Word: hofer
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There are five Rembrandts, the most valuable being a famed portrait of an old man painted in 1660, when Rembrandt took to using a knife blade and brush end instead of the straight brush technique. "I had to buy it in a hurry," Hofer said with a smile, "because Hitler's buyer was also there [in Paris], and he could have outbid...
This seemed to smack of artistic rivalry between Hitler and Göring, and Hofer confirmed the suspicion. But it seems that Göring and Hitler eventually agreed that, since Hitler preferred 19th-Century art, he should have priority on that and Göring could have the rest.* Hitler's collections, according to Hofer, are now hidden in caves somewhere in Germany, and have not been found...
...name of the German state"-as, for example, the Rothschild collection in Paris -Goring preferred more formal methods, with at least a fiction of legality. Göring did get some fine things from the Rothschild collection, such as a portrait of the Infanta Margarita Teresa by Velasquez, but Hofer insisted that everything taken from the Rothschild collection (which he said was "collected") was later appraised by French experts and a price paid to the French state-which, of course, was considerably in debt to Germany...
...ring bought things, it was not always to the satisfaction of the seller. One of his best pictures is an early Van Dyck. It was bought through Daniel Katz, an Amsterdam art dealer, and the receipt shows that Göring paid 200,000 marks ($80,000) for it. Hofer estimated the value of the picture at $150,000. There is also a rather acrid exchange of letters in the Göring files between Hofer and a Swiss lawyer, the gist of which is that the Reich Marshal was expected to pay more than he did for a certain...
...ring had other people besides Hofer working to get pictures for him, although Hofer was always the man who closed the deal. There is considerable mention of "Task Force Rosenberg," which as near as I could figure out went around France, Holland and Belgium, confiscating art collections. There is also frequent correspondence with a ist Lieut. Dillenberg. who seems also to have kept an eye out for choice objects, perhaps as a member of the "Art Historical Detachment" of the Luftwaffe, which is mentioned several times...