The Collector: Art and the SS

"Armed Ukrainians were herding other Jews in our direction. Some had locked themselves in 'their houses and the doors had to be broken down and the people dragged out kicking and screaming. I recognized Pieter Menten in a German uniform, along with two other Gestapo agents. They had mounted machine guns in front of them. I saw Ukrainians digging a pit some 15 yards from the guns. You could hear voices and crying. Later the guards began to take people out in small groups of ten and twelve. They pushed them onto planks set over the pit. Then you could hear the machine guns. A continuous rat-ta-ta-tat. It was Menten with the two Germans."

Abe Pollak, 65, a Polish-born Jew who is now a New York hotel electrician, vividly remembers those horrible events of Aug. 27, 1941. Pollak ran from the scene and managed to escape the massacre that befell his family and their Jewish neighbors in the East Galician town of Urice. For years he lived alone with his nightmare, but now it is known to millions of Dutch citizens--as is their fellow countryman, Millionaire Art Collector Pieter Nicolaas Menten, 77. Last week Dutch and Swiss police finally cornered the fleeing Menten and his wife in a hotel near Zurich. Found in Menten's room: photocopies of Swiss extradition law, and tickets for a TWA flight to New York. Menten unsuccessfully attempted suicide shortly after his capture.

Bringing him to bay came as a vast relief to the embarrassed Dutch government, which had inexplicably fumbled his arrest three weeks before, allowing the alleged war criminal to escape from his palatial Blaricum estate, and causing a national scandal.

Deep Grudge. Born to a wealthy Rotterdam family, Menten first became interested in Poland through his father's business connections there. The son, in turn, developed an extensive export trade in Dutch products to Poland. Menten moved in 1923 to East Galicia (then in Poland, now part of the U.S.S.R.'s Ukraine), where he became a prosperous landowner and businessman. He was mild-mannered and quiet, but developed a deep grudge against a prominent neighboring Jewish family over a business dispute. Menten went home to Holland in 1939, when Russia invaded eastern Poland, and returned in 1941 after the Nazi counter-occupation--this time as a member of the SS. In Galicia, according to witnesses, he helped shoot as many members of the offending family as he could find, then turned on other Jews in the area.

The Nazi occupiers thought highly of Menten, and made him, among other things, a custodian of Jewish antique dealerships. On his trip back to Holland in 1943, he traveled in a private train carrying four carloads of his personal art works. This remarkable shipment brought him to the notice of Dutch Resistance fighters, and after the war Menten was tried as a Nazi collaborator.

The proceedings became the most drawn-out in postwar Dutch history. Menten had influential friends. His chief defense lawyer was the speaker of the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament. When the controversial trial ended in 1949, Menten got off with serving only an eight-month term for having worked in uniform as a Nazi interpreter. Later, Dutch prosecutors ignored allegations by an Israeli journalist that Menten had taken part in the East Galician atrocities. Two years later, in 1951, the Dutch government also brushed aside a Polish request for Menten's extradition.

Menten grew progressively richer by speculating in stocks and art objects, filling his 20-room mansion with more art works (his collection includes paintings by Nicolaes Maes, Francisco Goya and Jan Sluyters), and building up millions of dollars in real estate holdings. His undoing began last spring with publicity that the firm of Sotheby-Mak Van Waay would auction part of Menten's art collection in Amsterdam. The same Israeli journalist, Haviv Kanaan, who had been accumulating evidence against Menten for decades, alerted the Dutch press and, once again, the government. The press, led by Hans Knoop, editor of the weekly magazine Accent, and journalists of a television current-affairs program, Aktua TV* launched an investigative effort on a scale rarely seen in Europe. Pollak and another witness to the Urice killings were found; later, interviews were made with townspeople in East Galicia who identified Menten and described other killings in a neighboring village. Menten, denying all, was confronted, on live television, with the evidence.

Dutch officials then launched a new investigation. They decided to arrest Menten on a Thursday, but delayed the seizure until the next Monday. When police arrived at his mansion, a servant reported the Mentens had left on a long trip--destination unknown.

The furor in the Tweede Kamer was instantaneous and may not die down despite Menten's capture following a Swiss newsman's tip. Before fleeing, the art-loving SS man did some homework, if not quite enough. He calculated correctly that the Swiss statute of limitations on his offenses had expired. But the Swiss can expel those who commit "crimes against humanity." Doing so, however, requires a decision by the full Swiss cabinet, which will meet soon.

* Run by TIME Stringer Wibo van de Linde.

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