Chapter Seven

Sieg Heil!

ON THE AFTERNOON of May 14, 1940, Hermann Goering introduced himself to the people of Rotterdam by having his Luftwaffe bombers transform the city into a smoldering pile of ash and rubble.

The battle for Holland was by then in its fourth day. After an advance attack by paratroopers, the invading German army had raced across the border at lightning speed, driving the ill-prepared and poorly equipped Dutch defense forces westward into the big cities along the Atlantic coast. Balking at the prospect of protracted urban combat, General Schmidt, commander of the Ninth Panzer division, halted his tank advance on the outskirts of Rotterdam. Schmidt wanted help from above. Through the appropriate channels, a call went out to Goering in Berlin.

As commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, Goering had pioneered the use of terror bombing as a military tactic, employing it first in support of Franco’s armies during the Spanish Civil War and again during the brutal Warsaw Blitzkrieg of 1939. Targeting civilians in densely populated areas had proven to be an extremely effective means of demoralizing the enemy. And the carpet-bombing raid on central Rotterdam was to be Goering’s biggest show of force to date, an unforgettable demonstration of the power and will of the Reich.

 

Hermann Goering at the 1934 Reich’s Party Day celebrations.

 

An RAF propaganda leaflet contrasting Goering’s imagined reactions to the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaigns early in the war and the Allies’ later attacks on German territory

 

A total of ninety German aircraft bombarded the city that day, delivering a payload of explosives so large that the resulting firestorm consumed over 26,000 buildings and rendered 80,000 people homeless. While the inferno raged out of control, the Nazi high command declared that Amsterdam and Utrecht would be next on the list, a statement intended, and understood, as an ultimatum. Defenseless against further airborne attacks, the Dutch had to choose between surrendering their country and seeing it blown to bits. With the royal family and a group of key state officials safely evacuated by ship to London, where they hoped to continue the operations of the legitimate government in exile, the armed forces of the Netherlands formally capitulated to Hitler’s Wehrmacht. By May 15, just five days after the initial invasion, it was all over: Hermann Goering’s bombers had put an end to Dutch liberty.

In Rotterdam, 640 acres at the heart of the city had been burned beyond recognition. But all was not lost. Whichever way the wind had blown on the afternoon of the bombings, it had not sent the wall of flame in the direction of the sleepy neighborhood about a half mile south of the central train station where the Boijmans Museum was located. The museum survived the tragedy mostly unharmed. Moreover, the curators had prudently removed the greatest masterworks of the collection to a blast-proof air-raid shelter. Vermeer’s famed Supper at Emmaus was perfectly safe.

 

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE living in the Netherlands during the occupation, Han van Meegeren had to adjust to the new order of things. Unlike most people, though, he seems not to have found the transition particularly difficult.

Consider the following incident. Within a year of taking power, the Germans decreed that every Dutch citizen over the age of sixteen would have to carry a set of tamper-proof identity papers. Along with fingerprints and a stamped photograph, this so-called persoonsbewijs was to include a special seal for Jews and other putative undesirables, marking out their second-class status. The persoonsbewijs program met with widespread resentment. When the day rolled around for Van Meegeren to be photographed and fingerprinted, he took the opportunity to send a message to the powers that be—a message of hearty approval. Living then in the chic Amsterdam suburb of Laren, where he and Johanna had settled after returning from France, Van Meegeren cheerfully trimmed his moustache into a small square, donned a black shirt, and marched off to the town hall to have his picture taken in a pose whose grandeur and melodrama would have made Heinrich Hoffmann proud. Indeed, had a golden statuette been awarded for best imitation of Adolf Hitler on the registration queue that day, the forger would surely have won.

Fascistic fashion statements aside, though, Van Meegeren concealed his Nazi sympathies during the war as often as he displayed them. Drawing upon a lifetime of experience in fraud, he danced a deft collaborationist two-step, toning down his behavior and rhetoric around anyone who was likely to take offense. For example, a socialist-minded poet who met Van Meegeren a few times at parties in wartime Amsterdam was later shocked to discover that Van Meegeren had been anything other than a loyal Dutch patriot. “Whenever the topic of the occupation came up,” the poet recalled, “he talked all ‘anti’ and made it seem like he was no friend of the Krauts.” So long as he was just talking, Van Meegeren was all things to all people.

His actions, however, show him pursuing a specifically pro-German brand of opportunism. During the early years of Nazi rule in the Netherlands, Van Meegeren donated substantial sums to both the German Red Cross and the controversial Winterhulp, an organization billed as a relief agency but vehemently denounced by the Resistance as a militaristic slush fund. “The Winterhulp helps only the war,” went one common graffito. “So don’t give!” Van Meegeren also took part in Nazi-sponsored art exhibitions in the Netherlands and Germany, showing works like his volkisch-themed Mealtime at the Farm. At one such exhibition, his entry bore a public dedication to Hitler. And, in January 1942, in response to a collegial request from Ed Gerdes, the occupation government’s art tsar, Van Meegeren produced a painting depicting a wool collection drive to benefit Germany’s troops on the Eastern Front.

Van Meegeren, moreover, was not pressured into doing any of these things. He acted of his own free will with specific goals in mind. For instance, he made his initial donation to the Winterhulp for the express purpose of establishing his bona fides with Ed Gerdes, who was to become his primary connection in the occupation government. A Nazi true believer and fanatical anti-Semite, Gerdes was Van Meegeren’s neighbor in Laren and a figure roundly despised by most Dutch artists during the war: his official duties included promoting Nazi ideology in art and eradicating any trace of Jewish influence from the cultural life of the Netherlands. Relishing his broad powers of censorship, Gerdes even demanded that the editor of a biographical dictionary of Dutch painters designate the long-dead Hague School master Jozef Israels as a “Jew artist,” effectively sewing a yellow star onto history. With an eye toward the prestige that came with official recognition, Van Meegeren spent an inordinate amount of time playing up to Gerdes—and the effort paid off. For it was through Ed Gerdes’s good graces that Van Meegeren was able to exhibit in the Fatherland, an honor reserved for artists with strong connections to the Nazi cultural establishment.

 

Ed Gerdes

 

However eager Van Meegeren was to ingratiate himself with the occupation regime, he never went so far as to join the Dutch Nazi Party—a step that would have been, for him, as useless as it was dangerous. Party membership represented the point of no return for opportunistic Dutchmen during the war: clear-cut, undeniable evidence of treason. As a member of the party, Van Meegeren would have had no room to equivocate about his allegiances; yet, unlike the average man, he would have gained nothing in return for losing that prerogative. Aside from expressing ideological zeal, the main reason people joined the party was to land cushy jobs in the occupation government. Dutch Nazi party members were, for instance, routinely installed as the mayors of towns and villages, putting a familiar face on German authority at a local level. But a conventional job, much less a bureaucratic one, had never been high on Van Meegeren’s list of desires, and it certainly wasn’t what he was after during the occupation. What Van Meegeren wanted from the Germans was something far more personal: a second chance at defining himself as an artist in his own name.

The possibility of having a successful public art career, complete with the imprimatur of state approval—finally, at the age of fifty-one—was the primary motivation in Van Meegeren’s turn from secret Nazi sympathizer to active wartime collaborator. Inside the Reich’s dominion, the Nazis had created a new European art world cleansed of any “degenerate” modern tendencies, opening up vast opportunities for an artist of Van Meegeren’s tastes, interests, and intellectual preoccupations. And despite the social stigma that working with the Germans entailed, Van Meegeren did not intend to let those opportunities pass him by. He could become, at long last, an artist of his times, because times had suddenly changed in his favor.

Van Meegeren’s collaborationist paintings and drawings allowed him to express openly the disturbing worldview that had already crept into The Supper at Emmaus. For instance, in a meticulously detailed oil painting called Arbeid—or “Work”—Van Meegeren created a symbolic-heroic tribute to the fascist corporative state. Here, the spectral face of a master builder shines forth from the skeleton of a steel-frame building, rising from the black smoke of a bonfire and pointing the way to a church spire towering in the hazy distance. Arbeid was commissioned by Ed Gerdes to decorate the entry hall of the Dutch Labor Front—Het Nederlandse Arbeidsfront—a quasi-governmental Nazi organization responsible for assimilating the Dutch workforce into the Reich’s economy and war effort. A perverse example of occupation re-branding, the Arbeidsfront was what remained of the prewar Association of Dutch Trade Unions after all the Jews, leftists, and other naysayers had been removed from the governing board and replaced by zealous functionaries dedicated to serving Germany’s interests.

Like many of Van Meegeren’s collaborationist images, Arbeid was an illustration of the Volksgemeinschaft, the Nazi ideal of a highly disciplined “community of the people,” guided and unified by the wisdom of the Führer—a concept much in vogue among the forger’s circle of friends. “In a dynamic society, every function has its proper role: commerce, industry, agriculture, also war,” Jan Ubink proclaimed in a lecture before his reactionary comrades at the League of Dutch Playwrights just days before the German invasion. Noting that democracy was inefficient at regulating these functions, the former editor of De Kemphaan went on to suggest a better alternative: “In the so-called totalitarian nations, things are arranged differently. There, the parliamentary game is no longer played, but rather, according to the dictates of the categorical imperative, the state cultivates the free time of its citizens in ways that benefit the entire society.” From its commanding location on the wall at the Arbeidsfront, Van Meegeren’s painting actually went Ubink one better, situating labor and industry in the context not only of the Volksgemeinschaft but also of the more aggressive Wehrgemeinschaft—or “war community.” Stressing the shared burden of worldwide conflict, the Wehrgemeinschaft obliged patriotic citizens to harness their “social roles” to the Reich’s triumphant struggle for military dominance.

 

Arbeid, ca. 1941

 

Although Van Meegeren was perhaps the least qualified artist in Western Europe to hold forth on the topic of civic virtue, his incorrigible bad faith was probably quite helpful to him in painting Arbeid, a fulsome advertisement for a fraudulent cause. Arbeid successfully conjures up a sense of resolute struggle and exertion, while conveniently ignoring the grim reality of the Dutch wartime labor situation. No grand edifices like the one shown in Arbeid were constructed in the Netherlands during the occupation for the simple reason that the Nazi occupiers were busy plundering the nation’s raw materials and transporting thousands of workers forcibly across the border to toil under duress in German factories.

Likely aware that the ideology behind works like Arbeid was abhorrent to most of his countrymen, Van Meegeren employed imagery in his collaborationist pictures that was readily intelligible as Nazi inspired but not so blatant in its implications that there was no possibility for denial. There are no swastikas on display in Van Meegeren’s wartime oeuvre, no insulting caricatures of Jews, and no identifiable German soldiers. And any Nazi symbols that do pop up are generally of a type that could be explained away with alternate interpretations. For instance, the death’s head emblem of the SS echoes the longstanding Dutch artistic tradition of signaling the fleeting nature of life through representations of skulls and bones. The pictures are obviously pro-German, but actually nailing down the specifics entails following Van Meegeren through a game of artistic hide and seek much like that involved in uncovering a forgery. Although here what’s at stake is not merely the authenticity of an old-master painting but disloyalty and betrayal in time of war.

 

Dutch farmers from the province of Utrecht being rounded up for work as forced laborers in German factories

 

Van Meegeren’s veiled approach to the production of Nazi art found its most interesting and outrageous outlet in Teekeningen 1, a book of drawings that the forger-turned-collaborator published in 1942. Clearly announcing its intentions, this folio-sized tome featured a black cover with the title embossed in gold Gothic lettering and a large red circle containing the number “1”—black, red, and gold being the ceremonial colors of the Nazi Party. In a 1976 letter expressing regret for his involvement in the project, the book’s Dutch publisher explained that Van Meegeren had incorporated the number “1” into the cover design not as a sequential designation—no Volume 2 was ever envisioned—but as a surreptitious ideogram. Van Meegeren said that he intended the single digit on a round field to look like a Wolfsangel, a Nazi hate emblem. The Wolfsangel, although German in origin, was the primary symbolic motif employed in the badges, flags, and insignia of the Dutch Nazi Party. Indeed, Teekeningen 1 resembled official party publications so closely that the inscribed copy Van Meegeren sent to Hitler must have looked quite at home on the shelves at the Reichschancellery in Berlin.

 

Cover image of Teekeningen 1

 

The Wolfsangel insignia of the Dutch Nazi Party

 

Van Meegeren initially conceived the book as a promotional-commemorative item for a major solo show that he mounted during the war, with the approval of Ed Gerdes, who noted that Van Meegeren seemed “to understand the new era.” Many occupation government VIPs attended the exhibition’s opening reception at the Mesdag Panorama in The Hague on January 12, 1942. Among those present that evening was Adolf Hitler’s favorite Dutch Nazi, Meinoud Rost van Tonningen, one of the most powerful men in wartime Holland. As minister of finance under the occupation government, Rost van Tonningen oversaw the transfer of the Netherlands’ gold reserves to the Reich and was, bar none, the single fiercest Dutch advocate of the German cause—far fiercer even than Anton Mussert, the titular head of the Dutch Nazi Party. Although it’s impossible to say for certain, it was quite likely Rost van Tonningen who delivered Van Meegeren’s signed presentation copy of Teekeningen 1 to the Führer, for he was one of the very few people in the Netherlands—and certainly the only person in Van Meegeren’s circle of acquaintance—who had any kind of face-to-face contact with the dictator in Berlin.

 

Martien Beversluis

 

Why would such an important figure have gone to the trouble? Although he didn’t know Van Meegeren well, Rost van Tonningen was quite friendly with the “coauthor” of Teekeningen 1, the Nazi poet Martien Beversluis, who wrote verses to accompany Van Meegeren’s images in the book. Beversluis, an eccentric, hard-drinking ideologue who spent gin-soaked weekends with Van Meegeren and Johanna in Laren, was not only the most militant of Van Meegeren’s close friends during the war but also the most foolhardy. While the timid Jan Ubink, for instance, advanced his career under Nazi rule simply by remaining noncommittal as he slipped into posts from which more principled journalists had been removed, Beversluis stormed the airwaves with fire-breathing propaganda broadcasts for the occupation government. A loyal member of the Dutch Nazi Party, he was named mayor of the town of Veere in the province of Zeeland, and received commendations for his fervor and efficiency in office. Ever ready to proselytize for the cause, Beversluis even wrote a children’s book intended to instill the youth of the Netherlands with appreciation for their benevolent Führer.

 

Grain, Petroleum, Cotton, ca. 1942

 

In Teekeningen 1, Beversluis’s poetry helped to clarify Van Meegeren’s sprawling pictorial repertoire. In the drawing Grain, Petroleum, Cotton, for instance, Van Meegeren presents a soap bubble blown by an angular devil figure who reclines on the pages of an open book. Inside the shimmering orb—a traditional symbol of life’s evanescence—sash-wearing dignitaries gather at a dais above a kick line of nude female dancers, oblivious to the fact that they are being carted away by the skeletal figure of death. Inscribed in the bubble’s surface are the Dutch words for the commodities named in the work’s title. In Beversluis’s accompanying text, we learn that the devil’s book is the Old Testament, whose “hatred” has spawned a degenerate society prostrate before the powers of international finance. Only after a “fiery day of reckoning” will the benighted world see the light.

 

Snake and Fawn, ca. 1942

 

This apocalyptic vision takes on a more specifically Dutch character in an alarming image that appears near the end of Teekeningen 1. Offering a reprise of his most beloved work, Van Meegeren depicts Princess Juliana’s pet fawn being ravished by an enormous black-speckled snake. The notion of “brittle elegance,” once prized in Net Hertje van Van Meegeren by the Liberal Party press, has clearly been left far behind, along with any lingering royalist sentiment. Ripped from its context, this picture could perhaps be read as a plea for mercy. But seen within the pages Teekeningen 1, where the purifying power of violence is glorified in plainly Nazistic terms, the murder of the fawn smacks of treason.

 

NOT ONLY DID the occupation reinvigorate Van Meegeren’s work in his own name, but it also gave a tremendous boost to his career as a forger. Nazi conquest created substantial opportunities for those who could supply items that the Germans wanted, such as wood and coal for industrial purposes, or woolen goods for soldiers at the front. The war did remarkable things to the picture trade too, dramatically transforming both supply and demand. On the one hand, everyone in continental Europe was bidding up the prices of hard assets like gem stones and old-master paintings amid wartime restrictions on the convertibility and export of currency; and on the other, the Nazis were systematically looting vast quantities of art from Jews and others deemed to be enemies of the Reich. During the war, paintings of every variety could be sold easily and profitably, and it was not at all uncommon for items of dubious or unknown origins to show up on the market—factors that worked very much to Van Meegeren’s advantage in selling his occupation-era Vermeers.

Indeed, Van Meegeren’s ersatz examples of the Dutch national patrimony were much sought after in occupied Holland. Loyalists in the domestic cultural establishment desperately wanted to keep the Vermeers out of German hands and were willing to pay handsomely to do so; on the other side of the equation, high-level Nazis yearned to acquire trophy pictures like these, in part, for the sake of vanity, but also to validate, in a material way, the Reich’s complete domination of Europe. Hermann Goering, in particular, was keen to get a Vermeer for his collection—largely due to an acute case of picture envy. While the Führer already had two Vermeers—The Astronomer, looted from the Rothschilds, and The Allegory of Painting, purchased under disputed circumstances from the rightful owner—Goering had none. The search for an example of the Delft master’s work became a matter of pride for Goering.

Although he couldn’t access the state treasury to fund his acquisitions the way that Hitler could, Goering nonetheless possessed a very substantial fortune with which to pursue his adventures in art collecting. As the number-two man in the Nazi Party hierarchy after the Führer, Goering had enriched himself by means of graft, influence peddling, and the routing of lucrative government contracts to businesses that he personally controlled. As a result, he enjoyed a lifestyle of almost comical luxury. A former World War I flying ace, born into an influential family, Goering liked to play the part of the gentleman squire, dressing up in fanciful Tyrolean costumes and practicing longbow archery on the manicured lawns of his country estate, Carinhall, just north of Berlin. Named for Goering’s deceased first wife, the Swedish Baroness Carin von Kantzow, Carinhall boasted an astonishing array of precious art objects, including nearly two thousand old-master paintings—some of them purchased, others looted, and still others given to Goering as gifts by people seeking government favor. As a collector, Goering had a weakness for showy, expensive items that were sometimes not of the highest quality; but still, he considered himself a great sophisticate. Ich bin nun mal ein Renaissancetyp, as he liked to say—“After all, I’m a Renaissance man.”

Goering was an active participant in the Dutch art market virtually from the moment the dust cleared after the bombing of Rotterdam. Within days of the German victory, Goering’s banker and financial advisor, Alois Miedl, went around to the major Jewish art collectors in the Amsterdam area and let it be known that they would be better off selling their possessions to him at fire-sale prices than letting the Gestapo simply haul everything away. That Miedl found a lot of takers for this seedy offer isn’t surprising. An atmosphere of panic prevailed in the Jewish community during the immediate aftermath of the invasion: more than 150 terrified Dutch Jews committed suicide in the week following the onset of hostilities. Working as Goering’s representative, Alois Miedl acquired the entire fourteen-hundred-painting collection of the famed Goudstikker gallery for a cash payment made under extremely murky circumstances. A deal was struck with dubiously appointed representatives of the absent owner—a Dutch Jew who had escaped with his wife and infant son, only to die in a freak accident en route to England. The Goudstikker’s pictures went to Goering, while Miedl got to keep the family’s real estate as well as the gallery itself. Thrown into the bargain was protection for Jacques Goudstikker’s elderly mother, who had opted not to leave the Netherlands with the rest of the family. She would survive the war unharmed.

 

Alois Miedl

 

Despite his strong Nazi connections, Miedl, a German national who had lived and worked in Amsterdam since the early 1930s, enjoyed a fairly amicable relationship with the city’s wealthy Jewish elite, largely because his wife, Dorie Fleischer Miedl, was Jewish herself. Dorie’s heritage notwithstanding, during the war, the Miedls threw annual galas in their home in honor of Hitler’s birthday. Dorie, who had been declared an honorary member of the Aryan race by the occupation government, personally led the toasts to the Führer’s health, surrounded by some of the highest ranking members of the Amsterdam Gestapo, while Alois proudly stood by dressed in a black SS-style uniform.

As the occupation progressed, Miedl spun his Jewish connections into a devil-you-know protection racket, purchasing or taking into “safekeeping” all manner of Jewish assets—not just paintings but also bonds, stock certificates, even entire corporations—and reaping windfall profits in the process. Viewing the Holocaust mostly as a business opportunity, Miedl wasn’t the Oskar Schindler of Amsterdam, but he did save more than a dozen Dutch and German Jews from death during the war—some for business reasons, some because they were members of Dorie’s family, and others, seemingly, out of the goodness of his heart. Not everyone on Miedl’s list, however, came out unscathed. Miedl employed two Jewish accountants to oversee his illegal trading activities on the black markets: toward the end of 1943, when he found that he no longer needed the services of Messrs. Einhorn and Danziger, Miedl chose to withdraw his protection, and the pair were promptly deported to Theriesenstadt, taking Miedl’s business secrets with them to their graves. As one of Miedl’s associates later remarked, the man was sehr schlau—very clever.

By building a personal empire, Alois Miedl was cheating the Reich out of its blood money, but Hermann Goering seems not to have minded, for Miedl knew how to get great artworks. Elsewhere in the Reich’s conquered territories, the official Jewish-property registration apparatus took control of confiscated Jewish collections, so Goering was obliged to defer to Hitler when divvying up the spoils; indeed, that’s why Goering couldn’t obtain Vermeer’s Astronomer from the Rothschild paintings seized in Paris. But by working with Miedl, Goering was able to acquire many of the very best Jewish-owned pictures in the Netherlands before the bureaucracy had time to get to work.

Indeed, due in part to Miedl’s coercive buying activities, relatively few pictures of truly momentous cultural importance were ever confiscated outright by the Nazis in occupied Holland. Aside from the Goudstikker pictures, there were, in fact, not many large blue-chip collections owned by Dutch Jews—certainly nothing like the Rothschild holdings in France—and on the whole, during the first twelve months or so of Nazi rule, an atmosphere of frantic deal making prevailed. For instance, the Katz brothers, the employers of Theo van Wijngaarden’s son Willy, used their expertise and connections to help Hitler’s representatives purchase a major Swiss collection that the Führer had long coveted; in return, thirty-five members of the Katz family were given exit visas to neutral countries, thus escaping the prospect of the concentration camp. Having done business with the Nazi regime left the Katzes open to criticism after the war, but given what was at stake, it is very difficult to question the prudence of their actions.

For those who possessed no bargaining chips, of course, there were no bargains to be struck. The Netherlands, once home to a thriving Jewish community, lost more Jews to the death camps per capita than any other nation in Europe. And with the lives went a great deal of property, including fine art objects as well as the everyday belongings of thousands of ordinary families. Most of the artworks confiscated from Jews in occupied Holland were several steps down from the level of quality that would have interested Goering, Hitler, or the German state museums and were therefore sold off. This was a subtly different endeavor from the Nazis’ elaborate efforts to capture the world’s great artistic treasures for the Reich. It was plunder for profit; commercialized pillage; the remorseless, workaday criminality of the Holocaust, carried out for the three-fold purpose of stealing from the Jews, obliterating all memory of their existence, and raising a bit of ready cash.

One of the few really large Jewish collections seized outright by the Nazis in the Netherlands was the decidedly mixed-quality trading stock of Leo Nardus, Theo van Wijngaarden’s early mentor in the ways of art world fraud. Nardus, who had retired to Tunisia in the early 1920s, left his art collection behind, entrusting it to the safekeeping of a well-to-do childhood friend, Arnold van Buuren, who had continued to sell individual pieces whenever good prices could be obtained on the Amsterdam market. In 1942, the Nazis arrested Van Buuren, who, like Nardus, was Jewish, and sent him to his death in a concentration camp. Confiscated as enemy property, Nardus’s pictures were then carefully assessed and sorted by major figures in the Nazi art world. Alois Miedl had examined the Nardus collection prior to Van Buuren’s arrest: finding only one item that he considered important enough for Goering—a copy of a Rubens picture—Miedl later reported that the collection consisted mostly of second-tier works incorrectly ascribed to first-tier masters, which sounds entirely plausible given Nardus’s usual standards and practices.

Yet, even though these pictures were deemed unfit to please a Nazi potentate, they still had real monetary value. And precisely because they were not immediately recognizable landmarks of western art, they were ripe for laundering through the trade. Aside from the one item that Miedl had acquired for Goering, the remainder of these 156 paintings were sold off, many of them in an auction that appears to have been something of a sham, with several lots going for implausibly low prices to buyers only very haphazardly identified. Asked about the ongoing efforts to re-cover these works, most of whose whereabouts remain unknown, a representative of the Nardus family has stated that, even when items do turn up, legally reclaiming them can be quite difficult because of the intentionally deceptive alterations commonly made to pictures dumped onto the wartime market. Panels got cut down and canvases restretched to change their dimensions, and in some cases, the images themselves were retouched. The records of Allied property recovery investigators even note assorted instances of complete overpainting to facilitate smuggling. Although the Nazis could make up their own laws to justify the seizure of Jewish property, the professional middlemen who chose to handle these pictures were fully aware that theft was theft, and took pains to cover their tracks.

We only know about the Nardus collection in detail because it was large enough to attract individual attention. But thousands of other moderately valuable nonmasterpiece paintings were confiscated from Jewish families throughout occupied Europe. And although there are fairly extensive records of pictures that were taken and scattered indications of how much was received when certain items were put on the market, the precise identifying details of the particular images often went unrecorded. Whereas vaunted Nazi record keeping can be extremely helpful in tracing the fate of pictures that were considered important enough to keep for the Reich, in the case of items destined for the marketplace, the records often served more to obscure the crime than to document it. And it should be said that some of the objects the Nazis chose to sell were quite fine, including minor works from world-famous collections. After the war, the art dealer Jacques Seligmann spent years trying to track down various bronze statues taken from his family’s Paris gallery and auctioned off by the Nazis to people identified only by first name. Likewise, in 1941, several pictures looted from the great collection amassed by the Parisian Jewish Schloss family found their way to the Dutch art market through a pseudonymous buyer called “Buitenweg”—a real Dutch surname, which, as a common noun, happens to mean “back road.” Due to the fact that an item from the Schloss collection was later found in the possession of the art expert Vitale Bloch, some have speculated that Bloch himself was the mysterious Buitenweg, although it seems unlikely that he could have been working alone.

Of course, Bloch hardly lacked for company in the less wholesome regions of the art world. Many of the same figures who had taken part in the Vermeer swindle business of the 1920s put their expertise to work dealing in looted Holocaust artworks once the Nazi kleptocracy took hold. Hans Wendland was one of the biggest offenders in this line. The most important artworks that the Nazis sold during the war were the masterpieces of European modernism that they took from Jewish collectors and dealers like the Rosenberg family of Paris. Although top canvases by Picasso, Matisse, and Van Gogh were extremely valuable in most of the world’s estimation, to the Nazis such pictures were “degenerate” and ripe for sale. Heedless of the risks involved in trafficking items so easily identified and traced, Wendland acquired several pictures out of the confiscated Rosenberg holdings and sold them on the Swiss market. Although most of Wendland’s looting-related activities later proved extremely difficult to nail down with any great legal precision, the Rosenberg pictures left a paper trail that caused Wendland considerable trouble when he was finally arrested trying to flee Europe via Italy in 1946. Wendland was, however, not easily thwarted: admitting no wrongdoing or complicity, he stonewalled through four years of legal proceedings and eventually walked away a free man.

The Rosenbergs’ hiding place for their pictures was revealed to the Nazis, in return for a large cash payment, by another figure who had been involved with the sale of dodgy Vermeers back in the Roaring Twenties, one Yves Perdoux. An associate of Wendland’s, Perdoux had acted as the front man in the sale of the sauced up and heavily repainted portrait of a French youth that Joseph Duveen had purchased as a Vermeer in 1923 and then sold to Jules Bache. During the war, Perdoux worked as a Gestapo informer and was also implicated in the sale of looted assets. His office mate, Achille Boitel, was murdered by the French Resistance; and if Perdoux had suffered a similar fate, the loss to humanity would have been very small indeed.

In the Dutch wartime art world, as looted objects found their way back to the open market, both from within the Netherlands and from abroad, a strange atmosphere began to develop, one in which commerce and pillage cohabited, sometimes uneasily and sometimes with disturbing nonchalance. Just as during the 1920s, when the biggest international galleries willfully suspended their disbelief at the notion of new Vermeers popping up one after another like toadstools, so too, during the war, many reputable dealers affected an air of incuriosity about what went on in their midst, a common failing in many fields of endeavor in occupied Europe. The really big Dutch dealers did not traffic in looted art: that was the province of thieves; smugglers; and disreputable, low-level operators. Generally, the better dealers also avoided accepting artworks of unknown provenance as payment in kind when doing business with major German buyers, Hermann Goering being particularly notorious for that type of bartering. But almost every top-drawer Dutch dealer remained quite eager to make money selling pictures to art-coveting Nazis, and the fact was that Nazi money was dirty no matter how you looked at it.

Aside from the obvious taint, doing business with the Germans on a grand scale was plainly contrary to the best interests of the Netherlands as a nation, for a warm commercial embrace gave the invaders clear reason to believe their presence in the country was welcomed. The Resistance press loudly denounced trading with the enemy, as did Radio Oranje, the voice of the Dutch government in exile, broadcasting nightly from London. After the occupation, dealers would claim that doing business with the Nazis had been the only way to put bread on the table amid the difficult circumstances of wartime. But millions of guilders changed hands in the Amsterdam market alone—fortunes were made buying and selling art during the war, not mere pennies put aside against adversity. Tacitly acknowledging this fact, many dealers would later say with a measure of pride that they had always made a point of overcharging their German customers, as if such price gouging were a patriotic gesture in support of the war effort. That such things were said with a straight face suggests that disingenuous self-justification was the order of the day in certain deluxe corners of the picture business.

And as soon as “see no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil” became the accepted watchwords of the Dutch wartime art market, the scene was set for Han van Meegeren to make a killing. All the stars had suddenly come into alignment for the master forger. He was a talented, hard-working crook living in a robber’s El Dorado. Indeed, if Van Meegeren had strolled into a bank vault with a wheelbarrow and a shovel, he couldn’t possibly have walked away with more money than he made selling fakes during the war.