The Last Vermeer by Jonathan Lopez

Author:Jonathan Lopez
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780547350622
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The Endgame

BY DIVULGING NOTHING and making a promise he couldn’t keep, Van Meegeren had earned two years’ breathing room with Hermann Goering. And at the beginning of 1944, two years must have seemed like a pretty long time.

Although no one knew how the war was going to end, only the most ardent of Nazis could have denied that the Reich was in trouble. The Germans had already been defeated in North Africa; they were pinned down on the Eastern Front; and the Allies were threatening a cross-channel invasion of France. Fighting to a Continental stalemate might yet have allowed Hitler to keep some of his conquests—perhaps his native Austria, perhaps even the Netherlands—but while Axis optimists may have held out a hope for a negotiated peace, their more rational colleagues were busy preparing for other outcomes. Alois Miedl, for instance, fled to the safety of Franco’s Spain just prior to the D-Day landings. Clandestine agents on both sides of the front speculated that Miedl had been dispatched to hide a portion of Goering’s financial assets for use after the war—a tantalizing theory that was, unfortunately, never proved. Whatever else he may have been up to, Miedl went into exile with consummate flair: having accumulated a vast and tainted fortune, he sat out the remainder of the war with his wife and two children in a sumptuous suite at the Hotel Ritz in Madrid.

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