The daughter of a butcher from Munich's West end, Maria Dietrich became a force in the French art market thanks to her connection to German Führer Adolf Hitler.
[2][3][4] Dietrich owned Galerie Almas in Munich[5] located on Ottostrasse 9 next to the Swiss and American embassies, the gallery mainly dealt in antiques and paintings from the 15th to 19th centuries.
Between 1936 and 1944 Dietrich acquired more than one thousand pieces of art for Hitler and his planned Führermuseum, making her one of the most important dealers in Nazi Germany.
[16][17] After the war, Maria Almas Dietrich returned to Munich and lived in a neighborhood close to other dealers of Nazi-looted art.
On 4 March 1949 she addressed claims to Occupation Costs Office because paintings by Grützner, Defregger, Horemans and Braith as well as “5 wooden sculptures of male saints” could no longer be found in the Collecting Point and were presumably stolen.
"[24] Recent historical research emphasizes Almas-Dietrich's connection to powerful Nazi art looters such as Bruno Lohse, describing her as part of the "solar system that included Nazi art traders such as Alois Miedl, Walter Andreas Hofer, Maria Almas Dietrich and Karl Haberstock"[25]