In 1945, Dutch painter Han van Meegeren was arrested for selling a Vermeer to Hermann Göring, a crime that carried the death penalty for collaboration. His defence was that the painting was not a Vermeer at all, because he had painted it himself. Nobody believed him, so the court sat him down under guard with period pigments and had him produce a fresh Vermeer from scratch. He was acquitted of treason, convicted of forgery instead, and much of the Dutch public decided he was a national hero for swindling a Nazi out of two hundred genuine Dutch paintings.