The Carlswick Affair
Page 20
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Stephanie woke the next morning with a headache. She hadn’t slept at all well. Crying herself to sleep didn’t help. In the cold light of day, she felt annoyed with herself. Who is he anyway? A jumped up little wannabe rock star with an overinflated ego. He had been annoyed about Sam though – far more than she thought he would have been. What right did he have to act like that; it wasn’t like we were together? And besides he was the one who had pushed me away. Still, she felt miserable. See, she told herself sternly, rolling over and sitting up, this is why you don’t get involved. You only end up hurting.
She shook her head. Enough – time to move on.
She hadn’t dated that many boys, but she did know that really the only thing to ease the pain of rejection, was time and distraction. However, she didn’t have the luxury of time to get over him, with her working for his best mate Andy, so it would have to be distraction. Still, she was surprised at the how much James’s words had hurt her – after all she hadn’t known him all that long and only kissed him that one time…..
Stop it, she told herself firmly.
She crawled out of bed and pulled on her workout gear and forced herself out of the house for a thirty-minute run. After a hot shower, she sat at her desk, switched on her laptop and looked through the stack of information she had gathered. She had Sophie’s journals, along with some old newspaper articles about the inquiry into the fraternisation claims that listed the names of several Germans who had supposedly visited Knox Manor in the immediate pre-war years. In addition, she had borrowed the autobiographies of some of the Knox and Wakefield family’s contemporaries, such as the Mitford sisters, from the local library.
A good real life mystery – now that was just the sort of distraction she needed. James’s insistence that she stop looking into the Knox family only strengthened her resolve to follow up on whatever Sophie and David thought they might have uncovered. James obviously knew more than he was letting on. She picked up the books and articles and curled up on her sofa to read.
If the Knoxes had been storing paintings and other valuables for European friends as Edward suggested to Sophie, what if they had kept some and not returned them after the war? she wondered.
She did a quick internet search on World War II and paintings. There were thousands of results. She clicked open the first search result which claimed to be the official site for research into looted art and scrolled through their first list. She was amazed. This was just something that she had never realised. There were literally thousands of works of art that had disappeared during those years that were still missing, presumed destroyed and lost forever. Specialist art theft units existed within police forces around the world tasked with recovering what they could, along with investigating more recent art thefts.
She clicked open an in-depth New York Times article from the previous year which explained how Hitler’s men had systematically plundered the art galleries and museums of the countries they invaded and stolen valuables belonging to many doomed Jewish families, such as the Rockefellers and Rosenbergs in Paris. The Nazis had meticulously catalogued their looting though, which had been an enormous help in the restoration process following the war.
The article went on to say that after the war, Allied soldiers had found famous art works by artists such as Picasso, Degas, Manet and Rembrandt, hidden in railway tunnels, underground mines and in the luxurious homes of the leaders of the Third Reich. The castle of Neuschwanstein had been a main repository of artworks stolen from France. It had taken a specialist team of Allied soldiers, the Monuments Men, six weeks to empty it. The Monuments Men were tasked with recovering and restoring whatever art, national monuments and treasures they could in Europe. Where they were able, many items were repatriated to their lawful owners, but countless others had simply disappeared.
Various efforts by governments and other groups in the years since the war ended, had recovered some of the art that had appeared in private collections and art galleries. But it wasn’t always straightforward proving ownership; although museum collections had good records, there were many gaps in the documentation of art works that changed hands in Europe between 1933 and 1945. According to the article, it was likely that many major collections around the world could still hold pieces with dubious gaps in the history of their ownership.
As part of the war reparation process in the late 1940s a list of missing works had been compiled, using the albums that Hitler’s men produced of the art work they had obtained.
Stephanie sat back at her desk and shook her head. This was unbelievable.
She spent the next hour reading other recent newspaper articles. Hitler had in effect tried to change Germany’s view of what was appropriate art and what wasn’t. He had labelled the art work of any modern, non-German artist as ‘degenerate’. Stephanie was shocked at the famous names that had been considered degenerate in Germany – Dali, van Gogh, Picasso, Renoir, and Chagall.
This fits with the story that Hoffman told at dinner, according to Sophie’s diary, she thought. Imagine if Germany had won the war – much of Europe’s cultural history would have been irrevocably altered and destroyed.
Artwork thought demolished during the Nazi area was still turning up though. As recently as 2010 a set of sculptures labelled as degenerate in the 1930s had been unearthed during the excavations for an extension to the subway in Berlin.
Stephanie followed a number of links and came to a website which claimed to list one hundred paintings stolen by the Nazis. Some had been found, but many had never been recovered. She scrolled through the thumbnail pictures on the website. There were paintings by Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Johannes Vermeer.
Suddenly she stopped. She scrolled back up the page and peered at one of the pictures – it showed a brightly coloured painting of a man in a country scene. It couldn’t be. I have seen that exact painting before.