He would likely have taken his dark secret to the grave if his letters from the war years had not survived him. As an officer in an air force construction company, he was assigned the management of a Lithuanian concentration camp in Ponevėžys after his deployment in Italy and Königsberg in the summer of 1944. He personally brought in the Jews needed for the airport expansion and later evacuated them to the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk. From there, many were sent to the extermination camp Auschwitz or assigned to labor transports to the Dachau concentration camp and distributed to subcamps. After the war, the painter and art dealer erased this culpable chapter from his biography and became an honorary citizen of his city. Although his military career can be clearly traced, he claims to have devoted himself exclusively to his art since 1937.