In an interview a few years ago I asked René Huyghe, Chief Curator of the Louvre in the Vichy years, exactly how he would define those in the French art world who had collaborated. Without hesitation he said that the collaborators had been the ones who had knowingly used the wartime situation to advance their careers. Jonathan Petropoulos, in his fascinating and well-researched study, The Faustian Bargain, gives us some twenty case histories of German art professionals who did just that.

The situation for the Germans was, of course, different from that of the French. They were not an occupied nation and it was not easy, at the beginning, for anyone to see just where Hitler's government was headed or how long it would last. And no one in this book