Bruno Lohse participant in Nazi plunder
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.Later years
Lohse found refuge in the home of another Nazi art dealer, Benno Griebert, whose son Peter became a close contact and business partner. Although the conditions of Lohse's release forbade him ever to work again as an art dealer, German officials quietly allowed Lohse to resume his profession in Bavaria (Munich) in the early 1950s. An unrepentant Nazi, Lohse was among several former Nazi art dealers who, after the war, pressed their own restitution claims for work they claimed to have lost during the years of conflict. Lohse's collection of Dutch old masters and Expressionist paintings was said to be valued in the "millions".According to the historian Jonathan Petropoulos, Lohse maintained contact with former Monuments Man Theodore Rousseau, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exchanging letters and seeing him in New York and in Europe on multiple occasions. Lohse's death in March 2007 was little-noticed, apparently because few realized one of the Third Reich's most notorious art looters was still alive.
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