The English Assassin

a glass of Médoc. His eyes were on the flames, but his mind was still in wartime France. Like a child creeping into his parents’ room, Gabriel gently intruded on his memories.
    “What happened to the paintings once they were seized?”
    “The ERR commandeered the Musée Jeu de Paume and used it as a storage facility and sorting house. A large staff worked night and day to catalogue and appraise the massive amount of art that was falling into German hands. Those works deemed suitable for the Führer’s private collection, for the Linz project, or other German museums—mainly Old Masters and Northern European works—were crated and shipped off to the Fatherland.”
    “And the rest of it? The Impressionists and the Modern works?”
    “The Nazis considered them degenerate, but they weren’t about to let them get away without first extracting something in return. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century works were sold off to raise cash or set aside to be used in exchanges.”
    “What sort of exchanges?”

    “Take Hermann Göring, for example. He owned a large hunting lodge south of Berlin called Carinhall in honor of his dead wife, a Swedish aristocrat named Carin von Fock. It contained one of the largest private collections in Europe, and Göring used his extraordinary power to enlarge it substantially during the war. He treated the storerooms of Jeu de Paume as though they were his private playground.”
    Isherwood drained his glass and ordered another.
    “Göring was a greedy bastard—he grabbed more than six hundred paintings from the Jeu de Paume alone—but he went to great lengths to make it appear as though his acquisitions were, on paper at least, legal purchases rather than outright thefts. If Göring wanted a work, he had it specially appraised at a ludicrously low level by a handpicked fonctionnaire. Then he would immediately take possession and promise to send the money into a special ERR account. In reality, he paid nothing for the paintings he took from Paris.”
    “Did they end up in Carinhall?”
    “Some, but not all. Göring shared Hitler’s disdain for Modern and Impressionist paintings, but he knew they could be sold off or traded for pieces more to his taste. One deal was carried out by Göring’s agents in Italy. In exchange for seven Italian Old Masters works and several other objets d’art, Göring handed over nine paintings seized from the Jeu de Paume. Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, and Monet, just to name a few—all stolen from Jewish collections and galleries. Göring carried out several other similar exchanges involving dealers in Switzerland.”
    “Tell me about the Swiss connection.”
    “Neutrality left the dealers and collectors of Switzerland in a unique position to capitalize on the rape of Paris. The Swiss were permitted to travel throughout much of Europe, and the Swiss franc was the world’s only universally accepted currency. And don’t forget that places like Zurich were awash in the profits of collaborating with Hitler. Paris was the place to buy looted art, but Zurich, Lucerne, and Geneva were the places to unload it.”
    “Or stash it?”
    “But of course. The banking secrecy laws made Switzerland a natural dumping ground for looted art. So did the laws covering the receipt of stolen property.”
    “Explain the laws to me.”
    “They were brilliant, and thoroughly Swiss in subtlety. For example, if a person takes possession of an object in good faith, and that object happens to be stolen, it’s rightfully his after five years.”
    “How convenient.”
    “Wait, there’s more. If an art dealer finds himself in possession of a stolen work, it’s the responsibility of the true owner to reimburse the dealer in order to reclaim his painting.”
    “So Swiss dealers and collectors could receive stolen works without any fear of the law or of losing money?”
    “Exactly.”
    “What happened after the war?”
    “The Allies dispatched an art expert named Douglas Cooper to Switzerland to try to find the truth. Cooper determined that hundreds, if not thousands, of stolen works had entered Switzerland during the war. He was convinced that many of them were hidden in bank vaults and bonded warehouses. Paul Rosenberg went to Switzerland to have a look round for himself. In a gallery in Zurich, he was offered a Matisse that had been looted from his very own collection.”
    “Remarkable,” Gabriel said. “What did the Swiss government do with this