The Just Judges taken from Ghent Cathedral

On the morning of 11 April 1934, the sexton of St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent found the door of the Vijd chapel forced. Visit Gent, the city’s tourism site, reports that the iron hinges had been taken off to free the panels. Thieves had worked in the night. They had taken the lower left panel of the Ghent Altarpiece, The Just Judges, and its back, a painting of John the Baptist. A note on the frame read, in French, “Taken from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles”. Visit Gent describes it as a false lead.

The altarpiece is dated 1432 and attributed to the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck. The Just Judges is oil on oak, 149 by 55 centimetres, says the Belgian prosecutor. The Art Newspaper reports that the cathedral sold the panels in 1816. They went to Berlin, where the two sides were sawn apart in 1894. They came back to Ghent in 1920 under the Treaty of Versailles. The saw cut made the theft easier.

On 30 April 1934 the bishop of Ghent received a letter posted in Antwerp. It asked for 1,000,000 Belgian francs and was signed D.U.A. Visit Gent reports that the bishop was willing to pay, but the public prosecutor and the Minister of Justice would not allow it. He kept the talks going with their knowledge. To prove he held the panels, the sender returned John the Baptist. It lay in a left-luggage locker at Brussels North station. On 14 June the diocese handed 25,000 francs to a taxi driver. The sender was angry and the talks failed. The last letter came on 1 October.

Arsène Goedertier, a 57-year-old financier from Wetteren, died on 25 November 1934. He was never charged. The Guardian reports that on his deathbed he told his lawyer, Georges de Vos, that he alone knew where the panel was. The lawyer found copies of about a dozen ransom letters. The sources give 11, 12 or 13. He found no panel. The police closed the 1934 case at Goedertier’s death. Belgian sources still ask whether he stole the panel or only wrote the letters. The prosecutor’s file stays open.

In the 1940s the restorer Jef Van der Veken painted a copy, which stands in the original’s place. Sources date it differently: between 1939 and 1945, or 1945. A rumour that the copy is the original was rejected by conservators, says The New Yorker. VRT NWS reports that German troops searched for the panel during the occupation and did not find it.

Every theory about the panel’s place is unverified. Prosecutor Caroline Dewitte says the likeliest case is that it is still at its first hiding place or elsewhere. This is her view. The historian Paul De Ridder said in 2014 that a prominent Ghent family holds it, afraid of scandal. No family has been shown to have it. Journalist Rudy Pieters has suggested it was destroyed in 1971, but he is not sure himself.

A dig in 2019 near the cathedral found an old iron ladder and no panel. About thirty tips reached the prosecutor in the ten years to April 2024. In October 2024 an investigating judge ordered searches at a villa estate in East Flanders, after a tip. They found nothing, and the prosecutors say the file stays open. De Volkskrant still called the panel missing on 12 February 2026.