A charged biography of a notorious Nazi art plunderer and his career in the postwar art world​ "[Petropoulos] brings Lohse into sharper focus, as a personality and axis point from which to explore a network of art dealers, collectors and museum curators connected to Nazi looting. . . . What emerges from Petropoulos's research is a portrait of a charismatic and nefarious figure who tainted everyone he touched."--Nina Siegal, New York Times "Readers of art history and WWII biographies will appreciate this engrossing deep dive into one of the world's most prolific art looters."--Publishers Weekly Bruno Lohse (1911-2007) was one of the most notorious art plunderers in history. Appointed by Hermann Göring to Hitler's art looting agency in Paris, he went on to help supervise the systematic theft and distribution of more than thirty thousand artworks, taken largely from French Jews, and to assist Göring in amassing an enormous private art collection. By the 1950s Lohse was officially denazified but was back in the art dealing world, offering masterpieces of dubious origin to American museums. After his death, dozens of paintings by Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro, among others, were found in his Zurich bank vault and adorning the walls of his Munich home. Jonathan Petropoulos spent nearly a decade interviewing Lohse and continues to serve as an expert witness for Holocaust restitution cases. Here he tells the story of Lohse's life, offering a critical examination of the postwar art world.

This volume reveals Hermann Goering's full role in forcing the Allies of World War I to back down repeatedly as he and Hitler bloodlessly occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Memel during 1938-39. In addition, the Luftwaffe's vaunted Legion Kondor helped win the Spanish Civil War, with air experience gained.

Originally published: New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.

The true story of the Goering brothers - one a Nazi war criminal; the other an anti-Nazi resistance fighter

When modern readers think of Hermann Goring, what probably comes to mind is the overweight drug addict and convicted war criminal who cheated the hangman's noose at Nuremberg by committing suicide just hours before he was due to be hanged. Next up might be the image of his powerful German air force in the Second World War---the Luftwaffe---bombing defenseless European cities and towns in the early part of the war, until it was defeated by the British Royal Air Force in the epic Battle of Britain in 1940. Next might come Goring the debauched art collector who pirated captured collections all over Nazi Europe during the Occupation years. All of these images are correct, but here we see another Hermann Goring: the slim, dashing fighter pilot and combat ace of an earlier struggle, the Great War, or World War I of 1914-18, which he began as an infantry officer fighting the French Army in the 1914 Battle of the Frontiers. During a hospitalization, his friend Bruno Lorzer convinced him to become an aerial observer-photographer, photographing the mighty French fortress of Verdun. He did, and began these never-before-seen personal photo albums of men and aircraft at war: up close.