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Painting Looted by Nazis in WW2 Discovered in Real Estate Ad

The 17th-century portrait was discovered in a real estate ad decades after a top Nazi aide stole it.

A lost painting looted from a Jewish art dealer by the Nazis has been discovered over 80 years later in the background of a real estate ad for a property in Argentina. Italian painter Giuseppe Ghislandi’s Portrait of a Lady had been missing for decades after it was stolen from Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who died while fleeing the Nazis in mid-1940. Following his death, Goudstikker’s collection of 1,100 paintings was “acquired” by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man and head of the Luftwaffe SS. An investigation by the Dutch newspaper AD uncovered wartime documents suggesting it had come into possession of Friedrich Kadgien, an SS officer and senior aide to Goering, who fled to Brazil and then later Argentina after the war until he died aged 71 in 1978. AD eventually dispatched a reporter to his family’s home in Buenos Aires, where no one answered the door. However, they were tipped off that the house was for sale, and while browsing the listing on the estate agent’s website, they discovered what appeared to be the missing portrait hanging on the wall. AD’s attempts to contact the daughters have been rebuffed, with one telling the paper: “I don’t know what information you want from me, and I don’t know what painting you are talking about.”

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