Nazi plunder

In addition to gold, silver, and currency, cultural items of great significance were stolen, including paintings, ceramics, books, and religious treasures.

An international effort to identify Nazi plunder which still remains unaccounted for is underway, with the ultimate aim of returning the items to their rightful owners, their families, or their respective countries.

Other Nazi dignitaries like Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Foreign Affairs minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, also took advantage of German military conquests to grow their private art collections.

These men were responsible for entering private and institutional libraries in the occupied countries and removing any materials of interest to the Germans, especially items of scientific, technical, or other informational value.

[22][23] The ALIU compiled information on individuals believed to have participated in art looting, identifying a group of key suspects for capture and interrogation about their roles in carrying out Nazi policy.

The ALIU Reports detail the networks of Nazi officials, art dealers, and individuals involved in the Hitler's policy of spoliation of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

[25] The first group of reports detailing the networks and relations between art dealers and other agents employed by Hitler, Göring, and Rosenberg are organized by name: Heinrich Hoffmann, Ernst Buchner, Gustav Rochlitz, Gunter Schiedlausky, Bruno Lohse, Gisela Limberger, Walter Andreas Hofer, Karl Kress, Walter Bornheim, Hermann Voss, and Karl Haberstock.

The Art Looting Intelligence Unit published a list of "Red Flag Names", organizing them by country: Germany, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Luxembourg.

Each name is followed by a description of the person's activities, their relations with other people in the spoliation network and, in many cases, information concerning their arrest or imprisonment by Allied forces.

This relatively low number in comparison to the German-occupied nations of Western Europe can be attributed to the indiscriminate scorched-earth policy pursued by Nazi Germany and the retreating Soviet Union forces in the Eastern Front.

2 states that Göring never crudely looted, instead he always managed "to find a way of giving at least the appearance of honesty, by a token payment or promise thereof to the confiscation authorities.

"[39] The Third Reich amassed hundreds of thousands of objects from occupied nations and stored them in several key locations, such as Musée Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Nazi headquarters in Munich.

[41] Degenerate art was legally banned by the Nazis from entering Germany, and so ones designated were held in what was called the Martyr's Room at the Jeu de Paume.

Following Joseph Goebbels's earlier private decree to sell these degenerate works for foreign currency to fund the building of the Führermuseum and the wider war effort, Hermann Göring personally appointed a series of ERR approved dealers to liquidate these assets and then pass the funds to swell his personal art collection, including Hildebrand Gurlitt.

[42] The Allies created special commissions, such as the MFAA organization to help protect famous European monuments from destruction and, after the war, to travel to formerly Nazi-occupied territories to find Nazi art repositories.

In 1944 and 1945, one of the greatest challenges for the "Monuments Men" was to keep Allied forces from plundering and "taking artworks and sending them home to friends and family"; When "off-limits" warning signs failed to protect the artworks the "Monuments Men" started to mark the storage places with white tape, which was used by Allied troops as a warning sign for unexploded mines.

The first shipment of artworks arriving at Wiesbaden Collection Point included cases of antiquities, Egyptian art, Islamic artifacts, and paintings from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

At its height, Wiesbaden stored, identified, and restituted approximately 700,000 individual objects, including paintings and sculptures, mainly to keep them away from the Soviet Army and wartime reparations.

Art dealers, galleries, and museums worldwide have been compelled to research their collection's provenance in order to investigate claims that some of the work was acquired after it had been stolen from its original owners.

[46] Already in 1985, years before American museums recognized the issue and before the international conference on Nazi-looted assets of Holocaust victims, European countries released inventory lists of works of art, coins, and medals "that were confiscated from Jews by the Nazis during World War II, and announced the details of a process for returning the works to their owners and rightful heirs.

The New Jersey owner has asked the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) to republish information about the theft, with the hope that someone will recognize the paintings.

Over the years, numerous efforts have been made to recover them, articles have been published, and an advertisement appeared in the German magazine, Die Weltkunst, 15 May 1959.

[58] In 2010, as work began to extend an underground line from Alexanderplatz through the historic city centre to the Brandenburg Gate, a number of sculptures from the degenerate art exhibition were unearthed in the cellar of a private house close to the "Rote Rathaus".

The sculptures, including a bronze cubist style statue of a female dancer by the artist Marg Moll, are now on display at the Neues Museum.

It appeared that one painting of the forest near Huis ten Bosch by the Dutch painter Joris van der Haagen came from a Jewish collector.

Since the mid-1990s, after several books, magazines, and newspapers began exposing the subject to the general public, many dealers, auction houses, and museums have grown more careful about checking the provenance of objects that are available for purchase in case they are looted.

[70] In 2013, the Canadian government created the Holocaust-era Provenance Research and Best-Practice Guidelines Project, through which they are investigating the holdings of six art galleries in Canada.

[76] In Wałbrzych, Poland two amateur explorers—Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter—claimed to have found a rumored armored train believed to be filled with gold, gems, and weapons.

However, to support their claims the explorers said experts have examined the site with ground-penetrating, thermal, and magnetic sensors that picked up signs of a railway tunnel with metal tracks.

Poland's deputy culture minister, Piotr Zuchowski, said he was "99 percent convinced" that the train had finally been found, but scientists claim that the explorers' findings are false.