The original appearance of Portrait of a Lady last week was fleeting. Within hours of the story’s publication in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad last Monday, the real estate listing was taken down.
Police raided the rustic Mar del Plata home of Patricia Kadgien, the Nazi officer’s daughter, but the painting wasn’t there.
Authorities this week conducted further raids on several homes belonging to the Kadgien sisters in Mar del Plata, seizing other paintings and engravings that they also suspect of having been stolen during the 1940s.
Hermann Goering (centre, left), with Adolf Hitler, amassed a huge art collection, mostly looted from Jewish properties.
Argentina’s federal prosecutor’s office said Tuesday they had ordered the detention of Kadgien and her husband pending a hearing on charges of concealment and obstruction of justice.
Adler, the prosecutor, said the couple’s lawyer had handed over the painting to authorities earlier on Wednesday. He gave no indication of where the painting would go next.
An art expert invited to assist with the investigation, Ariel Bassano, said the painting was being “stored in a special chamber to prevent contact with external agents and, later, with either artificial or natural light, which could eventually damage it”.
“It’s in good condition given its age,” Bassano said, dating the portrait to 1710 and valuing it at roughly $76,000.
Legacy of the ratlines
It’s not clear exactly how the painting came into the possession of Kadgien, who worked as a financial adviser to Hermann Goering, who died by suicide the night before he was due to be executed after being convicted of war crimes at the 1946 Nuremberg trials.
However, thousands of other former Nazis are known to have fled to South America at the end of the war via covert escape routes known in German as rattenlinien, or “ratlines”.
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According to The New York Times, declassified US intelligence from 1945 revealed that Argentina, under president Juan Peron, issued some 60,000-90,000 visas to fugitive Nazis, including high-profile figures such as Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele.
The Peron government was so complicit in its dealings that Washington at one point considered blocking Argentina’s United Nations membership, the Times reported.
Argentina this year published documents online suggesting that the Nazis may have bribed Peron’s government with some $US200 million ($306.1 million) in gold in return for refuge, some of which was allegedly delivered by U-boat.
