The Art of Stealing, Nazi Version

It's only stealing if you get caught.

In the act.

Suppose I have the Mona Lisa stashed in the back of my 4Runner, wrapped in burlap. No, I didn't steal it. I bought it fair and square from Ralph's Secondhand Emporium, down the road, for $79.99. Ralphie got it from his uncle Rebus, who brought it back from the Battle of the Bulge, where he got it from Marie St Pierre, mistress of Dietrich von Coltitz, Nazi commandant of Paris, who borrowed it from the Louvre for safekeeping during World War II.

France wants it back, but I'm going to sell it to Connecticut. Nice place, CT, but they are lacking priceless art and have all those hedge fund squillionaires there… Plenty of space in local art museums.

Let's make a deal.

Cash on the barrel. Call my Swiss banker. Ten percent discount for Venmo direct deposit.

Welcome to the world of stolen art, where possession is 99.9 percent of the law and, in the famous words of Zero Mostel, "Baby, when you've got it, flaunt it!"

Ridiculous, right? Not a bit.

So said a US federal court the other day, refusing to return a $30 million Pissarro painting to the Jewish family it was extorted from in 1939. It wound its way through the European aristocracy, eventually landing in the closet of Baron Piss-puss von Felonius Scepterus Thyssen-Munchkin, patron of the (surprise) Thyssen Museum in Madrid. He sold it to his museum and took a zillion-dollar tax write-off so he could buy another Maybach. When the descendants of the original owner found out where it was, they sued to get it back.

The other day the 9th circuit court of appeals (that's our West Coast branch, baby) overruled a lower California court and said no. Nope. Nada. Zippo. Bupkis.

Because? Spain's interest in providing "certainty of title" to its museums outweighs California's interest in deterring theft and obtaining recoveries for victims of stolen art (according to Reuters) and Spanish law says anything you have for six years is yours, baby.

No matter who originally heisted it from who.

I know a bit about that: In August, 1942, the SS knocked on the door of my great-grandparents' flat in the Tiergarten neighborhood of Berlin, and handed them a "contract" under which they surrendered all their earthly goods to Father Hitler in exchange for lifetime housing at a special "camp" in Czechoslovakia called Theresienstadt. This was an example of the Vito Corleone "offer you can't refuse."

Die now, die later? Hmmm.

It was a super investment for Hitler because the lifetime housing thingy was brief. My great-grandfather Siegmund Lewin-Richter died of pneumonia that October in the unheated attic of the old building he was imprisoned in. His wife Toni died likewise, two years later.

That's the fate Lilly Cassirer Neubauer was trying to avoid. She traded the Pissarro painting to the Nazis for a visa to leave Germany plus $360. They never paid. Off went the painting into the stolen art world, winding up decades later in the Thyssen Museum "legally."

Any lawyer will tell you that "the law" and "justice" are two different universes. I know about this, too: I grew up in the South in the Sixties, where the law said black people and white people could not marry, black people had to sit in the back of the bus, they could not vote, etc. The café across the street from my high school had a "Whites Only" sign on the front door. For centuries most Anglo-Saxon legal systems said wives were the property of their husbands. Until recently most states allowed parents to force their 13-year-old daughter Suzy to marry Uncle Bubba.

That's "the law."

Stealing art is a time-honored Western tradition, actually. Museums around the world grandly exhibit many thousands of pieces of indigenous art stolen from North Pacific peoples; I've seen them in Stockholm, London, Vienna, Berlin and more. The Brits loaded up the best parts of the Parthenon in ships in the dark of night in the early 19th century and to this day they are on full view in the British Museum. Greece wants them back, but the Brits say, "You guys have all that sunshine so sit back, relax, have an ouzo and shut up." Same for Egypt's Rosetta Stone, which was heisted during the Napoleonic Wars. And so on.

My grandparents were wiser than my great-grandparents, escaped Germany in the 1930s, and somehow smuggled out some unique pieces of Ethiopian Primitive art that they bought directly from the artist in Addis Ababa in the early 1930s. I've got one hanging in our farmhouse. Not for sale to anyone. Nazis fuck off.

I've visited the Berlin block where my great-grandparents once lived; it's a quiet side street on which it's hard to imagine that all this terror happened. Small plaques out front indicate the date they were taken and where they died.

There is no recompense for evil, but it's useful to recall that everything the Nazis did was "legal."

None of the facts in the Pissarro painting case were in dispute. The painting was heisted in 1939, and wound up in the Madrid museum 60 years later. One of the 9th circuit judges said, wringing her hands pitiably, she wished she could rule differently. “Sometimes our oaths of office and an appreciation of our proper roles as appellate judges require that we concur in a result at odds with our moral compass."

Is that what the SS officers said as they led my great-grandparents away?

What if the 9th circuit judges had instead said, "We know the difference between right and wrong, and we refuse to endorse this theft. Spain can go to hell."

Yeah, dream on.

*If you want to learn more about art theft, Daniel Silva's latest novel, The Collector, is edifying, entertaining and horrifying.

Lifelong journalist and editor Eric Lucas lives on a small farm on an island north of Seattle, where he grows organic hay, garlic, apples, corn and beans. To sign up for Eric’s blog, email him at ericplucas@yahoo.com. Learn more at TrailNot4Sissies.com.