dearly loved paintings of the nude. “I am the first to agree
that Göring was a ruffian,” Sutton lectured U.S. intelligence
officers, “but from the facts produced, could it not be argued
that he was one better than his colleagues at the top of the Nazi
party?”
In the last half of Göring plunged into art dealings
with a zest that left ripples that would not subside for half a
century. Connoisseurs and governments still fight greedy battles
over the canvas and plaster and marble and bronze that he ac-
quired. He bought many works quite legally, like Peter-Paul
Rubens’s “Venus and Adonis,” which he had “paid through the
nose for” at a Paris dealer’s. All were seized in . In December
of that year an internal memorandum of the Monuments, Fine
Arts & Archives branch of the U.S. Control Commission for
Germany defined that “looted objects” would even be under-
stood to include “those extracted under duress against some
form of remuneration and even those bought from French, Bel-
gian, and Dutch art dealers... Thus a picture bought by, or on
behalf of, Göring from a Paris dealer will be restituted, when
discovered, to the French government, it being considered as
part of the artistic patrimony of France.” In , this legal léger-
de-main was used to confiscate the Reichsmarschall’s entire col-
lection, including the paintings that he had inherited.
Toward the end of the war, more than one French or
Dutch or Belgian dealer had declined to give him a bill of sale
“hoping,” as one American officer later surmised, “that they
could eventually reclaim the objects and keep the purchase
money.” The moral code of the art dealers was, Göring once
said, on a par with that of the horse trader.
In he valued his Carinhall art collection at fifty million
marks. Raising the money to buy it was no problem for the chief
of the Four-Year Plan. “I was the last court of appeal,” he re-