An unusual case: How did the painting stolen by the Nazis from a gallery owner in Amsterdam end up in Mar del Plata?

The “Portrait of a Lady” by Giuseppe Ghislandi , stolen by the Nazis from the prestigious collection of the Jewish merchant Jacques Goudstikker and whose possible reappearance after 80 years was revealed yesterday through a photo taken at the Argentine home of the daughter of SS officer Friedrich Kadgien does not appear under that name in the Black Catalogue of its original owner.

The painting ended up in the hands of Friedrich Kadgien, a Nazi official and member of the SS , who fled first to Switzerland and then to South America, where he settled in Argentina and died in 1978 in Buenos Aires.

The name of the painter Giuseppe Ghislandi, or his also known name, Fra Galgario, also appears here. The work "Dames Portret" appears under the name Fra Ghislandi.

The catalog, arranged alphabetically, includes works by Goya, Van Dyck, Fragonard, and Vermeer and can be viewed online at this link . Not all the works in the Goudstikker collection were inventoried, but they are known.

The gallery owned by businessman and collector Jacques Goudstikker in the 1930s in Amsterdam, with some 1,300 pieces—including Rembrandts and Vermeers—was sold at bargain prices by high-ranking officials of the Third Reich.

Since then, the family of Jacques Goudstikker has been fighting steadily for years to find and recover all 1,300 works in the collection .

The 1,113 paintings listed were bought under duress and at a vile price of 2 million florins, approximately one sixth of their real value , by Hermann Göring himself, in Amsterdam, on July 13, 1940, after the accidental death of their owner, who fell into the sea from a boat while crossing the English Channel fleeing from the Nazis.

The current and sole heir, Marei von Saher, wife of Goudstikker's son , set a precedent by getting the Dutch government to return, in 2006, 202 works recovered by the Allied army at the end of the war.

Other returns include a Degas drawing, which was in the Israel Museum and was voluntarily returned. In 2024, "Adam and Eve," a work attributed to the 16th-century Dutch artist Cornelis van Haarlem, was also returned to the family. The artwork had been donated in good faith to the Rolin Museum in Autun, France. Upon examination, they discovered a label that led to the discovery of its true provenance. The donors agreed to return it. Luck has not always been on the side of such actions.

The close friendship between Göring and Friedrich Kadgien, nicknamed "the Nazi financial wizard," suggests that, if the work was original, he may have obtained it through the latter.

Last year, 2024, the documentary The Trail of the Serpent was released, produced by the WDR network, which tells the story of Kadgien's life in South America – Argentina and Brazil, among other destinations – who was considered one of the last "useful assets" of Nazism, decorated by Hitler.

After the war, he lived in Argentina without any major problems . The documentary can be viewed at this YouTube link.

If the work "Portrait of a Lady", which is a portrait of Countess Colleoni , is original, it will also be one of the few proven cases of works of art in Argentina, brought and preserved by the Nazis , who used the country mainly as a transit point and as a triangle in trade, mainly destined for the United States.

A list, declassified by the Allied army at the end of the war, includes several Argentines and residents of the country investigated on suspicion of art trafficking during World War II.

Articles by Miguel Ángel Navarro and José Emilio Burucúa, and the books *The Nazis in Argentina, *Odessa to the South*, *Argentina as a Refuge for Nazis and War Criminals * by Jorge Camarasa; *Silence is Golden * by Daniel Schavelzon; and *The Disappearing Museum* by Héctor Feliciano, among others, deal in various ways with the circulation in Argentina of works stolen by agents of the Third Reich.

For its part , The Goudstikker Case, by Pieter den Hollander, allows us to follow the story of one of the most complete art collections that disappeared during World War II.

For now, “Portrait of a Lady,” a work by Giuseppe Ghislandi, was found in a house for sale in the city of Mar del Plata in an unusual way : it appeared photographed in the living room, hanging over the sofa of a residence that one of the daughters of the former Nazi official put up for sale through the real estate agency Robles Casas & Campos, which when the discovery became news, deleted the publication from its website.