Kajetan Mühlmann

Who is Kajetan Mühlmann?

Kajetan "Kai" Mühlmann was an Austrian art historian who was an officer in the SS and played a major role in the expropriation of art by the Nazis, particularly in Poland. He worked with Arthur Seyss-Inquart in the initial Nazi government in Vienna following the Anschluss, in the General Government and in The Hague where he headed an art clearing house in the occupied Netherlands known as the Dienststelle Mühlmann.

Mühlmann was one of the most successful art thieves of Nazism. He was described in 1946 as "the most implacable Nazi in the group of looters held for American interrogation during the summer [of] 1945." and Jonathan Petropoulos, an art historian specialising in Nazi plundering, has called him "arguably the single most prodigious art plunderer in the history of human civilization."