The Lancia is packed to capacity. Porcelain, paintings, jewelry, small furniture. Early July 1944. Allied forces have landed on the beaches of Normandy. The Nazis retreat. In the midst of the confusion, antiques dealer Pierre Lottier and Gestapo agent Erich Schiffmann load the vehicle with objects looted in France, Belgium and Holland from Jews and families persecuted and fallen from grace during the Second World War. They go south, to make the same journey as the last three years.
In Monte Carlo they rent a taxi to load more trophies and precious stones. In Marseille, the German consul prepares their visas in his private chalet. The complicity is evident. Accompanied by another partner at the wheel of a third vehicle also packed with luxury items, the convoy crosses the border through Portbou at the end of July. No obstacles. Bribes make customs officers look the other way. The material will be resold in Barcelona. The loot, 250,000 francs.
It is the last trip of the Gestapo dealer to Barcelona. The liberation of Paris in August will prevent him from returning. The procedure followed since 1941 is simple. Lottier and his partner, and probably his lover, Schiffmann, were in charge of removing the fruit of the plunder from the French capital. The first, in addition, alone ran a second route originating in Marseille and Nice. Once the material was sold in Barcelona, ??they sent the corresponding percentage by bank transfer to Ernest Alisch, the captain of the SS and head of the security services in France, who provided cover for the operations.
When the world war ends, Lottier turns his life around like a sock. He introduces himself to the Gaullist officers of the French intelligence services in Barcelona and offers details about the Nazi ringleaders of the networks in which he participated. And in return? Let a veil cover his file. The Republic, interested in big fish, accepts. He makes her pay a small fine and forgets about marketing art and luxury objects. Many 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 collaborationists. He will soon become a gentleman of Barcelona and will be able to walk his fox terrier through the upper part of the city while he gains respect and prestige. The plot is explained by the historian Xavier Juncosa (Barcelona, ??1956) in the recently published biography The Double Life of Pierre Lottier.
The protagonist was born in 1916 in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the Côte d’Azur. His family owned the luxury hotel and restaurant La Réserve, where celebrities such as Charles Maurras, Raquel Meller and Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway visited. He soon devoted himself to art and antiques and to acting as a buyer’s advisor in Nice. In the 1930s he traveled to Madrid, Paris – where he was the lover of the poet Jean Cocteau – and Rome, where he was a correspondent for the far-right French newspaper L’ Ami du Peuple (along the lines of Maurras’s Action Française). Once the world conflagration began, his political orientation and his contact with Schiffmann, an Austrian Jew—surprising as it may seem—did the rest.
From the beginning of the Nazi occupation of France, the couple dedicated themselves to reselling looted material, like other agents in more European cities. More than fifty high-end cars were stolen to be resold in Barcelona, ??Bilbao and Madrid. They had collaborators. The main one in Barcelona was Sebastià Manonellas Vidal, owner of the Decoracion Manonellas store, on Gran Via and Urgell, which served as a cover.
In the late 1940s, Lottier weathered legal proceedings in France and some fines in Spain for smuggling—which La Vanguardia reported. Starting in the 1950s, 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. He is also an internationally recognized designer of interiors and furniture, lamps and accessories. They are still searching on the internet.
In the middle of that decade, Lottier was the interior designer of Ava Gardner’s chalet in La Moraleja. He also bought the Hostal de Cadaqués, former Casa Dalmau, and promoted nights for 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 in 1960.
In Cadaqués, Lottier met Henri-François Rey, who stayed for a long time because he was part of Salvador Dalí’s inner circle. As a result, the French philosopher wrote the novel Les pianos mécaniques (1961), with its epicenter in the Hostel, with the figurative name of La Estrella. In Spanish it was translated by Los organillos. In 1965 the filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem adapted it to film as The Mechanical Pianos. Lottier collaborated with the set designer Enrique Alarcón on the interior design, as he appears in the credits.
In the summer of 1965, Manuel Fraga’s Ministry of Information and Tourism was about to award him the medal for tourist merit. The usual procedural consultation made to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, however, advised against it. His past was ignored, but he was not forgotten. Two years later Lottier left Cadaqués to open La Réserve – as the family establishment – ??in Santa Susanna, in the Maresme. The inauguration, in September 1967, was attended by the Duke of Alba, diplomats and leaders of the regime, as this newspaper reported. For a decade, the restaurant was a must-see for Barcelona’s cream.
It is not surprising that at the end of the seventies Lottier was commissioned to participate in the restoration and decoration of the Ritz Hotel, as he himself explained in an interview with Diario de Barcelona in 1979. Two years later, at 65, he married a French woman. 38. In the autumn of 1987, he died in Santa Susanna, where he is buried, without the majority of those who knew him knowing that he was part of the Gestapo money laundering network.
Lottier’s biography is one more piece of the puzzle that Juncosa has been reconstructing for more than five years, based on the 25,000 documents about Spain that he photographed in the spring of 2019 in the archive of the Service Historique de la Défense de Vincennes, belonging to the military and police documentation from the Vichy period that François Hollande declassified. At the right time, since Emmanuel Macron reclassified it the following year.
A material, therefore, that no one else probably has and that already has suitors, including a university in the Basque Country. La Vanguardia contributed to arousing interest with the reports it released two years ago about the PNV’s contacts with Wehrmacht and SS officers. Documents that are part of the 1,400 pages of the volumes El contraespionatge franças a Barcelona (1943-1945) and El contraespionatge franças a Madrid i Marroc (1943-1945), from 2021.
Lottier’s profile is added to that of another collaborator, the origin of all of Juncosa’s research, Fernand-Joseph Sautès, of whom last May he published the biography, which Cultura/s reviewed. Journalism and extreme right between Pétain’s collaborationist France and Franco’s Spain. For Sant Jordi, the historian has advanced to this newspaper that is preparing a new installment, “a thousand minibiographies of scoundrels, agents of the Gestapo and Franco’s security in Barcelona, ??Madrid and other cities, antennas of information, of which we barely have bibliographic references”. For the published volumes, the historian only used about 800 documents from the set. It is shocking how many Lottiers, Sautès and murky stories there may be deep inside Juncosa.
