#168: Holocaust Shadows II - The Forgeries

So he takes a train illegally from Holland to Paris and once there he walks into the lion's den and he knows that he's caught there's no way to talk his way out of this. He waited till noon before entering because he assumed that fewer people would be around and people may be more focused on lunch than on their jobs and equally therefore if someone called the construction company or the director of this company in Germany to verify his letter maybe the director would be at lunch. I mean he knew there were a thousand things that could go wrong and all he could try and do was minimize the risk. Welcome to History for the Curious. I'm Manor Eisner and I host the International Renowned Lecturer, Dynamic Historian and Tour Guide, Rabbi Aubrey Hirsch, experience our history confront dilemmas and reveal the untold stories of 3000 years of Jewish heritage from Paris to Cairo, from the Russians art, my monodies and from the Sinai Revelation to the French Revolution. Join the fastest growing Jewish history podcast in the world by subscribing to this channel and discovering the events that have shaped us into who we are today. Next, this is episode two in our new Holocaust series, Holocaust Shadows and this is actually an interesting recording schedule for us because we recorded our last one a couple of days ago and this is on a Friday and the reason is although this is going to be released on Wednesday next week we are both traveling to Provence. Indeed, south of France, yes, Gertrude. Very much looking forward to. It's going to be with Rabbi Tets and a group of people and we'll know that next week about it on our return. Now this week we are focusing on Amsterdam. Correct, yes, the main story will be that of a famous forger who never put himself in danger at all during the war but first we will talk about somebody who did and both of them are non-Jews. Although we start with an unusual fact which makes today's recording very appropriate because exactly a hundred years ago to the day, 18th July 1925, Hitler Yamashima produced his book "Mine Camp" and centrally later it tells us that words written by extremists can have very real consequences. I mean until today mine camp is very much read amongst the NCC mites all over the world, even recent years October 7th and the war that followed, soldiers found mine camp translated into Arabic very appropriately. I've never read it myself but are the sentiment I'm assuming you have? Are the sentiments relevant till today or was it. Well it's not the type of book that you can't put down, it's not a sort of a good read, it's renting and yeah I mean it talks about the Jews as the enemy of the world. I cannot say that I have read the whole thing, I have read parts, you can find it online but it's not riveting but it's very polemical and very anti-semitic. The sort of anti-semitism we've seen in the news today is more polished maybe, slightly more politically correct, focusing on sinism, but the sentiments were the seed was laid back then. Yeah although some of the social media has got none of the diplomacy and in fact you could say it's worse and it's accompanied by images which this book isn't. The London was invaded by Germany on May 10th 1940 and after the bombing of Rotterdam on Goureng's orders the Dutch surrendered a few days later May 14th, the government and royal family fled to exile in Britain and the Germans took over. And really in their eyes Holland was basically a piece of fruit to grab and they rounded up a half a million Dutch factory workers and sent them to work in German factories, munition factories back in the third Reich. They confiscated food, clothes and sent it home and in fact when Hitler attacked Russia Germany stole 100,000 bikes from their Dutch owners in order to reuse the metal. But the Dutch bureaucracy stayed in place under Holland's new masters and continued its job. Apparently no one had thought it might be better to destroy Holland's official records which included personal and professional information on every Dutch citizen. They didn't think that that was prudent and they let them fall into enemy hands and the Nazis pounced on this gift and in fact in a radio broadcast from London in 1943 the Dutch government in exile issued a condemnation of its own civil servants. Now when the Nazis took over there was a Dutch bureaucrat who became a Nazi collaborator called Jonah Lentz and he created an ID card that every citizen over the age of 15 had to carry at all times and failing to produce the card meant rest on the spot. And this was not just a typed form, it had two photos, two sets of fingerprints, signatures and the signature and initials of the registry official and a stamp. And by the end of 1941 basically the Germans could immediately check the identity of anybody that they came across. Presumably all Jews had to have a J on theirs. Yes, absolutely. In fact the Jews were targeted, pieced by peace. In January 1941 they all had to register with the authorities. In April the Jews of Amsterdam couldn't move elsewhere in the country so they couldn't run the hide. In September they are banned from parks, restaurants, hotels, swimming pools, libraries and museums and then in May 1942 they are forced to wear a yellow star which had to be sewn onto their clothing. They had to turn in their jewelry, their aunt in June, they had to hand in their bikes and in July they are now put on the curfew. They have to stay at home between eight in the evening and six in the morning which made it easy obviously to arrest them. They were not allowed, they were forbidden to visit non Jews, to travel in public transport to use public phones and unsurprisingly it was then. It was on July 10th 1942 that Anne Frank and her relatives and friends went into hiding and she writes, this is a few months later, in November, countless friends and acquaintances have been taken off to a dreadful fate, night after night, green and grey military vehicles cruise the streets, they knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there, if so the whole family is taken away, they frequently offer a bounty so much per head. And by the end of September 43 the Nazis had more or less achieved their goal with the round up and deportation of even Jews in hospitals and old age home, Holland was basically a Yudonrain, in fact out of the 140,000 Jews in Holland, 102,000 were murdered which is the highest in any way in Western Europe, it's almost 75%. Why was that the case? Because there was a lot of cooperation, a lot of cooperation from the administration, from the police and it made life much more difficult for the Jews there. And from the Dutch civilians? The Dutch civilians were happy to hand out sort of information to the police in exchange for goods that they would be allowed to pilfer from empty Jewish properties and it was really only the resistance movement that helped Jews, they are famous stories of that, but they are few because many Jews were deported before anything was put together. So I'm going to tell a story about a particular forger, although the main role that he brought to his narrative was the fact that he had nerves of steel and I guess incredible inventiveness. His name was Yupp Penrat, he was born in Amsterdam and in fact as a child he had Jewish neighbors, he was their Shabbos Goy, he would you know turn on their lights on Shabbos. And at the age of 22 the Nazis occupied his country, he was a gifted interior designer, he was an architect, he was a sculptor and he lost his job which was designing ship interiors because he refused to join the Nazi architect organization. And when he saw what was happening to Jews including friends, he started his resistance by forging identity documents and for a number of months he ran this operation only to then be discovered and arrested on August 20th 1942 by the so-called Bureau of Jewish Affairs who were tasked with tracking down and arresting not only Jews but anybody helping them. Although as I just mentioned they weren't the only ones doing the tracking down because in fact after the Allied liberation of Holland in 1945 there was an investigation into the Bureau's activities and it basically revealed that the entire Amsterdam police force marched in in unison with the German occupiers. And what generally happened to these non-Jourish collaborators? So they would be taken to jail and from there, often to Mounthausen, of all the concentration camps. This is the one that was used pretty much publicly as a threat. I've got documents written in Dutch about Mounthausen, which were issued as a warning to people and that's normally where they ended up. So he is taken to jail in Amsterdam initially. He's in a small prison cell with three other people. The only light there came from a hole in the door and every morning a guard gave them a full slice of bread and they got a bowl of sort of watery soup at night. There was a bucket in the corner which was the toilet and they slipped on the floor. And he is actually tortured there, but he refused to reveal the names of those that he'd helped. And I guess for reasons that were never made clear, I mean he never wrote about this. He was released after eight weeks of solitary confinement and he was spared. Can only assume that the police thought his time in prison would have dissuaded him from returning to his activities. Yeah, maybe. I mean, he hadn't been involved for that long, so yeah, could be. But rather than deter him, it made him in fact all the more determined. He realized he would need a new way of getting Jews away from the Nazis with the new ID cards that the Dutch now had to carry and he had a very original, a very brilliant idea which he discussed with a Jewish friend and as he put it, if I can get my hands on documents from a German construction company, I'll copy their letterhead and print it on blank paper so it looks official and then I'll write a letter on it saying that the company has hired us to bring workers to their job site and we take this letter and apply for an official travel permit to bring workers from Amsterdam to France to which the friend said, well, where's the job site? And he answered the Atlantic Wall. The Germans are building a huge wall along the coast of Europe all the way from Norway down to Spain. They have over 500,000 people working on the wall right now. They want to turn Europe into a gigantic fortress and there's no way they can keep track of who's doing what and who is where. So the idea was to get permission to take 20 workers with travel passes and he assumed that once he was in southern France, he could somehow get the Jews smuggled over the border into Spain. And he found a non-Jewish friend who got this notepaper for him and he creates this fake letter. Who is he going to get the sign off from? Yes, so that's the big catch because the only place in Western Europe to get the travel passes and the license was in Paris. The Proustfeller was on the Chasilisee. It was the central clearing office for all permits for all licenses under the Third Reich and he would have to go there and the one advantage was that no one would recognize him, no one would know him personally. So he takes a train illegally from Holland to Paris and once there he walks into the lion's den and he knows that he's caught, there's no way to talk his way out of this. He waited till noon before entering because he assumed that fewer people would be around and people may be more focused on lunch than on their jobs and equally therefore if someone called the construction company or the director of this company in Germany to verify his letter, maybe the director would be at lunch. I mean he knew there were a thousand things that could go wrong and all he could try and do was minimize the risk but by miracle and by that afternoon he had a newly issued travel permit and blank documents for 20 workers that he would be taken. So he fills in the work permits, he disguised young Jews as workers and took them by train to France and found had contacts which he made within the French underground and they took these Jews to Gibraltar to Portugal even to Britain and he recreated these blank passes again and again and made 20 trips. He saved 406 Jews from the Nazis until May of 1944 and then a week later on the 6th of June the Allied forces landed in Normandy and basically Western Europe became a battlefield and he's spent the rest of the war hiding in a village living on sugarbeats and after the war he becomes a you know a known designer in Amsterdam and in 1958 he moved to the USA but incredibly he remained silent about his wartime activities through all of this until his daughters convinced him that his grandchildren should know. That's an amazing story. Did he ever say why? Why your wrist is life repeatedly? He felt this was the right thing to do in his mind there was no question that this is what you do when people are being threatened to be grown up amongst Jews and for him it was a completely natural thing to do. In fact there was an author of a book about him an eventual author who writes in his introduction. I happened to have the radio on one afternoon when I heard Yupp Penrock being interviewed about his wartime activities. Yupp and I had already been friends for 12 years but during all the holidays, birthdays and evenings we had spent together I had never heard a word about his heroic past and when I called him the next morning to inquire about his story he seemed surprised and honored that I would even take an interest in it. And Yupp Bishem unsurprisingly awarded him the designation of Hasil-e-Ghormis-Olem-Richress amongst the nations this was on June 11th 1988. Now onto our second Dutch story. So all armies looped and some of them like the French under Napoleon as we saw during our series on the Rothschild carried shopping lists and looted to order but Germany managed to plunder Yupp on the scale that had never been seen before. By the time Paris was liberated in August 1944 one-third of all the art in private hands in France had gone and over the course of the war's five years hundreds of thousands of paintings vanished into Germany or into German hands and during the war the number one and number two of the Nazi Reich were obviously Hitler at the top and the Hormann-Gorring. Both of them had ambitions as art collectors they fancied themselves as art experts Hitler fantasized about an art museum he would build in Lince his Austria in hometown and Goring talked about the great gift he would leave to the German people. Now it is easy to see Goring as a buffoon and many people did. He wore uniforms that he had designed himself he changed outfits four or five times a day and he wore so many medals that Germans joked very quietly that the decoration nearest the edge red continued on the back and everything to do with Goring from his ego to his ambition to his waistline was outsized but it is a mistake to forget that he was clever he was malevolent a US army interrogator in May 45 after Goring's first night in American captured custody after his arrest said Goring is by no means the comical figure he has been depicted to be so many times in newspaper reports so you have these two at the top of the pile who are art collectors and normally there would be a competition between the two but Goring always gave in because a contest with Hitler would only have one outcome so he could take what he liked but only after the führer had finished making his selections. Hitler got Hans Posse who was the director of the Dresden Gallery and offered him an opportunity that had never been offered in history to any museum director unlimited authority and unlimited funds basically to buy or confiscate whatever he wanted his first task was to fill the Vermeer gap gap in Hitler's art collection no Vermeers and by October 1940 Vermeers the art of painting was in Hitler's hands in today's dollars the final price paid was about nine million you said he put a side a funds as well didn't yes didn't they just steal everything yes they stole a lot but they couldn't steal everything under international law there are certain rules and one is that a nation even the war is illegal whatever there are laws right right crazily enough the Nazis kept this right and a sort of a victorious nation can't simply take whatever it wants especially when they are national treasures you know he wanted them on a Lisa one stage but art confiscated from Jews was different the reason they paid for the Vermeer is because it didn't come from a Jew when it came from Jews they either said well we're just you know safeguarding it or in certain cases the Nazis simply said that laws did not apply because there was an armistice with the French state and the French people but the Jews in France are permanent enemies of the of the Reich and obviously the most prominent of those permanent enemies were the Rothschilds they owned one of the world's greatest arcs left and when the war broke out, they hid part of their collection around France, gave some of it to the Louvre, and then they ran, you know, they escaped with their lives. And Gering wrote to a colleague in 1940, highlighting his success in recovering concealed Jewish art. He hired French detectives and police. He had as much money as he needed to get informers, and he had basically tame art experts telling him which collections had the best prizes. And all in all, the Germans cobbentfiscated 5,000 and 9 works from the Rothschild holdings alone, including Rembrandt and Rubens and One Vermeer. On February 3rd, 1941, a private train set out from Paris to Germany with 42 crates. The crates marked H1-19, where Eermarkt for Hitler, and G1-23 was for Gering. And there was a Vermeer, the astronomer, that went to Hitler, which is the second time that Hitler has taken a Vermeer that Goring wanted. And he can only nod politely and, you know, hail the Fuhrer's taste. But he wanted one and art is very high on his list of things to do. To the degree that when in 1942, the Allied troops under Montgomery threatened to push Rommel's Africa Corps into the sea. Rommel makes an urgent trip to Europe to plead for reinforcements from Gering, and he says, you know, defeat is imminent. But Gering doesn't focus, say. He launched into a monologue about his favourite painters, and Rommel returned to Africa empty-handed and presumably furious. And again, in '43, when the German army was fighting for survival at Stalingrad, Gering's office wrote, the following items were loaded aboard the Reichsmarschal special train today. It's a memorandum dated in November '43, '42 rather. And it went on to list the paintings that Gering had selected, 77 crates. How did he have enough time to deal with his other hobby of killing Jews? He sounds obsessed. He was obsessed by art, and he was the deputy commander of the Third Reich. He was a mass killer. I mean, at least somebody who ordered mass killings, who never had any conscience and whose complicity in genocide is very clear. I mean, he once said, I have no conscience, adult Hitler is my conscience, and he would eventually be sentenced to death in Nuremberg, but he's the one who took the poison capsule before the sentence could be carried out. And in fact, Hannah Arrent, who sat through all the testimony at Nuremberg said, for those crimes that he committed, no punishment is severe enough. It may be essential to hang Gering, but it is totally inadequate. So yeah, he managed to find time in his day for both of those things. Much like Hitler. Yes. And then in September '43, a Vermeer appears. Gering scout called Hofer, heard about the woman taken in adultery from a shadowy banker and an art dealer called Alouard Middle. The Vermeers for some of our non-art enthusiast listeners, were they considered the most valuable painters of the time? It's more the fact that there was a gap in the Vermeers that were being sold, and they looked to now scour through Europe to plug this gap, to find religious paintings by Vermeer. But yeah, he's one of the masters. Absolutely. Now this middle new Gering, and in fact he'd been carrying Hall at Gering's mansion. So he comes with this new Vermeer. The asking price was 2 million Dutch guilders, $10 million in today's prices. But it's Vermeer. Gering doesn't want to pay that much money, but he can't part with the painting. So he keeps it there while he sort of thinks over the proposition and months go by, every visitor who came would be taken on a tour by Gering which included seeing this Vermeer. And finally in the winter 43 he found a way to hang onto his prize while indulging his greed. He purchased the painting by trading it for other paintings. For this one masterpiece he gave middle 137 paintings. Now the art broker who sold this Vermeer was a Dutch citizen called Hans van Megerin, who bought himself a mansion during the war and we will come back to him. Now by the winter of 44 the Nazi vision of conquest and glory had collapsed and there now begins a desperate race, Gering and his fellow Nazis tried frantically to hide their art from the advancing allies. I don't know if the Nazis dreamt that they could somehow hold onto what they'd taken or protect their stolen art from bombs. They probably just wanted to deprive their enemies of what they then knew they can keep for themselves. Yep, that would be typical of the Nazis, yes very possibly. And American soldiers find art in 53 locations in Germany and each is a sort of Aladdin's cave of treasure. And some of these finds come through absolute happenstance, an overhurt conversation. On the night of May 5th, 1945, a chance meeting between an American military policeman and two French women ended up in the discovery of assault mines. And the discovery of assault mines which was crammed with art and Nazi gold in the deepest part of the cave, there were canvas bags with a row upon row of goods. And somebody reached into a bag and what do they pull out a gold brick because there had been teams of slave laborers, many of them choose, staggering into these mines carrying bags of gold for 70 hours. 100 tons of gold just in this one place. And the soldiers of the third army, if made another colossal find, they met up with Herman Bündgers who took about his academic career in Born in Harvard but under pressure he admitted that he had spent the war in Paris with the SS helping Hitler and going identify art for stealing. And he was, as one historian would later describe him, one of the nastiest piece of goods in the game and he sent them to Goering's treasures. Goering's silver vanished. It was placed, it was dug under the earth in the grounds of his mansion as was much of his wine collection. And he wanted that hiding place secret so he sent the soldiers who had done the digging to fight on the Russian front, presumably they would never come back. But the prizes of his collection were put in two private trains and they left for Berthesgaden which was Hitler's nest hideout. And the American soldiers found his art. The paintings alone filled 40 rooms and there were barrels of silver and gold, watchers, jewelry, boxes of wedding rings which were taken from the hands of women in concentration camps. And the Americans, you know, they put a large sign over the door saying Herman Goering's art collection through the courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division. And Major Harry Anderson who'd been the head of this unit, he heard rumors that some of Goering's most valuable paintings were still with his wife. And they found Emmy Goering in a castle as the rumors had said and in possession of masterpieces. So he takes the pictures and she protests the injustice of it. Right? She said the property is hers and not her husbands. And Anderson then says to her, there were rumors that Goering had given her the Vermeer to keep. Where was it? And she says no idea what you're talking about. And then as he's about to leave, Goering's nurse ran from the room and returned with something bulky in a blanket. Goering told me to keep this and I'd never have to worry about money again for the rest of my life. And he opens the blanket and he finds this Vermeer. And the next day's New York Times carries a story. Goering's nurse gives up a million dollar Vermeer. And it has to be said that Goering, you know, was a hero to his German compatriots, even when their country was devastated. The German soldiers cheered when they caught sight of him and they, you know, they'd rush over to shake his hand. And at one point he's driving, he knows the war is over. And the head of a seventh army American search party, an American soldier called Jerome Shapiro spots him. And Lieutenant Shapiro's orders were to bring Goering in alive. So he steps out of his Jeep and he comes up to Goering's Mercedes. And Goering is relieved because he's been captured by the Americans and not the Russians, even though in Nuremberg, as I said, he was sentenced to death anyway. And he takes him prisoner. A week before Shapiro had been one of the American soldiers who liberated Dachau and now this Jew from Brooklyn takes this Nazi into custody. It could be a podcast in itself, but what happened to all this art? What did that analyze? do with that. It is a podcast in its own right. Some of the fate was tragic. It was basically stolen. Some of it made it way to art museums across Europe and hence the famous book and story and documentary about Klimt and some of it is still unrecovered. And people are still fighting today. I recently saw an article. You see all the time but yeah there is a certain portion that did make its way back to the hands of the original owners. Anything ended up in America? It ended up all over the world where things also did end up not so much art as in paintings but Judea in Israel, the Israel Museum and other places like that. But let's now go with going in custody back to Amsterdam. Jupp Pillar was a Jew from Holland who'd been in the resistance movement during the war and now he was a captain in a unit looking for collaborators and stolen property because approximately 120,000 Dutch collaborators would be put on trial. Pillar found fitting quarters for an investigation squad specialising in Looted Property, the Art Deelishhip Gallery which had once belonged to Middle. Three weeks after VE Day, Pillar is in the front hall of Hans van Magerund's mansion. Because while many of his countrymen had start, Magerund seemed to have done quite well for himself during the war and he was mixed up in Göring's affairs and that in May 1945 in Holland was enough to bring a policeman calling. So he asks him how did you become wealthy in World War II? Why did you sell a vameer to Göring? And he says well a well off family that had fallen on hard times and listed his help. And this family's name and their connection with you and your connection with Göring to which Van Magerund said that to his infinite regret he couldn't provide more help because he promised confidentiality to the family that owned the painting. So Pillar arrested Van Magerund and tossed him in a prison cell in the hope of jogging his memory. Because he's convinced that Van Magerund had been up to something illegal and possibly ugly during the war years, perhaps taking property from Jewish families and they search Van Magerund's house. They didn't find anything at first and then someone thought that's to pull up the floorboards and they find jewelry and great bundles of cash. He's still said nothing? Yep, to all these questions. So Pillar explains to him that Göring was the man who had rained bombs down on Rotterdam and if Van Magerund had helped him in any way, he was a traitor and the penalty for treason was death. And Pillar had testimony that Van Magerund not only had Dutch Nazi friends but he'd been in and out of the main office of the SS in the heart of Amsterdam. And for six weeks he's pushing him for an explanation. It doesn't get any result but every lead bolsters his view that there's something very odd going on here. Now, you know, the truth is that Pillar is both a Jew and a resistance fighter so he had every reason to despise Van Magerund but remarkably they struck up a kind of relationship. And then on July 11th, a Dutch reporter in Bond out Berlin added a note to the story. He had wandered into Hitler's private library in the Reich's Chancellor, the seat of the government and he happened to see Van Magerund's book where there was a handwritten dedication to the beloved Führer in Grateful Tribute and Van Magerund signed his name in there. So the next day they say to him this is not going to end well and in the midst of another catten mouse interrogation Van Magerund finally cracks. After a question too many from Pillar, he burst out and shouts idiots, "Do you think I sold a vameer to that fat goring? It's not a vameer. I painted it myself." So Pillar rejects the claim at once. I mean, he's facing. I'm assuming forgery didn't have the same sentencing as treason. Absolutely. Treason could mean death, forgery meant fine, a jail sentence and a desperate man would say anything. So Van Magerund said, "I can prove it." He painted that goring picture on top of an old painting that he hadn't even bothered to scrape off. And he took a piece of paper, he sketched a battle scene with soldiers and horses and all you have to do now he said is X-ray Goring's vameer and you'd see this how the painting beneath it. And he then goes on to say, "Before the war I painted other vameers and a couple of the hooch's and in fact the emouse in the Boymans museum, that's mine." By the time he was done he claimed to have sold eight old master forgeries to Holland's best museums and wealthiest collectors and he rattled off names like the Reich's museum. So Pillar moves his prisoner into his residence. Obviously house arrest in such conditions was a vast improvement over a prison cell and soon everyone grew accustomed to the sight of this small man padding around in his slippers with a cigarette perpetually tucked into his mouth. And in the first days after his confession he is most important visitors or a pair of outsiders to highly regarded scientist, a Dutch chemist named Franchis and a Belgian chemist named Kormons. Because you know for years Van Maygren had lied to the world and it had fallen for every lie. Now he had the truth and no one believed the word of it. But by March 47 the Kormons commission proved beyond any doubt that Van Maygren's story was true. He had indeed forged the vameer he'd sold Goring and all the others so he couldn't be accused of selling off Holland's heritage because he hadn't enriched Goring he treated him. So the collaboration charge is dropped he would go on trial but only for fraud. Who was this guy? Was he known to be a professional artist? Yes of salt. So he was born in 1889 he is the son of a teacher and he studied art and architecture in Delft in fact which is the city of vameer and Van Maygren aspired to recognition as an artist but by the early 20s he's out of step with the times because his style is much more traditional than the older type of art from four centuries earlier biblical scenes which is old fashioned in modernist and abstract Europe. So he does get some prizes and minor successes but he is basically regularly dismissed by the critics so he turned against the art world and specifically against these critics and museum directors and he starts painting these fakes. Now had he not come across a successful invention by Leo Bakeland he would never have been successful his forging career owed everything to this American inventors genius even though he never met him because for Van Maygren to create a painting that looked old was easy. Basically you had to know certain dates for instance in 1845 lead white began to give way to the newly invented zinc white which is standard today and a forger has to know that because chemists can easily distinguish paints that look identical and if it was a painting made by vameer zinc white would be impossible so you've got to know when things came into being but for Van Maygren the real challenge was not the forgery he could replicate materials of you know 17th century painter studio he could make brushes like those that the old masters had used made of hair from a badger he could grind his own pigments he could follow age old recipes for making paint. I'm sure they had some sort of test to check if something is new or 300 years old. So that is the real thing what he couldn't do was cause three centuries to pass and as time passes oil paintings change there two crucial ways one is that the paint hardens and the second is that the painting surface develops miniature cracks and this is where bakeland came in he had earned his millions for his invention in America that changed the world and the adverts proclaimed bakelite as a miracle substance a material which has a thousand purposes but Van Maygren found use number a thousand and one he used this to artificially age a painting so that even experts would not know the difference and then comes his court case. In many ways his court case was the greatest of his life a team of armed men unloaded all his forgeries from an armored car and for 90 minutes while the Reichs Museum's curator supervised these paintings were hung in place and 40 guards settled in for the night so that they shouldn't be stolen and it was a quick trial basically for three reasons first of all the maker and admitted his guilt so the prosecution had no reason to you know belabor the case. Secondly Van Maygren's own lawyer wanted to keep the trial focused as narrowly as possible he didn't want to expose his client to questions about collaboration And thirdly, then Maygroom's many v- victims, museum dealers, directors, critics, scholars, they basically cringed at the thought of having their gullibility paraded in public. In fact, the Dutch state itself, even though it was prosecuting the case, was one of those duped buyers. The prosecution did ask why Captain Piller kept Van Megren as a sort of private prisoner when he could have immediately turned him over to the Department of Justice, to which he answered, because it took me quite a while to find out who at the Justice Department had been correct or incorrect in the war, in a very deliberately unsuttle insinuation of Holland's many Nazi collaborators and sympathisers. Your honour, I can assure you, this was not an easy task. Unsurprisingly, there were no further questions for the government prosecutor. And then Van Megren took the stand, and the backwards and forwards was as follows. You admit that you painted these fakes, the judge asked, yes your honour, and that you sold them at high prices. I had no choice if I had to sold them at low prices, no one would have believed they were authentic, there's laughter in the court. Why did you continue with your forgeries after your success with your mouse? I couldn't stop your honour, it became an addiction, I wanted to prove myself over and over again. That's all well and good, but you did quite nicely for yourself. It's true your honour, but I didn't do it for the money, I already had more money than I could have spent. So your motive was not financial gain? I wanted to strike at the art world, for always belittling me. It seems you succeeded. A plow's in the courtroom gavled down by the judge. And on November the 12th, the judge sentenced Van Maygren, the prosecution had asked her two years he was given 12 months, to which Van Maygren said, I think that must take it as a good sport. But on December the 29th, he suffered a heart attack, and he died the next day, having never served a day of his sentence. Over the course of the year that passed between his confession and his trial, public opinion in Holland swung completely in his favour, he was once called a traitor, he now became the man who swindled Gurring and he died a mini hero. It's a fascinating, quite a different episode of a harsh, a follicle series, but it also brings to light how many individuals there are. From 1939 to 1945, millions of millions of people affected. We know the headlines, so many of us know the headlines, but you hear stories like this that brings out the enormity of the amount of shit individuals, each with their own story. The amount of history that was created by millions of people over six years, yeah. Okay, so I hope you have a good chavus for our listeners and enjoy the rest of your week and we will, yeah, I'll see you next week in France and the next episode should be recorded on time. Thank you Robert Hersch, please send feedback, suggestions, reviews to [email protected] and thanks.