 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Jonathan Petropoulos, author of Gehring's Man in Paris. As German troops marched across Europe during World War II, the Nazis not only annexed more land for the Reich, but also systematically stole thousands of artworks from individuals and cultural institutions. Weiss, Marshall, Hermann Gehring, hungrily acquired a large collection for his own aggrandizement. Efforts to identify track down and return stolen artworks has continued for decades after the war, and the search often leads to the US National Archives. Our records are used to determine the extent of Nazi looting of gold to identify dormant bank accounts and to investigate confiscated works of art in attempts to recover them. Today's guest author brings us the story of Gehring's agent in Paris, Bruno Losa, who helped supervise the systematic theft and distribution of more than 30,000 artworks, mainly from French Jews, and helped to build Gehring's massive private collection. Jonathan Petropoulos is the John V. Krull Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in California. He began working on the subject of Nazi art looting and restitution in 1983, and his books include Art as Politics in the Third Reich, The Faustian Bargain, Royals and the Reich and Artists under Hitler. From 1998 to 2000, he served as Research Director for Art and Cultural Property on the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, where he helped draft the report Restitution and Plunder the US and Holocaust Victims Assets. Petropoulos has also served as an expert witness in a number of cases where Holocaust victims have tried to recover lost artworks. Now let's hear from Jonathan Petropoulos. Thank you for joining us today. Greetings from Yale University, where I am spending spring 2021 on sabbatical. I'm affiliated with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and I would thank my host or for their hospitality of this semester. I'm delighted to be here to talk about my most recent book, Green's Man in Paris, and let me share the screen on that. And this current slide. So yeah, so this is my fifth monograph, and very much grows out of my earlier work. I would mention that it's such an honor to speak in conjunction with the National Archives and Record Administration. I spend a great deal of time at NARA, especially NARA II out in College Park. When I worked for the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, we had an office in College Park, and we spent months, years there working, and I got to know much of the staff, so I'm very grateful to Greg Bradshaw and Michael Kurtz and many of the other archivists there. I remember Michael, excuse me, Greg Bradshaw had testified in one of the commission meetings that in NARA, there were something in the order of 35 million pages of documents in NARA related to Holocaust-era assets. Clearly, it's a treasure trove of material, and I could not have written Green's Man in Paris without NARA II. So I had been working on the subject of Nazi art plundering for almost 40 years now. I began it back in 1983 as a graduate student, and I was drawn to the topic for two reasons. One was more pragmatic. There was no scholarly academic study of Nazi art luding. There were memoirs and journalistic accounts, but not academic works, but more importantly, it engaged really important interesting issues to me about the nexus of culture and barbarism. I had been reading the work of literary scholar George Steiner on the subject, and I thought this was something that I wanted to explore about how the intelligentsia could contribute to the genocide and what happened to intellectuals during the Holocaust and the role of art in this tragedy, too. So I began mining this vein, and my dissertation appeared as a first book artist politics in the Third Reich, and it focused on the Nazi leaders involved in the culture, starting with Adolf Hitler. But I reconstructed collections for about a dozen Nazi leaders, including Hermann Göring, and subsequent to that book, there have been remarkable studies on these collections. For example, with Hermann Göring, Nancy Jaide, a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., she's written an extraordinary work, a catalog raisonne of the Göring collection, and we now have a better understanding of what kind of art he collected. It was a larger collection than previously thought. But what I was able to do in my book was to analyze this behavior, and I looked at their engagement with art in terms of ideology. I looked at it in terms of sociology. The Nazi leaders often used artworks instrumentally, and here it was a kind of stage prop as they bought grand houses and tried to integrate with a traditional feudal elite. I looked at the behavior more anthropologically. There was a culture of gift giving and the gifts were very expressive, and one could learn a great deal about someone's stature or fortunes by the gifts that they received. That project morphed and led to the second book, Faustian Bargain, because I was interested in the actual hands-on art plunders. Most of them had been intellectuals, academics, art historians, art dealers, museum officials, and I wanted to better understand their role in implementing the Nazi leaders' plundering program. I apologize for the next slide, it's disturbing, but I wanted to point out that this project of looking at the second rank was common in the field of German history, Holocaust studies in the late 80s and early 90s. This photograph, which the Nazis titled The Last Jew in Venetza, has been studied by scholars and they found that it was not just SS officers in the background, but there's uniforms from a number of other units, from Hitler Youth to German labor front, and we're just getting a better sense of the second rank figures and the perpetrators, if you will, and so I try to do that with the art plunders. And for example, one figure I wrote about, I focused on, was Cajetan Müllmann, who's arguably the greatest art dealer in history. Müllmann was an Austrian and he plundered in Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938, and from there he moved to Poland, where we see him in this photo of General Governor Hans Frang, and he in his unit plundered there, and then he went on to the Netherlands, where he plundered under Arthur Seisinkwart, right? And Müllmann continued to produce tones on art history with his Nazi and his SS credentials there. Müllmann and his team, they stole masterpieces, that's the right word, this is the Chartresky Raphael from Krakow. This painting is still missing, arguably the most sought after of the missing works from World War II, but Müllmann and his team took, not just these extraordinary artworks, but ordinary quotidian objects as well. They took, I guess one could say everything, but the kitchen sink, and I think it's really important to keep in mind that art looting and the Holocaust are inextricably linked, that the Nazis, as part of the dehumanization of their victims, first robbed them, right? They took their property and their cultural property, and again, art looting is so linked to the Holocaust or you look at the plundering actually taking place and the way objects were brought back to Germany and sold at official auctions, right? And the crowds that were there buying this Jewish property, there was so much Jewish property flowing into Germany, there were these wild auctions, right? And this is in Hanau, near Frankfurt, and just popping up out of the street corners. The historian Frank Bayor has studied Hamburg and he found that basically during World War II, there was an auction of Jewish property almost every day in Hamburg, and he estimates that over 100,000 Hamburg citizens bought looted Jewish property, right? So it's so pervasive and it has real implications in terms of big questions, who knew what, right? And again, it's part of this process of dehumanization of making your victims impoverished and starving them to death, and then they start to conform, at least in appearance, to the Nazi racial hierarchies, right? So I think Punder was an important station on the famous The Twisted Road to Auschwitz and I would make that link. Well, with Mühlemann, I tracked him as best I could. Every photo I could find, every document, he's at a speech with Goebbels and there's Mühlemann over here. But what I ended up with was just a partial picture. In many ways, this image is a metaphor for what I was able to do in Faustian bargain. It's from Mühlemann's SS file. You can see it's been burned and water damaged. The record has gone through a lot, but it's own partial record, right? And I feel like I had a picture of what they did, but there were still huge gaps missing. And I think it's striking that in Faustian bargain, there's no chapter about any individual that's longer than 30, 35 pages, right? I just didn't have more information at that time. I knew that Mühlemann had been captured by the Americans, that he was interrogated by them, that he escaped in 1947, but I had no idea really what happened to him. And I started a methodology that I would apply in Gurian's man, right? One tactic I used, you can see here, was to go to cemeteries and see if I could find last resting places for these individuals, just to figure out when they died. And I had my Nazi hunting dog there of Isla helping me. I did find Mühlemann. He was a cemetery in Salzburg. And if you can make out there, he died in 1958. With that information, I was able to find his widow and she lived in Austria, the Austrian Alps, and I went to visit her. She had just shut the door when I took this picture. She would not let me take photos of her, but I had asked her if she had images of her husband. She said had died in 1958, so I knew as well from that too. She said, yeah, in the attic they had photos and so I climbed up there and I found some photos of Mühlemann who was a fugitive. He had been an illegal Nazi in Austria in the 1930s and he had come back clandestinely to see his family. And so I found a little bit more, but that made me realize that this was an opportunity to find the old Nazis and their widows and their spouses and their children that this could be really useful. And I went on to visit with a film hotel, for example. He had been an SS general in Budapest in Hungary late in the war working alongside Adolf Eichmann as they attempted to exterminate the Hungarian Jewish population. And the hotel had played a key role in dispossessing Hungarian Jews and the so-called Hungarian gold train with valuables that came out of it. So I interviewed him on a couple of occasions at his home in Altause and it was very useful, especially for writing Faustian bargain. And I also was at this time that I found Bruno Loza thanks to a tip from Anne Weber. She was in a filmmaker. She's now the co-chair for the commission on Lutard in Europe. And she said that Loza was alive and well in Munich and I could look him up in the phone book. So I did. And I wrote to him and he agreed to meet with me. And this was the first of many meetings over the course of nine years prior to his death in 2007. And I would estimate that I met Loza about 30 times. And while that may seem like a lot of meetings, I thought it was necessary. I found it was necessary because he wasn't gonna tell me his secrets on the first meeting, right? When I had to develop a relationship and ask questions repeatedly and then triangulate. And then I was able to discern more about his life and other issues regarding Nazi-illuded art. I would mention that the archival basis for this project also changed since 2000 when I finished Faustian Bargain. I had been agitating, that's the right word, for museums to open files. In this case, the curatorial files that are in museums. And certain archives did open up that were really important and useful. The archives for military justice in Leblanc near LeMotion, France, they had been closed till 2016. Because Loza went through a trial before a French military tribunal, the trial records were incredibly important. It was not much of an archive in many respects. It was on a military base, but it was a gold mine. I was the only one working in there for the week I was there. Or the Swiss Federal Archives in Bern, right? They're also a treasure house. And those files have not been fully exploited. So the archival basis also grew and that allowed me to write this book. So who was Loza, and why is he important? Well, Loza was an art dealer in Berlin in the 1930s. He had received his PhD in art history in the mid-30s with a dissertation on Jakob Philipp Haakert, an 18th century German painter. He was not a particularly distinguished dissertation. An academic career was really not open to him. So he went into art dealing. He was also a member of the SS. He had joined the SS shortly after the seizure of power. And he remained in the SS throughout the Third Reich. And so those were two key elements. Loza had fought in Poland in the fall of 1939. And by 1941, and he was still in the East, he was in East Prussia. He had been injured and he had recuperated. He was still with his unit in the East. He was preparing along with this unit to go into the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa. And he received a letter inviting him to transfer to Paris where he would assist the Reichs-Marshal Hermann Göring in the Göring's pursuit of artworks. And so Loza went to Paris on a trial basis, trying to decide what he was going to do. At least that's what he claimed after the war. And he realized that Göring was trying to create a great collection. And I think Loza found that to be quite interesting. He also met Göring. And it's clear that the two men developed rapport. They had a chemistry. Loza was very self-confident. And it was PhD in art history. He would prepare for the meetings with Göring and study up. And he did very well in these presentations. And Göring liked him. And so Loza decided to stay. I think it was an easy decision in terms of the alternative going to fight in Russia. And Loza was assigned to the Nazi plundering operation in Paris, headquartered in the Judo Palm. It's called the ERR, short for Einsatzdauer Reichsler Rosenberg. And Göring paid 20 visits to the ERR headquarters in the Judo Palm. Loza was there for 19 and would organize these exhibitions. And Göring would decide what he wanted to acquire. A value was ascribed to each artwork, even though Göring never transferred any money. No payment was ever rendered. But they had this charade as if Göring was buying these works. And Loza assisted him in this way. Now, when Loza died in 2007, he left his private photos. And many have come to me in my possession. And so I was able to get an up close and personal glimpse of the life of an art plunder in Paris. And one gets a sense of how grand his existence was. This is a banquet for the ERR. And we can see there's wine and there's salmon, the next image here too, the silver. In short, it was a very good war for Loza. And that's what the photos reflect. He's out at restaurants with colleagues. There are a number of them with different women. He obviously had girlfriends there, even if he seems to be in this photo putting the antenna into her nose. That might say something about him and the way he has saved his misogyny. I think both adjectives are actually justified. This image survived as well. Loza in an SS sweater with two women on the bed. It's a very strange image. It's posed with the comrade on the phone. Part of a certain genre of wartime photography of occupiers and their lives there. I talk about it in the book. Really, you get a sense of what it was like for Loza to be in Paris and to be Gurian's man there. Here they're looking at two paintings by only Matisse and Loza and the others are laughing at them. These were too modern for Gurian's taste. Although he did like some modern art impressionists and even worked by Van Gogh, but Matisse with the colors was too much. So I think Gurian is passing on that as he holds a Dutch landscape in his hand. But this is an important picture because it reflected an important opportunity for Bruno Loza. The modern works were sequestered in the so-called room of martyrs, but they were fodder for trade, for exchange, right? And Loza was involved in these exchanges. Many works going to Switzerland. And I believe that Loza was able to embezzle, to abscond with certain works from the ER cash. And this was the basis for his post-war business, his post-war wealth. It's speculative, we can't prove this, but it seems to be the case. There's no doubt that Loza was wheeling and dealing while at the ERR in Paris, right? And again, the images give us a sense of the punders on the ground, right? And sometimes a seemingly innocuous photo is so poignant when you see all these frames, all these pictures stacked up, you get a sense of the scale, right? The ERR in Paris stole over 30,000 artworks from French Jews there. Now, Loza was not unopposed, if one could say. He had a nemesis, and that was Rose Vallande, who was a French curator, who was allowed to stay in the Chateau Palme. And Rose Vallande pretended she didn't speak any German. Loza was fluent in French, conversed with her in French, but in fact, she was a spy. She was keeping tabs on Loza and the others in the ER, and sending reports to French museum authorities about what was happening there. Later on, Rose Vallande became a Monuments Officer. The phrase Monuments Men is inactive because there were women Monuments Officers too. And she was positively heroic in her efforts on behalf of France's cultural patrimony. And in fact, she's treated as a heroine in France, and there's a graphic treatment of her life. It's actually rather amusing because you see the Loza figure and the Gering characters rendered as cartoons, if you will. And yeah, so for the French, they know Rose Vallande. Another fact that I find fascinating concerns, Max Beckman, who is probably my favorite artist, and the German master, he painted Loza in one of his paintings, a painting titled Dream of Monte Carlo from 1943. It features both Loza, here's a croupier, and Erhard Goepel, who is another art plunder, and a friend of Max Beckman. Goepel was bringing food and letters and artistic supplies to Max Beckman in Amsterdam during the German occupation during the war. And Goepel was also an agent for Adolf Hitler and a sense of rival of Loza, who's collecting for Gering. And Beckman painted the two of them as croupiers with swords with these knights behind them, these dark knights and bombs, they look like terrorists. And we're still trying to figure out the picture, blood on the hands here. Other figures we've been able to identify, this is Pierre Bonny, who was head of the Bonny Lafont gang, a criminal gang that collaborated with the French Gestapo, right? And Loza used Pierre Bonny and some of his raids there, too. So I think it's rather extraordinary that Max Beckman rendered Loza perhaps not, you know, complete surprise in that Max Beckman was dealing with the themes of culture and barbarism and Loza was appropriate in that way, but I think still rather extraordinary. So once Paris was liberated by the Allies in August 1944, Loza returned to Germany. And more specifically, he spent time at Neusch-Fonstein. The castle was one of the major repositories for the ERR, in fact, the major repository, with over 21,000 artistic objects stationed there. So Loza was helping safeguard the plunder at Neusch-Fonstein. He also helped protect the so-called card catalog. And these were the records of the ERR that linked each object to its previous owner. And the card catalog was indispensable for restitution. And Loza helped preserve both the art at Neusch-Fonstein and the card catalog. There were rogue elements of the SS that were interested in destroying this, not letting these things fall into the hands of the enemy. And Loza had to deal with some of those SS units, and he did well to keep them at bay. Loza was arrested on May the 4th, sitting on the wall of this convent right here, reading a book in French about Jeune Arc. He was arrested by this individual, James Rormer, and Rormer went on to become the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And in the movie Monuments Men, he's played by the Matt Damon character. And Rormer himself was a very interesting figure, the first Jewish director of the Met as well. So he was the one who arrested Loza. He, Loza was transferred to an OSS, an office of strategic services unit in Altausé. And the art-looting investigation unit of the OSS, they interviewed over the summer of 1945 about a dozen of the top Nazi art plunders, obviously Loza included. And a key member of this art-looting investigation unit was Ted Rousseau, theater Rousseau, who went on to be a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Well, Loza made a rather good impression on Rousseau and the others, and they were undecided in their initial verdicts and recommendations from the fall of 1945. They thought he deserved further scrutiny. The Americans ended up handing him over to the French who put him on trial in 1950. So Loza was in a French jail for about three and a half years, and he served one of the longer prison sentences for a Nazi art plunder. Rousseau and the other OSS officers tried to help Loza. They felt that he was still in prison when other plunders had gotten away, and he had made a good impression. And they wrote to their French counterparts asking for leniency and understanding that French didn't receive this intervention well, but we don't know how it played into their decision. Rather extraordinarily, Loza was acquitted in 1950. And this is the document he kept in his papers until he died, right? The 4th of August, 1950, he is exonerated, and this allowed him to go back into business in the 1950s. And he moved to Munich, as many in our world did. And in the later 50s, he bought this apartment in Bogenhausen, a very elegant neighborhood in Bogenhausen, and Loza had the top floor here. It was a fairly modest residence considering his wealth, considering the paintings he had in his possession. He could have afforded a villa on Lake Sternberg, for example, but I think he chose to live a more modest life to fly under the radar, if you will. And this apartment was part of that strategy. But Loza still pops up in the 50s and 60s. You know, we see him offering a painting by Murillo for 1.5 million Deutsch marks there. We see records from another art dealer, Julius Buller, and we can see some acquisitions, 53, 57, $20,000, 12,000 Deutsch marks there. Loza was part of a network centered in Munich. And, well, he's part of several networks. There's just not one network. There's multiple networks that overlap. And the network of old Nazi art plunders was at its core and included people like Walter Andreas Hofer, who had been the director of Göring's art collection. This was the position that Loza had aspired to, to be the director of the collection. Hofer, by 1966, is advertising in German art magazines like Die Welt Kunst. And so, you know, he's back in business. He lived in this apartment, this beautiful apartment, right on the English Garden. He had the upper floor. And down below him was Karl Haberstock, another Nazi dealer. Loza and those in the know called the Brown House. The Nazi partner headquarters in Munich which had been called the Brown House, right? But Haberstock had also been a Berlin dealer, much more successful than Loza. And he relocated to Munich and had his elegant apartment on the English Garden. Haberstock had profited greatly from his sales to Nazi leaders and amassed his own collection. He put it on loan for his hometown of Augsburg in Bavaria, and eventually gave it to Bavaria, to the Augsburg Museum. And they still treat him as a patron, as a native son whom they're proud of. There's a Karl Haberstock, Strasse in Augsburg, which is extraordinary because, you know, he was an art plunder. He was the major dealer for Hitler in the first half of the war. And, you know, to have the street named after him. Yeah, it's problematic. So, you know, this was the world in which the Gurbits operated too. Many of you will have heard of Hildebron Gourlet, another art dealer, and his wife and children who inherited the cash of about 1,500 pictures. And those were discovered in 2012, 11, 12 when the story came out. And they were valued at over a billion dollars in artworks. Hildebron Gourlet had died in 1956. So he wasn't there for the whole history, you know, the revival of the art world. But his wife and sons sold pictures off that were part of these networks, right? With Loza, it's interesting the networks extend all the way to the United States. And even though Loza was prohibited from entering the US, here we see him on the list, here Loza Bruno, doctor, chief assistant of Rosenberg Luttingen Office, they didn't have computers back then. They didn't have effective mechanisms to screen, you know, people on the war criminals trying to come into the country. So Loza was able to come in. And as soon as he got out of prison, one of the first people he had written was Theodore Rousseau at the Met, and said, there are works I want to show you. I'm sure there are things you'll be interested in. And Rousseau's papers became available a few years ago. They're in the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I was astonished to see these correspondence. I mean, first, how close they were the correspondence last decades. I was also surprised that Rousseau did not destroy any of these records. It seemed to be a rather problematic, embarrassing correspondence. To his credit, he kept the letters. But what do we see? We see Rousseau reaching out to Loza on Rousseau's trips to Europe. He would go on buying expeditions almost every summer. And he would check in with Loza regularly. And I have Rousseau and Loza meeting not just in Munich, but in Paris and in Switzerland. It seems very interesting, right? They didn't render much of what they were doing in writing. I was able to identify 35 works that Loza offered to Rousseau. Loza would write in German. And they're extraordinary works by Botticelli and Cézanne and others. But I have not been able to prove that Loza sold to the Met. But there may be a reason for that. He may not have sold directly to the Met. There may have been an intermediary. We're still trying to ascertain that. But it's clear that Loza was coming to the Met. And by 1961, he's just dropping in on his friend Rousseau, leaving his card and saying, I'll come back. And again, it's extraordinary that Rousseau was meeting with Loza. Rousseau knew about Nazi art plundering. He knew who Loza was. The issue of Nazi art plundering was still in the press. This is from the front page of the New York Times in 1964. So there's no ignorance in part of the Rousseau. Rather, he was just ambitious. He wanted to create the best collection of European paintings in the Met that was possible. And he was a risk taker. He was a swashbuckling curator. And whether that meant flouting European export laws, which he did sometimes, or dealing with old Nazi plunders, this was the way that Rousseau pursued artworks. Loza himself was transformed. He was no longer the malnourished, frightened war criminal who emerged from France. He had a certain presence, charisma even too. And when he came to New York, he arrived. He traveled in style. He would stay in the best hotels in the city, the Samurits. And he put on a show that he was a successful European art dealer. And so I met Loza in 1998 in these interviews as we tried to figure out what he was doing. And it was a process. At the center of our discussion for many years was this painting by Camille Passaro, called the Fisher Passaro. It's one of the last works done by the French impressionist artist who was Jewish. Done from the room where he died. And the picture had disappeared during the war. It had been looted from the Fisher family, the famous publishing family. And we didn't know what had happened. But it had been exhibited in 1984 in Switzerland in Lausanne. And the lender was discovered was Fondation Bruno, the Bruno Foundation. And so representatives of the Art Lost Register approached me and asked if I would inquire with Loza about his knowledge of this picture. And Loza said he had never seen it. He had never heard of it. But I continued asking him, the point where he referred to it as the damn Passaro picture. Are you going to ask me about that? That's for Dap de Passaro build one more time? And I did. And eventually Peter Griebert, the dealer shown before this slide, Griebert, he came to me with this letter. And it's a receipt, actually. And it says that Loza has sold the Passaro for $10,000 US. And Loza has received a commission of $1,500. So I realized Loza was lying. He had something to do with it. I was allowed to inspect the painting. And so I traveled to Zurich. And I saw the painting in the Zurich Cantonal Bank. We looked at it in a conference room. And we examined it to make sure it was the right painting to look at the condition. This was in early 2007. Loza died in March 2007. And upon his death, the story of his bank fault in the Zurich Cantonal Bank came out and attracted a lot of press. There were 14 masterpieces here, they say, in the bank fault, including works by Renoir and Monet, among others. And so this was really a question of what was Loza about and how many other looted works that he have. Well, as part of this process of figuring out the trail of the history of the Fischer Passaro, I ended up in Lichtenstein, which is a kind of appendage to Switzerland, but clearly autonomous there in the Rhine Valley. It has a population of about 35,000 people. And there are more foundations registered than there are residents in Lichtenstein. And I was taken to this foundation. It was called the Schönauer Foundation. And the idea was that Frederick Schöne, this lawyer who was never seen before, he had bought the picture and his children had the pictures. That's what I was told by all involved. That turned out not to be the case. It turned out that the Schönauer Foundation, the Schönauer Anstalt, was owned by Loza. I didn't know that at the time. I was lied to rather systematically about that. But through this whole process, I came to understand how Lichtenstein, with his foundations, played a role and helped Loza evade taxes and park his money. And I learned that this Frederick Schöne was a very important person in Loza's life and in the art world more generally. So ultimately, the Fischer Passaro was restituted and the heirs sold it off. But I kept going with my research, of course. And one thing that had come to light was Loza's relationship with the Wildensteins. Now, the Wildensteins are arguably the greatest art dealers of the second half of the 20th century. I think that honor goes to the Duvenes for the first half of the 20th century. But they had extraordinary holdings. And they were a French-American family. They have a ranch in Kenya. There's a lot of tabloid fair surrounding them. Plastic surgery gone wrong. And expensive divorces and what have you. But the fact remains, they are powerful. They have tremendous holdings. Artworks valued in the billions of dollars. They're known to keep paintings and their vaults for generations. And they decide when something comes on the market, right? And so it was rather extraordinary to find that Loza was in their orbit. And one clue concerned Frederick Schöne because it was clear from documents in Nara that the Wildensteins up here were shipping huge quantities of art to the United States in the 1950s, 60s, through Switzerland, right? And we see this image here from the U.S. State Department, right? The Wildensteins of 54 bringing in three Gogan's, two Cézanne's, a Monet, and who's doing it? Frederick Schöne, right? So that was a link. Loza's personal lawyer, the person who organized this foundation in Liechtenstein who gave him his name for Loza's foundation, who controlled Loza's money. Loza would go down there and get cash from Schöne. He was the Wildensteins' lawyer in Switzerland, right? And the Wildensteins, who I'm told pioneered the use of the private jet to transport works, you know, they would bring works to Switzerland and then import them to the United States. So this was part of the connection here, right? There's other evidence such as this letter from Alec Wildenstein, part of the Wildenstein dynasty. I have known Bruno for more than 60 years and he was always a good friend. This is the time of Loza's death in 2007. So if you go back 60 years, you realize there is a relationship. So I explore that relationship and why it might have been. But just briefly, the Wildensteins, even though they, you know, the key members of the family, the patriarch George Wildenstein got out of France in 1941 and came to the United States. There are reports, unproven, unverified, that he was still able to control things in France and communicate with agents and other representatives in France. And that he was, and the family were active during the war in France. This is the allegation. And who would have known about what the Wildensteins did during the war? Loza, right? He was the king of Paris, if you will. And so one possible explanation is the Loza, the Wildensteins viewed Loza as a threat that he had incriminating information about them. And it's best to keep the threats close to you, right? So that's a possibility. We're still trying to figure out more about this relationship. You know, with Loza, he tried to conceal his traces as someone pointed out to me. The only time he kept a receipt was to conceal something, to mislead. You know, he generally preferred handshake deals and cash transactions. And when he sold works, he apparently used intermediaries, right? A cutout. We know that Loza sold these two works to the German Historical Museum, but he used an intermediary, Peter Griebert, his partner to do that, to approach the German Historical Museum. So Loza made efforts to conceal his activities, and I've made it my project to, you know, to combat that effort at concealment. And so I feel like I've been able to write a more textured and nuanced treatment of Loza than, you know, it's been possible with any other art plunderer before. There's no doubt that Loza took his secrets to the grave, many secrets to the grave, but it's been my endeavor to counteract that effort. So I just wanna say in closing that, you know, this story is not just about one person. It's not even about the networks of dealers and museum officials who interacted with Loza during the war and after the war. I think it has broader implications, right? About intellectuals and culture and its relationship to barbarism, right? Germany was arguably the most advanced nation in the world culturally in the 1930s and they descended into this barbarism. And so when one sees, you know, an orchestra at Auschwitz playing Bach and Beethoven, it raises similar kinds of questions about culture and barbarism. So that's my account of my book on Bruno Loza, Green's Man in Paris. I hope that people enjoy it. So thank you for your attention.