Police raided a house belonging to the daughter of a deceased Nazi official in the Argentine city of Mar del Plata, where a painting allegedly stolen in the 1940s appeared to have been located.
Officers did not find the artwork, but they did seize two firearms after the house’s residents failed to produce the corresponding paperwork and licenses, sources close to the probe told the Herald.
During Tuesday’s operation police seized the cell phones of former SS official Friedrich Kadgien’s eldest daughter and her partner, who live in the house and were present during the raid, the sources said.
Peter Schouten, a journalist for Dutch paper Algemeen Dagblad who had been investigating Kadgien, spotted the painting hanging above a sofa in the living room in a photo from a real estate listing for the house.
When the police arrived, a horse tapestry had been hung in the place where the painting appeared in the image, but they took photos of marks on the walls and a hook that could have been used to hang a painting, according to a statement by Argentina’s public prosecutors’ office.
They also seized two folders containing drawings, engravings and prints. They featured text in German and appeared to be from the 1940s, leading investigators to believe they could be related to the art in question.
The investigators are focusing on locating the painting and will press charges against Kadgien’s two daughters.
The last known whereabouts of the painting, “Portrait of a Lady” by Italian artist Guiseppe Ghislandi (1655-1743), was in Switzerland in 1946. At the time, it was in Kadgien’s hands. Before he fled Germany, he was a high-ranking SS official who acted as Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring’s right hand man. The journalists at Algemeen Dagblad published their investigation on Monday.
The painting was owned by Amsterdam-based Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, but after he was forced to flee the Netherlands, his art collection was taken and sold by Nazis for very low prices.
Documentation shows that in 1946, Kadgien had two of Goudstikker’s paintings in his possession. Kadgien fled to Switzerland in 1945, before traveling to Brazil and then Argentina, where he settled and raised a family. He died in Buenos Aires, in 1978.