Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief (David M. Milch Foundation, Arte, BR, Taglicht Studios, WNET Group, PBS, aired February 19 and 26, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 23) I watched the second half of a PBS Secrets of the Dead episode whose first part my husband Charles and I had seen last week. It was called “Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief.” The Nazi art thief in question was a man named Bruno Lohse, who lived until 2007 and profited greatly first from his background as a Nazi art historian during World War II and then, after the war, from his knowledge of the caches in which Nazi art looters had hidden their stolen art and his willingness to sell certain artworks to Americans looking for tax-deductible gifts to musea. Lohse had made a minor name for himself in 1936 when he published a dissertation on an unimportant German painter named Jacob Phillip Hackert. He had already enlisted in the SS in 1933 and joined the Nazi Party in 1937 (a bit surprising to me because I had assumed you had to be a Nazi Party member to be accepted into the SS). When World War II started Lohse was drafted into the Luftwaffe (Germany’s air force) as a member of n anti-tank unit, but soon his background as an art historian came to the attention of Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command as well as the head of the Luftwaffe. Göring hired Lohse to be part of the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a group of art looters Göring assembled when the Nazis occupied France to go through the collections the Nazis had seized from Jewish owners they intended to kill anyway, steal them and then pick out the pieces Göring and the other Nazi bigwigs would be interested in. Since the Nazis in general had very conservative tastes in art and weren’t interested in Impressionist works or anything later than that, the ERR at first discarded such pieces but then realized that they could make money for the Nazi regime by selling such paintings clandestinely to collectors around the world. After Germany lost the war, Lohse fled from Paris to Berlin and then to Munich, where he established himself in Ludwig II’s old castle of Neuschwanstein and waited for American art historians to interview him.

A number of the so-called “Monuments Men,” portrayed as heroes in George Clooney’s film about them but whose real-life role was far more ambiguous, became Lohse’s friends and realized that he was one of the few people left alive who actually knew what had happened to all the artworks the Nazis had stolen, mostly from Jewish collectors. In 1950 Lohse was put on trial before a French military tribunal on charges of looting the art collections of Jews and others singled out for elimination in the Holocaust, and the principal witness against him was a woman named Rose Valland (who’s called “Claire Simone” in The Monuments Men movie and is played by Cate Blanchett), who had literally risked her own life to keep track of all the artworks the Nazis were stealing and putting in their own personal collections. Amazingly, Lohse was acquitted and he treated that verdict as a full exoneration. The first part of this film ends in 1955, when Lohse relocated from Germany to the U.S. and hooked up with art dealers and museum officials throughout the United States, including Theodore Rousseau, who had become the head of the paintings department at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rousseau and Lohse carried on an elaborate correspondence, almost all in German since Lohse never learned more than a smattering of English. With tax rates on the richest Americans in the 1950’s approaching 90 percent (to me, those were the good old days!), it was advantageous for rich Americans to buy a work of art of doubtful provenance for $1,000, then donate it to a museum whose experts would value it for $10,000, and the donor would get the full $10,000 as a deduction from their taxes. Amazingly, it took the fall of the Berlin Wall – literally – to derail Lohse’s double game of posing as an honest art dealer while quietly unloading stolen art to various private collectors. The East German government had been holding various archival records from the Nazi era and, once the wall came down and East Germany ceased to exist as an independent state, those records gave away more of the secret stashes where Lohse and other Nazi art looters had hidden their stolen treasures.

Jonathan Petropoulos, the principal source for this documentary, hooked up with Lohse and started interviewing him extensively in the late 1990’s. Some people have alleged that Petropoulos got too close to Lohse and was therefore an accessory after the fact to some of his crimes. One part of the second half of this documentary deals with a painting by French artist Camille Pissarro called “Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps,” an outdoor street scene Pissarro painted from a balcony window of his home, where he, a Jew himself, was hiding out in an attic from anti-Semitic mobs who were besieging Paris in 1902 (probably as fallout from the Dreyfus case). Petropoulos was told he could go to the Kantonal Bank in Zurich, Switzerland and be permitted to view the Pissarro painting, and when he did so he was offered two more alleged Nazi-looted paintings, one by Monet and one by Renoir. Petropoulos was given an elaborate set of instructions, one that could have been dreamed up by a spy novelist like John Le Carré or James Bond creator Ian Fleming, which involved going to the small home-based office of an art foundation called “Schönart” and meeting with attorney Andrew Baker, who allegedly managed it. It turned out that Baker was also involved with such sketchy “foundations” as Ali, Miselva (one of whose members was accused of dealing in stolen nuclear materials), and the Griffin Trust, which has been accused of laundering art for Russian oligarchs. Needless to say, the whole scheme was an elaborate setup (Petropoulos called it “theatre”) by which the art expert was led to believe the stolen paintings would be returned to him while the whole time they were sitting in the Zurich bank vault under Lohse’s and his business manager Peter Griebert’s control. (Ultimately the Pissarro was ordered returned by a Lichtenstein court to the family of its original owners shortly after Lohse’s death in 2007, and they sold it at auction two years later for $1,850,000.)

One interviewee for the program compared the art market to the traffic in weapons or drugs: an unregulated market in which both buyers and sellers are free to do pretty much whatever they like, without pesky government bureaucrats standing in the way. In the first few weeks of the second Donald Trump Presidency, in which he and his “hand” (to use the Game of Thrones term) Elon Musk seem bound and determined to destroy the federal bureaucracy and forever eliminate it as a check on the power of wealthy individuals and corporations to do whatever they please and make money in whatever scummy ways they can while screwing over ordinary non-rich individuals, Plunderer seemed more timely than ever in detailing how a few unscrupulous men made a ton of money off the social evil of Nazism and never had to look back or face being held to account.