It was a rare spectacle the highest-ranking soldier in Europe
trafficking with “the shadiest collaborationist art dealers, dis-
reputable lawyers, quasi-dealers [and] expert valuers,” as they
were tersely characterized in an August report “All the
riffraff of the international art market.”
He would invade Cartier, exclaiming delightedly at the
“cheapness” of their diamonds (exchange rates strongly favored
the Reichsmark). He would pick up a bag of cash from General
Hanesse, his sleazy air-force commandant in Paris. He liked to
pay in cash, and he was furious when he couldn’t. In Ghent,
Belgium, he saw a giant ring on display and then found he had
not enough cash with him. “When I drive around this part of
the world,” he thundered at his three adjutants Gritzbach,
Teske, and Ondarza, “I insist that each of you carry at least
twenty thousand marks.” He was not short of takers. “In Paris,”
he would tell American questioners five summers later, “the
people ran after me to sell.” His mail bulged with offers. “If I
went to Holland, or Paris, or Rome,” he told one Nuremberg
investigator, “I would always find a stack of letters awaiting me
... Letters from private people, from princes and princesses.”
Baron Meeus begged Göring’s agents in Brussels to buy his in-
teresting Dutch Old Masters. A New York dealer wrote, offering
portraits from the thirteenth-century school of Fontainebleau.
A certain Pierre Laisis (“expert in antiquities”) invited him to
buy twelve stone capitals inscribed with the letter N, and assured
the Reichsmarschall that their previous owner was Napoleon
himself.
There is contemporary evidence of this eagerness to sell.
“Just watch their eyes light up when they hear they’re dealing
with a German,” Göring said with a snort in August . “They
triple the price, and quintuple it if it’s the Reichsmarschall buy-
ing. I wanted to buy a tapestry. They were asking two million