Plunderer: Life & Times of a Nazi Art Thief

The documentary Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief (2024) focused on Bruno Lohse, a Nazi art dealer who shared in systematic looting of art from Jewish families. In 1936, Lohse earned a doctorate in art history and took his first steps into the art market. He ran the business from his father’s apartment, buying and selling artworks. The film investigated how Lohse profited in the post-war art market and explored the ongoing efforts of Jewish families to reclaim their cultural heritage. It examined historic crimes, illicit art markets and the struggle for restitution. It expertly confronted the art market’s frequent disregard for provenance and confronted the enduring human cost of these crimes.

The film has featured in various Jewish film festivals eg the Jewish International Film Festival/JIFF in Australia and the UK Jewish Film Festival. Directed by Hugo Macgregor in English, French and German, it was produced by John Friedman, National Centre for Jewish Film, Brandeis.

Plunderer analysed the dark part of the international art world, largely built on wartime tragedy. Using important masterpieces and personal letters, this documentary investigated the theft of thousands of artworks from Jewish families by Nazis in WW2. As noted, a key player in these war crimes was Bruno Lohse, an SS officer who became the art agent in Paris for Hermann Göring, a powerful Nazi figure in WW2. So this feature-length film focuses on the Nazis’ clearinghouse for confiscated pictorial art in France.

Bruno Lohse (second right) and Hermann Göring (cent) on a tour of stolen artworks,

at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris.

NY Times

Meet historian Jonathan Petropoulos, author of Göring's Man in Paris: Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer. He first met Lohse in 1998, interviewing him often before his death in 2007 about his role in Nazi looting operations. Petropoulos told of the unkind game he played with Lohse, leading to horrible discoveries of collusion with galleries and auction houses, and paintings stashed in European bank vaults. Lohse had risen to prominence in Göring’s inner circle, personally organising art thefts for Hitler’s right-hand man; Lohse’s role in stealing masterpieces from desperate European Jews was spelled out. Petropoulos clarified the web of postwar complicity that shielded Lohse from proper justice, exposing the formal art market’s disregard for provenance.

Having been captured and grilled by the Monuments Men post-war, Lohse served a brief prison sentence. But once released, he again dealt in stolen art for 60 years, successfully selling to collectors, galleries and big museums. No other film has closely analysed the ex-Nazi art dealers who operated their own postwar Odessa network i.e the unregulated art market. See stories of Holocaust survivors working to reclaim their families’ lost artworks and see the continuity between the post-war era and the contemporary, sometimes secretive art world.

Museums everywhere have to consider implications of retaining items many argue were taken from their owners under persecution or duress. And while many of the rows over restitution pertain to old pieces, the recovery of which is complicated by the sweeping eras that have passed since their removal, a new documentary shows how the fight to recover more modern artwork can be just as problematic.

Jewish art dealer Max Stern owned the popular Galerie Stern in Düsseldorf in 1930s, but he had to sell all his art at auction for bargain prices, while his accounts and assets were frozen and seized. He fled Germany for the UK, where he was held for 2 years then sent to Canada. In Montreal, he become one of Canada’s greatest art dealers, representing Rodin and Henry Moore, and Emily Carr. See a problem at an exhibition honouring Max Stern at Düsseldorf City Museum which was due to open in 2018. But it was delayed for years due to debates over the restitution of artworks looted by the Nazis. See how loaded in political and cultural issues in restitution were.

Göring and Lohse studying a book on Rembrandt. 

Archives des Musées Nationaux/

 

Stern died childless in 1987 and left most of his estate to Montreal’s McGill & Concordia universities & Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. In 2002 his estate started to reclaim his lost art. The Max Stern Art Restitution Project has restored 25 paintings, making it a successful project. But hundreds of Stern claims are still waiting. The film focused on the project’s attempts to restore two paintings by Wilhelm von Schadow in the last decade: Self-portrait (1805) and Artist’s Children from the City of Düsseldorf (1830).

Under the Allied Restitution Principles, an estate making a claim had to prove that the assets changed hands under duress. It then became a pedantic argument about what constituted “duress” and when did duress actually begin for German Jews eg in 1933 versus 1935?

Stern’s heirs are now seeking to restore a painting in the Tate Britain works, Jan Griffier the Elder’s View of Hampton Court Palace, bought by the gallery in 1961. The Stern project says newly found documents show the painting was in the Stern collection when he was forced to sell his assets. They also believed that other Stern paintings might be held by the National Trust; Joachim Patinir’s Temptation of Christ at Upton House, is also eligible for restitution as it was “sold” by Stern under Nazi threats.

The documentary shows the fight to recover paintings that a Jewish art dealer had been forced to sell by the Nazis. In all the disputes, there was a familiar pattern: politicians and museum officials, having ignored the claim as long as possible, finally making noises about doing the right thing. But inevitably things got stuck in endless legal, scholarly or scientific wranglings.

Documentary Plunderer is based on Göring's Man in Paris: Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World, 

written by Jonathan Petropoulos.

Question the failures of postwar justice and the continuing complicity of governments and the art trade in unpunished crimes. The film’s issues are very broad and resonate with larger questions facing the art world right now, the Director said. Recently restitution has been endlessly loaded with political and cultural issues, relating to antiquities, colonial plunder or paintings. From the Benin bronzes to the Parthenon marbles, debates over the restitution of cultural artefacts happen across the international art world that is forced to reckon with the treasures’ controversial histories. Thus the film should be shown at Film Festivals everywhere, and not just Jewish Festivals.

Many thanks to TheArtNewspaper.