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| https://www.fold3.com/image/291857322 National Archives |
Erhard Göpel was an art historian who worked as an art dealer for Adolf Hitler.
Göpel's role in art looting was extensively documented by, among others, the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit during and after the Second World War. His wife, Barbara, was also an art dealer.
The Göpels (or Goepels) are back in the news in 2018 as The Art Newspaper reports: "Widow of Hitler’s art dealer, Erhard Göpel, bequeaths Max Beckmann works to Berlin" by Catherine Hickley)"Erhard Göpel was a key member of the Linz Special Commission, the team of dealers who purchased—and looted—art across Europe for Hitler’s unrealised Führermuseum, planned for his home town of Linz. Göpel was instrumental in acquiring the Schloss family collection in Paris after it had been looted by the Gestapo. The collection, assembled by an Austrian-born French Jew, included works by Rembrandt and Frans Hals. After the war, Göpel evaded sentencing and spent the rest of his career organising exhibitions in Munich."...
In 1944, Göpel travelled to the Netherlands and Belgium on an art shopping spree with Hildebrand Gurlitt, the dealer whose collection caused a worldwide media sensation when it was discovered in the Munich apartment of his son Cornelius Gurlitt in November 2013. During their business trip they visited Beckmann, who was living in Amsterdam in exile with his wife Quappi. As a victim of Joseph Goebbels’s campaign against Modern art, Beckmann had left Germany the day before the Degenerate Art exhibition opened in Munich in 1937. "- The Art Newspaper, Feb 21, 2018