Painting was spotted online by Dutch journalists when the daughter of a former Nazi official put her house up for sale in Mar del Plata
There was nothing very remarkable about the middle-aged couple who lived in the low, stone-clad villa on calle Padre Cardiel, a quiet residential street in the leafy Parque Luro district of Argentina’s best-known seaside town, Mar del Plata.
Patricia Kadgien, 59, was born in Buenos Aires, five hours to the north. Her social media described her as a yoga teacher and practitioner of biodecoding, an obscure alternative therapy that claims to cure illness by resolving past traumas.
Her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, 61, built and raced go-karts. Like many in this neighbourhood, the couple were comfortably off, and discreet. “Patri was an excellent person”, one neighbour said. “Nice, well educated,” said another.
Then, last month, they put their house up for sale. A photographer from a local estate agent, Robles Casas y Campos, came round to shoot the spacious, elegantly furnished interiors. The pictures went up. And their quiet existence came crashing down.
The fifth photograph on the agency’s listing showed a general view of the villa’s living room. Hanging on the wall, above a buttoned sofa in plush green velvet and next to a polished antique commode, was a highly distinctive oil painting of a woman.
More than 11,000km away, the Dutch news outlet AD had, for several years, been quietly investigating the fate of old master paintings looted by the Nazis and still listed by the Dutch culture ministry as “unreturned” after the second world war.
Journalists had made several attempts to speak to Patricia Kadgien, the owner of the property, and to her elder sister, Alicia, the daughters of a high-ranking Nazi official Friedrich Kadgien, who was known to have settled in Argentina after the war.
Their calls and messages had consistently gone unanswered, or been rebuffed. But then a Dutch reporter based in Buenos Aires, Peter Schouten, went knocking on the door of the villa – and spotted a “for sale” sign.
“It’s very surreal – a little absurd, too,” Schouten said after a packed court hearing during which Kadgien and Cortegoso were charged with aggravated concealment for allegedly hiding Portrait of a Lady, by the late-baroque portraitist Giuseppe Ghislandi.
The federal prosecutor, Carlos Martínez, told the court that the concealment charge “must be understood as linked to the crime of genocide … This is theft in the context of genocide. It is connected to the most serious crimes known to humanity.”
A judge imposed a 180-day travel ban on the couple and barred them from leaving their home for more than 24 hours without approval as Martínez said the plundering of cultural assets “was part of a systematic plan … to enrich the Nazi regime and its members”.
After the media reports of the work’s likely location, and before a police search, the couple had tried to obstruct the investigation, the prosecutor argued, by taking down the online property listing and for sale sign and replacing the portrait with a tapestry.
Despite knowing they were under investigation, it was alleged that the defendants had also attempted a civil action claiming the painting was rightfully theirs, turning it over only after they were placed under house arrest and facing further police raids.
Through their lawyer, Kadgien and Cortegoso have denied concealment, saying they had always been willing to hand over the painting, and obstruction, arguing that their civil action was aimed at establishing ownership and not at hiding the artwork.
During a series of raids this week on properties owned by members of the Kadgien family, police seized engravings, prints, drawings and two 19th-century paintings, officials have said, with further charges likely if those works, too, prove to have been looted.
Portrait of a Lady belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish-Dutch art dealer who fled Amsterdam in mid-May 1940 to escape the Nazis, but died after falling through an open hatch into the hold of the SS Bodegraven, the ship carrying him to the UK.
Goudstikker carried with him a notebook detailing his collection of more than 1,100 artworks, including pieces by Rubens, Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, all of which were snapped up for a fraction of their value by Nazi officials.
Some were later recovered and displayed as part of the Dutch national collection in the Rijkmuseum, before 202 works were restored to the dealer’s sole heir, his daughter-in-law, Marei von Saher, in 2006. Portrait of a Lady was not among them.
Chief among the buyers in a forced sale typical of second world war art thefts was Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, one of whose senior aides, in the early years of the war, was a 33-year-old official called Friedrich Gustav Kadgien.
Born in 1907, Kadgien joined the Nazi party in 1932 and the SS in 1935. By 1938, he was a special representative working for Göring on the four-year economic plan drawn up by Adolf Hitler to rearm Germany and prepare it for self-sufficiency by 1940.
A key player in the Third Reich’s foreign currency dealings, Kadgien was also, according to a 1996 Swiss report, “heavily involved in criminal methods for the acquisition of cash, securities and diamonds stolen from Jewish victims”.
Kadgien “confiscated a large amount of property from Jewish merchants, including jewellery and diamonds in Amsterdam, and oversaw the sale of expropriated shares and securities through banks and front companies in Switzerland”, Martínez said.
He fled to Zurich early in 1945, then to nearby Baden, where in 1948 he set up a successful finance and trading firm, Imhauka. With pressure growing after questioning by Swiss and US investigators, Kadgien left for South America in 1949.
Thousands of Nazis fled to the continent after the war, settling in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay. With a few notable high-profile exceptions, most lived out their lives undisturbed, sometimes without even changing names.
Kadgien resurfaced in Rio de Janeiro in 1951, settling in the Santa Teresa district and establishing a Brazilian branch of Imhauka with Ludwig Haupt, a former colleague from the four-year-plan, and Anna Imfeld, the wife of his Swiss associate.
By whatever means it was acquired, his wealth was sufficient for him to invest in an 85,000-hectare ranch with 20,000 cattle. A Buenos Aires branch of Imhauka followed in 1951, and Kadgien – now Federico Gustavo – won Argentinian citizenship soon after.
Imhauka secured valuable contracts with Juan Perón’s government, including acting as an intermediary for major German engineering firms such as Siemens, while a second company, Dryamin, launched in 1973, specialised in food and drugs.
In the Argentinian capital, Kadgien married Hildegard Strauss, with whom he had Patricia and Alicia. He died, without being held accountable for his wartime and subsequent actions, in 1978 or 1979, and is reportedly buried in the German cemetery.
Alicia became a model and is locally well known, unlike Patricia, whose unwanted fame is more recent. “If you hadn’t told me I would never have known,” a neighbour said. Another said she was being “held responsible for her father’s mistakes”.
Even those sympathetic to her, however, admit it was strange that she did not hand over the painting immediately.
The fate of Portrait of a Lady, which will be registered with Argentina’s supreme court, is now uncertain.
Prosecutors have requested it be held, but not displayed, at the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires while its ultimate ownership is determined. This week von Saher, Goudstikker’s heir, lodged a legal claim to the work with the FBI in New York.
Source: www.theguardian.com