art that the Führer wishes to acquire from the Jewish
art treasures secured by the Rosenberg task force.Bunjes also reported that the French government had lodged
the first of a series of formal protests about Rosenberg’s opera-
tion. Göring airily dismissed it. “I shall take this up with the
Führer,” he promised. “As for the Rosenberg task force, my or-
ders are to stand.”
The spectacular all-nude Folies Bergères was doing business
as never before now that the Wehrmacht was in town. That eve-
ning, February , , Göring invited art agents Angerer and
Hofer who had spent the day with the French collaborators
leading them to still more concealed Jewish art hoards to see
the revue. His headache had evidently gone. Rising early the
next day, he again conferred with the two men, then consulted
Staffelt’s currency snoopers before setting off to the Jeu de
Paume. As he swept up the steps, flanked by Angerer, Hofer,
and General Hanesse, he found his way temporarily barred by
two German officials, clearly determined to prevent him from
shipping any more pictures out of France. One was Count Franz
Wolff Metternich, a haughty aristocrat and director of the
army’s Fine Arts Commission in Paris; the other, a top German
civil servant. The Reichsmarschall thrust them angrily aside, and
motioned Bunjes to follow him inside. (“I was shouted down by
him in the most uncouth manner,” testified Metternich in a
manuscript later. “He sent me packing.”) Even Bunjes became
uneasy as he guided the Reichsmarschall around this Aladdin’s
Cave of looted treasures, and he again drew attention to the “le-
gal uncertainties.” Not only had the French officially protested,
he pointed out, but the Nazi military governor General Carl-
Heinrich von Stülpnagel had issued a different ruling on the
disposal of confiscated Jewish treasures.