The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [121]
54
TRAPPED!
After the excitement of the art recoveries came the cleanup, the gigantic task of sorting out what belonged where. The first step involved gathering the loot from enormous recoveries like Goering’s and Alt Aussee and countless smaller ones and collecting it at temporary depots. Perhaps never before, reported a stunned visitor to one such improvised ware house, in Frankfurt, “had such a collection of what men call wealth been under one roof.” The haul included billions of dollars in gold bullion, most of Hungary’s silver reserves, and an entire room piled to the ceiling with canvas bags crammed with paper money. “There were hogsheads full of precious stones. There were barrels of silver and gold watches, jewelry of every kind, and long ‘sausages’ of threaded wedding rings stripped from the hands of women in concentration camps.”
Goering’s paintings and sculptures were transferred to the Central Collecting Point in Munich. Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery was tagged as item number 5295 and readied for its return to Holland. But before the picture ever left Germany, Joop Piller had already come knocking on Van Meegeren’s door, asking why his name had turned up in Goering’s paperwork.
In the spring of 1945, Piller, the resistance fighter turned detective, had nearly complete authority to do as he wished. Liberation had come to Holland on May 5, 1945—almost five years to the day from the Nazi invasion—but several months would pass before the Dutch government began to run along its customary tracks. In the meantime, a decisive and impulsive man like Piller could impose order according to his own lights.
After years of suffering and bitterness, peace came to Holland amid rumors of “hatchet day,” when Dutch patriots would take vengeance on those countrymen who had collaborated with the Germans. The forecasts proved too dire—in Holland, retaliation more often took the form of shaved heads and beatings than lynchings or shootings—but collaboration remained a huge, angry issue. A generation later, Germans would ask, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” In Holland, everyone asked the question immediately. Before a Dutch policeman could return to work, for instance, he had to demonstrate to an official tribunal that his war time record was clean. In the meantime, the provisional government had charged the so-called Militair Gezag, the military authority, with keeping the peace. Piller was a captain in the Field Security unit. Essentially on his own say-so, he took on the task of investigating collaborators and looted property.
Some 120,000 Dutch collaborators would eventually be tried and imprisoned. Piller stood in the front hall of Han van Meegeren’s mansion only three weeks after VE-Day. While many of his countrymen had starved, Van Meegeren had managed to thrive. Moreover, he had somehow gotten mixed up in Hermann Goering’s affairs. In May 1945, in Holland, that was more than enough to bring a policeman calling.
But if not for a bad break, Piller might never have heard of Van Meegeren. After Van Meegeren’s greatest coup, the sale of Christ at Emmaus in 1937, he had sold seven more forgeries. In each case, he had stayed safely out of sight while a middleman did the actual work of showing and selling his “De Hoochs” and “Vermeers.” The first middleman, the ex-politician named G. A. Boon, had brought Emmaus to Bredius. Boon played a similar role with one more forgery, this one a “De Hooch,” and then moved out of Van Meegeren’s life. Next came several acquaintances of Van Meegeren’s notable only for their ignorance of art and their willingness to take on a high-paying job without asking any questions.
Boon’s first successor was a real estate agent named Rens Strijbis. Together he and Van Meegeren sold four forgeries, a De Hooch and three Vermeers, in 1941 and 1942. Then, for