Maria Almas-Dietrich
Maria Almas-Dietrich, nee Dietrich, (born June 27, 1892 in Munich; † November 11, 1971 in Dachau) was one of Hitler's most important art suppliers for his planned FührerMuseum in Linz. Life. The daughter of a butcher in Munich's Westend, Maria Dietrich became a force in the French art market thanks to her connection to Hitler. In 1920 she gave birth to an illegitimate child. In 1921 she married Ali Almàs, a Turkish journalist of Jewish origin born in Izmir on May 1, 1883 who also wrote under the name “Diamant”. Dietrich owned Galerie Almas in  Munich located in Munich's Ottostrasse 9 next to the Swiss and American embassies, which dealt in antiques and paintings from the 15th to 19th centuries. She divorced Almas in 1937, but kept the name for the gallery. On January 15, 1940, she was naturalized in the German Reich after swearing she was not Jewish. Art dealer for Hitler. Dietrich got close to Adolf Hitler through his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, and Hitler authorized her to purchase artworks for him without asking permission first. Between 1936 and 1944 Dietrich acquired more than one thousand artworks for Hitler and his Führermuseum, making  her one of the most important dealers in the Third Reich. Much of the art she acquired had been looted from Jews. Arrest and interrogation. In autumn 1945 Almas-Dietrich was arrested and interrogated by the OSS Art Looting Intelligence Unit (ALIU). A special interrogation report about her was drafted. However, it was not published. She was mentioned 22 times in the ALIU Final Report on Nazi-looting of art which noted ""Dietrich, Frau Maria Almas. Munich, Gustav Freytagstr 5. Art dealer; personal friend of Hitler, and for a time his principal buyer of works of art. One of the  most important purchasing agents for Linz. Was under house arrest at Grafing, Bavaria, autumn 1945."" The Allies suspected that Almas-Dietrich '"like many other dealers" had stashed away quantities of Nazi-looted art. Monuments Man S. Lane Faison recommended that her licence be suspended. Postwar. After the war, Maria Almas Dietrich returned to Munich and lived in a neighborhood close to other dealers of Nazi-looted art. Despite her deep involvement in Nazi-looted art, she was not troubled by the German authorities. She even made claims for artworks that had been found by the Monuments Men. On March 4 , 1949, she addressed claims to Occupation Costs Office because paintings by Grützner, Defregger, Horemans and Braith as well as “5 wooden sculptures of male saints” could no longer be found in the Collecting Point and were presumably stolen. She was one of the exhibitors at the Munich art and antiques fair co-founded by Otto Bernheimer. Mimi tho Rahde continued the art business after the death of her mother. Nazi-looted art acquired via Dietrich. The number of Nazi-looted artworks acquired through Dietrich is so great that it requires databases to track them, including the Hitler's Linz Museum  database, the Lostart database, the Central Collecting Point Database, the ERR database and others. Many of the artworks she acquired were destined for Hitler's personal collection or his museum in Linz. Others entered the private market for Nazi-looted art via dealers in Switzerland or other intermediaries. A few examples include: Importance as an art looter. The Austrian Lexicon of Provenance Research places Almas-Dietrich among the top dealers in Nazi looted art under the Third Reich: "Alongside Karl Haberstock and Maria Almas-Dietrich, the art dealer Bruno Lohse was probably one of the most important art dealers in  the service of the National Socialist government." Recent historical research emphasizes Almas-Dietrich's connection to powerful Nazi art looters such as Bruno Lohse, describing her as part of the "solar system that included Nazi art traders such as Alois Miedl, Walter Andreas Hofer, Maria Almas Dietrich and Karl Haberstock" External links. <nowiki> </nowiki>