their way from the Jeu de Paume into Göring’s possession.
Italy rivaled France and Holland as the sources of Göring’s
fabulous art collection. In October General Italo Balbo had
transported to Carinhall an antique marble copy of the Venus of
Praxiteles, excavated at Leptis Magna near Tripoli. As Musso-
lini’s own military misfortunes began, at the end of , he be-
came eager to ingratiate himself with the Germans. In January
Hofer arranged for him to give to Göring eight large
Vipiteno paintings for his birthday. “I can imagine how sur-
prised and pleased Hermann must have been,” wrote Frau
Hofer, congratulating her husband on the deal. “Without you
he would never have got those paintings. What kind of lunch
did you get [from Göring]? It was Hot-Pot Sunday. I’m sur-
prised that Goebbels was there too they must have buried the
hatchet.”
To evade customs duties, his agents routinely underde-
clared the values, with the connivance of Mussolini himself. In
November the export office at Rome was shown a manifest
of thirty-four sealed crates of art bound for Carinhall, allegedly
worth a mere two hundred thousand lire (or roughly , in
). In fact, the crates contained two Canaletto landscapes,
works by Spanish, Venetian, and Florentine masters, furniture,
and a marble relief of the Madonna and Child; the fifteen largest
of these items had been purchased by Hofer from a Florentine
antiquary on May and October , , for . million lire.
In July this kind of customs fraud would be repeated with
sixty-seven crates packed with antique sculptures and bas-reliefs.
To his harassed secretary Gisela Limberger would fall the
job of keeping track and creating inventories of her boss’ objets
d’art and of the palaces and villas where they were currently
displayed or stored. But the fate of the Paul Rosenberg collec-
tion shows the kind of problem she faced. Wanting to send his