Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  I looked again at Otto’s letter to Priscilla. 4-3-1947 – the date teasingly ambiguous, as so much in her story. It was an extremely perky letter for someone to be writing from prison. What could be his motives for pretending that he was in St Moritz and that everything was fine? The practice on the Continent of placing the month before the day meant that Otto could have written to Priscilla either on 4 March, three weeks before his death, or on 3 April, one week after it. Were they one and the same person? If so, what was Otto doing still alive on 3 April? If they were not the same person, then who was Priscilla’s Otto?

  Printed at the top of his letter to Priscilla was a name: Otto H. Graebener.

  It appeared in no history of the Occupation. Nor was there a record of any Otto Graebener in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. At first, I wondered if the name was a pseudonym like ‘Simone Vernier’: another cloak for Hermann ‘Otto’ Brandl and his extensive assets to hide under. Then in the National Archives in Kew I found a trace.

  The confidential report was dated 4 December 1944 and written by R. C. Fenton from the British Ministry for Economic Warfare. I was permitted to read it in a locked room.

  Fenton’s report on ‘Looted Art in Occupied Territories, Neutral Countries and Latin America’ concerned a wanted German banker, Alois Miedl, who in August 1944 was stopped by Free French officers on the Franco-Spanish border. ‘He, and a companion named Otto GRAEBENER, alleged to be a Gestapo agent, were arrested by the Maquis, but Miedl escaped the next day.’

  It was exciting to know that Graebener might not be a pseudonym, but there was no further reference to him other than the phrase: ‘Implicated in the Miedl case’. If I wanted to pin down Priscilla’s German protector, I had to find out about ‘the Miedl case’ – whatever that was.

  Otto Graebener’s identity unravelled from a single loose strand, as had Max Stocklin’s. His solitary mention in a file in Kew, his fate left dangling, led me to another confidential report in the National Archives in Washington, and to a filing card in the same Paris police archives where I had found Priscilla’s dossier. Document by document, his cover peeled back.

  28.

  THE MISSING BOX

  Three weeks after D-Day, on 28 June 1944, Alois Miedl, a man ‘as bulky and as powerful as an ox’, fled Amsterdam in a high-powered American Mercury, and drove to Paris. The German Military Command interrupted everything to facilitate his onward journey.

  In Paris, Miedl took possession of up to a dozen new pinewood crates which had been shipped out of Holland via Le Havre. Marked ‘FRAGIL’ in brown paint, the crates and their immeasurably valuable contents had been entrusted to him by Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Göring. Miedl loaded them on to his convoy and continued south to Spain, having obtained three-month entrance visas for his family.

  Few people might have heard of Miedl again after he passed unnoticed into Spain. But on 20 August, Miedl recrossed the border and was chauffeured with some haste to a villa a mile away in the French town of Hendaye.

  Travelling with Miedl in the back of his green Mercury was a reddish-haired man with different-coloured eyes and dressed in an elegant double-breasted grey worsted suit and spats. This was Priscilla’s lover, Otto Graebener, who had earlier accompanied Miedl from Paris and organised his passage into Spain on 5 July. Their intention was to bring back a second Mercury from Hendaye and, according to Miedl, ‘a box’ that he had left behind as security.

  The box must have been important to warrant the journey to the villa of Jean Duval, a Corsican specialist in shifting paintings, jewellery and cars across the Spanish border. Paris – where days before, Graebener had said an emotional goodbye to Priscilla – was in the throes of self-liberation; and in the south, forces of the Free French, which had landed on 15 August as part of Operation Dragoon, following the BBC message ‘Nancy has a stiff neck’, scrambled to regain control of the country. Miedl and Graebener were delayed ‘for various reasons’ and did not return until the next day, by which time German troops had withdrawn from Hendaye. ‘When they reached the frontier they found it occupied by the French FFI who arrested them.’

  The convoluted report received by Allied Intelligence three weeks later reveals that the Free French unit expressed notably less curiosity in Miedl and his box than in Priscilla’s lover: they did not believe who he claimed to be – a businessman living in San Sebastian. ‘Graebener, in whom the French were apparently very much interested, was immediately isolated from the other prisoners.’

  Miedl was then interrogated. ‘He was asked questions about himself and more particularly about Graebener whose real identity the French were particularly keen to learn. Miedl replied that he had always known him by that name and that furthermore he believed it to be authentic because he knew many people in Spain who did business with Graebener and who knew him by that name.’

  At 3 a.m., Miedl was taken out of the common cell where he had been locked. His handcuffs were removed, his car and his box returned to him without explanation, and he was escorted over the international bridge by a French officer who asked – again – what he thought of Graebener. ‘Miedl answered that he would “. . . put both his hands into the fire for him” to which the Frenchman replied that he would not expose so much as his little finger.’

  Otto Graebener was taken to Paris to be interrogated. He did not resurface for another two years, typing to Priscilla from Switzerland: ‘Since I came home from France in June 1946 what they did with me I will tell you when we meet again.’

  The Free French were convinced that in Graebener they had captured a figure of the utmost importance. But who? The likeliest interpretation is that they had mistaken this suave-talking round-faced sophisticate for none other than Hermann ‘Otto’ Brandl, who had attempted to cross the border two weeks before. Gillian Sutro may not have been alone in confusing their identities, and it is easy to see why: the hands of both men were plunged in the same contraband pies. Otto Graebener knew Brandl and other senior figures in Bureau Otto – which ran a section specialising in the traffic of looted art. Graebener also knew Max Stocklin and Daniel Vernier and Priscilla’s imprisoned lover, Emile Cornet: ‘Poor boy had also to suffer. You don’t know that I helped him sending him parcels to Fresnes.’

  But who could tell me about Graebener?

  Tell me who you are with and I will tell you who you are. The circumstances of their arrest indicated that Otto Graebener and his bulky German friend were thicker than average thieves. Graebener was Alois Miedl’s ‘supposed associate’ in the assessment of Allied Intelligence, and featured in the following months on a list of German nationals ‘believed to have been involved in the looting of European art treasures’. But then Graebener’s trail goes cold.

  To pick it up, I had to turn to the passenger weighing down the springs beside him in the back of that green Mercury.

  The big rat that got away at Hendaye was the German banker from Amsterdam, Alois Miedl.

  Ten months later, unable to arrest Miedl in neutral Spain, an American Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Theodore Rousseau, spent time talking to him in his Madrid hotel room. He described Miedl as: ‘A typical south German, 5’9”, brown hair, brown eyes, ruddy complexion; young-looking for age, rather fat, but strong; used to do great deal of mountain-climbing; when talking looks straight in the eye and gives frank open expression.’

  Otto Graebener’s interrogation in Paris has not come to light. But his character is there to read between the lines, in the interviews that Rousseau conducted over a brandy with Graebener’s friend Miedl during the same period. To understand Graebener’s 17-stone Bavarian associate is to understand Graebener, but also the sort of people Priscilla mingled with in Occupied Paris; men and women whose activities brought them – and Priscilla – into close contact with Nazi leaders. Miedl positioned Priscilla and her German lover just one step away from the figure whom Himmler called ‘the king of the black markets’: Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command.

  The sociable Miedl was
born in Munich in 1903 and shared a birthday, 3 March, with Priscilla’s husband. Although a strong Catholic like Robert, Miedl had a Jewish wife, who waited anxiously to receive him on the far side of the bridge at Irun. It was a tribute to Miedl’s friends in high places that he had been permitted to scale the peak he had in the Reich while married to Dorie Fleischer.

  Not for another three weeks did British Intelligence learn of Miedl’s ‘evasion’ at Hendaye, and they were apoplectic. Agents had been tracking Miedl since April 1940, when the British Consul General in Amsterdam reported that ‘A.M. should be watched very closely and with great suspicion.’ Miedl was not just any German banker: he was Göring’s financier. Not only that, he was the most active of Göring’s art agents, and regarded at the end of the war as one of only five confidants who had knowledge of both the inventory and location of the Reichsmarschall’s treasure.

  In the view of Allied Intelligence, Miedl was the person instrumental in helping to amass the Hermann Göring Collection, including the Reichsmarschall’s favourite of all his paintings, Vermeer’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. Miedl was also involved in building up the collection of Nazi-approved art in Hitler’s vast museum complex in Linz. The value of this stolen European treasure is unknown, but in August 1946 the Director of the Metropolitan Museum calculated that it was worth ‘more than the value of all the works of art in the United States’.

  Otto Graebener’s thwarted journey to retrieve Miedl’s box from Jean Duval’s villa on Boulevard de la Mer took on immense significance for one reason: it alerted the Allies to Göring’s booty. The Miedl Case became the first report issued by the Art Looting Investigation Unit in February 1945. A direct consequence of Graebener’s arrest, this was the keystone of an investigation that raised the rock on how Göring and Hitler had put together their art collections, and afterwards tried to dispose of them – with input from Miedl, plus Priscilla’s ‘chums’ Max Stocklin and Otto Graebener. The paintings on the wall above the fireplace in Otto’s photograph to Priscilla were not any old paintings.

  When on 14 September 1944, a branch of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) received a report of Miedl’s brief detention at Hendaye with Graebener, the combined forces of British, American, Dutch and French Intelligence were unleashed.

  Miedl had walked over the bridge at Irun, and back into his wife’s arms, on 22 August 1944, a free man. His last sighting was on the balcony of the Pension Ursula. Then, on 28 September, an undercover customs officer came across three packing cases in the port of Irun. The cases, ‘made of pinewood very new and clean’, contained twenty-two paintings shipped from Holland in June. Packed in sawdust, the paintings were wrapped in coarse brown paper with ‘Miedl’ written on the outside in blue pencil together with the names of Van Dyck, Corot, David, El Greco and Thomas Lawrence. Two of the pictures were protected in grey blankets with black stripes. Every single one was stolen.

  Sequestered, Miedl’s dubious consignment sparked a gunpowder trail that led back across Europe to a seventeenth-century mansion in central Amsterdam, and a smuggling network with long-established branches in Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina.

  The hands that Miedl was prepared to put in the fire for Priscilla’s German lover could not have been more compromised. They had been clasped to Hitler’s deputy since the 1920s. Miedl’s Swiss lawyer ‘somewhat naïvely’ disclosed the fact that Miedl and Göring used ‘Du’ and not ‘Sie’. Miedl admitted to his American interviewer ‘that Göring was his chief client and that he both admires and likes him . . . and every year gave him a birthday present’.

  Miedl and Göring were closer than mere business partners: they were ‘great friends’. Their relationship went back to the days when Miedl was a Munich banker ‘helping to finance the Party’. In 1932, Miedl moved to Amsterdam. Impressed by the role that Miedl had played in a campaign for ‘the return of German colonies’, Göring provided funds for Miedl to buy his own Amsterdam-based bank. He entrusted Miedl with money ‘to be deposited abroad’ and financed several Miedl ventures, including a geological survey to Canada with the aim of purchasing a section of the Labrador coast; the authorities in Montreal blocked the sale because they ‘suspected its real purpose as being the establishment of a German outpost’. Elsewhere, Miedl and his silent partner Göring bought up sisal plantations in East Africa, palm-oil factories in Cameroon, cement works in India, and the German Asiatic Bank in China. Miedl’s network of shipping agents laid the base for a formidable contraband operation.

  Miedl was even more intimate with Göring’s widowed sister Olga, whose visits to Miedl’s homes in Munich and Amsterdam were the subject of hot speculation. But when Göring suggested that Miedl divorce his Jewish wife, saying she was a liability, and wed Olga, Miedl refused. He remained steadfastly married to the neurotic Dorie Fleischer. His loyalty made him vulnerable to Göring and beholden to him in the area that Göring was most rapacious to exploit: the art world. In return for protecting Dorie, Göring ‘the art lover’ expected Miedl to satisfy his aesthetic cravings and assist him in putting together the collection on his estate near Berlin that he was dedicating to the memory of his late wife, Karin.

  With Göring’s shadow behind him, Miedl was unassailable. The SS knew that ‘he could always get to Göring personally as a last resort. Which always protected him.’ Göring in return called on Miedl to talk ‘as a businessman’ to Jewish collectors reluctant to sell. Göring allowed Miedl to augment his own art collection, provided that Miedl offered him the best pieces first.

  Like Max Stocklin, Miedl had no scruples about selling both to Göring and to Hitler. His main conduit to Hitler was Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann – ‘an honest and good man’, in Miedl’s opinion. But Miedl’s willingness to feed simultaneously Nazi Germany’s two rival buyers caused resentment in Göring’s circle, and with the director of Göring’s private museum at Karinhall, Walter Andreas Hofer. Matters came to a head over the sale of what was to become the undisputed jewel of Göring’s collection, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, a painting signed on the upper left side by Vermeer.

  The story is well-known. Miedl told a self-serving version to Theodore Rousseau in Madrid. ‘One night,’ wrote Rousseau, ‘a man who he knew was in the Resistance came to him and said “Mr Miedl, I know you buy paintings for the Reichsmarschall and I have a picture for you. But I will sell it to you only on one condition. And that is that you don’t inquire where it came from. Because it belongs to an old Dutch family who want to give the money to the Resistance.”’ The anonymous elderly widow wished to sell for the astronomical sum of two million Dutch florins. Miedl had Hoffmann staying at the time. ‘Miedl took the painting up to Hoffmann, who said, “Why it’s a Vermeer! I want it for the Führer.”’

  Rousseau warned that Miedl would ‘never tell a complete story unless under proper control’. What Miedl omitted to say was that he had all but agreed to let Hoffmann offer the painting to Hitler when Hofer stepped in, with a cold reminder to Miedl of his obligation to allow Göring first refusal. Miedl could not afford to antagonise Göring and in September 1943 he brought the Vermeer, nailed in the bottom of a case, to Berlin. Göring inspected it in the vault of the I. E. Meyer Bank and scooped it back to Karinhall, at last offering 1.65 million Dutch guilders – then the highest price paid for a single object of art.

  The bogus heart of the Nazi regime was nowhere better on display than in this Vermeer – the showpiece in the grand gallery at Karinhall. An Allied officer who inspected the painting after its capture, Lieutenant Craig Smith, was among the first to express doubts. ‘One morning as we unloaded a truck from Berchstesgaden in the bright sun, we came to Göring’s Vermeer. It looked untrustworthy to all who were unsupervising the loading.’ This was hardly surprising in view of the fact that the artist had used a cobalt pigment not invented till the nineteenth century and, for the craquelure, a substance like Bakelite. Inter
viewed in his Madrid hotel room about the Vermeer’s provenance, Alois Miedl said that he had bought it off a Dutchman, and gave his name. Three weeks later, a morphine-addicted forger called Van Meegeren was arrested in Amsterdam, confessing all. Asked where he had got the Vermeer from, he said: ‘I did it; I painted it.’

  But what of the authentic masterpieces? Göring boasted that his collection was ‘the most valuable art collection in the world’. When the tally was made, hundreds of Old Masters were still missing. A report in 2000 computed at $30 billion the value of unaccounted stolen art. Where did it all go? The answer was contained in the Allied Intelligence report that I had read in Kew. ‘There is a great body of evidence to show that men like Göring and Ribbentrop have taken steps to transfer some of the most important items in their collection to neutral countries. Switzerland and Spain in particular, though the Argentine has been mentioned.’

  The Nazis took care to not to leave behind any traces. The only tangible evidence of art-smuggling from Holland was Miedl’s personal consignment of twenty-two paintings held by the Spanish authorities. But SIS sources in Madrid discovered that this accounted for only a small fraction of the original cargo; furthermore, Miedl had already transported the bulk of it into Spain on 5 July. Packed in the dozen pine crates marked in big brown letters ‘FRAGIL’ had been 200 canvases that belonged to Göring, plus 4.2 million pesetas in bonds. ‘It was suggested that Miedl was acting under orders from Göring to sell the paintings and keep the proceeds for him.’ This was why Miedl and his luggage had been fast-tracked through Paris.

  On 26 October 1944, two months after he was arrested with Graebener at the Spanish border and released without charge, Miedl reappeared in Madrid, staying at the Ritz. Snippets of information reached London. He had seen a representative of the Prado who might be interested in buying a Goya for two million pesetas. He planned to auction the remaining 199 canvases, which were, by his account, extraordinary – works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Cranach, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Titian and El Greco. ‘Miedl had distributed a catalogue of them. He had boasted of his connection with Göring and of the commission he would receive upon the sale of the paintings; German circles in Madrid believed his boasting to be justified.’