Nazi Art Thefts: Fiction (mainly crime fiction)
Mysteries, suspense novels, thrillers, and crime novels and stories about the misappropriating, looting, plundering, hiding, selling, and taking of art and antiquities by Nazi party members and by others during World War II, as well as novels and stories about the hiding and preserving of art by various individuals and groups during the war. This list was compiled originally by a former librarian living in Pennsylvania, with additions by others, including members of Fiction-L and DorothyL during Dec. 2005.
There's also a short list of Nazi Art Thefts Non-Fiction titles.
Find these titles at your local library or through ABEbooks, AddALL, and other used and out-of-print book dealers.
Some descriptions are taken verbatim, or in essence, from review sources such as Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal, and from booksellers' descriptions.
JENNIFER S. ALDERSON
- The Lover's Portrait: An Art Mystery (2016): Set in the Netherlands. This crime novel is the contemporary story of American art history student Zelda Richardson, who finds clues to the whereabouts of a collection of masterpieces hidden somewhere in Amsterdam, secreted away in 1942 by a homosexual art dealer who'd rather die than turn his collection over to his Nazi blackmailer. Others are looking for the same artworks; who has the real claim, and to what lengths will desire for possession drive them?
EDWIN ALEXANDER
- Theft of the Master (2009): Central to the plot, which has PI (and former Marine) Al Hersey running from Half Moon Bay, CA, to Estonia, Paraguay, Sweden, and New York, is a sculpted wood carving of Christ preaching the Sermon on the Mount, completed by Veit Stoss in 1493, presented as a national icon at Estonia's Tallinn Church of the Holy Ghost, and later, during WWII, smuggled into Paraguay by one of Hitler's underlings. The secret society of Templars is also part of the fast-paced story.
EVELYN ANTHONY
- The Poellenberg Inheritance (1972): Thriller. The daughter of an SS general finds life in jeopardy because her father was the only person who knew the location of a priceless masterpiece that disappeared during WWII.
JEFFREY ARCHER
- A Matter of Honor (1987): When Adam Scott opens the yellowed envelope bequeathed to him in his father's will, he learns of the secret that shadowed his father's military career, reaching back to the Nazi plunder of Europe. In the deepest vault of a Swiss bank, Scott discovers a priceless icon, the key to a shocking document that could forever change the balance of power between America and the Soviet Union.
LISA BARR
- Woman on Fire: A Novel (2022). After talking her way into a job with Dan Mansfield, the leading investigative reporter in Chicago, rising young journalist Jules Roth is given an unusual and very secret assignment: Dan asks her to locate a painting stolen by the Nazis more than 75 years earlier, legendary Expressionist artist Ernst Engel’s most famous work, Woman on Fire. World-renowned shoe designer Ellis Baum wants this portrait of a beautiful, mysterious woman for deeply personal reasons, and has enlisted Dan’s help to find it. But Jules doesn’t have much time; the famous designer is dying. Meanwhile, in Europe, provocative and powerful Margaux de Laurent also searches for the painting. Heir to her art collector family’s millions, Margaux is a cunning gallerist who gets everything she wants. The only thing standing in her way is Jules. "A gripping tale of a young, ambitious journalist embroiled in an international art scandal centered around a Nazi-looted masterpiece."
EVELYN BERCKMAN
- The Evil of Time (1954): Archaelogist Keith Elgin of the Art Reparations Commission in Germany is sent to the ancient castle of Drachensgrab (Dragon's Grave) in a final attempt to recover the paintings and other loot that the Nazis had hidden there.
STEVE BERRY
- The Amber Room (2004): When Judge Rachel Cutler's father dies under suspicious circumstances, his daughter begins investigating a decades-old secret: the Amber Room, an exquisite treasure that was appropriated by the Nazis when they invaded the Soviet Union. Rachel and her ex-husband, Paul, travel to Germany, to learn why her father died and to find the truth about the Amber Room. Based very loosely on historical events.
DOUGLAS BOYD
- The Fiddler and The Ferret (1997): Involves art theft, kidnapping and a background that goes back to Nazi-occupied Paris. When his old violin teacher is murdered, an international star of the concert platform hires a man he was brought up to hate -- an MI5 veteran -- to track down the killer.
ESTELLE RUBIN BRAGER
- The Dreyfus Collection, a Novel: The Race to Find Priceless Art Stolen by the Nazis (2021). Lisa Warden is a talented young artist haunted by her father's disappearance; she was only fourteen in early 1956, when Peter Warden phoned from Europe to let her know he was returning soon. What he hadn't told her was that he, the owner of a prestigious Manhattan art gallery, had been commissioned by the U.S. government to recover rare and valuable paintings confiscated by the Nazis after their invasion of France in 1940. After that call, Lisa never heard from her father again. The paintings had been the family property of Peter's friend and client, David Dreyfus, a Jewish-American businessman with French roots. Prior to the Nazi invasion, Dreyfus had promised to donate the collection -- containing works by Matisse, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other greats -- to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. but was murdered to conceal the theft. While Lisa is working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, she chances to meet Sara Dreyfus', David's widow, and she begins to learn the truths of her father's fate and more.
T. DAVID BUNN
- The Amber Room (1992): From their high-priced London antique shop, Alexander Kantor and Jeffrey Sinclair have made deep contacts into the secret treasure troves of Europe, particularly the former Eastern Bloc nations. They are pulled into a trail of intrigue and cover-ups that surround the Amber Room. A novel of deception and danger. (Sequel to Florian's Gate).
LILLIAN STEWART CARL
- Garden of Thorns (1992): Gothic/Romantic suspense. Mark and Hilary get back together in Fort Worth, Texas. He's excavating a mysterious turn of the century house, she's working at an art gallery on Coburg treasures recovered from the Nazis. Soon their jobs intersect, as they both run afoul of a prominent local family who resorts to murder to keep its skeletons in its closets.
DAVID ADAMS CLEVELAND
- With a Gemlike Flame: A Novel of Venice and a Lost Masterpiece (2001): When Renaissance scholar and art dealer Jordan Brooks journeys to Venice to view a masterpiece believed to have been destroyed by the Nazis, he must discover if the painting is a fake or the original, which leads him to his former teacher and a group of corrupt art dealers.
FRANKLIN COEN
- The Plunderers (1980): Suspense novel set in Nazi-occupied Paris, of love and greed centered on the obsessive seizure of France's art heritage.
JACQUELINE CORCORAN
- A Surrealist Affair (2021): Crime/romantic suspense novel. American art history doctoral student Elle Dakin and undercover FBI Counterterrorism agent Ryan DeLong, on loan to the Art Crimes squad, meet when Elle comes to Paris to authenicate a newly discovered painting by her favourite surrealist artist; soon she's involved in the investigation of the recent theft of a million-dollar masterpiece by the same painter, which may have belonged to a family whose collection was stolen by Nazis in Vienna.
ROBERTSON DAVIES
- What's Bred in the Bone (1985): Fictional biography. Through two supernatural beings, art collector Francis Cornish's life is exposed: an art expert, a forger, a collector of international renown, a hero involved in secret intelligence work. (Sequel to The Rebel Angels and The Lyre of Orpheus)
J. MADISON DAVIS
- The Van Gogh Conspiracy (2005): The search for answers takes Esther and Henson on a life-and-death odyssey through the halls of fine art, European capitals, and a spider web of blackmail and deceit that encompasses former Nazi officers running a clandestine operation to ship stolen artworks around the world.
DEBRA DEAN
- The Madonnas of Leningrad (2006): Debut novel. Marina was a guide at Leningrad's Hermitage Museum. In the autumn of 1941, she and her colleagues were set the task of taking objects d'art out of the grand galleries, storing them safely against the German bombardment, invasion and looting. This is a novel about one woman's struggle to preserve an artistic heritage from the horrors and destruction of World War II.
MAURICE DEKOBRA
- The Golden Eyed Venus (1963): Struggle for possession of a secret haul of Nazi loot.
AARON ELKINS
- A Deceptive Clarity (1987): The assistant curator of art at the San Francisco Museum travels to Berlin to set up an exhibit of art recovered from the Nazis after WWII, until his aristocratic boss gets murdered.
- Loot (1999): Suspense novel featuring ex-curator Ben Revere. Half a century after a truck laden with masterpieces stolen by the Nazis disappeared in an Austrian salt mine in a snowstorm, one of the paintings shows up in a seedy Boston pawnshop. Starred review from Booklist, recommended by the others.
- Turncoat (2002): Set in the Kennedy Era, features USAF-veteran Pete Simmons searching for his missing French wife in a Europe still roiled with hatred and violence from WWII. A stand-alone thriller that probes wartime guilt from multiple angles.
LINDA FAIRSTEIN
- Cold Hit (2000): Two real-life felonies -- the Nazi looting of Russia's legendary Amber Room, and the 1990 heist at Boston's Isabella Gardner museum -- are sidelines to this crime novel about sex crimes and murder, set in NYC.
DAN FESPERMAN
- Lie in the Dark (2000): Crime novel set during the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s. Homicide detective Vlado Petric in Sarajevo unravels the crime surrounding the death of a government worker. What looks like a sniper death is actually much more; the pillaging of art treasures during the Second World war is central to the plot.
DEAN FETZER
- Death in Amber (2009): Once part of a palace outside St Petersberg, the Amber Room has been missing since the end of World War II. Removed from the palace by a Nazi art collection squad at the height of the war, the Amber Room was last seen in Konigsbourg in late 1944. Now, someone knows where it has come to rest and will do anything to get it. Ninety years on and beautiful young women are being found dead with no evidence of why they died. Contractor (and blind investigator) Jaared Sen is hired by an old friend to find his missing niece. Can he find her, and the Amber Room, before the killer strikes again?
TIMOTHY FINDLEY
- Famous Last Words (1982): Controversial novel that's part-horror story, part philosophical meditation on art and good and evil, featuring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as fascist sympathisers during WWII. (Note: Not sure how much, if any, actual art theft figures in the book.)
MARTIN FINE
- The Lost Stradivarius (2006): Entombed with its creator for almost 200 years, the lost Stradivarius violin is discovered, only to be lost again, until it surfaces in Nazi-occupied Europe, where it is hidden away. Bad luck has befallen everyone who has possessed it, and a quirk of fate draws a brilliant young British virtuoso into the desperate search to recover the lost violin. This intoxicating thriller weaves effortlessly between countries, encompassing the world of classical music, stolen art, and historical fact.
ALEXANDER FULLERTON
- The Aphrodite Cargo (1985): An action-packed thriller. Mike Clinker, a Chicago journalist, has flown to his beaten father's bedside in London and pieces together a fragmented tale of Nazi loot shipped out of Russia forty years ago, intercepted and mislaid. When Mike attempts to clear the matter up, he is also hunted.
JONATHAN GASH
- The Ten Word Game (2004): 22nd Lovejoy novel. British rogue/antiques expert Lovejoy is to visit Leningrad's Hermitage Museum to allegedly abscond with a few masters. However, as he is pampered from Amsterdam to Oslo, and finally Leningrad, he learns the true caper: to steal the renowned wall panels of the Amber Room.
HARRIS GREENE
- Canceled Accounts (1972): 'Who would suspect an old Jew, survivor of German concentration camps, of being in league with O.D.E.S.S.A., the organization of ex-SS members? Who could imagine that the numbered accounts he controlled in Swiss banks contained millions of francs-once the property of murdered Jews?'
JONATHAN HARRIS
- Seizing Amber (2001): Inspired by The Maltese Falcon, this novel follows a high stakes quest for one of the world's most valuable treasures, the Amber Room.
ROBERT HARRIS
- Fatherland (1992): Crime thriller/alternate history, set 25 years after Germany has won WWII. Joseph Kennedy is U.S. president, Adolph Hitler is about to turn 75. Police investigator Xavier March investigates the apparent suicide of a prominent Nazi, which leads him to discover other suicides, accidental deaths, a numbered vault in Zurich, and a beautiful American reporter, and eventally the pattern behind the deaths. He learns through incriminating papers that the Holocaust actually happened. Well-reviewed. (Filmed in Prague and Berlin as an HBO original movie, with Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson.)
APRIL HENRY
- Circles of Confusion (1999): When Oregon DMV employee/sleuth Claire Montrose inherits a beautiful small painting of a woman sitting at a table that looks as if it might be valuable, she suspects the artwork might be one of many masterpieces that disappeared in Europe during WWII. She has it appraised in New York, where an expert tells her that the painting is a forgery, but at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a handsome artist says that the canvas may be an authentic Vermeer. Attempts to steal the painting convince Claire that the artist may be right. First in the series; each chapter ends with a license plate to be deciphered.
PHILIP HOOK
- Stonebreakers (1994): A novel constructed out of the presumed destruction of a painting by Courbet (i.e. 'The Stonebreakers') in Dresden at the end of the war.
- The Island of the Dead (1995): 'The Island of the Dead' is a disturbing painting, but that cannot be the only reason for its mutilation when it goes on view in a public gallery.
- Soldier in the Wheatfield (1999): Parnello Moran can see which paintings have hidden talent or are by major masters. He buys a painting of a German landscape, and it is immediately stolen from him. As he sets out to get it back, he finds all the recent owners have met with violent deaths.
- An Innocent Eye (2000): A man is murdered in a London hotel room, and the only clue is a Polaroid of Monet's landscape in his pocket. British journalist Daniel Stern recognizes the connection. The unfolding plot interweaves two story-lines: the tracking down of a Monet painting, misappropriated in occupied Paris in 1940, and corruption within the Vatican.
A.E. HOTCHNER
- The Man Who Lived at the Ritz (1981): Thriller about an art historian who lives at the Ritz in Paris. The art treasures of Paris are the prize in this tale of intrigue and suspense, set in Nazi-occupied Paris and featuring a cast of characters including Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goerring, Coco Chanel, Lindbergh, and Hemingway.
SARA HOUGHTELING
- Pictures at an Exhibition (2009): Set in a Paris darkened by World War II, this is a sweeping novel about a son's quest to recover his family's lost masterpieces, looted by the Nazis during the occupation. He navigates a city of corrupt art dealers, black marketers, Resistants, and collaborators. Not a crime novel (though it is 'written with tense drama').
RICHARD HUGO
- Last Judgment (1988): Among other plots, a special Nazi unit expropriates art works in Poland and the SAS (a secret counter-terrorist organisation) tries to uncover a terrorist plot that might sabotage high-level meetings between NATO scientists. The Irish Republican Army, Marxists and denizens of the London art world also feature.
J. ROBERT JANES
- Mannequin (1999): 4th in crime series. Set in 1940s Europe, features Inspectors Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the French Surete and Hermann Kohler of the Gestapo. Top Nazi Hermann Goering's in Paris on an art-looting mission that crosses paths with an investigation by Kohler and St-Cyr into the murders of several young women who answered an ad to become fashion models.
LYNNE KENNEDY
- Deadly Provenance (2013). Mystery. “Still Life: Vase with Oleanders” is a painting by Vincent van Gogh, believed to have been confiscated by the Nazis during the Second World War Today, almost seventy years later, world-renowned digital photographer, Maggie Thornhill is searching for the missing work of art. Her lifelong friend, Ingrid, has asked her to do the impossible -- authenticate the painting from a photograph that's been passed down to Ingrid by her grandfather, Klaus Rettke a key member of the German Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi organization appointed to confiscate art from the Jews. From the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris, Maggie searches for answers. Finally, she confronts the possibility that there is not one painting, but the original and several forgeries. With tens of millions of dollars at stake and a killer at large, she is determined to find the authentic Van Gogh. To do so, Maggie must stay alive, something that’s proving difficult to do.
ANDREW KLAVAN
- The Uncanny (1998): Hollywood filmmaker Richard Storm is running out of time, diagnosed with a brain tumour. He heads to London in a desperate quest to find evidence of life beyond the grave, and falls in love with Sophia, whose wealthy father runs an art gallery and who is involved in the purchase of the famous Rhinehart triptych of the Holy Family, which is about to be auctioned. The triptych, an art treasure looted by German occultists who were helping to guide Hitler, has just surfaced. An eccentric modern ghost story.
WILLIAM E. KNIGHT
- The Devil's End Game (2006): Almost 4 decades after Mussolini was deposed in Italy, Greenwich Village detective Leopold Czernik, war veteran and now trouble-shooter for big business, is hired by an Italian Holocaust survivor to track down art works stolen from his family by the Nazis. His investigations lead him into a tangled web of violence, treachery and murder.
ROCHELLE KRICH
- Blood Money (2000): A murder investigation into the suspicious death of a Holocaust survivor. Elements include Swiss bank accounts, an art collection that may contain stolen paintings, a philanthropic organization dedicated to helping Holocaust survivors reclaim their assets but which seems to be implicated in the present-day murder of aging, lonely Holocaust survivors. Police procedural featuring Los Angeles homicide detective Jessica Drake.
JANE LANGTON
- The Thief of Venice (1999): 14th in Homer Kelly series; set in Venice. Homer settles in to study Renaissance manuscripts, and Mary sets out, guidebook in hand, to see the city, where she becomes involved with a handsome doctor, who turns out to be a particularly vile murderer. The tangled plot jumps between the personal and spiritual problems of the Kellys' host, a librarian, and the discovery of art treasures hidden by Venetian Jews during World War II.
DONNA LEON
- Wilful Behavior (2002): Commissario Brunetti is drawn into secrets dating back to WWII by the murder of a young girl.
ROBERT S. LEVINSON
- Hot Paint (2002): A gift of eleven Warhol silk screens exposes actress Stevie Marriner and her L.A. newspaper columnist ex-husband Neil to an art underground that will murder to acquire stolen Nazi art treasures. Fast-paced thriller.
PAUL LINDSAY
- The Fuhrer's Reserve: A Novel of the FBI (2000): Thriller/suspense. Agent Taz Fallon is charged with the dangerous mission of locating Hitler's priceless, missing art treasures before a band of neo-Nazis can sell them to benefit a neofascist regime. Another description: A lost painting (a rare Alfred Sisley) that surfaces at an auction is key to discovering a cache of paintings stolen by Herman Goering. The focus is on how the Nazis stole art from Jewish collectors, and how much of that stolen art was later sold to unscrupulous dealers who made fortunes. Well-reviewed by Kirkus and Booklist.
ELIZABETH LOWELL
- Amber Beach (1997): Romantic suspense. When her brother Kyle vanishes, along with a fortune in stolen amber, Honor Donovan settles into his cottage in the San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest and hires fishing guide Jake Mallory to help her search for him. What Jake doesn't want Honor to know is that, until recently, he brokered amber deals for Donovan International, and is now suspected by them of having stolen the missing amber, along with a priceless Russian antiquity called the Amber Room.
GAYLE LYNDS
- Mosaic (1999): Romantic suspense. Concert pianist Julia Austrian's intermittent blindness is one of the mysteries woven through this book, which focuses on Nazi theft of artifacts from the fabled Amber Room in one of Russia's imperial palaces at the end of World War II. Julia and Sam Keeline, a disillusioned CIA agent, team up.
HELEN MACINNES
- Pray For a Brave Heart (1955): Set against the breathtaking mountain backdrop of Switzerland, this novel of international intrigue unfolds the powerful story of a young American's search for a priceless cache of hidden Nazi loot. (Another book, Above Suspicion (1942), is a story of Nazi Germany, the Gestapo, and the underground railroad. It was made into a film starring Fred MacMurray and Joan Crawford.)
JIM MALLON
- Laundered Loot: A Novel (2002): Very little info available about this book, described only as 'thriller involving banking tycoons and Nazi crimes in the Netherlands.' Doesn't appear to have been reviewed.
ADRIAN MATHEWS
- The Apothecary's House (2005): When an old woman storms into the Rijks Museum demanding the return of her painting, archivist Ruth Braams cannot quell her curiosity. Ruth delves into the history of the piece of looted Nazi art and discovers an enigmatic picture with a disturbing wartime provenance.
FRANK MCDONALD
- Provenance (1979): Story of a hoard of art masterpieces stolen by the Nazis during World War II -- those who collected the paintings, stole them, and now propose to sell them. Spans 1895 to 1979 and Paris to New York.
EARL MERKEL
- Dirty Fire (2003). Crime novel in series. Former Chicago cop, now fire marshall, John Davey is helping an old colleague investigate the suspicious death of a wealthy art collector who burned to death in his opulent North Shore mansion. Soon his inquires lead to billions of dollars in artwork that disappeared during the holocaust.
LAURA MORELLI
- The Night Portrait (2020). The Tattooist of Auschwitz meets Girl with a Pearl Earring in this gripping, dual-timeline historical novel about one of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous paintings and the woman who fought to save it from the Nazis. Set in Munich, 1939, and in Milan, 1492.
- The Stolen Lady (2021). Historical novel about two women, separated by five hundred years, who each hide Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, with unintended consequences. Set in France, 1939, and in Florence, 1479.
NEIL OLSON
- The Icon (2005): Thriller. In 1944 a group of Greek partisans are hiding from the Germans near the village of Katarini. A plan to trade a painted icon for some weapons goes awry, and an ancient Byzantine icon disappears, to resurface 56 years later on the wall of a private chapel in the New York City home of a Swiss banker named Kessler. After Kessler dies, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an elderly Greek gangster and other mysterious characters vie to acquire the icon.
LEONARDO PADURA
- Heretics (2017). A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author. In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana's port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear. Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel's son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family's lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana.
STEVEN K. PALUMBO, M.D.
- Spoils (2006): Suspense, with a love triangle. A French Resistance fighter, trying to make contact with his wife and daughter, and a German art historian, unwillingly conscripted into the Nazi plot to loot the art treasures of Paris, try to outwit the war machine in 1940 Nazi-occupied Paris.
PATRICK PARKER, USA-Ret.
- Treasures of the Fourth Reich (2005): Dix and Maria Connor face down a deadly network trafficking in stolen art. Dix is a retired lieutenant colonel who served with NATO, Maria an art historian who fought against Noriega's regime. Together they expose a plot with origins in the Nazi looting of a Titan, a Bruegel, and a panel from the Amber Room, from European museums and families during World War II.
IAIN PEARS
- The Last Judgment (1993): Hired to deliver a painting from a Parisian art dealer to a client in Rome, British art historian and amateur sleuth Jonathan Argyll finds himself involved in a double murder and begins a probe that uncovers a secret hidden since World War II.
LEWIS PERDUE
- Daughter of God (2000): The Nazi plunder of Europe's art and antiquities during WWII sets the stage for a thriller spun around a religious cover-up that could topple the Vatican and crush Western religion. A dying, repentant Nazi, Willi Max, calls renowned American art broker/historian Zoe Ridgeway, to Switzerland, where he reveals his cache of looted treasure, hiring her to catalogue and return it to the owners or heirs. Starred review from Booklist, good review from PW.
ELIZABETH PETERS
- Trojan Gold (1987): Art historian Vicky Bliss returns in search of Schliemann's famous discovery, gone missing since the fall of Berlin, the fabulous gold of Troy. The arrival of a bloodstained envelope sparks a fascinating treasure hunt and a surprising international academic reunion at a posh ski resort somewhere in Southern Germany.
J. C. POLLOCK
- Goering's List (1993): 'Goering's list' names current owners of many art treasures missing since World War II. When a former SS man dies, he leaves the list to his son, a former member of the Stasi and now a most-wanted terrorist known as Dieter, who puts the information to use funding operations for his secret organization, planning and executing daring art robberies in New York and Britain, murdering the current art owners. The CIA calls on renegade counter-terrorist Mike Semko to team up with a beautiful Israeli agent to track down Dieter.
PATRICIA POTTER
- Broken Honor (2001): Romantic thriller. Publishers Weekly: 'History professor Amy Mallory's devotion to her long-deceased grandfather is put to the test when he and two other high-ranking World War II vets are accused of having looted Jewish treasures nearly 60 years earlier.'
JOE POYER
- The Balkan Assignment (1971): International caper sparked by $1,000,000 worth of blood-soaked Nazi loot, buried for 30 years in a forgotten island cave off Yugoslavia.
MICHAEL PYE
- The Pieces from Berlin (2003): Inspired by a true story from secret criminal files, about a woman who made her fortune trafficking stolen art in wartime Berlin and the price other people paid for her crimes
PIERS PAUL READ
- Patriot in Berlin (1995): aka The Patriot. A blatant present day art heist appears to mirror the looting of art treasures during World War II. America art historian Francesca McDermott arrives in Berlin following the murder of a Russian couple and the disappearance of a rogue KGB agent.
ROBERT L. RODIN
- Articles of Faith (1998): Thiller about Nazis' theft of art treasures, Swiss fencing of Nazi gold, the German clergy's accommodation of Hitler, and a father-son relationship. Not well reviewed by PW, LJ, or Kirkus.
LUIS SEPULVEDA
- The Name of a Bullfighter (1996): Translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Ruta. During WW II, two German soldiers steal a collection of priceless gold coins. One escapes to Chile, where he buries the coins; the other gets caught and ends up living in East Germany. Fifty years later, after the fall of the Berlin wall, the coins are hot again, sought after by Juan Belmonte, a political exile from Chile living in Hamburg, and Frank Galinsky, an ex-Stasi agent. Well-reviewed by Booklist.
DANIEL SILVA
- The English Assassin (2003): Gabriel Allon, painting restorer and reluctant Israeli spy, is assigned to Switzerland to meet with a man who has a painting to be restored and also has requested a meeting with Israeli intelligence. When Gabriel arrives, he finds the client dead and himself involved in a 50-year-old mystery involving Nazi art theft from World War II. (Another book featuring Allon, The Confessor (2003), explores Vatican collaboration with the Nazis. Allon is also in A Death in Vienna.)
LOREN SINGER
- Making Good (1991): An inventory of Nazi loot leads to a mysterious character, Hamplemann, listed in Nazi records as the owner of paintings, first editions, rare stamps, coins -- hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of antiques and collectibles. Is he a Nazi who stole a fortune, a con man, or a front for someone even more powerful?
DOUGLAS SKEGGS
- The Estuary Pilgrim (1989): A Monet that was once a treasure of Nazi Germany becomes the center of a violent and mysterious international art fraud scandal when the painting, supposedly destroyed during World War II, resurfaces. Looks at how a lost painting is authenticated.
TAYLOR SMITH
- Deadly Grace (2001): While on the trail of Jillian Meade, suspected of brutally murdering three veterans of the anti-Nazi underground, federal agent Alex Cruz uncovers an extraordinary tale of a wartime heist of Nazi gold and betrayal.
NEAL STEPHENSON
- Cryptonomicon (2002): Lengthy, detailed techno-thriller. An army corporal and a cryptanalysis specialist cross paths during WWII as they fight to mislead and outfox their Nazi counterparts. Skip ahead decades, when these two and the grandson of one of the men, himself the founding member of an internet bank, learn of a plot to hide billions in Japanese and Nazi gold at the end of WWII and trace a path to find it.
WADE STEVENSON and BARBARA TEEL
- The Salzdorf Wellspring (2000): Thriller. Mid-1950s America was a time of peace and hope, while much of Europe was still recovering from the horrors and destruction of WWII. Old Masters paintings and other priceless objets d'art were stolen from victims of the Reich and secretly stored in mines and vaults all over Germany. Many of those hiding places were discovered after the war, but many remain hidden --even today. One in particular, the Salzdorf Wellspring, was the richest and most magnificent of them all....
KAREN SWAN
- The Paris Secret (2016). When high-powered fine art agent Flora Sykes is called in to assess objets d’art in a Paris apartment that has been abandoned since WWII, she is skeptical at first — until she discovers that the treasure trove of paintings is myriad, and priceless. The powerful Vermeil family to whom they belong is eager to learn more and asks Flora to trace the history of each painting. Despite a shocking announcement that has left her own family reeling, Flora finds herself thrown into the glamorous world of the Vermeils. As she researches the provenance of their prize Renoir, she uncovers a scandal surrounding the painting, and a secret that goes to the very heart of the family. The fallout will place Flora in the eye of a storm that carries her from London to Vienna to the glittering coast of Provence.
HEATHER TERRELL
- The Chrysalis (2007): Debut novel. Hard-driving Manhattan attorney Mara Coyne is confronted by the case of her career when she is asked to defend a prestigious auction house against claims that a mysterious Dutch masterpiece about to be sold is a Nazi wartime theft, a case that reveals the brutal methods used by the Nazis to pilfer art, as well as the corrupt underbelly of the art world itself.
JONATHAN TULLOCH
- A Winding Road (2009): From the Black Forest to the wastes of Ukraine, Nazi Germany to modern day Amsterdam, from the fall of Berlin to the excesses of the modern art world, Van Gogh�s lost painting takes us on a journey through the best and worst of European history. Historical thriller.
JAMES TWINING
- The Black Sun (2006): Thriller. "Around the world, thieves are committing strange robberies and bizarre murders, all of them apparently connected to World War II and Nazi Germany. To solve the crimes, art thief turned investigator Tom Kirk and his partner navigate their way through a labyrinth of devious clues left behind by a supersecret Nazi group more than half a century ago" (Booklist review). Eichmann's 'gold train' and the lost Russian Amber Room figure.
JANWILLEM VAN DE WETERING
- The Butterfly Hunter (1982): Thriller of the chase for hidden Nazi loot.
SUSAN VREELAND
- Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999): Novel follows the trail of an 'unknown' painting by the Dutch master Vermeer, titled 'The Girl in Hyacinth Blue,' after it is discovered in the basement of a man who inherited it from his father, a Nazi looter in Holland during World War II. Also looks at the circumstances of the Jewish family from whom the painting was stolen. Received starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus.
SYLVIA MAULTASH WARSH
- To Die In Spring (2001): First in a mystery series featuring Dr. Rebecca Temple, a young widow recovering from the early death of her beloved artist husband. The book explores deceptions that go back to the Nazi death camps in Poland and that underlie the paranoia and death of one of Temple's patients. The novel also explores Jewish museums, housing Jewish artifacts -- which Hitler planned to build to show future Aryan generations what Jews were, once they no longer existed -- as well as the mentality of Nazi Judaica experts who collected the artifacts for the museum. Set in 1979 Toronto and in Germany during WWII. Nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award and two Anthonys.
SUSAN WINKLER
- Portrait of a Woman in White: A Novel (2014). Not crime fiction but a family saga set in 1940 France. When a beloved Matisse portrait of Lili Rosenswig's mother is stolen by Herman Goring, the eccentric family's story is intertwined with the fate of the painting.
A.J. ZERRIES
- The Lost Van Gogh (2007) : A painting stolen during WWII mysteriously appears at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is returned to its rightful owner/heir but an attack on the heir leads the New York Police to a cunning mastermind who will resort to as many murders as necessary to regain the painting.
Nazi Art Thefts: Non-Fiction
There are many non-fiction books about art theft during World War II. Here are a few that have been well-reviewed:
GERARD AALDERS
- Nazi Looting: The Plunder of Dutch Jewry during the Second World War (2004): Looks at art, real estate and equities -- interlocking looting systems -- in the Netherlands. The Engliish Historical Review calls it a 'well-researched and concise book,' Seems to be somewhat of a textbook.
KONSTANTIN AKINSHA
- Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe's Art Treasures (1995): This book explores the politics, motives, and secrecy of the Soviets' plunder of millions of treasures from German museums and private collections during and after WWII.
KENNETH D. ALFORD
- Allied Looting in World War II: Thefts of Art, Manuscripts, Stamps and Jewelry in Europe (2011). This book, which addresses the often-overlooked practice of Allied looting, follows the journey of the Hungarian Crown Treasure from muddy oil drum in Austria to Fort Knox and back to Austria. Numerous lost treasures are discussed, including Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man, and lost manuscripts, including the earliest known printing by the Gutenberg press.
ILARIA DAGNINI BREY
- The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II (2009): One review, by the author of Brunelleschi's Dome: 'Art and war come together in this superbly researched history that reveals how Italy's Renaissance masterpieces were caught in the crossfire of World War II. Brey recounts how many of these works almost miraculously survived, and who we have to thank for saving them -- a somewhat unlikely crew of art historians, scholars, and architects.'
CHARLES DE JAEGER
- The Linz File: Hitler's Plunder of Europe's Art (1981). Tells of the recovery of thousands of works of European art stolen during WWII, meant to provide the basis of the great museum that Hitler planned to be built in Linz after the war. With extensive bibliography and a list of works not yet recovered. 192pp.
PAULINE BAER DE PERIGNON
- The Vanished Collection (2022). Translated by Natasha Lehrer. It all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss: Renoir, Monet, Degas, Tiepolo and more. Pauline Baer de Perignon knew little to nothing about Strauss, or about his vanished, precious art collection. But the list drove her on a frenzied trail of research in the archives of the Louvre and the Dresden museums, through Gestapo records, and to consult with Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. What happened in 1942? And what became of the collection after Nazis seized her great-grandparents’ elegant Parisian apartment?
EDWARD DOLNICK
- The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century (2008): Reads like a thriller. This is the true story of three men and an extraordinary deception: the revered artist Johannes Vermeer; the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him years later; and the con man's mark, Hermann Goering, the fanatical art collector and one of Nazi Germany's most reviled leaders.
ROBERT EDSEL
- Rescuing Da Vinci: Hitler and the Nazis Stole Europe's Great Art - America and Her Allies Recovered It (2006). 460 photographs that tell the story of the Monuments Men.
- The Monuments Men (2009): The story of seven men from the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives section of the Allied armed forces, an ambitious effort to preserve the world's cultural heritage; these men -- including a curator, a conservator, a scuptor, a painter, and an infantryman -- were among those charged with saving hundreds of damaged buildings and finding millions of cultural items before the Nazis can destroy them forever. Highly acclaimed.
HECTOR FELICIANO
- The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art (1997): Reads like a good detective story. Journalist Feliciano focuses on French private collections that were either appropriated outright by the German government or purchased at fire-sale prices. Well-written and thoroughly documented. Part mystery, part crime thriller, and part art history. Booklist says that this 'zesty, incisive, and entertaining inquiry illuminates the hidden dimensions and explicates the far-reaching implications of this fascinating and provocative collision of art and ambition, deception and war.'
SIMON GOODMAN
- The Orpheus Clock: The Search for My Family's Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis (2015). Simon Goodman’s grandparents came from German-Jewish banking dynasties and perished in concentration camps. And that’s almost all he knew about them—his father rarely spoke of their family history or heritage. But when his father passed away, and Simon received his old papers, a story began to emerge. The Gutmanns, as they were known then, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany’s most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many more. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives. Only after his father’s death did Simon begin to piece together the clues about the Gutmanns’ stolen legacy and the Nazi looting machine. With painstaking detective work across two continents, Simon has been able to prove that many works belonged to his family and successfully secure their return.
PETER HARCLERODE AND BRENDA PITTAWAY
- The Lost Masters: WW II and the Looting of Europe's Treasurehouses (2000): With an almost overwhelming attention to detail, the authors trace the elusive web of collaborators, opportunists and dealers who exploited the Third Reich's lust for prestigious trophies. Gripping vignettes and revelatory anecdotes illuminate the fates of specific works of art.
CATHERINE HICKLEY
- Munich Art Hoard: Hitler's Dealer and His Secret Legacy (2016). A comprehensive retelling of the Gurlitt case.
WILLIAMS HONAN
- Treasure Hunt: A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Hoard (1997): The famous and priceless medieval artworks that became known as the Quedlinburg treasures were commandeered by the Nazis and hidden in a cave on the outskirts of Quedlinburg in central Germany, but after American troops occupied the area April 1945, twelve of the treasures (worth more than $200 million today) went missing. For many years, the Quedlinburg case was considered the longest unsolved art theft of the century ... until Honan, a senior reporter at The New York Times, and Willi Korte, a German researcher, tracked down the thief and the hiding place of the treasures in northeastern Texas.
BRINKLEY HOWARD
- MFAA: The History of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program (2016). "A group of art historians, museum curators, scholars, and others with an expertise in art accepted the enormous responsibility of traveling to the front lines of World War II in an effort to protect art before it could be stolen or recover the art that fell into the hands of the Nazis. Even more lent their expertise when the fighting ended, remaining in Europe for years after the war was over. They were called "Venus fixers" by the troops but have since come to be known as the Monuments Men. Acting on orders from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had the backing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, many of the Monuments Men - and women - put their lives on the line for art. By doing so, they preserved not just paintings, sculptures, and tapestries, but a significant portion of the culture that makes life worth living."
HANS KNOOP
- The Menten Affair (1978): The story of the exposure, arrest, and eventual conviction in 1977 of Pieter Menten, a Nazi collaborator and mass murderer who had established himself after the war as a benign multi-millionaire art collector. This account of Knoop's investigation reads like a fast-paced crime drama (from Kirkus review).
MARY M. LANE
- Hitler's Last Hostages: Looted Art and the Soul of the Third Reich (2019). In 2013, the German government confiscated roughly 1,300 works by Henri Matisse, George Grosz, Claude Monet, and other masters from the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of one of Hitler's primary art dealers. For two years, the government kept the discovery a secret. In this book, Lane reveals the fate of those works and tells the definitive story of art in the Third Reich and Germany's ongoing struggle to right the wrongs of the past.
ADRIAN LEVY AND CATHERINE SCOTT-CLARK
- The Amber Room: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure (2004): Details the hunt for the Amber Room, showing how modern-day searchers must deal with the agendas of previous hunters and of the guardians of the archives. Clear maps and 50 black-and-white photos.
ARTHUR J. MCLAUGHLIN, JR
- Art and the Nazis, 1933-1945: Looting, Propaganda and Seizure (2022). "This first comprehensive analysis of the Third Reich's efforts to confiscate, loot, censor and influence art begins with a brief history of the looting of artworks in Western history. The artistic backgrounds of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering are examined, along with the various Nazi art looting organizations, and Nazi endeavors to both censor and manipulate the arts for propaganda purposes. Long-held beliefs about the Nazi destruction of 'degenerate art' are examined, drawing on recently developed university databases, new translations of original documents, and recently discovered information. Theft and destruction of artworks by the Allies and looting by Soviet Trophy Brigades are also documented."
MELISSA MULLER & MONICA TATZKOW
- Lost Lives, Lost Art: Jewish Collectors, Nazi Art Theft, and the Quest for Justice (2010). The legendary names include Rothschild, Mendelssohn, Bloch-Bauer — distinguished bankers, industrialists, diplomats, and art collectors. Their diverse taste ranged from manuscripts and musical instruments to paintings by Old Masters and the avant-garde. But their stigma as Jews in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe doomed them to exile or death in Hitler’s concentration camps. Here, after years of meticulous research, Melissa Müller and Monika Tatzkow present the tragic, compelling stories of 15 Jewish collectors, the dispersal of their extraordinary collections through forced sale and/or confiscation, and the ongoing efforts of their heirs to recover their inheritance.
LYNN H. NICHOLAS
- The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (1994): Nicholas offers an astonishingly good account of the wholesale ravaging of European art during World War II by Allied and Axis soldiers alike, of how teams of international experts have worked to recover lost masterpieces in the war's aftermath and of how governments are still negotiating for the return of many stolen objects.
ANNE- MARIE O'CONNOR
- The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (2015). The true story that inspired the movie "Woman in Gold." O’Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt’s 1907 masterpiece, the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government. When the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, its decision had profound ramifications in the art world. Expertly researched, masterfully told, The Lady in Gold is at once a stunning depiction of fin-de siècle Vienna, a riveting tale of Nazi war crimes, and a fascinating glimpse into the high-stakes workings of the contemporary art world.
NICHOLAS M. O'DONNELL
- A Tragic Fate: Law and Ethics in the Battle Over Nazi-Looted Art (2017). Published by the American Bar Association. Addresses comprehensively the legal and ethical rules that have dictated the results of restitution claims between competing claimants to the same works of Nazi-looted art. It provides a history of Art and Culture in German-occupied Europe, an introduction to the most significant collections in Europe to be targeted by the Nazis, and a narrative of the efforts to reclaim looted artwork in the decades following the Holocaust through profiles of some of the art world's most famous and influential restitution cases.
JONATHAN PETROPOULOS
- The Faustian Bargain: The Art World of Nazi Germany (2000): Spotlighting five groups -- art museum directors, art dealers, art journalists, art historians, and artists -- Petropoulos carefully and systematically details how each of these groups either directly or indirectly facilitated the theft of countless works of art and legitimized the Nazi regime. Petropoulos is research director of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Committee on Holocaust Assets and history professor at Claremont McKenna College in California.
- Goering's Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World (2021). Petropoulos "brings Lohse into sharper focus, as a personality and axis point from which to explore a network of art dealers, collectors and museum curators connected to Nazi looting. . . . What emerges from Petropoulos's research is a portrait of a charismatic and nefarious figure who tainted everyone he touched." (Nina Siegal, New York Times review)
SUSAN RONALD
- Hitler's Art Thief : Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe's Treasures (2015). The world was stunned when eighty-year old Cornelius Gurlitt became an international media superstar on the discovery of over 1,400 artworks in his Munich apartment. Susan Ronald reveals in this stranger-than-fiction-tale how Hildebrand succeeded in looting in the name of the Third Reich, duping the Monuments Men and the Nazis alike.
ANDERS RYDELL
- Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance (2017). The story of the Nazis' systematic pillaging of Europe's libraries, and the small team of heroic librarians now working to return the stolen books to their rightful owners.