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The widespread looting of European art by the Third Reich before and during the Second World War was one of the most shameful chapters of art history. The Nazis systematically stole thousands of paintings from individuals, and confiscated many thousands more from museums and other cultural institutions. Beside artworks, gold, silver, currency, jewelry, books, and religious treasures were also plundered. Most of these looted items were recovered and restituted after the war. But many thousands of pieces of art were never retrieved by their rightful owners.
Click through and read the shameful story of Nazi plunder.
Hitler wanted to enrich the Third Reich and its leaders with exquisite and culturally significant treasures. He did this by encouraging the widespread looting of Jewish property, which became a key element of the Holocaust. Pictured are looted Jewish shops in Pressburg (today Bratislava), Slovakia, in 1938.
The thefts perpetrated by the Third Reich were carried out from 1933, beginning with the seizure of the property of German Jews, until the end of the Second World War. This photograph shows looted books; most were destined to be burnt.
A US Army chaplain examines one of hundreds of Jewish Sefer Torah scrolls, stolen from all over Europe by Nazi forces and stored in the cellar of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Frankfurt.
As Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler enforced his aesthetic ideal on the nation. This did not include modern art. In 1937, the Nazi Party presented the Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art") Exhibition in Munich.
Several hundred works of contemporary art, confiscated from German museums, were put on display as a way of showing its alleged perverse nature and immoral influence. Pictured: Hitler with Hermann Göring and other Nazi party officials examine a painting at the Degenerate Art Exhibition.
The looted "degenerate" art collection was later sold at auction on June 30, 1939 at the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, Switzerland. The catalogue for the sale is pictured.
In 1940, the Nazis created an organization known as the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (Einsatzstab Reichslieter Rosenberg or ERR). It was led by committed national socialist Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), who was executed at Nuremberg after the war. The sole purpose of the ERR was the appropriation of cultural property.
The role of ERR was later clearly more defined by Hermann Göring, who effectively controlled the organization. He ordered the ERR to seize "Jewish" art collections and other objects. In 2015, France published the handwritten catalog of Hermann Göring, a comprehensive record of the thefts committed by Nazis during the Second World War. Göring's personal art collection numbered over 2,000 pieces, including 300 paintings. He killed himself in his cell at Nuremberg after being found guilty of war crimes.
Cultural objects plundered by the Third Reich numbered in the hundreds of thousands, looted from occupied nations. Classical portraits and landscapes by Old Masters, particularly those of Germanic origin, were set aside for eventual display in the Führermuseum, a cultural complex planned by Hitler for his hometown, the Austrian city of Linz. Pictured are crates of paintings confiscated from the National Museum in Kraków packed for shipment to Germany in 1942.
The Führermuseum was in fact never built. But the systematic plundering of artwork continued. It was stored in several key locations, including the Musée Jue de Paume in Paris. Between 1940 and 1944, the museum served as a Nazi sorting house for the party's ill-gotten gains. In this photograph, workers unload returned works of art, which had escaped the clutches of the Nazis, from a truck at the Jeu de Paume Museum in October 1945.
The Nazi party headquarters in Munich, the so-called Brown House, also served as a repository for looted art. Destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945, the site is today home to the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism.
The Nazi party looted the assets of its victims to accumulate wealth. Gold was prized currency. Mines and caves were often used to hide gold bullion. These locations also offered the appropriate humidity and temperature conditions for stashing artworks, many examples of which were centuries old. The Merkers salt mine in Thuringia, Germany, provided the ideal repository for a staggering amount of gold and paintings.
Thousands of gold rings the Nazis removed from their victims to salvage the precious metal were discovered at Merkers after US troops searched out the subterranean site in 1945. Besides rings, watches, precious stones, eyeglasses, and gold fillings were also found, all confiscated from prisoners at Buchanwald concentration camp. As Minister of Economics and Reichsbank president, Walther Funk was responsible for banking for the SS the gold artifacts taken from Nazi concentration camp victims. Funk escaped the hangman at Nuremberg, instead being sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released on health grounds in 1957 and died three years later.
Among the more famous paintings recovered at Merkers was 'Wintergarden,' by the French impressionist Edouard Manet, seen here being examined by American GIs. Contrary to reports, this work of art was not a looted piece. It had been in the collection of the Berlin National-Galerie until it was moved to the salt mine for safeguarding.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower (right) accompanied by General Omar N. Bradley (left) and General George S. Patton (center) visited Merkers on April 12, 1945 to inspect the stolen art treasures.
The Altaussee salt mine complex in Austria also served as a repository for stolen art. Much of the loot found here was intended for display in the Führermuseum.
Altaussee was seized on May 8, 1945 by members of the US Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, the so-called Monuments Men, portrayed in the 2014 war film 'The Monuments Men' starring George Clooney and Matt Damon. One of the treasures discovered hidden at Altaussee was the 15th-century Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, the central panel of which is pictured as it was recovered.
Despite war damage, the Flemish polyptych panel was restored to its original splendor. Considered a masterpiece of European art, the Ghent Altarpiece can today be admired in St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium.
The Nazis also chose to hide loot in landmark buildings throughout Germany. In this April 1945 image, a soldier from the US Third Army stands guard over a large cache of artworks stored in Schlosskirche in Ellingen, Bavaria.
While a lieutenant checks his list in the background, soldiers from the US 7th Army carry three valuable paintings down the steps of Neuschwanstein Castle at Füssen in southwest Bavaria, where they were hidden.
The seizure at Neuschwanstein also yielded numerous pieces of antique jewelry and valuable ornaments, including a collection of snuff boxes.
A soldier with the US First Army holds up a painting by Rubens after Allied forces overran the German city of Siegen (incidentally, Rubens' place of birth) in April 1945 and discovered a hoard of Nazi loot hidden in an underground copper mine.
To investigate and estimate Nazi plunder in the USSR, the convoluted-sounding Soviet State Extraordinary Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating the Crimes Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices was established in 1941. Pictured in 1945 are Red Army soldiers recovering paintings stolen from the Peterhof Palace and Pushkin Palace.
In Poland, the Nazis systematically carried out a plan of looting the nation even before the start of hostilities. Pictured is a German unit plundering the Zacheta Museum in Warsaw in 1944.
After the German invasion of Poland, Hans Frank was appointed Governor-General of the occupied Polish territories. His reign of terror against the civilian population was particularly brutal, and he was directly involved in the mass murder of Jews. In 1940, Hitler received a special "gift" from Frank—a collection of over 500 items of the most valuable art from Polish collections. Frank was found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg and later executed.
One of the paintings stolen by German forces in Poland was 'Jewess with Oranges' by the Polish artist Aleksander Gierymski. It was taken from the National Museum in Warsaw and for decades afterwards Poland campaigned for its return. In 2010, the painting appeared in an antique market in Northern Germany. After compensation was paid out by the Polish authorities to the German owner, the painting was returned to the nation in 2011.
Indeed, much looted gold and art was recovered and restituted after the war. But despite the best efforts of the American and other governments, many thousands of pieces of art were never recovered by their rightful owners. A celebrated exception was the case of the 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.'
Completed between 1903 and 1907 by Gustav Klimt and also known as 'The Woman in Gold,' this painting was stolen by the Nazis in 1941. Nearly 60 years later it turned up in the Galeria Belvedere in Vienna. Maria Altmann, a niece of the original owner Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, successfully won a claim against the gallery for the return of the work, and others by Klimt. She later sold the painting for US$135 million. In 2015, Altmann's story was dramatized for the film 'Woman in Gold' starring Helen Mirren.
In 2012, a sensational "Nazi loot discovery" was made in Munich when a collection of around 1,500 art works assembled by the late Hildebrand Gurlitt, a Third Reich dealer of Nazi-looted art, was discovered in the apartment of his son, Cornelius Gurlitt. The collection was suspected of incorporating a number of looted items and, probably, works acquired in dubious circumstances during the Second World War. Cornelius Gurlitt died in 2014. He bequeathed the collection to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, in Switzerland. Fourteen pieces were later conclusively identified as belonging to Jewish owners and returned to their heirs. Pictured: the press preview of the Gurlitt Collection at the museum.
One of the paintings from the Gurlitt hoard, Max Liebermann's 'Two Riders on the Beach,' painted in 1901, was returned to the descendants of the original Jewish owner in 2015.
'Portrait of a Seated Woman' by Thomas Coulture was also found in Gurlitt's apartment. Identified as a looted work, it too was restituted, in 2019, to the descendants of the original owner.
The fabled Nazi gold train is the legendary "treasure train" supposedly hidden by Nazi troops in a mountain tunnel as the Germans fled the area between Wroclaw and Walbbrzych in southwestern Poland during the closing stages of the war. Despite numerous claims that the train and its treasure exists—most recently by two amateur historians in 2015—the locomotive and its valuable hoard remains an enduring urban myth.
Sources: (National Archives) (Artland) (Widewalls) (Today's Document) (Biography) (BBC) (DW)
See also: The awful truth about Albert Speer, Hitler's architect