Argentina court orders house arrest for daughter of Nazi official in search for missing painting

By Lucila Sigal

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) -A federal court in Argentina ordered house arrest for the daughter of a former Nazi official and her husband after a raid failed to locate an iconic painting stolen decades ago by the Nazis.

In an incident that captivated Argentina last week, authorities raided a home in the coastal city of Mar de Plata after a Dutch newspaper identified a painting seen in a real estate photo as an Italian masterpiece registered on a database of lost wartime art. 

They failed, however, to locate the piece.

The painting, a portrait of Contessa Colleoni by Italian artist Giuseppe Ghislandi, who died in 1743, had been missing for 80 years, before it was spotted in the listing for a home believed to be owned by Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of the late former Nazi official Friedrich Kadgien.

Patricia Kadgien and her husband, were ordered to remain under house arrest for 72 hours starting Monday and will be questioned for obstructing the investigation to locate the painting, a judicial official in Mar de Plata told Reuters on Tuesday. 

The couple will be summoned for a hearing before Thursday, the official said, where they are expected to be charged with "concealment of theft in the context of genocide." 

Argentina authorities carried out four new raids on Monday to find the painting, the official said, at homes linked to Kadgien and the couple's relatives, where investigators found two other paintings presumably dating back to the 1800s.    

Reuters was not immediately able to contact Patricia Kadgien. 

After the fall of the Third Reich at the end of World War Two, a number of high-ranking Nazi officials fled to South America.

The portrait of Contessa Colleoni was among more than 1,000 works of art stolen by the Nazis from Amsterdam-based art dealer Jacques Goudstikker who died in 1940, according to Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, which also reported on documents suggesting it was in the possession of Friedrich Kadgien, a senior official in Adolf Hitler's government who moved to Argentina after World War II. Kadgien died in 1979.

(Reporting by Lucila Sigal, editing by Cassandra Garrison and Alistair Bell)