(clockwise from above) Dancer, by Marg Moll, declared “degenerate” art by the Nazi regime, was redis- covered in Berlin. Henri Matisse’s Bathers With a Turtle was stolen from a German museum by Nazis in the 1930s. Soldiers of the 7th Army unearthed looted jewelry, ornaments, and snuffboxes hidden by the Nazis. (facing page) An 1836 painting (top left) depicts Napoleon Bonaparte, who famously stole the Horses of San Marco (bottom left). (top right) Adolf Hitler, right, examines a painting his regime considered degenerate. A pro- cession (bottom right) marks “The Day of German Art.”


the time of Napoleon’s exile to Saint Helena in 1815, the Louvre and other state-run museums were bursting at the seams with ill-gotten booty. Decades after Napoleon’s reign came to an end, a child was born in a small Austrian town who eventu- ally would make the Little General’s plundering look like the work of an amateur. When he was a boy, Adolf Hitler’s parents moved to Linz, Aus- tria, where he began dabbling in art and became convinced he possessed great talent. In 1907, a young Hitler left home for Vienna, where he took


IMAGES: ABOVE RIGHT AND ABOVE LEFT, CORBIS; TOP RIGHT, GETTY IMAGES


the exam to enter the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna). The panel of judges rejected him twice, however, and when he discovered four out of seven of the panelists were Jewish, his anger set him on a path that would change the world. Whether 20th-century history might have differed had Hitler been admitted to the academy can only be speculated. But by the mid-1930s, he already had stripped German Jews of their citizenship, seizing their art- work and other possessions, and had


JUNE 2012 MILITARY OFFICER 59


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