The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [2]
But at his first meeting with the little man in the big house, Piller knew only that Van Meegeren’s name had turned up in the paperwork of a dodgy art dealer. And so, when Piller took out his notebook and posed the question that would set the whole complicated story in motion, he had suspicions but not much more. Tell me, Mr. Van Meegeren, he asked, how did you come to be involved in selling a Vermeer?
2
LOOTED ART
Piller’s knock on Van Meegeren’s door came only three weeks after VE-Day, which marked the Allied victory over the Nazis and the official end of World War II in Europe. Holland had suffered bitterly through the war years, its citizens bombed and starved and dragged into slave labor and sent off to extermination camps. For the Germans occupying Holland, on the other hand, life had retained its civilized pleasures. While the Dutch had choked down “roof rabbit”—dog or cat—Nazi officials had dined off fine china in bustling restaurants. When peace finally came, the Dutch erupted in anger. Jubilant crowds jeered and screamed, “Traitor!” as members of the Dutch Nazi Party were paraded through the streets. Indignant mobs grabbed Dutch girls who had taken German boyfriends—“Kraut girls,” the Dutch called them—and shaved their heads as punishment.
Rebuilding the country would take years. Piller had been made a captain in the Militair Gezag, the provisional government, but he had not the slightest interest in formal authority or chains of command. A freelancer and a rebel by temperament, Piller had lived by his wits for the last five years. Now, with the war finally over but few government structures yet in place, he had a free hand. He set up, essentially on his own authority, a group charged with investigating collaborators and crooked businessmen who had sold out the Dutch to the Nazis.
A hunt for looted property led inevitably to a hunt for stolen art. Holland had lost countless art treasures to the Nazis. Both Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, the two highest-ranked figures in the Nazi pecking order, fancied themselves art connoisseurs and collectors. Europe’s art, Hitler and Goering believed, belonged in German hands. With the Fuehrer and the Reich Marshal showing the way, the Nazis had ransacked Europe’s museums and private collections and grabbed what ever caught their eyes.
Goering, a six-star general and the highest-ranking military official in Germany, was self-obsessed to an almost unfathomable degree. What he wanted, he deserved. What he wanted, after power, was art. “I love art for art’s sake,” he told an interviewer at the Nuremberg trials, where he was charged with war crimes, “and, as I said, my personality demanded that I be surrounded with the best specimens of the world’s art.”
With the help of art dealers scouring Europe on his behalf, Goering accumulated masterpieces literally by the trainload. “I intend to plunder, and to do it thoroughly,” he had declared early on, and for once he kept his word. From Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, and Italy, trucks full of confiscated art drove in convoy to Goering’s private trains, for delivery to Germany. There the Reich Marshal’s newest masterpieces took their place among his other trophies, Rembrandts and Van Dycks and Halses and Goyas hanging on the walls in tiers three and four paintings high.
Goering reveled in taking visitors on tours of his new possessions: old masters, statues, tapestries, antique furniture, suits of armor, golden candlesticks, bronze lions, all in endless profusion. Some of it little more than ornate clutter, much of it priceless, all of it unmistakable testimony that Europe’s new rulers could do as they pleased.
Goering had wasted no time. By the time the war was a year old, his collection had grown to a spectacular size. “At the current moment,” he wrote in a letter in November 1940, “thanks to acquisitions and exchanges I possess perhaps the most important private collection in Germany, if not all of Europe.”
Amid such splendors,