The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [29]
Goering had invited both Rommel and Rommel’s wife aboard his private train, which he directed to Rome so that he could shop for art. In the meantime, he showed a bewildered Frau Rommel such treasures as his emerald tie clip and his diamond ring. “You will be interested in this,” he said, brandishing the ring. “It is one of the most valuable stones in the world.” In the end, Goering promised Rommel men and supplies, then reneged on his promise, and finally reported to Hitler that “Rommel has completely lost his nerve.” Rommel returned to Africa furious and empty-handed.
In Russia, too, the winter of 1942 marked a crucial moment in the war. The German invasion of the Soviet Union had neared its climax. Both sides knew that the battle for Stalin grad, which would prove to be one of the deadliest battles in history, would mark a turning point of World War II. Once again Goering was preoccupied.
On November 19 and 20, 1942, the Soviet Army swooped down on Stalingrad simultaneously from the north and south and trapped 250,000 German soldiers inside the city. Goering headed from his Berchtesgaden retreat in the Bavarian Alps to Paris, to shop for art. On November 23, he hurried to the Jeu de Paume, the museum that the Nazis had converted into a store house cum gallery for confiscated paintings. (The Jeu de Paume, with its unmatched collection of masterpieces, was a special Goering favorite. He visited twenty times between the beginning of November 1940 and the end of November 1942.) While the German army fought for survival at Stalin grad, Goering pondered his selections. “The following items were loaded aboard the Reich Marshal’s special train today,” began a memorandum dated November 24, 1942.* It went on to list the paintings and statues that Goering had selected for himself. The handpicked art filled seventy-seven crates.
IT WAS THE Nazi style to offer up a façade of legalisms and euphemisms for even the most overt crimes. Art confiscated from Jewish owners, for example, was supposedly being “safeguarded.” International law decreed that a victorious nation could not simply take what it wanted from its defeated foes, but in certain cases, the Nazis asserted, the law did not apply. The Jews of France had no claim to their former property because “the armistice with the French state and people does not extend to Jews in France…who are to be considered ‘a state within the state’ and permanent enemies of the German Reich.”
In France, the most prominent of those “permanent enemies” were the Rothschilds, the enormously wealthy banking family. The Rothschild family owned one of the world’s greatest art collections. When war broke out, they hid part of their collection in chateaux around France and entrusted much of the rest to the Louvre, with the intention of reclaiming it when it was safe to do so. Then the Rothschilds escaped with their lives.
For the Nazis, hunting for the Rothschild treasures and for works of art hidden by other refugees was akin to sport. “As far as the confiscated art works are concerned,” Goering wrote to a colleague in November 1940, “let me highlight my own success over a considerable period in recovering concealed Jewish art treasures. I have resorted to bribery and hiring French detectives and police officials to winkle these treasures out of their (often devilishly clever) hiding places.”
Goering’s success owed more to devilishness