The germans have know this for 2 years and are just now revealing it. The are also being difficult about returning the art.
On Nov 6, 2013 11:46 AM, "Pablo Coronel" <pablo.coronel.70@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
wow, if this is true it woul dbe fantasticI sitll have hope that ne day the works of Rafael Troya will show up againOn Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Jan Faul <jan@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wednesday, November 6, 2013 4:44 AM, _ <list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
PICASSO, MATISSE AND DIX AMONG WORKS FOUND IN MUNICH'S NAZI ART STASH
An art haul confiscated from a Munich flat includes previously unknown works by Marc Chagall and Otto Dix, and original pieces by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Bavarian authorities have revealed. The art historian who has been studying the collection since its discovery gave a first glimpse of the treasure trove, which includes modernist works as well as older pieces dating back as far as the 16th century, at a press conference in Augsburg, southern Germany. <http://tinyurl.com/k22roj6>
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UPROAR IN ART WORLD OVER MUNICH DISCOVERY OF LOOTED ARTWORKS
If confirmed, the discovery would be one of the biggest finds of vanished art in years. But word of it left almost equally big questions unanswered: Why did the German authorities let more than two years pass before such a sizable find was disclosed? What will become of the recovered works of art? Did Mr. Gurlitt continue to make sales even after the raid? And where is he today? _NYTimes
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MISSING IN ACTION: ARTWORKS PRESUMED TO HAVE BEEN DESTROYED IN THE WAR by Jonathan Jones
Modernist works by Klimt and Van Gogh and masterpieces by Caravaggio are among the pieces that have long been assumed lost. But could the Munich hoard give hope for their survival?
Klimt University Murals and Schubert at the Piano
Klimt's decorations for Vienna University were his most controversial and radical paintings. These cosmic dream pictures were attacked for their eroticism and atheism in his lifetime – today they might secure his reputation as a great modernist. But together with other paintings, including Schubert at the Piano <http://tinyurl.com/n4x2gqt>, they are said to have been burned by the SS in 1945.
Caravaggio Portrait of a Courtesan
Caravaggio's great painting of Saint Matthew and this portrait of a courtesan <http://tinyurl.com/khjo2oq> friend were both stored in Berlin art shelters that were hit by incendiary bombs. But were these masterpieces really burned in allied air raids? The survival of "degenerate" art in a flat in Munich raises questions about every disappearance of art from the Nazi era.
Painter on the Road to Tarascon, also known as Painter on His Way to Work, 1888.
This <http://tinyurl.com/mnqcvrn> renowned painting by Van Gogh has never been forgotten even though it is believed to have been burned in an air raid on Germany in the second world war. Francis Bacon even painted his own version that can be seen at Tate Modern. But does the fate of the original need to be re-examined in the light of the Munich art find?_GuardianUK
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REDISCOVERED MUNICH WORKS COULD BRING RESTITUTION WITHOUT TEARS
Kelly Crow puts her finger on the most important aspect of the Gurlitt hoard, it will drive Modern work to a market starve for fresh material. The best part is that unlike previous restitution cases, no museums will be punished for the finds by losing their works:
"Christie’s said it has sold 65 restituted works over the past three years; Sotheby’s said it has sold more than $1 billion of restituted art in the past 15 years. The scale of the Munich trove sets it apart, though.
"London-based art adviser Patrick Legant, who buys for several collectors of German-Austrian Expressionist art, said he has never seen so much art come up for restitution at once—not at least since the years immediately following the war. “It’s incredible.”
"Far from being taboo, a restitution history today can give an artwork “an edge” if offered up for sale, and Mr. Legant said he expects many of these Munich artworks to eventually trickle into the marketplace. The heirs of such restituted pieces often want to share the value of the works equally. A sale allows for equal divvying. And families who choose to keep their returned paintings must pay for insurance and other ancillary costs of ownership._ArtMarketMonitor
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MUNICH NAZI-LOOTED ART TROVE REVEALS UNFINISHED WW2 BUSINESS
Art is the last unfinished business of World War Two. Though the Allies uncovered large numbers of stolen paintings in 1945 in the Alt Aussee salt mines near Salzburg, and in a castle south of Munich, an unknown number have been lost forever. Russia holds more than 120,000 wartime art objects in three museums round Moscow." _BBC
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NAZI ART: DOES GERMANY HAVE A PROBLEM RETURNING ART STOLEN BY THE NAZIS?
“You have to wonder what is behind the extreme reluctance to provide information,” says Anne Webber, of the London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe. “We have reminded the Bavarian authorities of the need for transparency and requested a full list of the works. So far we have had no response.
“Germany was a signatory to the Washington Principles in 1998 and 1999, along with 44 other countries, making a commitment to identifying the looted works in their collections and publishing the results. Bavarian state collections contain thousands of works acquired during the Nazi period, but they have failed to publish any list. An annotated catalogue of one of the main dealers of the Nazi era was discovered, saying which families the works were taken from and their eventual owners. This would be fantastically useful to the families concerned who are hoping to create a link with their past. This also hasn’t been published.”
It is tempting to see this apparent blocking by the Bavarian authorities as something more than the embarrassment that characterises Germany’s official response to its 20th-century past: bloody-mindedness, perhaps, or even belligerence. Bavaria is synonymous, certainly from a British perspective, with social and political conservatism. Munich, though it was an avant garde stronghold early in the century – home to Klee and Kandinsky – provided the platform for Hitler’s rise to power. You don’t have to dig too far below the surface in this part of Germany to encounter an attitude of “what more do these Jews want from us”.
Yet this apparently wilful obfuscation regarding the return of looted works of art is far from exclusively Bavarian. Webber quotes culture minister Bernd Neumann, who declared recently that until the thousands of looted art works in German museums are returned to their owners, there can be no line drawn under this issue. Hanover’s Sprengel Museum, for example, home of the largest collection of the works of Kurt Schwitters, one of the most notable of the banned “degenerate” artists, has yet to publish a list of contested works. The head of the German Museums Association recently went on record as saying that the reluctance to publish lists of works is tied to the likelihood of large numbers of claims.
“That surely is the point,” says Webber, with a laugh of exasperation. “You publish the lists so that the rightful owners of the works have the opportunity to come forward. These are works of art that were stolen in the most appalling circumstances and museums were often complicit in the theft.”
Only 200 of the Munich works are believed to be on the Art Loss Register’s list of missing masterpieces. That doesn’t mean that the other 1,300 works aren’t masterpieces, simply that nobody has laid claim to them, because the rightful owners don’t know they exist.
“If people see photographs of listed works, it may prompt memories of things that belonged to their relatives,” Webber says.
“The time this should have happened is yesterday,” says Marinello, who is currently acting on behalf of French broadcaster Anne Sinclair, the former wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former head of the IMF, in a claim for a major Matisse painting from a Norwegian museum. “People are dying, memories are fading, records are being lost, and the German authorities are holding on to this information. When people make claims for works of art, museums ask for a receipt of payment. When you’re running for your life, the last thing you’re thinking about is the receipts for paintings you’ve bought.”
Yet one can surely feel some sympathy for museum directors who might face losing substantial parts of their collections, seeing their institutions diminished and, conceivably, staff laid off. “They’re curators,” says Webber, “and it’s the job of a curator to keep a collection together.”
It is apparently likely that most of the works in the Munich hoard were not part of the Degenerate Art collection – confiscated works that were sold off to buy Aryan masterpieces (Vermeer, Rembrandt and the like) for Hitler’s Führer Museum – but are works seized from French Jews during the Occupation. Here we enter the territory of France’s wartime collaboration. And beyond the holdings of museums lies the far more complex matter of paintings in private collections, which may have changed hands several times on the commercial art market over the decades since the Second World War._TelegraphUK
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IN PICTURES: LONG-LOST ART UNVEILED IN GERMANY
<http://tinyurl.com/la8tfop>
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MAKING SENSE OF THE MUNICH ART HOARD by Marion Maneker
The second-day stories on the Munich art hoard are filled with contradictory bits of information and many, many questions. Foremost among the questions is why the German authorities have behaved with such secrecy. The news from Focus magazine has unleashed a storm of frustration.
Catherine Hickley reported on the German prosecutor’s news conference where it was revealed no list of works would be made public to hasten claims:
“The legal situation of the artworks is very complex,” Nemetz said at a news conference today in Augsburg. “We don’t want a situation where there are 10 claims for one painting.”
Instead, the authorities have given the responsibility for finding claimants to a Berlin art historian who says there are a number of previously unknown works among the 1500 paintings:
"a self-portrait by Otto Dix and a Chagall gouache, said Meike Hoffmann, an art historian investigating the hoard. […] Some of the art dates back as far as the 16th century. It was stored correctly and in good condition, Hoffmann said. It also includes a long-lost Courbet painting that was auctioned in 1949 and a Franz Marc landscape with horses. A Matisse is known to have been seized in France from the Rosenberg family, Hoffmann said."
However well intentioned, this effort does not satisfy most in the restitution community as the Telegraph found out:
“You have to wonder what is behind the extreme reluctance to provide information,” says Anne Webber, of the London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe. “We have reminded the Bavarian authorities of the need for transparency and requested a full list of the works. So far we have had no response.”
The Telegraph goes on to marvel:
"even more bizarre is the way the Bavarian authorities have held on to the information over the two and a half years since the works were first found."
"The matter only came to light through an accidental leak to the German news magazine Focus. The examination of the works had been put in the hands of an organisation called the Research Centre for Degenerate Art. Meanwhile, since his detention for tax evasion, but before the seizure of the collection, Gurlitt was able to sell a major work, Max Beckmann’s The Lion Tamer, through a reputable dealer for €840,000 (£731,000).
But the New York Times has a different story on the sale of Max Beckmann’s The Lion Tamer. Alison Smale spoke to Karl-Sax Feddersen who handled the sale for Lempertz who suggests the proceeds were split:
The sale of the Beckmann painting by the Cologne auction house represented what Mr. Feddersen characterized as a relatively rare occasion in which Jewish heirs — in this case the heirs to Alfred Flechtheim, a gallery owner and dealer forced to flee Nazi Germany who died poor in London in 1937 — were able to share proceeds with the owner, Mr. Gurlitt.
The Times also cautions not to jump too quickly to conclusions. Restitution cases are complicated and the works under discussion were taken from many sources:
"Any claims that do arise from the Gurlitt case are likely to take years to sort out. German museums whose collections were ravaged by the Nazis are as likely to submit claims as the heirs of Jewish collectors and dealers whose work was confiscated by the Nazis. […]"
The Galerie Kornfeld, a gallery in Bern, Switzerland, reported by Focus to have been the source of the cash found on Mr. Gurlitt on the train in 2010, denied having any dealings with him since 1990. Back then, the Galerie Kornfeld said in a statement, Mr. Gurlitt got 38,250 Swiss francs from selling works on paper by artists whose work was confiscated by the Nazis in 1937 as “degenerate.”
"Hildebrand Gurlitt had acquired the works his son sold in 1990 “for cheap money in the years after 1938,” the Kornfeld gallery’s statement said. Cornelius Gurlitt never declared that he inherited the works upon the death of his mother, Helene, in 1967, the gallery said. (Hildebrand Gurlitt died in a traffic accident in 1956.)"
"The Bern gallery said Eberhard Kornfeld, who runs the gallery, was not available to speak to a reporter by phone. His gallery’s statement did not provide details of past dealings with Mr. Gurlitt, but emphasized how carefully one must distinguish between confiscated art and art that was acquired legally, even if the acquisition now seems to have been strange or made under duress. These works “are freely available for purchase to this day,” the statement said."
Finally, ABC News interviewed an expert who warns that the hoard might not be as valuable as assumed:
“We don’t know how many of the 1,500 works are ‘degenerate’ works or looted by the Nazis,” said Christoph Zuschlag, an expert on “degenerate art” at the University of Koblenz. “So we need to examine each piece individually.”
"He cautioned against overestimating the value of the collection before it had been thoroughly assessed. “We need to see whether these were originals or prints,” he told The Associated Press.
"He noted that of the 21,000 pieces of “degenerate art” seized from German museums in or shortly after 1937, two-thirds were prints while only one-third were originals." _ArtMarketMonitor
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NAZI-LOOTED ART: WILL GEORGE CLOONEY MOVIE SPEED UP RECOVERY?
The saga of 1,500 art works recovered in Munich, with an estimated value of more than $1 billion and possibly stolen by Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, made big headlines over the weekend. The German publication Focus reported that the 2011 discovey — which included masterpieces by Matisse, Picasso, Klee and Chagal — in the cluttered home of Cornelius Gurlitt, could be the largest stash of Nazi-looted art uncovered since World War II. But the recovered trove is likely just a drop in the bucket of what some call the greatest theft in history.
“I’ve been saying for 10 years this is the tip of the iceberg. There are still hundreds of thousands of missing cultural objects,” says Robert Edsel, author of the book “The Monuments Men,” which chronicles the search for and recovery of art looted during World War II. The estimated amount of works stolen by the the Nazis is about 650,000 paintings plus an untold number of other art — drawings and sculptures, among them — according to a survey by the Jewish Claims Conference. Edsel calls the Munich recovery a long and piecemeal process “in what seems like slow motion.”
All of that, however, may change with the movie adaptation of his book, he says. The film version, due out in early 2014, was directed and co-written by George Clooney, who also stars alongside Matt Damon and Bill Murray. Edsel feels the film’s inherent mass appeal will draw attention to this issue._LATimes
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SEARCH IS ON FOR SECOND CACHE OF ART CONFISCATED BY THE NAZIS
German customs officials were yesterday searching for what they believe is a second secret cache of modernist paintings looted by the Nazis following the sensational discovery of 1,500 masterpieces by artists including Picasso and Paul Klee in a squalid Munich apartment.
The paintings were discovered stacked between dirty plates and cans of food past their sell-by date, in the run-down apartment of the reclusive 80–year-old Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of an art collector who was yesterday said to have disappeared without trace. “He could be anywhere in Germany. We think he may have access to unlimited funds,” a Munich customs spokesman said. The works are currently being held in a customs storage depot outside Munich while a state prosecutor’s investigation continues. Customs officials said they were searching for a second cache of valuable “lost” art works by modern masters including Picasso, Max Beckmann, and Marc Chagall among others, which they thought Mr Gurlitt was living off by slowly selling them and parking the proceeds in a Swiss account. They said their suspicions were raised by his sale of a Max Beckmann masterpiece entitled “The Lion Tamer” at auction in Cologne in December 2011 – two months after his secret cache of paintings was discovered and confiscated by customs officials. “The Lion Tamer” was sold off for a total of €864,000 at the Lempertz auction house._IndependentUK
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DISCOVERED NAZI-SEIZED ART IS POISED TO MAKE MARKET SPLASH.
Auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's owe some of their biggest windfalls to sales of masterpieces whose ownership was clouded by the Nazi era._WallStreetJournal
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DOES THE MUNICH HOARD TURN THE STORY OF ART AND THE NAZIS ON ITS HEAD? by Jonathan Jones
It is one of the most shuddered-at chapters in the story of art. In July 1937, Nazi officials turned up in full uniform alongside evening-suited cultural eminences of the Third Reich at an art gallery in Munich for the opening of the Exhibition of Degenerate Art. They came not to praise modern art, but to laugh at it.
Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – the masters of modernism, including giants of Germany's own avant garde, were shown in this exhibition as deviant, decadent practitioners of so-called Degenerate Art – "Entartete Kunst". Sections of the show had titles such as "Total Madness", "The Prostitute Raised to a Moral Ideal", "The Negroisation of Art". Modern art was interpreted in the catalogue as a conspiracy by Russian Bolsheviks and Jewish dealers to destroy European culture. The admiration for African carvings that had so fired Picasso and other artists was taken as proof of modern art's racial degeneracy.
Vile stuff – but the Nazi attitude to modern art may have been radically misunderstood. An amazing discovery in 21st-century Munich turns the story of art and the Nazis on its head.
Cornelius Gurlitt's flat looks meagre in photographs. It is located in an apartment block in Munich that, from the outside, appears to have seen better days. Yet in that flat lay secrets of the Third Reich only now accidentally uncovered. Intrigued by Gurlitt's lack of German identity documents and odd behaviour while crossing the border on a trip to Switzerland, police raided his home and found a hoard of more than 1,500 works of art including pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Otto Dix and Oskar Kokoschka. The understandably reclusive Gurlitt turned out to be the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, an art dealer who played a key role in the Nazi roundup of "degenerate art". Although half-Jewish, and the cousin of the "degenerate" composer Manfred Gurlitt, the Nazis considered him a useful expert. This is not just any haul of stolen goods: it may turn out to be one the most important recoveries of lost art ever. For it takes us to the heart of the cultural policies and crimes of the Third Reich.
It raises massive questions about the fate of art in and after the second world war. As the allies entered Germany in the last phase of the war they took with them experts, nicknamed the "monuments men", whose job was to find out where the Nazis had stashed looted works of art. For it was not just modern art the Nazis abused. All over Europe, they seized the best masterpieces from the finest museums. Many of these, including such treasures as Titian's Danae <http://tinyurl.com/ktxfnpk> and Van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece <http://tinyurl.com/9sksuhl> , were found stashed in mountain tunnels and mines. Others, including many of the works of art shown in the Degenerate Art exhibit, are believed lost for ever. Paintings such as Van Gogh's The Painter on his Way to Work <http://tinyurl.com/m7zlox8> and 14 masterpieces by Gustav Klimt are written off as destroyed. But is it possible a Nazi network preserved a secret world of stolen art after 1945? Is it even possible such art was used to fund neo-Nazi activities or maintain war criminals in quiet comfort?
To put it another way: were Hildebrand Gurlitt and his son unique, or is the find in Munich a clue to some larger network of Nazi art hoarders sitting on secret treasures all this time in postwar Europe, living off occasional covert sales of the Picassos that they keep among the canned foods in their anonymous flats?
One thing is certain: this story comes from the dark heart of Nazi Europe. Munich was Hitler's art capital. As a young man, famously, he wanted to be an artist. He wasted an inheritance trying to get an art education in Vienna. While Klimt was creating modern art there, Hitler was going to the opera to hear Wagner (conducted by the modernist Gustav Mahler), and soon eking a living painting drab topographic scenes. Eventually he left for Munich, where he survived as a hack painter of typical German scenery until the first world war gave him a new life as a soldier. Hitler loved Munich, and when he came to power lavished money on its art scene. The city's expressionist painters were in trouble. But while Degenerate Art pilloried them, in 1938 Hitler opened a huge exhibition of "proper" German art at the newly built House of German Art, a grand neo-classical temple to the art of a new, fascist Europe. Where the year before thousands had flocked to see the art they were told to hate, far fewer went to see Nazi-favoured art.
This is where the cliches start. It is conventional to contrast the avant-garde art the Nazis maligned with the traditionalism and conservatism of the art they admired. But the National Socialist nightmare was not "conservative". It was, in its own way, horribly modern – it imagined a different, perverted vision of modernity. The House of German Art still survives in Munich. Today it is used as an alternative arts centre. Video and installation look subversively great in its grand icy halls. You wouldn't call these rooms old-fashioned. Rather they have a chilly neo-classical hauteur that speaks of sublime ambition. This is the neo-classical modern art of Nazism <http://tinyurl.com/ldaehbe> that can still be seen in Leni Riefenstahl's terrifying films – some of the most disturbingly beautiful ever made – and the designs of Hitler's architects Paul Troost <http://tinyurl.com/llby338> and Albert Speer.
Hitler did not hate art – he loved it. Other leading Nazis just saw it as money. Goering, greedy and corrupt, amassed art because it symbolised wealth and power. Munich was at the centre of the regime's cultural pretensions. The Gurlitt hoard is a survival of the Nazis' strange and ambivalent attitude to art, from Hitler's aesthetic New Order to the simple philistine greed that probably motivated most of their art theft.
Gurlitt's cache reveals that many assumptions about the Nazis and art are simply untrue. The Degenerate Art exhibition was real enough – but did it really mean the Nazis hated modern art? It is because we take this for granted that no one has been searching for lost "degenerate" works such as those in the flat in Munich. Some works from the Entartete Kunst exhibition, many seized from once-progressive German museums, were sold abroad afterwards. Others have vanished. As the war began and Nazi racial policies became ever more explicit, more modern and pre-modern works were seized or bought for a pittance from Jewish owners. Much was destroyed. Or was it?
One of the most suspicious cases is that of Klimt's lost works. Fourteen paintings by this Austrian visionary of dreams and desire were stored in an Austrian castle during the war. In 1945, an SS battalion reportedly held an orgy there before setting the castle alight. The Klimts are presumed lost, but there were rumours that some might have been spirited away. Now, surely, such stories need to be re-examined. The 1,500 works hidden by the Gurlitts, father and son, were also presumed lost.
The allies tend to blame themselves for art lost in Germany in the 1940s. Almost every major German city was bombed by Britain and the US during the second world war. Firestorms ravaged museums and art stores as well as killing thousands of civilians. "Bomber" Harris, Britain's Bomber Command mastermind who insisted this was the way to win the war, was apparently responsible for burning paintings such as Van Gogh's Painter on the Way to Work and Caravaggio's first version of St Matthew, as well as his portrait of a courtesan.
Perhaps the single most significant fact that has so far come out about Hildebrand Gurlitt is that he claimed his collection of looted art was destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. So it was the allies who burned it. If he lied so easily about that, what about other Nazi-owned art that supposedly vanished in wartime air raids?
The massive destruction the Nazis brought down on Germany created chaos in 1945. As the "monuments men" were seeking out stolen art treasures in Alpine mines, it seems Gurlitt was carefully and quietly preserving his personal hoard.
The reason he got away with it is that he had grabbed so many modernist works. Ever since 1937, it has been assumed that "degenerate art" was either sold abroad or destroyed. The "monuments men" went searching for Titians, not Picassos. But the Munich hoard proves the naivety of this assumption. Even in the mind of Hitler, modern art was bizarrely fascinating. You do not put on an exhibition of something you do not want to look at. In some strange way the Nazis needed modern art, as a demonic image of their nightmares. The Degenerate Art exhibition is, after all, the biggest backhanded compliment ever paid to the avant garde. Many people think art has no influence on the world. Hitler knew it did. The old saw that he hated modernism is just too simple. He loved to hate it. What you love to hate, you want to keep, somewhere, if only as a freakshow curiosity.
Other Nazis simply went along with Hitler's taste in public but did not really know what the would-be artist in him was talking about. In Mussolini's Italy, the Futurist movement was cosy with fascism. There was no reason – Italy proved – that fascists needed to spurn modernism. Some German modern artists, notably Nolde, were themselves sympathetic to the far right.
Then there was greed. In the end, the National Socialists were thugs, criminals and murderers. The idea that most of them believed deeply in ideological discriminations about art is not that plausible. For men like Gurlitt, modern art made a good stash. He and his son sat on the hoard while his claim that it was lost in a firestorm was taken at face value.
Now the books on Nazi loot need to be reopened. It seems only too possible that other Gurlitts hid away other art treasures in the chaos of defeat.
In one of the last photographs ever taken of Adolf Hitler he is in the bunker in Berlin contemplating Albert Speer's design for a new art capital to be built at Linz <http://tinyurl.com/l2k6rtr> . Much as he loved Munich, this city was closer to his childhood home. Its massive new museum was to have contained all the art treasures of conquered Europe.
While Hitler doted on his cultural fantasies, paintings were vanishing into fruit cellars and attics. It was so easy to write them off in the Führer's Götterdämmerung._GuardianUK
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