Stealing the Mystic Lamb (31 page)

In Belgium, the mystery excites a passion reminiscent of the Kennedy assassination in the United States. It has inspired more than a dozen books, fiction and nonfiction, as well as documentaries, docudramas, and countless articles—none of which have been translated into English. The story is still fresh and the investigation, at least from an amateur perspective, still active.

Speculation abounds—the rocks in the background of van der Veken’s copy of the Judges look just like those at Marches-les-Dames, where the Belgian king Albert mysteriously fell and died. Coincidence? To this day, every few months a new clue as to the location of the missing Righteous Judges is announced in Ghent newspapers. In the summer of 2008 the floorboards of a Ghent home were taken apart by the local police after a tip had suggested that the Judges panel was buried beside a skeleton between the floorboards. Authorities continue to investigate astonishing and unbelievable leads, as the search for the missing panel continues.

One final significant clue would present itself decades later. Though it did not solve the mystery of what happened, it may solve the mystery of where the panel is hidden today. But
The Ghent Altarpiece
, minus the Righteous Judges, would undergo one more hurricane of theft, smuggling, and ultimate salvation.

The Second World War was on the horizon, and Nazi wolves had their sights set on the Lamb of God.

T
he search for Nazi stolen art has been called the greatest treasure hunt in history. The supreme prize among the kidnapped treasures was
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
. And the fate of
The Lamb
during the Second World War, along with that of most of Europe’s artistic masterpieces, was sealed by the heroism of an Austrian double agent, a group of salt miners, and a fortuitous toothache.

In May 1940 the German army invaded Holland and Belgium. Because many of Belgium’s art treasures had been looted during the First World War, in the face of the advancing storm troopers the Belgian government sought a safe house to which its prized artworks could be sent.
The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
was Belgium’s national treasure; as long as it was safe from harm and foreign capture, Belgium was in control.

The government first considered the Vatican as a hiding place. A truck carrying the altarpiece in ten large wooden crates was en route to Italy when Italy joined the Axis and declared war. France then offered to guard
The Lamb
, and the truck veered west towards Chateau de Pau at the foot of the Pyrenees, birthplace of Henry IV. It was somehow poetic that the birthplace of the French king, whose conversions from Protestantism and Catholicism resulted in so much death and destruction, should protect a Catholic treasure that had nearly been burned by Protestant rioters during the uprising in 1566. Chateau de Pau already housed many of the works from French national museums, including the Louvre.
The Lamb
was added to its treasure trove. The default guardian of the chateau treasures,
and the guardian of all of France’s art during the war, was Jacques Jaujard, director of the French National Museums and the Louvre itself.

Born in Asnières, France, Jaujard was a courageous man in a hopeless position—in charge of the safety of the French national art collections during the Nazi occupation from 1940 through 1944. With each defeat of the French army before the Nazi onslaught, Jaujard ordered the crated art treasures shipped ever further south, away from the front line, to locations that seemed inevitably safe from harm’s way. Surely the Nazis would be stopped before they reached Lyon or Pau. But the tide pressed on with alarming speed. After Paris, Jaujard relocated to Chambord, the castle in the Loire Valley south of Paris that featured a torque double-helix staircase, with two monumental stairs wrapped around each other, yet never meeting, designed by Leonardo da Vinci. He was directing the shipment of art from Chambord to points further south, most to a series of museums and castles in Provence and along the Pyrenees, when the Germans surprised him. They informed him that he was the first important French official whom they had encountered thus far on duty, rather than fleeing or in hiding. He also then learned that Hitler had ordered that all artworks and historical documents in France be seized as collateral in peace negotiations with France—they would become German property in exchange for a cease-fire. There was little that Jaujard could do, other than move artworks further south and pray. While he was unable, in an official capacity, to guarantee that French artworks would remain in France, he had a strategy. He prepared an underground intelligence network that would keep track of which artworks were confiscated and where they were headed. That network consisted, primarily, of an unassuming librarian by the name of Rose Valland, a clerk at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, which became the depot for Nazi-looted art in France.

By June the Germans had conquered all of Holland and Belgium. The Belgians were particularly concerned that Hitler would seek out
The Lamb
by way of revenge for its restitution through the Treaty of Versailles. The fact that Germany had been forced to return the wing panels at the end of the First World War had outraged the German populace.
Now, the seizure of
The Ghent Altarpiece
by Hitler would symbolically erase the perceived wrongs done to Germany at Versailles.

In May 1940, very soon after eleven out of twelve original panels of
The Lamb
were shipped to Pau for safekeeping, a Nazi officer arrived in Ghent: Oberleutnant Heinrich Köhn of the Nazi Art Protection Department. He had been commissioned specifically to investigate the unsolved 1934 theft of the Righteous Judges—and to hunt down this last missing panel.

Köhn, a fanatical Nazi and Hitler look-alike, sporting a smudge moustache, had been assigned this task by Josef Goebbels. Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda with a doctorate in Romantic drama, rose to power alongside Hitler, making a name for himself early on by spearheading the burnings of books that were considered degenerate by the Nazi government. The mastermind behind the attacks on German Jews, including the infamous Kristallnacht of 1938, he also established a propaganda technique referred to as “The Big Lie,” based on the principle that a lie, if audacious enough and if stated with sufficient conviction and repetition, will be accepted as truth by the masses. Heinrich Köhn was Goebbels’s bloodhound, hunting for a unique gift for the führer. Goebbels had timed this assignment with the aim of presenting the Judges panel to Hitler in 1943, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of his assumption of power.

The people of Ghent had reason to be nervous, even with eleven-twelfths of the altarpiece in storage abroad. Why would a Nazi art detective be sent to find the one missing panel, if the Nazis did not intend to seize the other eleven?

Köhn was a meticulous investigator, but he did not read Flemish. He enlisted the aid of Nazi sympathizer Max Winders, an Antwerp architect and advisor to the Belgian Ministry of Education’s Art Board, who accompanied him to Ghent. They arrived in September 1940. The first person with whom they spoke was the canon of Saint Bavo Cathedral. Gabriel van den Gheyn had seen
The Lamb
safely through the First World War and would do his best during the Second. The three men
went through every page of the archives on the history of
The Lamb
and Saint Bavo Cathedral, scouring the Ministry of Justice, the cathedral, and the Ghent city archives. But they encountered a surprising hurdle at each archive: Most of the pages on the Judges theft were missing.

At the time of the 1934 theft there had been talk of cover-up and conspiracy, including the suggestion that sometime hero van den Gheyn had been complicit. Though clues suggested that the panel had been hidden somewhere prominent, perhaps even on the façade of the cathedral, the case was closed, and the files stored in various archives. Now that Köhn was reopening the investigation, portions of the files from all the relevant archives were found missing. Someone had stolen them between the theft and the Second World War. If the investment-group theory was true, then it made sense that the archives had been doctored.

Köhn interviewed everyone who had any involvement in the Righteous Judges investigation, which by this time was six years old. Either the trail had grown stale, or there was a collective agreement on silence. That van den Gheyn accompanied Köhn on his investigations smacked to some of complicity; others thought that the best way for the canon to steer the Nazi detective clear of the truth was to work with him every step of the way. While Köhn’s search for the Judges was fruitless, it indicated to the people of Ghent that the Nazis had serious designs on their treasure.

Although it was as yet unknown outside of Nazi circles, there was good reason to fear a widespread Nazi harvest of Europe’s art treasures. Hitler had a plan to assemble every important artwork in the world and create a
kulturhaupstadt
, a citywide supermuseum, to be located in his boyhood hometown of Linz, Austria. To this end, Hitler instructed his officers to seize and send him works of art they came across during their conquests.

Various explanations have been offered for the passionate enthusiasm Hitler had for this project. Hitler was a failed art student. His work considered too poor, Hitler was rejected from studies as a painter and an architect
in Vienna. Here was an opportunity to show the lords of the art world not only that they had erred in rejecting him, but that he could deprive them of their greatest treasures. Hitler’s inferiority complex, about which much has been written, may also have contributed to his choice of Linz, a working-class town without much in the way of culture, as his new world art capital. By elevating his boyhood hometown, Hitler could elevate his own modest origins. Hitler’s Linz would be ever after known as the culture capital of the world, his
kulturhaupstadt
. Hitler’s dislike for Vienna, a city he had once idealized before he was rejected from studies there and forced to live in low-income communal housing, may also have contributed to his choice of Linz. He would strip the old Austro-Hungarian culture capital and elevate its poor neighbor.

The entire city of Linz was to be converted into one expansive museum that would house all of the world’s art. Every art historian would come there to study. Even the art that Hitler considered “degenerate,” primarily nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and abstract works, would be placed in a special museum to be viewed by future generations as evidence of the grotesqueries from which the Nazis had saved humankind. The city, naturally, would have to be completely transformed, old buildings uprooted in favor of new state-of-the-art museum facilities. There was a joke that while Munich was the city of Nazi
Bewegung
(the Nazi movement), Linz would become the city of the Nazi
Bodenbewegung
(the Nazi earthquake).

Unsurprisingly, Hitler’s artistic agenda followed his social one. He was passionately in love with art by northern European artists or of northern European subject matter. He sought works by Teutonic/Scandinavian artists or Teutonic/Scandinavian subjects—art that, to him, demonstrated Aryan greatness—by the likes of Breughel, Cranach, Dürer, Friedrich, Vermeer, Holbein, Rembrandt, Bouts, Grünewald, and Jan van Eyck.

Hitler already had experience with censorship. Early in his tenure as führer, he had ordered the closing of the modern wing of the former crown prince’s National Gallery in Berlin, the same museum that had displayed
six panels from
The Ghent Altarpiece
until the Treaty of Versailles. He referred to this wing, with its masterpieces by the likes of Kandinsky, Schiele, Malevich, and Nolde, as the “Chamber of Horrors.” It was closed officially by the Ministry of Education on 30 October 1936, just months after the departure of foreign visitors who had been in Berlin for the Olympic Games. The timing of the closure indicates a Nazi awareness that their views on art would not be well received by the world at large.