added significance, I think,
because Camille Pissarro was a
Jewish French Impressionist painter,
and this was one of his last pictures.
The 1984 exhibition was organized by someone
with close ties to the Wildensteins,
and a number of the pictures in the exhibition
came from the Wildensteins.
But when she dug deeper,
she found that the lender of this Pissarro
was the Fondation Bruno, or the Bruno Foundation.
Seeing that name,
I went to Bruno and posed the question, you know,
"Do you have anything to do with the Fondation Bruno?"
Lohse looked me straight in the eye and he said, "No."
You know, "Do you think I would be so foolish
as to put a foundation in my own name?"
In fact, for five years, I asked about the picture.
Sometimes, he would preempt me and he said,
"Are you going to ask about the damn Pissarro picture again?
"Das verdammt der Pissarro-bild?"
I have nothing to do with it. I've never seen it."
But then, in December 2006,
Griebert's attitude changed markedly,
and he seemed very upset by the fact that
Lohse appeared to have something
to do with this Nazi looted art.
And he vowed that he would assist me in this quest.
Ah, here it is.
This is the letter that Peter Griebert gave me
in December 2006.
Dated 2nd of July 1957.
It's written by a Dr. F. Schoeni,
an attorney in Zurich.
And Schoeni writes to Lohse,
"I hereby confirm that you acquired for me
in Berlin the painting by Pissarro,
'Le Quai malaquais,' formerly in the Fischer Collection."
When Griebert gave me this document, I was stunned.
Here's clear proof that Bruno had something
to do with the Fischer Pissarro.
And he knows it's a Fischer Pissarro because Fischer,
the name is there, even though Fischer is slightly misspelled.
The "C" is missing there.
I was upset because it was, you know, evident to me
that Lohse had lied to me about this picture.
I started asking myself, who is this Frédéric Schoeni?
Schoeni had died in the early 1980s,
but as I researched further,
I found Schoeni had worked for not just the Wildensteins,
but also Walter Andreas Hofer, the rival of Lohse,
Karl Haberstock,
who had helped expropriate the art of the Goodman family;
Hans Wendland,
who engaged in a number of trades with Lohse and the ERR.
That, to me, was extraordinary, I mean, even explosive.
I thought to myself, "Oh, my.
This is quite a list here of Schoeni's clients."
-It's a small world.
It always ends up being a small world.
-Griebert called me and he asked, could I come to Zurich?
He had learned that Frédéric Schoeni
had had several children,
who had created this foundation of heirs
that controlled the Fischer Pissarro, this trust,
and that they, as a first step,
were prepared to let me examine the picture.
I thought this was extraordinary.
I finally get to see this looted artwork
that had been missing for half a century.
Griebert told me that the picture was brought
from Liechtenstein to the bank in Zurich
by one of the heirs that day
and that it was just going to stay there in the bank
for one day for my inspection.
I followed him into the bank, and he then informed me
that we were going to inspect the painting
in a conference room.
And there, sitting on the chair, was the Fischer Pissarro.
It was magnificent. It had this glow to it.
It's a very special picture.
And for this Jewish artist,
there was other layers of poignancy for me.
The picture was painted in 1901,
during the outburst of anti-Semitism in France.
He no longer felt safe in Paris,
and so he retreated upstairs to safer spaces.
And this picture was from the room in which he died.
Griebert was assuring me -- he says,
"Look, the heirs are being cooperative.
They're prepared to undertake restitution."
And so the beginnings of a kind of settlement
seem to emerge at this moment.
She had a dental appointment,
and after her dentist appointment,
she was going to pick it up and take it back to Liechtenstein.
After I had inspected the Fischer Pissarro
and we had seemingly come to an agreement,
things began to unravel.
The foundation that controlled the Fischer Pissarro
wanted 5% of the value of the picture
if they were going to return it,
and Gisela Fischer found that objectionable.
And so she asked me to go meet the representatives
of the foundation.
So Griebert and I set off to Liechtenstein.
But I got a sense that things might not be so straightforward.
Griebert said we had to turn off our cellphones,
and he was concerned about surveillance
by the German authorities.
And the fact that Griebert said we had to take these measures
seemed dodgy to me.
-In 200 meters, you have arrived.
-The headquarters of the foundation
was truly unremarkable.
-Destination reached.
-So, you can see it's really tucked away.
And we walked down some steps.
And as I approached the door, I saw a brass plaque.
And, for the first time, I saw the name Schoenart.
And I recall thinking to myself,
"Ah, Frédéric Schoeni, Schoenart, that makes sense.
That's the name of the foundation."
So, I came in and met the two lawyers,
Andrew Baker and Stefan Metzler, and we proceeded to talk.
You know, they're professional and they're polished.
And so, you know, my alarm bells don't go off.
A little bit later, an elderly lady arrived.
She was the president of the foundation, a Milly Sele-Vogt.
Griebert and Milly Sele-Vogt had this tradition
that he would bring Bavarian sausage, weisswurst,
down, and she would give him in return Swiss sausage.
She was a character,
but she seemed quite credible and she maintained
to me that the foundation was controlled
by Frédéric Schoeni's children.
I felt that, you know, we were making progress
and that I was helping restitute this picture.
You know, I felt satisfaction
that I was advancing the process.
And at the end of our meeting,
Peter Griebert did something that surprised me.
He reached into his briefcase and he pulled out two dossiers
and he handed them to the attorneys and said,
"Here are two pictures, one by Monet
and one by Auguste Renoir.
Does the foundation have these pictures?"
And they said, "Yes, we have these pictures."
And Griebert said, you know,
"We would like to have a commission to restitute them.
I think that they are looted, as well."
And, again, this had caught me completely by surprise.
Griebert hadn't tipped me off in the slightest.
But, of course, I was excited.
You know, a Monet and a Renoir
and a chance to restitute two more pictures
from this foundation.
I thought that was very positive news.
Of course, in hindsight,
the sausage exchange should have tipped me off.
If Griebert and Milly Sele-Vogt
were exchanging sausages over the years,
obviously they knew each other
and obviously this was a setup of some kind, right?
But at the time, I just couldn't process
and appreciate all of this.
At that time, I was aware that Frau Fischer was requesting
that the Bavarian authorities go to Lohse
and make him answer questions about the Fischer Pissarro.
But now Lohse was also being investigated
for the death of August Liebmann Mayer.
-Mayer was a German Jewish art historian
who had emigrated to Paris,
and during the war, he had been hunted by the ERR.
And this is what Lohse did.
So, Mayer was arrested, was interrogated.
And I would say the minute that Lohse, after the interrogations,
came to the conclusion
that he would get no further information from Mayer,
he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.
-And here's a copy from the Munich prosecutor's
office of the investigation that was ongoing into the murder
of the art historian August Liebmann Mayer.
And so, you know,
I think Lohse was becoming increasingly nervous
because his past was closing in on him.
-They call it the Demjanjuk drama,
a trial that is magnetizing the nation,
the appetite to hear the Holocaust tragedy growing
as events unfold.
-I mean, in 2006, Lohse had every reason
to be concerned about justice knocking on his door.
-It was not lost upon him
that there were other elderly perpetrators
who were being brought to account.
-You know, can we find some of these perpetrators?
Can we bring them into the courtroom?
-So, I knew the Bavarian authorities were looking into
filing charges for murder against Lohse.
And I could see the pressure mounting on Lohse.
Then, in 2006, after a particularly intense discussion,
Peter Griebert took me outside and he said,
"Jonathan, you don't realize how dark,
how sinister Lohse really is.
Let me tell you a story."
And he recounted the tragic history of the Gutmann family.
The Gutmanns, who had been living in Netherlands
and in exchange for relinquishing
their art collection
and their property, had been promised safe passage to Italy.
-All of these stories are tragic,
but in the case of the Gutmanns, it's probably more tragic
because there was pure deception.
They still had this wonderful silverware collection,
and Goering wanted, terribly, this collection.
So he would not stop at anything
in order to get whatever he wanted.
And the only way that they could get
it was by offering them a fake safe conduct
to join their daughter in Florence.
-Mussolini himself had signed an entry visa.
So this is where they thought they were going.
Instead, the train took them to Berlin.
So, there's a whole slew of top-ranking Nazis
on the platform greeting my grandparents as they arrive.
Amongst them
was an SS officer representing Hermann Goering
and Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi governor of the Netherlands.
This was quite a reception committee.
-According to Griebert,
the Gutmanns were taken away for interrogation.
Fritz Gutmann was beaten very badly
as the Gestapo tries to induce him to sign over the silver.
-So, my grandfather refuses to sign this contract.
My grandparents are put on another train,
not such a nice train, with a new SS escort.
And this train takes them to the concentration camp.
-Peter Griebert became extraordinarily emotional,
and with tears running down his cheeks, he said to me,
"When the train arrived at the Berlin station,
who was the representative of Goering?
Bruno Lohse."
And that Lohse was not only at the station,
but, in fact, Lohse was standing in the back
of the interrogation room watching this all transpire.
-This was my grandfather's cell.
My aunt went to the station every morning in Florence,
waiting for the train.
And my grandparents never arrived.
This is where my grandfather spent
the last three weeks of his life.
Oh, my God.
And then, pretty much on the last day of April,
he was beaten to death by the guards, by the kapos.
-With the authorities bearing down on him,
Lohse was a man who doesn't want to end his life
being interrogated about his past.
It was also clear that he was scared.
Then, March 2007,
he claims that he's ill and needs to go to the hospital,
and two days later, he was dead.
Then one day, my telephone rang, and it was a Swiss journalist.
Leo Mueller, his name was.
And he was writing an article about a Swiss bank vault.
And I said, "What kind of Swiss bank vault?"
He says, "Well, it belonged to Bruno Lohse."
And I said, "Lohse had a Swiss bank vault?"
You know, I was shocked. I said, "Where?"
And he said, "In the Zurich Cantonal Bank."
immediately I realized, "Oh, my gosh, that's where we had met.
I was right next door in the conference room."
And I asked Mueller,
"He had a bank vault, at Zurich Cantonal Bank?"
And he said, "Absolutely."
And it was filled with 14 pictures.
-I think we're talking about tens of millions
of dollars worth of art.
-And, of course, the Fischer Pissarro.
And when Leo Mueller told me that, I realized,
"Oh, my goodness," you know,
"the Pissarro belonged to Lohse."
It was absolutely clear.
Finally, this was clear proof
that Lohse had been trafficking in Nazi looted art for decades.
But, also, I knew at that point that I had been deceived.
I realized that Peter Griebert had gone into the bank vault,
taken out the Fischer Pissarro,
brought it into the conference room,
and that everything else was theater.
But then the news got worse.
I said, "I thought that the Fischer Pissarro belonged to
Schoeni's children."
Leo Mueller said, "There were no children.
This was completely fabricated."
And he said, "Well, let me tell you one thing.
Schoenart did not belong to Frédéric Schoeni.
Schoenart belonged to Bruno Lohse."
I realized the scene in the Zurich Cantonal Bank
about the artwork being dropped off there,
that that was completely false,
that the two days in Liechtenstein with this whole
team of lawyers, that was staged,
and even where I'd pushed him
on the Fischer Pissarro and Griebert
had joined me and seemed to be so angry, you know,
that also was a piece of theater, too.
So I felt, you know, that I'd been had.
-The whole point is that his ownership was cloaked.
His relationship to Schoenart was cloaked.
The presence of the painting was cloaked.
So it was virtually impossible
for the outside world to pierce through the veil of secrecy.
But that's precisely why it's set up that way.
-We weren't at all surprised when we discovered that,
yes, indeed, there were looted artworks in his bank vault.
And, amongst them, a painting by Meerhout, a Dutch painter,
that actually belonged to a Jewish family
whom we represented --
the family of Alfons Jaffé and his wife.
When Lohse's bank vault was opened,
they found that Lohse had a black leather-bound notebook
in which he wrote down the history of some
of these works of art,
and the Meerhout painting was in there as a Jaffé painting.
So he absolutely knew.
-Before that,
I was always very skeptical about Nazi loot being hidden,
you know, particularly in Swiss bank vaults.
I thought that was something for the movies.
Of course, history proved me wrong, you know.
-I went back to Liechtenstein
and I confronted the lawyer, Andrew Baker,
who was behind the foundation.
I am with Andrew Baker. It is the 26th of June.
He may be guarded in what he says.
Saw Peter Griebert...
And he admitted that he had participated
in the staged meeting with Milly Sele-Vogt.
-And the whole meeting was a bit of a surprise
and a revelation.
-Okay. Alright.
I also wanted to know what happened to the other paintings
that Griebert suspected were looted, as well,
but we don't know for sure.
There was a Renoir and a Monet, right?
-Correct. -Right.
What's happened to them?
-We've sold them privately, but we tried to auction them.
The auction houses eventually wouldn't take them.
They were interested,
but there was a slight hole in the provenance.
Because of their history,
we got less than we probably would have done at auction.
-Okay. What part of the world did they go to?
-I do not know. We delivered them in Switzerland.
Where they went after that, I do not know.
-And so, I, of course, tried to look into the foundation,
and one thing that I saw that was interesting is
how it subsequently evolved.
The Schoenart foundation became something called
the Ille Foundation,
and that was connected to an entity called Miselva.
And that, in turn,
was related to something called The Griffin Trust.
And I immediately got the sense of the way these --
you know, these tax shelters, you know,
these schemes at tax evasions, how elaborate they get.
I have subsequently read about Miselva and The Griffin Trust,
and the accusations are very damaging, right?
They're accused of concealing assets for Russian oligarchs.
It's been reported that an ex-employee of Miselva
was even implicated in a scheme
to smuggle some nuclear materials, right?
And so, you know,
they were mentioned in the Panama Papers, as well.
And so, yeah, it's a very interesting operation.
-I think the art world is only comparable
to two other types of markets --
to the weapons/arms market and the drug market.
These are international markets that are not controlled at all.
-If you happen to be, you know,
in possession of a work of art that has a Nazi past,
as long as your name, you know, is unavailable to anybody,
you're fairly free to do whatever you want
with the work of art.
-Some 90% of the works of art
that people are looking for still can't be found.
-If Lohse's life is indicative of anything,
it's indicative of the fact that the crime of plunder
pays for itself and most of the people who committed it
were able to go off scot-free
and enjoy the rest of their existence.
So, in other words, if I'm going to recommend
any crime against humanity, it's the crime of plunder.
-I do have one defining memory of Bruno Lohse.
I asked him, "How would you characterize your life?
How would you sum up?"
And he looked at me,
and there was kind of a sparkle in his eye.
And he laughed and his head went back a little bit
and he started to sing a very famous song,
"Je Ne Regrette Rien."
"I Regret Nothing."
♪♪
-"Plunderer" is available
with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video.
♪♪