Unrepentant Nazi art thief who stole Jews’ art from ‘still warm walls’ focus of new film

Even a quarter-century later, European history scholar Jonathan Petropoulos still can’t believe the German Expressionist artwork he saw on the walls of the third-floor walk-up in Munich. Then there was the apartment’s occupant: a 6-foot-4, 300-pound, blue-eyed giant named Bruno Lohse, who had played a pivotal role in the Nazi looting of art — much of it Jewish-owned — during World War II.

Decades before, Lohse had been in Paris after the fall of France, working for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, one of multiple Nazi agencies competing against each other to loot art collections on a massive scale in occupied Europe. Lohse also secretly helped boost the illegally obtained private art collection of Hitler’s number two Nazi — Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who was vying with the Fuhrer over who could build up the biggest stash.

Lohse did not exactly suffer following the war. He sweet-talked his way past an investigation by the Monuments Men, then got acquitted by a French military tribunal. As for the looted art, some of it he reportedly used for his personal benefit.

In his late 80s, he grew ready to talk — at least to some extent. The ex-Nazi met with Petropoulos again and again, some 30 to 40 times in total, until his death in 2007.

Petropoulos, a Claremont McKenna University professor, wrote a 2021 book about Lohse, titled “Goering’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World.” Now this story is chronicled in a two-part PBS documentary that premieres on February 19, “Plunderer: The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief.” Part two is scheduled for a week later, on February 26, with the overall documentary part of PBS’ “Secrets of the Dead” series.

“The Nazis were not only the most systematic mass murderers in history, they were its greatest thieves,” Petropoulos said.

The docuseries estimates that the Nazis made away with one-fifth of Europe’s artwork between 1934 and 1944. But that is only part of the story. As Petropoulos explained, after the war the German art world was rebounding and Lohse had a network of fellow ex-Nazi art dealers to sell to — all of which shut out the rightful heirs to the art.

“[We] link the war years almost up to the present,” said Jewish American filmmaker John Friedman, who co-produced “Plunderer” with Hugo Macgregor. Friedman’s previous credits include “Hotel Terminus,” an Academy Award-winning documentary about Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.

“We show how Jewish families, for many years after the war, really were unable to even try to reclaim their art,” said Friedman. “And once they started to try to reclaim their art, they were met by a number of barriers from governments, from museums, and from a number of individuals. And greed — greed really played a part. Many of these paintings were worth a lot of money, and people didn’t want to give them up, no matter what the claim was.”

The topic of Nazi-looted art has held Petropoulos’s interest for over 40 years. His Greek immigrant father impressed upon him the centrality of WWII and the Holocaust in modern history. Although Petropoulos is not Jewish, his father married a German Jewish émigré, and he himself grew up in a Jewish milieu in the San Fernando Valley of California. The professor remains a Californian; he and his family have been impacted by the recent wildfires. Their family home burned down, and his nearly 95-year-old father had to be rescued at the last minute by one of Petropoulos’s sisters.

Petropoulos first began exploring Nazi leaders’ interest in art as a doctoral student at Harvard. He said his interest was heightened by a professor’s dismissive remark about cultural history — and by a historical contradiction within the upper middle classes in Nazi Germany.

“[How] these cultured, sophisticated individuals descended into such violence and criminality, the hatred,” Petropoulos said.

Lohse was one such individual. The son of a musician in the Berlin Philharmonic, his background included the fine arts from an early age.

By early 1941, he was serving with the German military in Poland, a likely candidate to join the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union. Thanks to his knowledge of art, he went west instead: A telegram from Goering requested him to go to Paris and join the agents and brokers working for the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.

Sometimes he wore civilian clothes, other times it was SS gear. He went to galleries and auction houses — as well as private homes of Jews.

“A viewer might think, ‘Oh, they go into a museum and they take a picture off the wall, so what?’” Petropoulos said. “With Bruno Lohse, he would go into apartments that were still warm. Think about what that means. People were just recently taken out, thrown out, taken to Drancy, deported to Auschwitz. And he’s in their apartments, sometimes just minutes after they’ve been evicted. He knows what’s going on.”

Profit from other’s pain

According to the film, Lohse also knew how to profit from a type of art Nazis were supposed to loathe — modern art, which they viewed as degenerate.

“Lohse came up with a scheme of trading these works for the more desirable — usually Old Masters — and he was doing it initially on behalf of Goering,” Petropoulos said. “But subsequently he realized he could profit on his own, he could freelance on his own.”

Monets, Renoirs, Courbets, Pissaros — upon his death, Lohse was connected to a trove of almost 50 works of modern art, collectively estimated to be worth tens of millions — possibly hundreds of millions — of dollars.

“The stealing of art wasn’t just part of trying to gain these valuable works,” Friedman said. “It was also part of the Nazi plan to eradicate Jewish culture.”

Petropoulos has accomplished much in terms of documenting the scale of Nazi art looting — and in some cases, attempting to make amends. From 1998 to 2000, he served on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, as research director for art and cultural property.

The year 2000 marked the release of his book “The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany,” which profiled some of the leading figures in the looted-art narrative.

One figure went unmentioned among the profiles, yet was consulted as a source and appeared in the footnotes: Lohse. Why?

“I wasn’t ready at that point,” Petropoulos explained. “I was collecting information and digging deeper.”

“I played a longer game,” Petropoulos said, noting this unfolded over nine years and that he had built up trust with his subject, in part by interviewing 10 other ex-Nazis in the looted art network who vouched for him.

“I also played a cat-and-mouse game with Lohse. There were things he would just not tell me. I’d say, who were your customers, who were your clients? ‘I don’t talk about that.’ There were times when I believed he was lying to me… it was kind of a catch-me-if-you-can game.”

“If you’re going to discover secrets about an old Nazi art plunderer, you have to be patient,” Petropoulos said. “They’re not going to tell you their secrets on the first meeting.”

From the page to the screen

From day one of meeting Lohse, Petropoulos sensed a book might come out of it. He did not know there would be a film as well. But in 2016 – when Petropoulos gave a talk that mentioned the late art thief during a symposium at Columbia University – the audience included Friedman, who made a surprise pitch.

Petropoulos remembered the words from his new acquaintance: “That’s extraordinary, I’d like to make a movie about this.”

“It only took up to 10 years,” Friedman quipped, noting the difficulties of making documentaries in general, including funding, and adding that with “Plunderer,” there was another complicating factor — the COVID-19 pandemic.

Petropoulos saw a silver lining in the decade of making the film, which included multiple trips to Europe: “What a tremendous advantage to capture a world that, in many ways, is almost gone now. With mortality and demographics, there were people around 10 years ago whom we could interview, and we could put on film and camera.”

He has also worked on restitution cases, including a controversial one involving the so-called “Fischer Pissarro.” As The Los Angeles Times explained in 2008, this painting by the French Jewish Impressionist Camille Pissarro originally belonged to a German Jewish publisher in Vienna, but somehow wound up in a Zurich bank, reportedly linked to Lohse. An attempt by Petropoulos to recover the painting ended with its heiress, Gisela Bermann Fischer, accusing him of extortion. Years later, in 2021, The New York Times reported that Petropoulos was not criminally charged, and his conduct was found to be within the law by a Claremont McKenna investigation, but he resigned as head of a university center on the Holocaust.

Asked about the controversy, Petropoulos described the situation as complicated, noting there were two heirs to the painting — Gisela Fischer and a cousin — and that it has been restituted.

“In an interview, [Fischer] claimed she felt like she was being extorted,” Petropoulos said. “I didn’t feel like I was extorting her in any way, I was just trying to help her.” He added, “The two cousins went to court against one another and fought one another. There was ultimately a settlement. It goes to show sometimes restitution is messy.”

“I’ve done consulting work trying to help Holocaust victims and their heirs recover property, and I would note, I’ve only worked for Holocaust victims and heirs,” Petropoulos said. “I’ve never worked for a museum that was rebutting a claim. My life’s work has been to help people recover this property.”