Hermann Goering’s personal art dealer plundered the world for decades; his victims’ descendants are still seeking justice
PBS’s “Plunderer” details the life and work of Nazi art dealer Bruno Lohse
Hermann Goering (left) and Bruno Lohse. Courtesy of John S. Friedman
The new PBS documentary Plunderer follows the life and career of Bruno Lohse, an SS officer who quickly rose from being a soldier in an anti-tank unit to become the personal art dealer for Hermann Goering, one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich.
Created by veteran PBS and BBC director Hugo MacGregor and produced by John Friedman, known for the Academy Award-winning film Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, the film was largely guided by the work of historian Jonathan Petropoulos. Petropoulos interviewed Lohse for his book Goering’s Man in Paris over a number of years before Lohse’s death in 2007.
While styled like a typical PBS history documentary, Plunderer can also be described as a crime thriller. It exposes how after the war, secret networks existed to sell off stolen art to interested buyers willing to overlook how the pieces were acquired. Sometimes the buyers themselves were Nazis.
Before Plunderer, most books and films on Nazi art theft have focused only on the years during the war or modern-day efforts by the families of the original owners to reclaim these pieces.
“The intervening years are ignored,” Friedman told me in an interview. “I think our film is unique in that way, that we show the connections that a perpetrator like Bruno Lohse had, not only with the Monuments Men, but also with American museums and the whole American art market.”
Lohse’s ambition and artfulness are well captured in the documentary. Before the war, Lohse was a wannabe art dealer who was having little to no success. When Nazis began their looting campaign, Lohse seized on the opportunity to help catalog the artifacts which included not only art but any physical object the plunderers could get their hands on, including furniture and cutlery.
Lohse was captured in Bavaria at the end of the war. However, he was acquitted of all charges of looting. He continued to deal in stolen artifacts, trading them across Europe and the United States. After his death, it was discovered that Lohse had a secret vault of valuable paintings he had held onto since the war.
Plunderer, as thorough as it is, depicts only a small part of Lohse’s story. McGregor and his team shot over 200 hours of footage across seven countries with more than 50 interview subjects. Many of the stories the filmmakers captured did not fit into the two-hour final cut, including the conversation Lohse had with Goering just before the latter took his own life, and the mysterious background of a painting that depicted Lohse himself at a gambling table.
A number of interviews with families trying to reclaim stolen art did not make it into the film either. Friedman thinks these stories are still misunderstood.
“People have said that families just want to get their paintings back because of the value. But that’s not true,” he said. “The families wanted to regain their art because it was the only link they had to their past, to their parents, to their grandparents, to their childhoods, and the art brought back memories.”
The filmmakers did manage to include the story of one family that was directly affected by Lohse’s work — Fritz and Louise Gutmann from the Netherlands.
In addition to being swindled out of priceless paintings, the Guttmans were promised safe passage to Italy in exchange for signing over a collection of silver. They were instead sent to labor camps. Fritz was beaten to death at Theresienstadt in 1944 and soon after, Louise perished in Auschwitz.
Their descendant, Simon Goodman, has spent years trying to reclaim the stolen pieces with varying degrees of success. One of the paintings he has not yet been able to reclaim, “The Portrait of Isaac Abrahamsz Massa” by Franz Hals (circa. 1635), is owned by the San Diego Museum of Art.
Friedman hopes that his film will encourage even people who do not have direct ties to stolen art to petition governments and museums to assist in the restitution process.
“I think that anybody who feels sympathetic to losing one’s memories or one’s past should try to help the families regain their art and have some compassion and sympathy for their efforts,” he said.
Plunderer is currently available to watch online at DOCNYC.net until December 1st. It is also scheduled to air on PBS on February 19th and 26th at 9pm EST.
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