by Noah Charney
Dutch author Karl Hammer proposes a theory that Hitler was after The Lamb not only because of his interest in stealing art and as revenge for the Treaty of Versailles, but because the painting was thought to have contained a coded treasure map that led to the Arma Christi, the instruments used at Christ’s Passion, which might include the nails, the sponge, the Spear of Destiny, Christ’s robe and reed, the column and scourge from the Flagellation, the Holy Grail, and the Crown of Thorns. Hitler’s interest in the occult and the interest of many of the Nazi leaders (Himmler foremost among them) are well documented, as are the Nazi expeditions launched through the Ancestral Research and Heritage Group, the Ahnenerbe, which might be described as the Nazi supernatural research center. Hitler ordered expeditions to Tibet in search of the yeti, to the Holy Land to find the Spear of Destiny with which Longinus pierced Christ’s side as he hung on the cross, and to the Languedoc to find the Holy Grail. The Nazi Party itself began as an underground occult confraternity.
It is certainly possible that Hitler believed that The Ghent Altarpiece contained a coded map to supernatural treasure. The Ahnenerbe was hard at work looking for a secret code in the Icelandic saga The Eddas, which many Nazi officials thought would reveal the entrance to the magical land of Thule, a sort of Middle Earth full of telepathic giants and faeries, which they believed to be the very real place of origin of the Aryans. Whether such a map is in The Ghent Altarpiece is another matter, one most scholars dismiss out of hand, though it is tempting to interpret the complex, enigmatic iconography and disguised symbolism of van Eyck’s masterpiece in terms more exotic than those in the average art history textbook. Some believe that the signature on the ransom notes, D.U.A., stands for “Deutschland Über Alles,” and that Goedertier, De Swaef, and Lievens were murdered by agents of the Ahnenerbe.
Karl Hammer argues that the ulterior motive of van Eyck’s secret mission to Portugal—ostensibly undertaken to paint a portrait of Princess Isabella of Aviz for Philip the Good—was to meet with famed Portuguese cartographers. Together, Hammer claims, they concocted a cartographic cipher with which to hide the whereabouts of the Arma Christi within The Ghent Altarpiece. According to Hammer, the theft of the Judges panel was a preventative measure, to ensure that a key piece of the treasure map was missing so that the Arma Christi remained safely lost.
Writer Filip Coppens focuses on the most obvious treasure of all of the Arma Christi, hidden in plain sight at the heart of the altarpiece. In the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb panel, front and center, the Lamb bleeds from its chest into a golden chalice—the Holy Grail. Coppens links this to the subtly drawn AGLA in the Angelic Choir panel, the abbreviation for the Kabbalistic protective magical incantation atta gibbor le’olam Adonai (“The Lord is mighty forever”), first noted as such in the 1970s by the Belgian historian Paul Saint-Claire. Hammer extrapolates from the AGLA, suggesting that a secret society known as the Allahists (a corruption of Agla-ists) are the historical protectors of the Arma Christi. Though this sounds rather far-fetched, it is another rationale for the theft of the Righteous Judges panel that has found considerable popular support.
Perhaps the Judges panel was stolen in order to hide it from the Nazis or from one Nazi in particular? Hammer suggests that it was being hidden from renowned Nazi grail scholar Otto Rahn, one of the earliest historians to search the Languedoc for the Holy Grail and to write about the Cathars and the Templars in his fascinating, scholarly, and nonconspiratorial 1933 book, The Crusade Against the Grail. Rahn was certainly searching for the Grail from the early 1930s until his mysterious death in 1939. As Patrick Bernauw suggests, if The Mystic Lamb was a key to it, then perhaps Goedertier and his accomplices were murdered by Nazi secret agents, who then seized the panel? Perhaps Goedertier thought that Hitler would not be interested in hunting down an incomplete masterpiece?
One historical point interferes with these conspiracy theories: If the theft were in any way preventative, why would Goedertier have tried to ransom the stolen painting back to the bishop?
The case is heavy with “perhaps” and “what if ”and short on conclusive evidence. But one explanation, while difficult to believe, fits the clues while providing a feasible motive. While it has not been proven, it seems the most plausible, based on the incomplete information that has survived the cover-ups.
An alternative theory has been proposed, one that includes Arsène Goedertier as the ransomer, though not the thief, and explains the conspiratorial nature of the enduring mystery of the Righteous Judges. Though it does not involve Holy Grails and treasure maps, it is highly controversial, because it implicates the very victim of the Judges theft—the diocese itself. While unproven, it is the only explanation that accounts for all of the extant, confirmed information and provides what has been lacking from other interpretations: a logical motivation for Goedertier’s involvement and a rationale for a case that seems to have been subject to a massive cover-up from the start.
It is possible that Goedertier knew about the theft but had no direct involvement in it, only in the subsequent ransom negotiation. It seems improbable, perhaps impossible, for the pudgy, poor-sighted Goedertier to have been the lone thief, as the police had determined. But he could have been the ransom negotiator. Perhaps his slip in the ransom notes from initially describing himself and the criminals in the plural to using the singular in the final ransom notes was no mistake, but rather an indication that what was once a group effort had fallen to him alone to solve. If he could pull off the ransom demand successfully, then there could be both a cash reward and a pardon for those involved.
What would Goedertier stand to gain from his involvement? Though his company, Plantexel, had gone bankrupt, he died with money in his account. He seems to have been a staunch and steadfast Catholic, far more likely to seek the recovery of church art than to steal it. Could his role have been that of a middle man, brought in after the theft was complete and when other avenues of criminal profit seemed closed, in order to barter with the church—a role that he accepted in order to ensure the return, unharmed, of the Righteous Judges? Some historians believe that this was the case, but it is far from conclusive.
The most probable motive for the theft is also the most complex of those suggested and contains elements drawn from the investigations of various aforementioned “weekend detectives” and the amateur scholar Johan Vissers, who mapped out the theories and personages implicated. It involves an illegal investment group comprising prominent members of the Ghent diocese, including a new cast of characters, all intimately linked to Goedertier, as well as some familiar faces who may have had a more sinister involvement than anyone could have believed. The theory suggests that this group of investors had gathered money from wealthy Catholic families and invested it, along with the majority of the funds of the diocese, in a variety of enterprises that all failed during the financial crisis of 1934. The crisis culminated in the bankruptcy of the Socialist Bank of Labor, which held most of their funds, and prompted them to devise a criminal solution to their losses.
The “investment-group theory” involves the following individuals:
Henri Cooremans was a stockbroker and chair of the cathedral choir, whose father, Gerard Cooremans, had been the minister of the Catholic Party in the 1890s and was chief of the Belgian cabinet until 1918. Henri had founded an investment company called Flanders Land Credit and served in a number of governmental positions.
Investor and secretary of the diocese of Ghent, Arthur de Meester was a priest in the Waasland region of Belgium. He acted as financial advisor to the diocese, selecting the investments into which this group channeled its resources. De Meester died, ostensibly, of problems brought on by alcoholism, on 30 May 1934, barely one month after the Judges theft. The timing raised suspicions that his death was not entirely of natural causes.
Kamiel van Ogneval had been director of a retirement facility in Ghent called Saint Antone, run by the Ghent diocese, from which he stepped down in 1930. He then became cantor of S
aint Bavo. His brother, Gustave van Ogneval, was a local Catholic politician. Also involved in the scheme was Arsène Goedertier, though his role in the group before the Judges theft is unclear.
Finally, it has been suggested that both Bishop Coppieters and The Lamb’s greatest defender, Canon van den Gheyn, were complicit—an unsettling inclusion that would explain many of the cover-ups that have clouded the Judges investigation from the start.
According to the theory, Kamiel van Ogneval supervised the collection of money from wealthy Catholic families throughout the region, many of whom had relatives linked to the Saint Antone retirement home, with the promise that their funds would be invested in Catholic charities. The money was invested by Arthur de Meester, while legal contracts between the investors and the group were drawn up by Henri Cooremans. The exact nature of the investments made by this group is unclear—based on Goedertier’s other projects, the investment group may have used a portfolio of real and fake projects, ranging from for-profit projects like Goedertier’s Plantexel (a failed attempt to establish coffee and oil plantations in the Belgian Congo) to charities that may or may not have existed. It is not clear as to whether there were criminal elements to the investment group’s purported activities (such as selling shares in nonexistent companies) or whether the group’s activities were aboveboard, and they resorted to crime only when they lost their investors’ money and could conceive of no other way to repay it. Bishop Coppieters invested all of the money of the diocese into the legitimate projects pursued by the investment group, and then he would receive a percentage of the profits for himself. Van den Gheyn might have felt compelled to play along, as by this time he was the acting treasurer of Saint Bavo, but it seems that he was not directly involved in the scheme.
In the winter of 1933-1934, Arthur de Meester received a tip about a particularly lucrative investment, but one that would require a lot of money to be raised in a short period of time. The funds were raised, but the timing could not have been worse. On 28 March 1934 the Socialist Bank of Labor, which held the money of this investment group, declared bankruptcy, and they lost everything.
Panicked and frightened at the financial loss, the money owed to the investors, and loss of face for both the Catholic families and the diocese itself, the group devised a plan to recuperate the money through the theft of the altarpiece. The plan offered two possible means of remuneration, and the group fervently argued over which avenue should be pursued. Bishop Coppieters, Canon van den Gheyn, Arthur de Meester, and Arsène Goedertier wanted to keep the Judges panel on the cathedral premises but feign its theft and try to coerce the Belgian government into paying the ransom for its return. Kamiel and Gustave van Ogneval and Henri Cooremans wanted to sell the panel abroad. They thought they could get more money by cutting the panel into pieces, one piece for each painted figure in the Judges scene, and selling them individually. They knew the smuggler Polydor Priem, then living on a houseboat in Ghent, who had a wealth of foreign contacts thanks to some years spent in America. Priem was certain that he could procure an American buyer, even for this most famous of paintings. But ultimately, before the actual theft took place, the group agreed on the safer and more practical plan—ransom.
The cheese thief, Caesar Aercus, had named Polydor Priem as one of the two men he saw outside of Saint Bavo on the night of April 11. But when Aercus was arrested a decade later, the police document failed to note the name of the other man whom Aercus claimed to recognize.
According to the investment-group theory, Kamiel van Ogneval was the second thief who emerged from the cathedral carrying a plank, wrapped in black cloth, under his arm. Most people have assumed that this plank was both the recto and verso, John the Baptist and the Righteous Judges. In actuality, it was just the recto—John the Baptist. The Righteous Judges had always remained on the cathedral premises, hidden.
Many have argued that there must have been at least two men inside the cathedral to steal and carry the unwieldy panels. If there was a third thief that night, it was almost certainly Gustave van Ogneval. The van Ognevals, like Goedertier, were residents of the Ghent suburb of Wetteren. When Kamiel van Ogneval and Polydor Priem drove off that night, they headed straight to Wetteren, where they passed the John the Baptist panel, carefully wrapped, to Arsène Goedertier. His task in this scheme was to act as ransomer. The John the Baptist panel remained hidden in Goedertier’s attic, beneath a false panel at the top of a closet, until it was returned via the Brussels luggage check as part of the ransom negotiations. The plotters may have assumed that the Belgian government would finally have succumbed to the ransom demand, and thereby covered their losses.
The loophole in this interpretation comes down to numbers. The ransom demanded seems too small a sum to necessitate criminal measures to replace the funds—particularly considering the stature of the individuals involved and Goedertier’s own comfortable financial situation at the time. Why not pass the hat around the group of failed investors and replace the church funds privately, rather than go to the elaborate ends of staging a theft and ransom from your own church, thereby igniting the interest and scrutiny of the world media?
There does not seem to be extant proof of this investment-group scheme, a crime that seems to lack a motive. So many details remain unknown that the story is not entirely convincing. Yet a number of private investigators see it as the best explanation of the Judges theft. It involves real figures engaged in the political and social dynamics of the diocese of Ghent. It explains the strange, conspiratorial cover-ups, the refusal of the diocese to cooperate with investigations as one would assume they should, and the link to Arsène Goedertier, a man who otherwise seemed like the least likely candidate to orchestrate a cathedral theft but whose convenient death by heart attack would make him the fall guy for the entire criminal group.
Most difficult to swallow is Canon van den Gheyn’s cooperation in a scheme to dismember the very treasure that he had risked his life to protect during the First World War and that he continued to defend. He may have been coerced into involvement in the Judges scheme, particularly because of the role of Bishop Coppieters. Were he to expose the bishop or not play along, he might have put the good name of the diocese on the line. Van den Gheyn’s dedication to the diocese and to the Catholic Church may have forced at least a silent acceptance.
Though his role in the theft and the motivation behind it remain very much a mystery, it is generally agreed that Goedertier was behind the ransom notes. In addition to the discovery of the carbon copies of the ransom note and the eventual finding of the typewriter on which they were written (about which we must take Georges de Vos’s word), Goedertier’s enthusiasm for the detective novels of Maurice LeBlanc, which feature the famous fictional art thief Arsène Lupin, provides a fruitful line of inquiry.
Goedertier’s wife spoke of his feeling of some personal connection, almost an idolatry, for the Lupin character, who, after all, shared Goedertier’s first name. Of his fictional creation, LeBlanc wrote: “[He does] everything above average, and he deserves to be admired. This man beats everything. From his thefts come a wealth of understanding, strength, power, dexterity, and a nature which I unabashedly admire.” If Goedertier were to model himself on someone whose manner could acquit him of some of the moral guilt of committing a crime, Arsène Lupin was the fellow to choose.
It was the fantasy writer Jean Ray who first noted the link between Arsène Lupin and Arsène Goedertier. Lupin is a gentleman cat burglar whose primary target is paintings. Goedertier’s attempts to ransom the Judges painting recall Lupin’s preferred modus operandi, negotiating a ransom for stolen paintings through newspaper advertisements, which he signs with the initials ALN, an abbreviation for his own name. Goedertier’s various ransom letters reveal a childlike sense of betrayal at his counterpart’s refusal to play by the rules of the game—in novels like LeBlanc’s, the elegant criminal is rewarded for his efforts by the ransom payment. Lupin is a master of disguise, variously concealing his identity
in the guise of a painter, a banker, and a politician—all of which were Goedertier’s professions. In one instance, Lupin concealed an artwork at the scene of the crime itself, all the while negotiating for the ransomed return of the painting that had never been removed from the property of its owner. Could this indicate a solution to the mystery of the Righteous Judges?
In LeBlanc’s 1909 novel L’Aiguille Creuse (The Hollow Needle), Lupin is on the hunt for a hollowed-out stone, roughly in the shape of a needle, which was a secret treasure storehouse for the kings of France. The location is hidden in code, but Lupin deciphers it and finds the stone on the coast of Normandy. The “hollow needle” is used to hide two artworks: a painting of the “Virgin and Agnus Dei” by Raphael and a statue of Saint John the Baptist. The world’s most famous Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, is The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan van Eyck, and the recto of the stolen Judges panel showed the grisaille rendition of John the Baptist. These particularities, in addition to Goedertier’s lifelong love of LeBlanc’s novels, suggest that Goedertier modeled himself, and his crime, on his hero Arsène Lupin and The Hollow Needle.
There would be a series of codas to the Judges theft, like the false endings to Beethoven symphonies, each one leading to further mysteries—but that ultimately point to one logical, however improbable, conclusion.