Making one’s fortune in Occupied Paris was largely a matter of knowing the right people: in fact, the further to the right the better. In 1941, Bruno Lohse, a lowly SS officer and art history PhD, was languishing on the Baltic coast recovering from a gunshot wound when he was seconded by Hermann Göring to work as his ‘personal art agent in Paris’, where he became one of history’s ‘greatest all-time art looters’.
Abroad in the lawless city — able to produce, for any purpose, authorization papers bearing the Reichsmarschall’s signature, with their talismanic power to instruct ‘all offices of the state, party and armed forces to support his work’ — Lohse reigned as the self-styled ‘King of Paris’: a charismatic cultural pirate in expensive civilian clothing, surrounded by money and women and chauffeured cars. Unofficially, he also co-directed the ERR, a semi-clandestine Nazi party task-force operating out of the Museé du Jeu de Paume. In principle, the ERR’s euphemistic function was to ‘safeguard heirless property’; in practice, it plundered the cultural possessions of French Jews, often in lightning raids on private homes at which an art historian would be conveniently on hand to point out those items most worth safeguarding.
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