The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [36]
17
THE AMIABLE PSYCHOPATH
No one doubted Hermann Goering was evil; no one suggested he was banal. Even those who knew his record well felt the man’s pull. On the May night in 1945 when the Americans finally brought him in, Goering spent the evening drinking and singing with his captors. (The idea behind the soft treatment was that Goering might be more likely to provide useful information if he felt at ease.) He clapped along merrily during the choruses of “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and then called for his accordian and performed a makeshift concert of his own favorites ’til two in the morning.
Years earlier, on the night he first met Goering, the foreign correspondent Leonard Mosley had marveled at the Reich Marshal’s charm and conversational flair. Mosley was no naif; he was an authority on Nazi Germany who had served as the Associated Press bureau chief in Berlin for twenty years and won the Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting in 1939. To his surprise, Mosley found that Goering had little to say about politics. The Nazi leader seemed to brighten up only when the talk turned to nature or art.
“How had such a worldly, cultivated man got himself mixed up with such a sleazy and murderous gang as the Nazis?” Mosley asked himself after that first conversation, but then he saw Goering perform at a political rally. “I saw on the platform not the charming art and animal lover I had first encountered but a ranting, raving anti-Semite mouthing all the shibboleths of the party, a quivering mass of hate and rancor.”
When it came to art, Goering put the ranting aside, but the bullying came through regardless. After dinner one evening in 1935, for example, Goering showed his house guests the paintings he had taken from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. “The director did object,” Goering said, “but I threatened to take twice as many if these were not brought over here first thing in the morning.” (Goering used another painting “borrowed” from the museum, Rubens’s Diana at the Stag Hunt, to hide his movie screen between showings.)
Over the years he improved his technique, acquiring a kind of oily charm. This was blackmail with the best of manners, extortion with a smile. Dealers and collectors knew perfectly well the danger they faced, of course, but Goering left the actual threats to his scouts and middlemen. “Goering was never unpleasant in his dealings,” wrote the historian Lynn Nicholas. “He would arrive in high spirits on his palatial train, complete with oversize bathtub and phalanxes of elegantly uniformed adjutants, and go from one gallery to another. Even the most endangered agreed that he had a certain charm, and considering the amounts he spent, they were not reluctant to see him arrive.”
Many times Goering favored an especially grim form of barter. In Holland in 1943, for example, the Gestapo arrested a Jewish art dealer named Kurt Bachstitz. It so happened that Bachstitz was married to the sister of Goering’s art scout, Walter Hofer, and Hofer intervened on his brother-in-law’s behalf. “Bachstitz is to be left alone,” Goering commanded the Gestapo. On August 14, 1944, Goering’s private detective escorted Bachstitz safely to Switzerland. Goering collected his fee in paintings.
GOERING HAD BEGUN indulging his acquisitive appetites from the moment he came to power. Nothing made him as angry as the charge that he was lazy, but his official duties seemed not to weigh too heavily on him. One colleague, writing in 1938, noted matter-of-factly that Goering’s workday typically began with a sequence of visits—first his tailor, then his barber, art dealer, and jeweler.
In Germany in the thirties, everyone knew the rules of Goering’s game. The titans of German industry lined up to offer tributes of art and high-class bric-a-brac, especially on his birthday. Little was left to chance. Hofer made the rounds of prominent galleries and left lists indicating which gifts his master would