The Revelations of a Nazi Art Catalogue

The folder is, at first glance, unremarkable: gray, archival, tied with a small, neat ecru ribbon. Jotted in pencil is a notation: “Collection GOERING, inventaire des peintures.” Inside is a ledger, brittle with age but well preserved, its handwritten notations spanning two-hundred-odd pages and eleven years. The first is from April 1933: a listing for a Venus painted in oil on wood by Jacopo de’ Barbari, purchased in Rome for twelve thousand lira, displayed in a private office of Carinhall, the hunting estate outside Berlin belonging to the Nazi second in command, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. One thousand three hundred and seventy-five paintings follow this Venus, all of them carefully recorded: date of receipt, title of painting, painter, description, collection of origin, and destination. Tintoretto, Renoir, Rubens, Monet, Corot, van Gogh, Botticelli, a large group of Cranach; it goes on. After 1940, the pace of acquisition becomes frantic, obsessive, and the names of the European masters are often matched in provenance with names of some of the greatest art-collecting families and dealers of the early twentieth century: Goudstikker, Rothschild, Rosenberg, Wildenstein. It all stops abruptly in the spring of 1944.