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87 Nazi's death in 2007 at the age of ninety-fve. "He was a nasty piece of work," Petropoulos says. Captured by the Americans, Lohse testifed against colleagues at the Nuremberg trials and later was acquitted in a French military tribunal. He returned to Germany, where he continued to trafc in looted art. In one complicated scheme that unraveled after his death, Lohse had seized a Pissarro from a Jewish publisher named Samuel Fischer and later pretended to have sold the Parisian street scene in the 1950s to a man who then gave it to a Lichtenstein-based foundation. It turned out that Lohse himself was behind the foundation and had stashed the painting in a Zurich bank vault, where Petropoulos identifed it in 2007. "Tese plunderers, they enriched them- selves," says Petropoulos. "Tey had ample oppor- tunity. At his death, Lohse had forty-seven paintings worth many millions of dollars, from Renoirs to Du- rers." Among Lohse's own heirs: the daughter of his old boss, Hermann Göring. Te fact that the thieves themselves—or, as in the recent headline-making case of Cornelius Gurlitt's tremendous and suspicious trove, their heirs—were still in possession of the stolen goods was just one factor in the slow pace of restitution after the war. Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s was chaotic, with untold scores of survivors still suffering from dis- placement and focused frst and foremost on fnding loved ones and rebuilding their lives. Tere was also a pervasive attitude of not wanting to dwell on the Holocaust's many horrors. Schavemaker says people felt that "we are done with this war. We've done our best. We need to move forward." Te Americans turned over the art recovered by the so-called Monuments Men to European gov- ernments, which frequently kept the valuables in national collections rather than restituting them to owners or, in the common circumstance of deceased owners, fnding their heirs. Other works were laundered in a maze of transactions or disappeared into private collections, sometimes genuinely un- beknownst to those who had acquired them. Petro- poulos points out that the postwar era in America was a time of great expansion for art museums, and they were eager to add to their collections. "Tey chose not to ask questions," he says. "Tat became the established culture." Meanwhile, heirs who were able to locate their rightful property typically struggled to reclaim it. Petropoulos has consulted on numerous such cases, including Maria Altmann's groundbreaking—and ultimately successful—fght to reclaim her aunt and uncle's fve priceless Gustav Klimt paintings. H E N R I M A T I S S E 1 9 2 1 Odalisque 29 x 24 inches