Secrets of the Dead

[ Bells tolling ] -I first met Dr. Bruno Lohse in June 1998.

And I remember every single detail.

You know, after all, it's not every day you meet an old Nazi.

We arranged to have lunch together, and he said he would pick me up from the Central Institute for Art History in the heart of Munich.

[ Bells tolling ] It had been an old Nazi building.

And I remember thinking this was actually appropriate.

And as the moment drew nearer, I think my heart started to beat even more and more quickly.

And then I do recall this extraordinary moment when a massive Mercedes pulled up.

[ Engine rumbling ] In front, there was a driver.

He appeared to be a kind of chauffeur.

The back door swung open, and there he was.

The last Nazi art plunderer still alive.

He motioned for me to get in the car, and off we went.

He had a presence.

He had an aura, if you will.

I knew that Lohse was a member of the SS.

I also knew that he was a real player in the post-war art world.

Especially in America.

But I didn't realize that our relationship would continue for years and years and that, you know, it would take me to another world.

To his apartment filled with valuable artworks.

To a Swiss bank... ...that concealed stolen pictures... ...and even to the contemporary art world, where Nazi-looted art is still traded and is still concealed.

It's the greatest art scandal of the 20th century.

But one doesn't trifle with Lohse without consequences.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

I have been studying Nazi-looted art for over 35 years, and I've been investigating Bruno Lohse for over 20 years.

When he died in 2007, I was given his private papers.

I was told Lohse wanted me to have them and to preserve them.

And they include many, many letters, photos, and documents, many of them from Hermann Goering himself.

But, you know, Lohse was very concerned about his image in history.

And these documents were clearly sanitized by him to present a certain image.

Lohse played a game with me.

When we met in person and we did interviews, he would tell me some of what happened, he would give me partial truths, he would mix in lies.

I knew that I was becoming closer to an old Nazi and that there was criticism amongst peers, other scholars.

And I would respond, "You have to get to know these people before they're really going to tell you their secrets."

And so, that was his challenge to me -- could I separate the truth from the lies?

Could I put this whole story together?

You know, "Try to make sense of this.

Try to catch me if you can."

-A mad dog is on the march again.

Once more, he breaks every bond of international decency.

-Belgium, France, and Norway.

The Nazi tide sweeps over Europe.

-The French government has capitulated.

Now France signs abject terms of surrender.

-When the war breaks out in September 1939, Lohse is conscripted into the German Army, into an anti-tank unit preparing to go into the Soviet Union.

Before the war, he was trying to find his way as an art dealer.

He has a PhD in art history, which he was very proud of, right?

So, he was always "Dr.

Lohse."

But, you know, when the war breaks out, he's really kind of a nobody in the art world.

But then something extraordinary happens.

He receives a call from Paris, and he is asked whether he wants to join a new and secret initiative.

And he's not told very much about it, except that they need his skills as an art historian and that he will be working for a Nazi Party agency in Paris called the ERR.

-So that's where the Lohse story basically officially starts.

The ERR is one of the rarest forms of state organizations, whose sole purpose was to plunder Europe.

Its reach extended all the way from the far western parts of France, all the way up to the Baltic states, and as far southeast as Crimea.

And it basically went where the German army went.

So, we're talking about a massive organization with tentacles everywhere.

-It was probably the largest looting that has ever happened in history.

-They actually stole everything that they could lay their hands on.

Whether it was a painting of really no value except to the family, they would steal it.

They stole furniture, they stole tables, they stole the plates, they stole the cutlery, the candlesticks.

-And so, when Lohse arrives at the ERR in Paris, he sees German art looting on an industrial scale.

And France is special.

France has more art, or more valuable art, than any other part of Europe.

-France was really the place where art was being shown, the place where art was being collected, the place where art was being sold.

It was really the capital.

-They start to go after the French Jewish collections, right?

And they're going after the Rothschilds, and they're going after Alphonse Kann and the David-Weills and these great French Jewish families that have these great collections.

And they're going off with these commandos and bringing in masses of art.

One estimate is that they steal one-third of all the art in private collections in France.

-I mean, you see the trains from Paris going back to Germany.

Carriage after carriage stacked to the gills with fabulous works of art.

-The French authorities are forced to relinquish a museum, the Jeu de Paume -- it's part of the Louvre complex -- and hand it over to the Germans, and that becomes the ERR Paris headquarters.

That's where Lohse's going to operate, there in the Jeu de Paume.

-To pick up, sort, catalogue this material, the ERR needed specialists.

It was a new job market for those academics.

You can imagine the excitement in opening the boxes, you know, what kind of treasures would arrive.

-You know, works by Rembrandt, Canaletto, Titian.

There are Old Masters.

There's modern Impressionist works.

And Lohse comes in as a cataloguer, and he has to create an inventory of who it was stolen from and what objects they have.

It's very, very well organized.

It's a strange mix between, on the one hand, barbarism and violence and, you know, a kind of attack on Jewish families with this industrial efficiency.

-And we are here at the heart of the Nazi mindset, you know?

They were really applying what they did to the Holocaust.

It was the same thing.

They were really accounting for people.

They knew who this person was.

They knew where they were coming from, and they knew when they disappeared.

So it's the same system.

In early March 1941, something very important happened to Lohse that shapes his future in a profound way.

Hermann Goering, the second-most powerful man in the Third Reich, comes to the Jeu de Paume for a review of the artworks that have been seized by the ERR.

Lohse is tasked with preparing an exhibition that might impress Hermann Goering.

-Lohse probably had the feeling that that was the opportunity of his life.

[ Camera shutter clicking ] -And so, Goering and the entourage arrive at the Jeu de Paume, and Lohse starts the tour.

[ Camera shutter clicks ] There is something about Lohse's manner, the confidence that he projects, that Goering likes very much.

Goering happens to have an art dealer with him, someone called Walter Andreas Hofer, who is the official director of his collection.

And there are moments when Hofer challenges Lohse, and he says something like, "No, no, you're wrong!

That's not a Rembrandt."

And Lohse was prepared to say, "Yes, it is."

Hofer is a well-established dealer, and here's this young upstart who challenges him, and Goering is impressed.

The following day, Goering says to Lohse, "I need an agent here in Paris.

I will keep you involved with the ERR, but your primary mission is to buy artworks for me."

[ Telephone rings ] "You can call me day or night."

And he gives Lohse his telephone number.

And so, he has direct access to the second-most powerful man in the Third Reich at that time.

-Art was very important to the Nazi leaders because they envisioned themselves as the new monarchs of Europe.

So that required great museums and great art collections.

Hitler particularly wanted to build himself a museum in Linz.

That would be the biggest museum in Europe, with the finest collection.

-I don't know if he was an art lover, but Goering was the only Nazi leader who invested so much time in building a collection he wanted to be unique.

So, he had this obsession with building an art collection.

He needed someone he could trust within the Jeu de Paume to channel towards his collection the best pieces.

The rise to power for Lohse was very quick.

In a matter of two months, he became Goering's man in Paris.

-And so, once someone became a special agent of the Nazi leaders, they were given special privileges.

They could travel more freely.

He had a car, which was highly unusual, to have your own car.

And they were given large stipends and, probably most important, they had unlimited funds.

-This is one of Lohse's power documents, if you will.

It's the telegram that Goering sent to Lohse at the end of December 1941.

And it says, "Lieber Herr Lohse" -- Dear Lohse -- "I thank you with all my heart for all of your diligence concerning my art collection."

You can see it would fold in two different places, so he could place it in his breast pocket there, and pull it out if ever he was challenged.

And I think anyone seeing "Lieber Lohse," signed by Goering, would click their heels and salute and give Lohse what he wanted.

It's an extraordinary moment.

Lohse had been a small, you know, cog in the machine.

But now he joined the exclusive ranks of those German dealers who served the Nazi leaders.

They were the dealers working for Hitler.

And then there was the Goering dealers.

There were dealers active in Brussels and in Amsterdam.

And then, there were a few others operating on the open art market.

And the competition was tough.

And I don't mean to give the impression that Lohse comes in and he spends his days strolling down the boulevard, popping into galleries and buying -- and buying artworks.

No, I mean, he has a network of subagents, of informants, people he'll work with.

He's utterly ruthless as he goes after artworks.

He gets a tip -- there's an artwork belonging to a Jewish person there, or there's someone who's vulnerable here -- and he's going to seize upon any opportunity, exploit any weakness that he can.

And the Nazi leaders didn't care how their agents obtained works.

And so, the agents were encouraged to be aggressive.

-You have to be a good hunter because there are objects that have to be hunted.

You have this Darwinian competition to get to the object and have, let's say, to be faster than all your fellow National Socialist competitors.

-The commandos would come into a residence.

They would oftentimes break down the door.

They were real thugs.

They would grab everything in the apartment or the home.

There was chaos.

So, Lohse's actually riding along on these raids so that he could make sense of what they were stealing.

[ Tape player clicks ] There was a kind of blind spot there for Lohse.

But he didn't think too much about the families and their fate.

-The reality was, there was so much art.

I mean, all of Europe was -- pretty much all of Europe -- was there for the picking.

They were insatiable.

-The Netherlands were invaded in May 1940.

And within a month, literally, Goering's agents arrived at the doorstep here.

Karl Haberstock was the next Nazi dealer to show up.

He talked Fritz, my grandfather, into selling 10 of the best paintings.

So, our Cranach, our Botticelli, our Baldung Grien.

So, he pays on paper my grandfather a song for these wonderful pieces, and then he bargains with the upper echelons of the Nazi government as to who will get which piece, upping the price each time.

And, of course, usually Hitler wins out because he's the top dog.

So, Goering gets the next three best pieces, and so on and so on down, until half our furniture goes to a man called Glassmeyer, who ran the Nazi radio system in Europe.

The Franz von Stuck, that was in one of the guest bedrooms here, goes to Hitler's personal physician, Karl Brandt, who's not an ordinary doctor.

He's actually the man who initiates the first medical experiments and euthanasia program, so he was personally accused of the murder of 60,000 people.

[ Voice breaking ] So, this is where... [ Breathes deeply ] This is where our beautiful things are going, yes.

And they stripped the house down to the last pot in the kitchen.

-As well as going on these raids with the ERR, Goering has tasked Lohse with finding artworks on the French art market.

-Why was it booming?

Because you had a lot of people who made a lot of money working with the Germans, and they needed to invest.

What can you buy in a time of war but art?

And the number of non-Jewish dealers who did business as usual, but working directly with the Germans or dealt with looted art, it's amazing.

It's really mind-blowing.

In this network of art dealer, Lohse developed his network of spies, of middlemen that could feed him, you know?

-After the Jewish collections that came into the ERR in Paris were -- you know, began to be sorted out, it became clear that a huge number of the works were unacceptable to the Nazis.

-The ERR is taking in a great deal of modern art.

According to Hitler and the other theorists, modern art was "degenerate art" -- Entartete Kunst.

The rationale behind it was that modern art was a Jewish conspiracy.

-My grandfather's gallery was taken over as soon as Germans arrived in Paris.

Everything there was pillaged.

Matisses, Picassos, Degas, and Corots and Braques, and so forth.

And all of this was brought to the Jeu de Paume.

-So, they're looting so much work that is worthless to them.

But they realize that it has market value.

-You know, Lohse, who's a good problem-solver, realizes that, with some of the collaborationist dealers, that if he could exchange the modern degenerate art, he could obtain other works from them that are desired by Goering and other Nazi leaders.

-When you look closely at the exchanges, they are very lopsided.

You might have, you know, an Old Master painting, and it's being exchanged for, say, a dozen looted Impressionist paintings, which apparently are of much lesser value.

But, actually, that's not the case.

They then go on to be sold for much higher values, whether it's in France or it's in Norway or it's in Switzerland, and the dealers do extremely well out of that.

-We don't know precisely how many of these official exchanges there were, but I think we're talking about 35 in the next 2 1/2 years.

And it's almost certain that Lohse has a cut on these exchanges.

So, Lohse goes from being a cataloguer two months earlier in the ERR to a Paris dealer and Goering's man in Paris, to, really, an international dealer.

I mean, you can see his career take off in the most extraordinary way.

But when I asked Lohse about this, he was very evasive.

Lohse told me that he had wanted to go back to his unit and become a soldier again.

But if you look at his behavior once he arrives in Paris in February, you know, this is not someone who wants to go back to the front.

-Any German military person of any kind was dying to be stationed in Paris because it was a really nice place to live.

-He enjoyed the Paris nightlife, and they would go to nightclubs.

You can see in the photos that Lohse left that he had a number of girlfriends.

When he was in his old age, he'd pull out these photos of his time in Paris and, you know, they would evoke these memories.

-When you see these pictures of Nazi perpetrators with champagne and women, this is the world they want to remember in their photo albums as the good old days.

And it allowed them to legitimate, explain away, the fact that this life of luxury, of debauchery, was on the corpses of these victims.

They were the beneficiaries of the genocide.

-Lohse liked, you know, going to the Alps, you know, skiing.

He liked going to the Cote d'Azur.

He was living very close to the Champs-Elyses in a beautiful flat that was a Jewish-owned flat.

-It's furnished with furniture stolen from Jews, too, so he's living in this world of luxury, but stolen luxury.

And we can only imagine what it was like to be Goering's man in Paris with all these resources, all these connections.

And this is why he thought of himself as the "King of Paris."

It was the best time of his life.

-We can imagine the tense excitement in Paris when the Hun was being beaten in the Battle of Normandy.

The Bosch and his weapons were being beaten and destroyed in Paris, by the people of Paris.

And the first liberation notices... -Towards the end of the war, Lohse is commandeered to the Bavarian Alps.

The ERR had about 10 different repositories.

But the French plunder, the cream of the crop, was in Neuschwanstein.

It's a very precarious situation as the Allies, you know, move steadily closer to the castle.

As the Americans are advancing, behind them was a unit called the Monuments Men, and actually there are Monuments Women, as well, and they were created to locate the looted artworks and the plunder that the Nazis had stolen.

-From all over Europe, Goering looted these masterpieces, by conservative estimates, worth $200 million.

-What's so fascinating is the way that Lohse prepares to surrender, and he's strategic about it.

He and a colleague come down from Neuschwanstein to a convent at the base of the castle.

He purposely wears civilian clothes.

He is not a combatant.

No, he is a civilian art historian.

The Americans rolled in on the 4th of May 1945 and found Lohse sitting right on the ledge here, and he was holding a book.

It was a book in French about Joan of Arc.

That was the image that he wanted to project -- a civilian, a gentleman, an intellectual, an art historian, a lover of French culture.

You know, he was already acting in a certain role.

And, of course, in this case, the stakes were very high.

Looting was a war crime for which Lohse could be sentenced to death and executed.

-General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.

The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.

We have rid the world of Hitler and his evil band.

-Well, after he was captured, Lohse was taken to a place called Haus 71... -Ah, there it is!

-...which was an interrogation center set up by the American OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit to interrogate the major art looters.

-There's, you know, about 15 of these Nazi art plunderers who were there.

-It must have been kind of a reunion party for Nazi art dealership there after the war.

-Art Looting Investigation Officers interrogate them on a daily basis.

There were three of them -- James Plaut, S. Lane Faison, and then Theodore Rousseau.

And their aim was to track down and recover missing artworks.

And also to determine whether these people should be prosecuted as war criminals.

The three OSS officers produced a series of reports of each individual.

But the Nazi plunderers were formidable.

-The general plea on behalf of the interrogated German art dealers and art historians is that they were buying on the free market things that were being offered and so on.

-"We are not stealing, of course, we are not seizing, we are not robbing art.

We are saving it.

It's 'besitzlos.'

There are no more owners of this art, and we are taking care that nothing happens to it."

-So, all elements of force, of violence, were negated as if they had never existed.

And this is, I think, the general line.

-In the interrogation report, Lohse characterizes himself, of course, as a cultivated man who acted correctly.

-He was merely doing an inventory or doing a catalogue.

-He saved the lives of many Jews.

-If you listen to Lohse, it sounded like he was a member of the Resistance.

These reports tend to be very harsh, and they call most of the subjects all sorts of terrible things.

And Lohse's is striking because it's more neutral.

And so, he found the balancing act, where he appeared to be honest and cooperative.

And they don't recommend that he be tried as a war criminal, as they do with a number of the others held at Haus 71.

-After the American investigation, suddenly, the French started to become interested in Lohse.

They have read the American report, and they are not convinced.

They realize, no, he is "falsely amiable."

"We don't trust him," you know?

"He's crooked," you know?

He's -- "Don't believe him."

And, finally, in January 1948, he's transferred to France, awaiting his trial.

-One of the first things they bring up is that Lohse was a member of the SS.

You know, they point to his relationship with the Gestapo and the SD, the security service of the SS.

-The SD basically provide liquidation skills.

They're used in anti-partisan warfare.

They're used to hunt down political dissidents.

-So this paints a pretty dark portrait of Lohse -- that he's working with the SD to pursue artworks.

And the French focused in on one particular case -- the case of the Schloss collection.

-So, Schloss was a French Jewish art collector.

And it was a legendary private collection of 333 paintings, you know?

So, it was quite significant.

-In 1939, the children of Adolphe Schloss hid the whole collection in a castle in southern France, Chateau Chambon.

And it was one of the very last collections which had not been found yet.

-So, many people were hunting for this collection.

So, Lohse, you know, for Goering.

-Two of the three heirs of Adolphe Schloss are arrested -- right?

-- and they're interrogated.

And, you know, they reveal the location of the collection.

Lohse, it turns out, decides he's gonna order the seizure of the collection.

A huge truck shows up at the chateau, and the collection is loaded onto the truck.

But for Lohse, things turn even worse when the French prosecutors realize that the individuals who had manned the truck come from a notorious criminal gang, the Bonny-Lafont gang.

-They were the auxiliary of the Gestapo.

Hunting for the Jews, torturing, raiding, looting, helping the Germans to despoil occupied France.

Being associated with those people, we can imagine that Lohse is getting a bit anxious, you know?

Nine members have been arrested and condemned to death.

-So, it's potentially a life-and-death matter for Lohse, as he is accused of working with the French underworld to steal artworks.

The French prosecution had a secret weapon, and that was Rose Valland.

She was the force behind the interrogations.

After the Germans demanded that the French hand over the Jeu de Paume facilities, the French made one condition.

They wanted a curator to be on site at the museum.

-She was supposed to make sure the potted palms were watered, and she was supposed to make sure that, you know, the janitors were cleaning the building.

And what nobody knew at the time was that she spoke German.

-She was a spy, and she was a member of the French Resistance.

-You know, she was really the main witness.

-Lohse's trial before the military tribunal begins on August 1, 1950.

There's considerable anticipation because there had never been a trial of art plunderers in history, that I'm aware of.

There are four ERR staffers who were placed in the dock, with Lohse as a key figure.

And no one knows quite what to expect.

For Lohse, there was acute terror when he's put before this military tribunal.

You know, military tribunals line people up and they shoot them.

-But very quickly, it became obvious that the prosecution was not very solid.

And Lohse became very rapidly self-assured.

So, there is this moment, you know, in which the prosecutors ask, you know, "Why is your name on the list of the ERR?"

And Lohse said, you know, "I was doing just, like, the mail," you know?

Everybody laughed.

-And Rose Valland was searching all over for any evidence that would help incriminate Lohse.

-And she tried very hard, you know.

But she had no evidence.

This is the problem.

-They didn't have all of the documents.

They didn't have the documents we have today.

-And, you know, Lohse, again, has been very good at, you know, erasing the traces.

-After 2 1/2 days, the judges handed down their verdict.

Lohse himself was acquitted.

And it was shocking.

But for Lohse, this was a tremendous victory.

-So that's what happens.

The whole thing got swept under the carpet.

-The chief prosecutor is trying to find his way through this looting, and, obviously, it's very difficult for him.

He doesn't understand.

He doesn't understand the ideological dimension of the looting.

You know, the general knowledge, you know, of the Holocaust and the looting was not available, you know?

It was before the publication of the first books on the Holocaust and the importance of the looting.

That came later.

-I think the art looters escaped serious sanction because the Allies really didn't have time or the heart or the inclination to pursue what they thought was a white-collar crime.

-At that time, as well, there was a fatigue as far as this kind of prosecution and the pursuit of justice.

So, for the lower-level perpetrators like high-profile plunderers, if they weren't kind of considered the most, like, sadistic, the worst of the worst, then people would just -- well, they were not going to bother.

So, really, by 1950, people just wanted to move on.

-By allowing the perpetrators to basically run free, they were sending really a wrong message to the population.

It's, you know, "The crime of plunder pays for itself, and go for it."

-How do you feel being here?

-Um, a little strange.

Um...

But it, you know, brings back memories of visits that I found very exciting.

Little nerve-wracking.

I'd always get a little bit nervous before I went to visit Lohse.

Lohse lived on the top floor, and he had those two rooms that looked out over the street there.

I don't know exactly what the thinking was, but he invited me to come to his home in the fall of 2000.

There're the rumors that he had extraordinary artworks in the apartment.

And I'd also heard that he would not let anyone in that apartment.

And so, I felt there was a challenge there, too.

I do remember, the first time I arrived, walking up the three flights of stairs, and being led in by a housekeeper.

And there was Lohse, sitting at a dining-room table.

I was immediately struck by all the art that was surrounding us, right?

It was -- it was dazzling.

I always suspected him of holding on to looted artworks, and this whet my appetite.

And, of course, they were worth millions of dollars.

I was told this was just the small stuff, the more modest works, and that he had more valuable pictures elsewhere.

That raised questions about how he was able to obtain these paintings, and also to rehabilitate his reputation and revive his career.

When Lohse was released from a French prison in 1950, he relocated to the Bavarian capital.

-Munich, which people refer to even today as the capital of the movement, is where the Nazi Party originated.

And so, for ex-Nazis, it's a desirable place to live.

-I couldn't think of any seriously sort of prominent Nazi who wouldn't end up in Bavaria at the end of the war.

I mean, the ones -- besides the ones who ended up being dead.

So, yeah, you would find lots of old comrades.

[ Chuckles ] -So, Munich re-emerged as the center of the German art trade, and all these Nazi dealers went back to work.

Haberstock, Hofer, Lohse, they're all back to their old ways.

-His timing is impeccable.

When he comes back to Munich in 1950, this is just when the art world is taking off again.

-In those very first years of Germany after the war, knowledge, and especially that kind of knowledge which Bruno Lohse had, was pure money.

He knew who stole paintings, who still had paintings.

And he knew where works had gone to, from Paris, from France.

-They continued dealing in looted art because they still owned a great deal or had access to a great deal.

So the fact that they went back and resurrected their careers and became -- continued to be art dealers is galling enough in itself, but the fact that they continued to deal in looted art with impunity is just very hard to believe.

-With Lohse, we don't really know what he had, but there are myriad rumors about how he allegedly acquired stock, both during the war and right after the war.

And, of course, we have the reports of Rose Valland within the ERR.

Lohse also started to claim from the Bavarian state a number of artworks that had been confiscated from him by the Monuments Men at war's end, claiming that, you know, these were artworks that were previously part of his collection before the war.

And, indeed, in something that becomes a pattern, they returned five pictures to him.

Were all of the pictures looted?

We just don't know.

But probably the most tantalizing clue I found came from the restitution cards that the Bavarian authorities created as they restituted these artworks to Lohse.

On every one of the five cards it says, "confiscated by the ERR."

And one of them, in fact, in the box about identifying marks, also has -- there's the lettering, "SD."

That's the SS's security service that worked hand in hand with the Gestapo.

It doesn't mean 100% that these were looted in France or, you know, looted by the SD.

I mean, there's clues there, but, you know, so often, it's difficult to prove the case.

-Lohse, you know, was in good company in the '50s, making "restitution claims."

-Bavaria's idea of restitution seems to have been to return them to the Nazi families who had been instrumental in looting them, rather than returning them to the families from whom they'd been looted.

The Streichers, Emmy Goering, who was the widow of Hermann Goering, Hans Frank, who was the governor of Poland, his family.

They were all recovering these artworks, many of which were looted.

-But the Bavarians go a step further, and they auction off many of these works, as well.

-And there is correspondence saying, "Let's do this quietly, because otherwise we might -- it might be a political issue, and we don't want people to come and ask too many questions."

-Lohse did tell me, he said, "I was among the dealers that went to these auctions."

And so, he has, if you will, a second crack at Goering's paintings and Hitler's paintings, too.

-If you were Bruno Lohse and were making the restitution claims, your chances were much better, you know, in terms of getting back, you know, a painting, than if you happen to be, you know, a Jewish claimant.

It sounds sickening, but it clearly was the reality in the 1950s.

-My father, who survives the war in Britain, gets to the house, and, um... the first thing he notices is the walls of everything is stripped bare.

There's nothing anywhere.

My father travels all over Western Europe trying to track what might remain of the family collection, without much success.

The West Germans came up with an extraordinary thing, talking about the things that Goering got from our family, that they said, "Well, that's not government responsibility.

You'll have to find Goering's wife and daughter and sue their family as private individuals."

So, therefore, they wash their hands of everything that Goering had ever gotten from us.

-At that time, they thought, "It's over.

The Nazis are gone."

You know, "Now I'm dealing with people who are trying to help me recover my property."

Fat chance.

-By 1950, this is a new world.

So why care about what happened five years ago?

Nobody does.

Look forward.

Don't look back.

-It was clear that the new powers that be, who were really much the same as the old powers that be, didn't particularly care about what people like Lohse had done.

I mean, my father was even told by some official, "You're lucky you're alive.

Count your blessings."

[ Upbeat jazz music plays ] - Hey, everybody Let's have some fun You only live but once And when you're dead, you're done So let the good times roll I said, let the good times roll -In 1950s, Munich was just the starting place for Lohse.

It was kind of the minor leagues, but he knew that the major leagues were going to be in America.

- And let the good times roll now -The U.S. was now going to be number one.

When you have a lot of money, you want to show the importance that you have also by buying art.

-Auction record disappear under the hammer before an overflow crowd in New York.

-If you want it to have an international business, if you want it to sell for good money, you want it to be, you know, on the U.S. art market.

-Sold for $2,300,000.

-This is going to be a very important moment for the U.S. cultural world.

-New York's Museum of Modern Art, like museums all over the country, is today crowded with visitors.

-And if you look at the museum landscape, there is a statistic that 94% of American museums were founded after World War II.

-The most controversial building in the history of New York City, the Guggenheim Museum, is open to the public.

-The museum world just explodes in America, as these new institutions are created.

-The most fabulous collections of jewels and art objects comes to light after 50 years... -And, of course, they need works to exhibit.

Lohse has a glimpse of America in its potential and the resources there, right?

And, you know, he knows that America's going to offer him the greatest opportunities.

Next time... At war's end, Bruno Lohse is a former Nazi.

He's an art plunderer.

He was acquitted, and he was free to do what he wanted.

He knows that to revive his career, he needs to go to America.

The museum world just explodes.

They need works to exhibit.

There was too much money to be made, and there were no consequences.

If Lohse's life is indicative of anything, it's that the crime of plunder pays for itself.

Next time on "Secrets of the Dead"... -"Plunderer" is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.