Wilhelm Peter Bruno Lohse (17 September 1911 – 19 March 2007) was a German art dealer and SS-Hauptsturmführer who, during World War II, became the chief art looter in Paris for Hermann Göring, helping the Nazi leader amass a vast collection of plundered artworks. During the war, Göring boasted that he owned the largest private art collection in Europe.
World War II
Lohse, who published a scholarly thesis on painter Jacob Philipp Hackert in 1936, worked as an art dealer in Berlin from 1936 to 1939, selling paintings out of his father's home. Having joined the SS in 1933, Lohse became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937. He would eventually be drafted into Göring's Luftwaffe, then appointed by Göring to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), Hitler's special art looting unit.
Lohse arrived in Paris by November 1940 to help catalog the celebrated and eclectic collection of Alphonse Kann, which numbered 1,202 items. Though Lohse reported to Paris ERR chief Kurt von Behr (1890–1945), he enjoyed "special agent" status conferred on him by Göring. Among other privileges, Lohse was not required to wear a uniform for the nearly four years he lived in occupied Paris. As the ERR's Deputy Director in Pari] from 1942 to 1944, Lohse helped supervise the systematic theft of at least 22,000 paintings and art objects in France, most of which were taken from Jewish families.
Although Lohse set aside the most highly prized Old Masters for Hitler's Führer Museum (planned in Linz), he helped Göring develop his own enormous private art collection, which accumulated during the war at Göring's vast German estate, Carinhall. Between November 1940 and November 1942, Lohse staged 20 exhibitions of looted art for Hitler's second-in-command in the Jeu de Paume, from which Göring selected at least 594 pieces for his own collection.
Lohse was awarded the War Merit Cross, 2nd class by Adolf Hitler because of his activities in art theft in Paris.
Interrogation and imprisonment
Lohse fled Paris in August 1944, and briefly served in one of Göring's safe Berlin regiments before travelling to Neuschwanstein Castle in February 1945, where a major cache of art looted in France (as well as the Rothschild family jewels) had been safely stored. Lohse was ordered by Robert Scholz to protect Nazi art holdings and records from destruction, and to "turn them over to the American authorities at such time as Füssen [a nearby town] might be occupied."
Facing a possible death sentence for crimes witnessed in Paris by Rose Valland (and others), Lohse underwent a two-month interrogation, during which he shared a cell with two other notorious Nazi art looters, Karl Haberstock and Walter Hofer. The suicide of Baron Kurt von Behr proved to be a godsend to Lohse, permitting him to blame the systematic confiscation of French art collections on his former ERR chief in Paris. Lohse cooperated with American occupiers and repeatedly traded his encyclopedic knowledge of the Nazi art trade for further leniency—he testified, for example, in the Nuremberg trials in November 1945, providing evidence against his superiors and professing a personal distaste for activities of the ERR. Lohse was described, however, as "elusive" and known to lie.
After being transferred from American to French custody in 1948, the American ALIU investigators James S. Plaut, S. Lane Faison and Theodore Rouseau, intervened repeatedly to help free Lohse, to whom Plaut wrote, in June 1948, "My friends, Rousseaux and Faison, and I have all been working in your interest for some time and you have been very much in our thoughts We would like to do anything in our power to facilitate your release and we all wish that you could have had your freedom long before now." They also wrote to Lohse's lawyer, Albert Naud, to help him with Lohse's defense at the French trial, and Plaut and Rousseau wrote to Albert Henraux, in charge of the French Commission for Art Recovery to try convince him to intervene on Lohse's behalf, to which Henraux responded, "If you continue to want to intervene on behalf of one of the greatest pillagers of France's artistic patrimony and one who is most responsible for its impoverishment, you will have to follow the usual legal procedures".
Lohse was acquitted in a 1950 military tribunal in Paris and never conceded responsibility for art looting, admitting only to possessing furniture stolen from deported Jewish families which Lohse had abandoned in his Paris apartment.