The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [120]
The American soldiers collected Goering’s art from the bunker and combined those finds with the far larger treasure trove still in the trains. Soon they had converted a three-story “rest center” for railworkers into a makeshift museum. The paintings alone filled forty rooms. Sculptures spilled out into the halls, where they stood almost as close together as commuters on a subway. The exultant Americans mounted a large sign over the door—“Hermann Goering’s Art Collection Through the Courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division”—and welcomed their fellow soldiers for a visit.
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THE NEST EGG
Maj. Harry Anderson, who put together the 101st Airborne’s art exhibition, had heard rumors that some of Goering’s most valuable paintings were still with his wife. She was supposedly in the nearby town of Zell am See. Anderson found Emmy Goering holed up in a castle, just as the rumors had said, and indeed in possession of several stolen masterpieces. Anderson, a Monuments Man, confiscated the pictures while Emmy wept at the injustice of it all. The pictures were her property, she told Anderson, not her husband’s. Anderson told Emmy he had heard rumors that Goering had given her a Vermeer. Where was it? Emmy claimed to have no idea what Anderson was talking about.
Then, as Anderson turned to leave, Goering’s longtime attendant and nurse, Christa Gormanns, ran from the room. She returned carrying something bulky inside a blanket. She handed the package to Anderson. Goering “told me to keep this, and I’d never have to worry about money again for the rest of my life.”
Anderson pulled back the blanket and found a painting wrapped around a four-foot-long piece of stovepipe. This was Goering’s cherished Vermeer, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery. Anderson hurried back to the rest house to add this new prize to his exhibition. The next day’s New York Times carried a story on the discovery. “Goering Gave Nurse a $1,000,000 Vermeer,” the headline read.
THE AUSTRALIAN WAR correspondent Osmar White was one of the first reporters to visit Major Anderson’s impromptu exhibition. Walter Hofer, Goering’s art advisor, led White on a tour with all the quiet glee of any proud collector. “A large bedroom was almost filled with unframed canvases and panels,” White recalled. “Hofer shuffled amongst them with gentle haste, peering, tilting, commenting in thick English, his spatulate fingertips exploring the paint anxiously for blemishes.” That single room contained seven Rubenses, Hofer boasted. He slid one out from behind the others and turned it toward the light. “Ah!” he exclaimed, “is it not superb!”
Hofer continued his tour. He propped up two Boucher nudes that had once adorned Madame Pompadour’s bedroom. “Very—what do you say?—hot.” Here was a folio of drawings by Dürer, and here were five Rembrandts. Here was a Van Dyck. “Exquisite, no? Ah, what magic in that brush.” Hofer rattled on contentedly, full of gossip and good cheer. “Goering knew nothing about art when he started. He just wanted to do the right thing and have a collection like other important men…. Goering had really got quite good at it in the end. He developed an almost unerring sense for what was important in art.”
Hofer’s wife was there, too. “His faded, colorless wife was an expert restorer,” wrote Osmar White, “and while I was talking to her, she went imperturbably on with the work of removing a mildew mark from the surface of Vermeer’s Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery.”
It was the middle of May, in 1945. It would be two weeks before Han van Meegeren opened his front door to two men who wanted