Blaine and the lost treasures

As he lies listlessly above the Thames, David Blaine likes to think of himself as an artist, rather than an opportunistic self-publicist. So, as he prepares to endure only six more days in his Plexiglass box by Tower Bridge - apparently largely unaware of the furore surrounding his starvation stunt - Blaine will, either way, be content that his "artistic-statement" has kept him in the spotlight worldwide.

Throughout his ordeal, Blaine, 30, has sought solace from the comforting-sight of his girlfriend, the former German model Manon von Gerkan, standing loyally below him. Amid the mayhem that has plagued his London showpiece, the blonde and elegant Manon has been there since the beginning of last month. Only once did her Teutonic facade crack, when she slung an egg into the face of yet another overly exuberant spectator who had himself hurled half a dozen at her boyfriend's glass prison. They have been together for nearly two years. They are, say friends, the perfect couple: the fiery New York Jew and the composed German beauty. He is the peculiar one; she the calm one.

But, perhaps inevitably, in the strange world of David Blaine, there is always a surprise. For Manon, 30, has an intriguing story of her own: and it is one which might come as something of a surprise to her boyfriend. It may even, in fairness, come as something of a surprise to Manon herself.

It is the most outlandish twist yet in the saga of David Blaine and his Thames-side box. A story, indeed, which sees Nazi forces looting some of the world's most precious antiquities; Roman archaeological sites plundered at the whim of Hitler's henchmen; secret interrogations by the embryonic CIA in the months after the Second World War; and classified files, only recently made public, buried deep in a warehouse in the Maryland countryside just outside of Washington DC.

At the heart of it is Manon von Gerkan's grandfather, Arnim von Gerkan, whose son Meinhard is Manon's father. A specialist in Greek and Roman architecture, Professor Arnim von Gerkan - a precocious student born to German gentry - found himself travelling as one of many archaeologists researching historic sites on the Italian and Grecian peninsulas in the decade before the Second World War.

But as the Nazi grip took hold of Germany (and later Europe), von Gerkan was inevitably and irretrievably pulled into the Reich conspiracy to plunder the occupied territories of their priceless, ancient works of art. From Athens to Florence to Rome ... nothing was too precious for the Nazis. And so it was that Von Gerkan - who was 84 when he died in Hamburg in 1969 - came under Allied suspicion as one of the influential figures involved in the German "burglary" of Europe's culture.

In dusty boxes of files in an anonymous warehouse a few miles from Washington DC is a list of names referred to by experts as the Red List. It is essentially page after page of badly typed names of leading Nazis and artworld figures - SS generals among them - investigated by the Allies after Hitler's Reich had finally crumbled.

Von Gerkan's name is on this list, which was highly classified until just five years ago. His name was included by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, one of whose mission in the months after the war was to try and trace the treasures the Nazis had sequestered. "It's the list of people the Allies compiled in their search for those who had had a hand in the looting of artefacts," says Nancy Yeide, a specialist at the National Gallery in Washington.

A small team of only 10 special agents made up the highly secret Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU) of the OSS. It was this unit, established in November 1944, that interrogated Von Gerkan after the German defeat. During the Nazis' reign, this bookish man had been the high-powered director of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome.

It was a position he had always longed for, although fate was to hand him the Nazis as his ultimate masters. Von Gerkan was born in the Baltic region in 1884, trained as an architect - like his son - and went on to become one of Germany's leading archaeologists, renowned even to this day for his work on Pompeii and Hellenic ruins.

But it was out of his Institute's opulent via Sardegna mansion in Rome that Von Gerkan, according to Allied intelligence, assisted his Nazi superiors in trawling the Roman capital for its treasures. The ALIU had a particular interest in Italy: it was from here that much of Hermann Goering's infamous collection of stolen art was plundered.

It is almost impossible, even now, to quantify the objects that were stolen. "Monuments, treasures, tapestries," Greg Bradsher, an archivist specialist at the National Archives in Washington, tells me as he flicks through file after file of stolen treasures, much of it still untraceable.

"If you were on the Red List," he goes on, "then the Allies were very interested in you. The list is not foolproof: But, even given the chaos of the time, these were investigators who knew what they were doing. It wasn't amateur. They were after the people who had helped plunder art for the Nazis."

It was, it seems, a conspiracy to which Von Gerkan was privy: perhaps, in fairness, he had little choice but to toe the line. Can any of us, in truth, have said that we would not have? What we do know for certain is that Von Gerkan worked alongside some of Goering's most notorious operatives: the repugnant Prince Philipp von Hessen, a close Goering aide and an envoy of Hitler's, and his accomplice, Ludwig Curtuis, who was Von Gerkan's boss at the German archaeological office in Athens (and was also promoted over Von Gerkan's head) and who worked with Von Gerkan in Rome.

It would, of course, be censorious in the extreme, to in any way associate Manon with the activities of her grandfather during his time working for the Nazis in Rome. Last night, neither of the couple's representatives were available for comment.

But however mysterious her grandfather's exploits may have been, there is, according to academics, little doubt about his true associations; indeed, although he was not "a believer" when Hitler first came to power, he did become a regular contributor to the Nazis' glossy official art journal, Kunst im Deutschen Reich (Art in the German Reich). In 1939, for example, he wrote on "Colonial Cities of Antiquity", establishing himself as a leading Nazi authority on archaeology.

Jonathan Petropoulos, Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College in California and author of The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, says: "Considering that this was a thoroughly Nazified publication, this suggests that he subscribed to the Nazi ideology. Archaeology was a highly Nazified field: scholars were expected to provide support for Nazi racial theories and the Nazi conception of history."

Moreover, Von Gerkan was affiliated, through his work, with the German Kunstschutz operation in Italy between 1943 and 1945, a body of German academics on whom file after file exists at the archives in the US.

This was the period of the frenzied German occupation of much of Italy, stretching down to the south of Rome. As Hitler's expansionist vision began to falter, Berlin tried to give legitimacy to what was essentially outright theft and, in so doing, set up this body of renowned academics, among them Hans Gerhard Evers (then a professor in Munich) and Alexander Langsdorff (an expert on Babylonian archeology), and all colleagues of Von Gerkan's.

The Kunstschutz (literally "Art Protection-unit was supposed to safeguard-art, but there were also standingorders from Berlin to buy objects - or sequester them - when possible. "They were by no stretch the worst of the art plunderers, but they were implicated in removing Italian cultural property to Germany, with unclear plans for the future," says Professor Petropoulos.

"They worked closely with the German Archaeological Institute. Von Gerkan surely would have known about efforts to remove cultural property north to Germany in an effort to keep objects out of the hands of the advancing Allied armies."

Von Gerkan's precise role may never be known: certainly, after the war, he continued as an academic, teaching at the University of Bonn before his death, .

In Washington, nonetheless, they are continuing to investigate the real role that Armin von Gerkan played in the Nazis' plunder of Europe.

"I doubt we shall ever know, even in my lifetime," says Greg Bradsher at the National Archives.

In the chaos and the treachery of that time, Von Gerkan may have been an unwilling participant in Nazi plunder. He was, according to some records, a quietly-spoken academic who found himself in impossible circumstances.

Just the kind of man, you might think, whom David Blaine could empathise with. In a few days' time, he'll have the opportunity to ask his girlfriend all about her family's past.