The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [12]
So spoke Eric Hebborn, an artist of formidable vanity. Han van Meegeren, on the other hand, decided to pass himself off as Johannes Vermeer.
7
OCCUPIED HOLLAND
Fat, swaggering, casually cruel Hermann Goering was the best-known of Van Meegeren’s victims. The forger’s scams ensnarled countless others as well, many of them supremely confident connoisseurs of art who could raise a work from obscurity to glory by whispering an enthusiastic word into an eager ear. But the stage for this drama played as important a role as the actors themselves. The chaos of occupied Holland was crucial to everything that followed. Only in those unsettled times could such grasping buyers and such frantic sellers have found one another. And only in a country and an era where no rules applied could a man like Han van Meegeren have pulled off one multimillion-dollar scam after another.
When the Nazis first took over Holland, the Dutch seemed almost dazed, not quite able to grasp that the world had changed forever in five frenzied days. “The man on the street was grieved and startled, but not desperate,” the Dutch historian Walter Maass wrote, based partly on his firsthand observation. “Many people seemed to live in a strange state of euphoria, hoping for speedy liberation, though no real cause for such optimism existed.”
Desperation would come soon enough, but for a time the Nazis did not tip their hand. All the eyewitness accounts of the first days of occupation highlight the conquerors’ discipline. The Dutch watched warily, Maass continued, but despite all they had heard of Nazi atrocities, they saw no looting, no celebrating, and certainly no killing and raping.
This brief era of forebearance reflected a miscalculation on the part of the Germans—they believed, at first, that the Dutch were fellow “Nordics” so closely tied to Germany by culture, language, and “blood” that Holland could smoothly be annexed into greater Germany.
That belief did not last long. In February 1942, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, confided his impatience to his diary: “The Dutchman’s character is in many respects quite strange to us,” he groused. “…His pigheadedness can’t be beaten.” By September 1943, Goebbels offered his complaints without preamble, as if Dutch contrariness was so familiar that there was no need to give examples. “As everybody knows,” Goebbels wrote, “the Dutch are the most insolent and obstreperous people in the entire west.”
The Germans had brought in a dangerous but seemingly bland official, an Austrian lawyer named Arthur Seyss-Inquart, to rule Holland for them. Seyss-Inquart was a music lover and an intelligent man (the Allies administered IQ tests at Nuremberg, and Goering sulked that Seyss-Inquart and one other Nazi official outscored him). More important, he was a doggedly loyal follower of Adolf Hitler. In Austria, after the Nazi takeover, Seyss-Inquart’s diligence on behalf of his new masters had helped him rise from obscurity. He performed so well that when the Nazis put a formal end to Austrian independence, they made Seyss-Inquart chancellor.
When the Nazis went on to conquer Poland, they brought Seyss-Inquart in as deputy governor-general. He distinguished himself again. By the time the Germans took Holland, Seyss-Inquart was a natural choice as Reich Commissar for the Occupied Netherlands Territories. His authority was nearly unbounded. As “guardian of the interests of the Reich” in Holland, Seyss-Inquart answered only to Hitler. His first official act was a reassuring, if insincere, address to his new subjects. Dutch laws would remain in force, Seyss-Inquart promised, “as far as possible.