Jacques Goudstikker was one of the wealthiest Dutch art dealers of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Old Masters in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. As he was a Jew, in the summer of 1940, he was forced to sell his famous collection, which included more than a thousand works of art, as well as real estate, at a greatly reduced price to Alois Miedl,2 a German-born naturalized Dutchman and art collector who’d moved to the Netherlands to work as a banker. What many people didn’t know was that Miedl also worked for the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and was therefore very well connected within the circle of Nazi SD officers in the Netherlands, including Ferdinand aus der Fünten, the head of the Zentralstelle, and Willy Lages, the head of the SD in Amsterdam. In fact, Lages’s wife lived at Nijenrode Castle, one of the elegant properties Miedl acquired along with Goudstikker’s art assets. Miedl and his wife, who was Jewish, often hosted lavish parties attended by the who’s who of the SD, as well as highly placed German officials in the civil administration. Miedl had deep connections in Germany as well. He was a close friend of Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer.3 He was reported to have spent several days with Hitler at Berchtesgaden.4
The Goudstikker sale, set up almost immediately after the German invasion in 1940, was a shadow transaction on behalf of Field Marshal Hermann G?ring, the number two man in the German Reich. To keep their own hands clean, Hitler and G?ring used surrogates to locate collections and negotiate transactions to satisfy their taste for rare works of art, and it is clear that G?ring or his art agents had the notable Goudstikker collection on his wish list of acquisitions. One condition that Goudstikker demanded before he agreed to the forced sale to Miedl was that Miedl protect his elderly Jewish mother.
As the German forces approached Amsterdam on May 13, 1940, the Goudstikkers, who had missed their chance to leave Amsterdam for the United States, fled, without visas, for England, finding passage on the SS Bodegraven, in part because a soldier on guard recognized Goudstikker’s wife, a well-known opera singer. But Goudstikker never made it to England alive. During the overnight sailing, he mysteriously fell through an open hatch into the ship’s cargo hold, fatally breaking his neck.5
Even after his death, Goudstikker’s “art house” continued to thrive under the occupation as large numbers of Germans with unlimited money flooded the country. After his first visit at the end of May 1940, Hermann G?ring came several more times, using his private train or plane and taking over the Hotel Astoria in Amsterdam. There is a famous photo of G?ring exiting the Goudstikker gallery on the Herengracht during one of his trips to inspect the paintings he wanted to purchase. (It was that photo that Van den Bergh’s granddaughter recognized.) During his postwar interrogation on August 30, 1946, a little more than six weeks before his suicide, G?ring claimed to have met with Goudstikker’s notary. Whether that was on his first visit or later, he did not specify, nor did he name the notary, but it was clearly Van den Bergh.6 The field marshal held leverage over Miedl because of Miedl’s Jewish wife, whom he, being a conservative Catholic, refused to divorce. Miedl continued to pacify G?ring by supplying him with valuable paintings and gifts.
In the sham transaction, Alois Miedl acquired the real estate and the company name Goudstikker N.V., while G?ring acquired most of the paintings, including a Rembrandt (which he gifted to Hitler), a Frans Hals, and a Ruysdael. Arnold van den Bergh officiated over the transaction as the Goudstikker notary and wrote the deeds of sale for the art collection, even though, as the Cold Case Team later learned, a notary was technically not required for such a sale.* The payment of 2 million guilders ($10 million today) was tendered in 1,000-guilder bills that Van den Bergh purportedly had to count by hand. (The original agreement called for the transaction to be handled via bank check, but there seems to have been great urgency to complete the sale and the conversion to a check never took place.)
After the sale to G?ring, which was clearly illegal since it was a coerced sale, everyone in Goudstikker N.V. received a bonus. Van den Bergh received 10 percent of the 2 million guilders. The appraiser and restorer, J. Dik, Sr., and the administrator, A. A. ten Broek, each received 180,000 guilders. Even the lower-level personnel, such as the gardeners, were given bonuses. Privately, they called the sale “the golden shower.”7
The Cold Case Team determined that Van den Bergh himself was a prolific art collector and sold artworks directly to the Reich Chancellery, one of which ended up in Hitler’s personal collection.8 He was paid handsomely, but even more important than the money was the fact that his role at Goudstikker N.V. and his association with Miedl provided him with many contacts within the SS and the Nazi administration who could ensure his safety.
Evidently at Miedl’s request,9 in September 1943 Van den Bergh opened the doors of his villa at Oranje Nassaulaan to Goudstikker’s mother, Emilie Goudstikker, and she remained there until the end of the war. A check of her Jewish Council card indicated that Miedl managed to have her card “cleaned”: there was no identification number, no Sperre number, and no mandatory J.10 That was impressive; the man obviously had real power. Van den Bergh was clearly counting on Miedl to return the favor by using his influence with the Nazi administration to protect him and his family.
Van den Bergh was a clever man. He’d tried several strategies to save his family. He applied for and received several Sperres and even a Calmeyer exemption—until the Dutch notary J.W.A. Schepers challenged it. He had the resistance hide his children. He clearly recognized that survival was a matter of whom you knew. Through his relationship with Miedl he enjoyed the (indirect) protection of Ferdinand aus der Fünten and Willy Lages. But even though he had connections at the highest levels of the Nazi world, Van den Bergh was not naive enough to trust a Nazi. His duties as notary for Goudstikker N.V. ended on February 28, 1944. After this he must have been making plans to find refuge. The Cold Case Team knew that Van den Bergh and his wife were never deported, were never listed as being in any concentration camp, and survived the war. What did Van den Bergh do to secure their survival?
By 1944, it was becoming clear that the Germans were going to lose the war. Hermann G?ring’s influence was on the wane; Hitler was furious that G?ring’s Luftwaffe was unable to stop the Allied bombings of German cities. Miedl saw the writing on the wall. No longer able to count on G?ring’s protection, he decided to move his family to Spain, whose caudillo, Francisco Franco, was friendly toward Germans. In his postwar interrogation by a US Army representative, Miedl claimed he entered Spain on July 5, 1944, with three paintings in his personal luggage. The Cold Case Team found a report indicating that he was arrested and briefly held by the Germans in France on August 21, 1944. He probably smuggled his paintings across the frontier into Spain on a number of occasions. He left his business and two mansions to his friend Hans Tietje, the same Tietje who had secured the 120,000 Sperres for Van den Bergh and his family. The caretaker, servants, and a neighbor of Miedl’s reported to the Dutch resistance that in the months prior to Miedl’s departure, many German Army trucks had stopped at his villa and loaded valuables into them for transportation to Germany.11
With Miedl’s power seriously diminished, Van den Bergh was more exposed than ever. Although the team cannot be certain, it’s possible that he and his wife sought sanctuary at one of the two properties Miedl had “bought” from Goudstikker and for which Van den Bergh had served as notary. The Cold Case Team checked to see if the couple stayed at the Oostermeer estate just outside Amsterdam. They discovered that there were many people in hiding there at the end of the war, but there was no mention of Van den Bergh and his wife, and they therefore ruled that possibility out. However, Castle Nijenrode remained a plausible address for the Van den Berghs.
One former resident, a German friend of Miedl named Henriette von Schirach, the wife of the notorious leader of the Hitler Youth and Reich governor of Vienna Baldur von Schirach, was a close personal friend of Hitler. She described the castle as a very strange place:
The same evening, I followed Miedl’s advice and moved to his moated castle. In this house you would find anybody that feared persecution in Germany: engineers of the Messerschmittwerke, who were brought here because of G?ring and had Jewish wives, actors who had escaped from a Wehrmacht tour in Holland, journalists, impostors, men and women with fake/wrong passports and fake/wrong names.12