made it illegal for people of Jewish descent to create art of any kind. In 1937, Hitler held a Degenerate
Art exhibition featuring the stolen works, while also debuting the House of German Art, a collection dedicated to more classical works favored by the führer. The “degenerate” exhibit drew record crowds, while Hitler’s tradi- tional German art museum suffered poor attendance and hardly any sales.
Hitler ups the ante With the advent of war in 1939, Ger- man troops advancing into Europe
60 MILITARY OFFICER JUNE 2012
ransacked museums, churches, and other cultural centers, especially those with Jewish connections, and sent their treasures back to the father- land. Hitler’s plan was to establish the largest art museum in the world in Linz, which he considered his home- town. He took a page from Napoleon’s playbook by institutionalizing art theft, establishing an extensive net- work of agents who swept across Eu- rope to identify and bring back stolen artifacts for his führermuseum. This wholesale plundering did not go unnoticed in the U.S., says Robert
(clockwise from top left) This 17th-century painting, stolen by the Nazis in 1937, was repatriated to the estate of Dr. Max Stern in 2009. U.S. soldiers load a painting onto a truck after finding it in a cave be- longing to Hermann Goering. Nazis deemed Portrait of the Actress Anni Mewes, by Edwin Scharff, “degen- erate.” Wintergarden, by Édouard Manet, was found in a salt mine.
Edsel, author of The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Center Street, 2009). Edsel notes that early on, European museum directors and art mavens were corresponding
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