The Lancia is full to the flag. Porcelain, paintings, jewelry, small furniture. Early July 1944. Allied forces have landed on the beaches of Normandy. The Nazis retreat. Amid the chaos, antiquarian Pierre Lottier and Gestapo agent Erich Schiffmann load the vehicle with objects looted in France, Belgium and Holland to Jews and families persecuted and disgraced during the Second World War. They are going south, to make the same journey as the last three years.
In Monte Carlo they hire a taxi to load more trophies and precious stones. In Marseille, the German consul prepares their visas in his private chalet. The complicity is obvious. Accompanied by another partner at the wheel of a third vehicle also filled with luxury items, the convoy crosses the border through Portbou at the end of July. No jams. Bribes make customs officers look the other way. The material will be sold in Barcelona. The booty, 250,000 francs.
It is the last trip of the Gestapo merchant to Barcelona. The liberation of Paris in August will prevent him from returning there. The procedure followed since 1941 is simple. Lottier and his partner, and probably lover, Schiffmann, were in charge of removing the fruits of the loot from the French capital. The first, moreover, directed alone a second route originating in Marseille and Nice. Once the material was sold in the county town, they sent the corresponding percentage by bank transfer to Ernest Alisch, the SS captain and head of the security services in France, who covered the operations.
When the world war ends, Lottier turns his life around like a sock. He introduces himself to the officers of the new French information services in Barcelona, ??Gaullists, and offers details about the Nazi leaders of the networks in which he has participated. And in return? That a veil be thrown over his file. The Republic, interested in big fish, accepts. He makes him pay a small fine and forgets the marketing with art and luxury objects. Many of their owners will never claim them. They have expired in the gas chambers.
Lottier settled in Catalonia, where the Franco regime welcomed him with open arms, like so many other French collaborators. He will soon become a gentleman of Barcelona and will be able to walk his fox terrier around the upper part of the city while gaining respect and prestige. The plot is explained by the historian Xavier Juncosa (Barcelona, ??1956) in the biography La doble vida de Pierre Lottier that has just been published.
The protagonist was born in 1916 in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera. His family owned the luxury hotel and restaurant La Réserve, where celebrities such as Charles Maurras, Raquel Meller or Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway visited. He soon devoted himself to art and antiques and to acting as a buyer’s adviser in Nice. In the 1930s she traveled to Madrid, to Paris – where she was a lover of the poet Jean Cocteau – and to Rome, where she was a correspondent for the far-right French newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (along the lines of Action Française from Maurras). Once the world conflagration began, his political orientation and contact with Schiffmann, an Austrian Jew – as surprising as it may seem – did the rest.
From the beginning of the Nazi occupation of France, the couple dedicated themselves to reselling the looted material, as other agents did in different European cities. More than fifty stolen high-end cars came to be resold in Barcelona, ??Bilbao and Madrid. They had collaborators. The main one in the county town was Sebastià Manonellas Vidal, owner of the Decoración Manonellas store, in Gran Via amb Urgell, who served as a tapadora.
At the end of the 1940s, Lottier faced legal proceedings in France and some fines in Spain for smuggling – which was reported by La Vanguardia. From the fifties he became a promoter of boxing matches in Barcelona and manager of the Catalan boxer Boby Ros, winner of several championships in Catalonia and Spain. Also an internationally recognized interior and furniture designer, lamps and accessories. It is still easy to find them with a simple internet search.
In the middle of that decade, Lottier worked as an interior designer for Ava Gardner’s villa in La Moraleja. He also bought the Hostal de Cadaqués, formerly Casa Dalmau, and promoted the nights of class vacationers in the town. As he confessed to Andreu-Avel·lí Artís, “I like the selected clientele”. This is how Sempronio collected it in Destino magazine in 1960.
In Cadaqués, Lottier met Henri-François Rey, who stayed there for a long time because he was part of Salvador Dalí’s inner circle. As a result of this, the French philosopher wrote the novel Les pianos mécaniques (1961), with its epicenter at the Hostal, with the figurative name of La Estrella. In Spanish it was translated as Los organillos. In 1965, the Madrid filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem adapted it to the cinema as Los pianos mecánicos. Lottier collaborated with scenographer Enrique Alarcón in the interior design and thus appears in the credits of the film.
In the summer of 1965, Manuel Fraga’s Ministry of Information and Tourism was about to award him the medal for tourism merit. The usual procedure consultation that was made to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, advised against it. His past was overlooked, but not forgotten. Two years later Lottier left Cadaqués to open La Réserve – like the family establishment – ??in Santa Susanna, in Maresme. At the inauguration, in September 1967, the Duke of Alba, diplomats and leaders of the regime went there, as this newspaper gathered. For a decade, the restaurant was a must for the Barcelona cream.
It should come as no surprise that at the end of the seventies Lottier was commissioned to participate in the restoration and decoration of the Hotel Ritz, as he himself explained in an interview with Diari de Barcelona in 1979. Two years later, at 65, he married a 38-year-old French woman. In the autumn of 1987 he died in Santa Susanna, where he is buried, without most of those who knew him ever knowing that he had been part of the Gestapo’s laundering and resale network.
Lottier’s biography is another piece of the puzzle that Juncosa has been reconstructing for more than a year, mainly from the 25,000 documents related to Spain that he photographed in the spring of 2019 in the archive of the Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes among the military and police documentation from the Vichy period that François Hollande declassified. Just in time, because Emmanuel Macron reclassified it the following year.
A material, therefore, that it is likely that no one else has and that already has suitors, including a university in the Basque Country. It’s not because it is. La Vanguardia contributed to arousing interest with the reports it released two years ago about PNB’s contacts with Wehrmacht and SS officers. Documents that are part of the 1,400 pages of the volumes French counter-espionage in Barcelona (1943-1945) and French counter-espionage in Madrid and Morocco (1943-1945), published in 2021.
Lottier’s profile is added to that of another collaborator, the origin of all Juncosa’s research, Fernand-Joseph Sautès, whose biography was published last May, which Cultura/s reviewed. Journalism and the extreme right between Pétain’s collaborationist France and Franco’s Spain. For Sant Jordi, the historian has advanced to this newspaper that he is preparing a new installment, “a thousand mini-biographies of scoundrels, agents of the Gestapo and Franco’s security in Barcelona, ??Madrid and other cities, antennae of information, of whom hardly there are bibliographical references”. For the volumes published, the historian has only used around 800 documents from the set. The amount of Lottiers, Sautès and murky stories that there can be in the rest of the fund Juncosa owns is chilling.
