The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [3]
For the Nazis and all other art collectors, a Vermeer was a prize almost without peer. The beauty of the work was part of the appeal, but its scarcity counted for even more. In all the world there are only three dozen Vermeers. Even a conqueror with Europe at his feet could do nothing to alter that brute fact.
THE WAR HAD shattered countless lives. In the “hunger winter” of 1944–1945 alone, twenty thousand Dutch citizens had died of starvation. Joop Piller had suffered, and seen his friends suffer. Van Meegeren had floated through the war in style. Now his name had turned up in the worst possible company, with Hermann Goering’s, on the sales records for Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery. Piller, who before the war had managed a factory that made raincoats, had no special interest in art or in Vermeer. He did, however, have a special interest in the Nazis and in those of his countrymen who had done business with them.
3
THE OUTBREAK OF WAR
On the evening of May 9, 1940, Hermann Goering swept into Berlin’s State Theater resplendent in his white uniform. The play was half over. Goering’s entrance was hard to miss, just as he preferred.
Elsewhere in Berlin on the same evening, two old friends met for a tense dinner. Major G. J. Sas was the Dutch military attaché; Hans Oster was a German officer, a colonel in the German High Command, and a committed opponent of Adolf Hitler. They had first met in 1932 and had stayed in touch afterward. In September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and triggered the Second World War, Oster began secretly passing his Dutch colleague detailed information about Hitler’s plans to attack the West.
After their dinner, the two men took a cab to German headquarters. Sas waited in the car; Oster disappeared inside. When he returned, he delivered his news in an urgent whisper: “This is the end. No counteroffers. The Swine has gone to the western front. It’s all over now. Let’s hope we see each other after the war.”*
Sas raced off to phone the War Department in The Hague. He was put on hold. Twenty minutes passed. Finally, Sas had the chance to pass along his coded message and its urgent conclusion: “Tomorrow at dawn. Hold tight.” The Dutch chief of foreign intelligence, not quite sure whether to believe Sas, phoned him back. “We have heard the bad news of Mrs. Sas’s illness. Have all doctors been consulted?”
“Why bother me again?” Sas snapped. “You know it now. She has to have an operation tomorrow morning.” He hung up.
IN THE YEARS to come, everyone in Holland would remember the unsettling beauty of the spring days just before the invasion. As the news from elsewhere in Europe grew ever worse and people’s moods ever darker, the weather in Holland had turned uncharacteristically, almost mockingly, mild and bright. The tulips bloomed on into May. In the early morning hours of May 10, German bombers cut their way through cloudless skies. At first, no one who was woken by the humming in the air knew where the sound came from. But when the planes dipped lower, the hum turned to a roar, and soon everyone in Holland knew that the long-feared invasion had come at last.
German parachutists began dropping from the sky at precisely 4:00 A.M. At the same moment, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and more than a thousand tanks began pouring across the border. The paratroopers’ task was to secure Holland’s bridges before the Dutch could blow them up, so that the invading army could thrust into its tiny neighbor unimpeded.
Holland had been braced for an attack for months. (In a sense, Sas’s problem was that his source was too well connected. In the months before the actual Nazi attack, Hitler repeatedly canceled his invasion plans at the last second—eighteen