Original subtitles

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,

and welcome to Christie's and to this evening's sale

of impressionist and modern art.

Lot 11 is the 1922 Picasso there,

"Buste de femme la chemise".

A Picasso painting torn from a German museum wall in 1937

is just now resurfacing at auction in New York City.

Four million nine hundred thousand, $5 million.

At $5 million, $6 million.

Six million two hundred thousand, six million two.

No?

All done, and selling here then.

Last chance at six million two.

For you, sir, six million two, thank you.

The last time this Picasso was at auction,

it sold for just $1,800

as part of a campaign to rid Germany

of artwork the Nazis condemned.

Adolf Hitler purged art he hated,

and he stole art he coveted.

The Nazis were not just the most systematic mass murderers

in history, they were the greatest thieves.

They stole everything.

Art of all kinds would be vulnerable to Hitler's plan:

Paintings, sculpture,

furniture, religious objects.

There's always been looting.

There was planned looting done by Napoleon,

but this was really industrial.

Along with looting, the Nazis unleashed a modern war

that destroyed historic European architecture.

In the struggle to defeat Hitler,

the allies would have to choose between saving lives

and causing even more damage.

There is the age-old argument: Which is of more value,

a work of art or a human life?

Today, even after more than 60 years,

lost art is still being found,

battle damage is still being repaired,

and stolen masterpieces are still caught up

in bitter disputes.

All of this is the unfinished business

of the greatest war in history.

This painting, in Vienna, it's their Mona Lisa.

This is their icon.

This is one of the most important images of Austrian art

of the 20th century.

The painting was stolen by the Nazis during the war.

Over 60 years ago,

Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

became part of the collection

of the Austrian national gallery in Vienna.

Now worth more than $100 million,

it is just one of many works of art

whose ownership has been contested

since the Nazis wrought havoc

on the art world of Europe.

Most people call this viennese icon "the gold portrait."

Few think of it as a portrait of a viennese Jew

and a reminder of the Jewish community

that flourished here before world war ii.

When the Nazis occupied Austria,

they stole the Klimt portrait from this building,

then the home of ferdinand Bloch-Bauer,

a prominent Jewish art collector.

The Nazis commandeered the Bloch-Bauer home.

And the various representatives of the museums came together

and picked out paintings and porcelain and sculpture

that they wanted for their collections.

This is the document that sent

the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

over to the Austrian gallery.

And at the bottom of the document,

it says, "I sign with heil Hitler."

For years, Adele Bloch-Bauer's niece

has fought a legal battle with the Austrian government

for ownership of her aunt's portrait

and four other Klimt paintings her family once owned.

I grew up with the paintings.

So that when people ask me, "do you remember the paintings?"

Well, yeah, every Sunday for lunch we were there,

and the Klimt paintings were all in Adele's room.

My uncle commissioned Klimt

to paint the portrait of my aunt Adele.

Adele and ferdinand Bloch-Bauer

were major patrons in Vienna's vibrant modern art scene

before the war.

Artists from all over flocked to Vienna

to take part in the modernist revolution.

While Klimt worked on Adele's portrait,

three young artists were applying

to Austria's top art academies.

Egon schiele and Oskar Kokoschka

both went on to become great modern painters.

The third was an unknown 18-year-old named Adolf Hitler.

Schiele and Kokoschka were accepted and Hitler was not.

And Kokoschka always said jokingly,

"imagine if Hitler would have been accepted

"and I would have been rejected.

"I would have run the world quite differently,

"and he couldn't have done that harm that he did,

being a bad painter."

In its basement archives,

the center for military history in Washington, D.C.,

stores many Nazi paintings too controversial

for public exhibition.

Among them are early watercolors by Adolf Hitler.

He was a mediocre painter.

Not terrible, but clearly not gifted.

He thought himself gifted, though.

He certainly thought himself able enough

to have been admitted to the academy of fine arts in Vienna,

and he took it as a real rejection.

Many of the jurors at the academy were Jewish,

and I suspect that this fueled his anti-semitism.

Generally, he hated what was going on in modern art

as a would-be artist himself.

There were Jewish artists around, heaven's sakes.

Not only that, some of those figures looked like

they were wild black negroes from Africa.

"How come people like nolde and kandinsky can be shown

"and all this to-do about them,

and they don't let me shine as an artist?"

It must have riled him.

Over the next 20 years,

as Hitler created the Nazi party and rose to power,

art continued to obsess him

and became part of his political agenda.

By the early 1930s, he was in a position

to force his artistic tastes on Germany.

He believed that artists who produced modern art

could not see colors as they appeared in nature,

they could not see forms as they actually were,

and that this was a sign of racial inferiority.

"You Germans shouldn't see that, it will foul your mind.

"It will stain your whole life if you do that,

so we get rid of it."

In a 1937 speech, Hitler shouted,

"we will from now on lead

"an unrelenting war of purification,

"an unrelenting war of extermination

against the last forces which have displaced our art!"

Hitler began with a purge of German museums,

ordering them to cleanse their collections

of 16,000 works by modern masters

like Matisse, Van Gogh, and Picasso.

Hitler labeled all such works "degenerate."

Modern art was then ridiculed and condemned

in a hugely successful "degenerate art" exhibit

that toured Germany.

And the best of the German museums' collections

of modern art were auctioned off at fire sale prices

to benefit the reich.

Thousands of purged artworks were simply burned.

Germany was destroying its own standing

as a world leader in modern art.

Next, Hitler commissioned his first public building

for Nazi Germany, the house of German art, in Munich.

There, he would display contemporary paintings

and sculpture that glorified the third reich.

It would be a museum for the new fascist art,

overseen by Hitler himself.

It was actually very unusual for a head of state

to get this involved in cultural matters,

but it was all part of his really racist ideology

that everything had to be pure

down to the last detail in Germany.

Hitler would go with the curators of this thing

and choose what was going to be in it.

Year after year it went on, right until the end of the war.

And it was all for sale,

but most of it had to be bought by the government

because nobody really wanted it.

With proceeds from his best-selling bookmein kampf,

Hitler had set himself up as a collector of fine art.

Every year, he purchased 250 paintings from the museum,

which he added to his growing collection of old masters

and sentimental germanic art.

Other Nazi leaders followed his example.

Art collecting became a required pastime

for the Nazi party elite.

It was not just Hitler.

Every Nazi leader had an art collection.

If one goes down the line through g ring and goebbels,

himmler, Albert Speer,

the party leaders all had art collections

and spent a great deal of time amassing these artworks

and trying to influence cultural policy.

After Hitler, the most enthusiastic Nazi art collector

was Hermann g ring, head of the Luftwaffe,

the German air force.

But g ring was a different sort of collector

than the rest of the Nazi leadership.

He cared more about the size and prestige of his collection

than its ideological correctness.

G ring was a flamboyant personality.

He thought of himself as romantic and heroic.

He was an illustrious fighter pilot from world war I

with tremendous social connections,

and he lived this ostentatious lifestyle.

He was not a particularly well-educated man.

He was someone who cared about making himself look like he was

civilized and sophisticated and a man of culture,

and that's what men of culture did, they collected art.

Because he was the second most powerful person in Nazi Germany,

this gave him ample opportunity to embezzle

and to enrich himself.

He also encouraged the giving of gifts.

Art was the preferred gift,

oftentimes very, very expensive artworks.

It became clear to some Jewish collectors

that they could play on g ring's desire

or the desire of the Nazi leaders to collect

and use works of art to save themselves and their families.

You know, a painting could be traded for a life.

With the annexation of Austria in 1938,

organized looting of Jewish property began

on a massive scale.

Even the German party leaders were surprised

by the anti-semitic fervor of Austrian Nazis.

The Austrians, they talk now about being the victims.

They were never victims.

Of course, there were some that were against it,

but there overall was a royal welcome.

Maria altmann was a new bride just back from her honeymoon

when Hitler entered Vienna.

Everything changed after march 11.

It became a different life, a different city.

When the Nazis came, they threw us out of the apartment,

and the gestapo man took the apartment for himself.

We left Vienna.

At that time, I didn't even think about

what we are leaving behind,

because we only thought of saving our lives.

The portrait of Maria's aunt Adele by Gustav Klimt

was just one of hundreds of artworks left behind

when the Bloch-Bauer family fled Nazi Austria.

After agents for Hitler, g ring,

and other Nazi officials chose what they wanted,

the rest of the collection, including the Klimt paintings,

was divided up among the state museums of Vienna.

Some were returned to the family after the war,

but the Klimt paintings remained

in the Austrian national gallery.

I think there is a general understanding

that these paintings belong simply to Austria.

And we have reason for this.

It's written down in a document.

It's written down in the last will of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Maria's aunt died in 1925 and left behind a hand-written will.

In this will she asks that her husband give the paintings

to the Austrian gallery upon his death.

And what happened was, of course,

that the paintings were taken from him,

stolen by the Nazis before he died.

Adele's husband escaped to Switzerland in 1939

and died in exile after the war.

He never got the klimts back.

After the war, the Austrians decided

not to return the paintings based on the claim

that under Adele Bloch-Bauer's will of 1923,

they had the right and title.

It's very, very clear that she always had in mind

that these paintings would come at the end of the day

to the Austrian gallery.

The paintings belong in the museums.

They have to be seen by the public.

But not in Austria when they keep them there under a lie.

What upsets me so is the total injustice

that they don't admit that they are not theirs.

Adele Bloch-Bauer's will has been the focus

of much of this dispute.

The Austrian authorities interpret the will

as a bequest to the Austrian national gallery.

On the other hand, when she drafted her will in 1923,

she had no idea what would transpire

and the kind of persecution that would take place in Vienna,

in her country.

And so it's a very complicated situation.

The struggle over Adele Bloch-Bauer's portrait

is only one of many such disputes left in the wake

of the Nazis' vast art-looting operation.

The Nazis were systematic about their plundering.

There was a plundering bureaucracy, if you will.

They employed bureaucrats, they employed art experts.

There were thousands of individuals

who participated in the plundering of artworks

during world war ii.

The bureaucracy was an administrative infrastructure

set up to feed works of art

straight into Hitler's collection.

Hitler had been collecting art for quite some time,

but he started to think about an art collection

in a more systematic way,

and the epiphany comes when he travels to Italy

on a state visit to see Mussolini.

Hitler was not a very sophisticated

or well-educated person.

He had never been to Italy.

He had never seen most of the great monuments of Europe,

so that when he did go and he was taken

to some of the great museums in Rome and Florence,

he was absolutely smitten by this.

He spent hours and insisted on seeing absolutely everything.

He has this idea, it's really for him an inspiration,

that he is going to create a great museum

as a monument to his rule.

Linz, Austria, Hitler's provincial hometown,

would be the site for the enormous f hrermuseum.

Hitler planned to turn Linz

into the cultural capital of Europe.

Starting from sketches he drew in his youth,

he ordered his architects to prepare secret plans

to remake this small industrial town

into a grand imperial city.

In the town of Linz,

he had visualized an Avenue up to...

From left to right of different buildings,

and I call it Hitler's acropolis.

The Linz project is really connected to Hitler's legacy.

There's going to be an opera house,

a symphony hall, a great library.

There's also going to be a mausoleum with his tomb.

And at the center of the Linz complex

is going to be the greatest museum,

not only in Europe, but in the entire world,

dozens of galleries that would hold thousands of artworks.

The collection was for the state.

Hitler thought the reich should have a great art collection

for prestige.

This is going to be on a very big scale.

He is prepared to purchase the artworks, of course,

but he has really no compunction about stealing them.

This museum is going to be created

both by purchase and by plunder.

Hitler and his ministers were commissioning art historians

to draw up lists of artworks abroad that the Germans wanted.

The hit list, if you will, predated the invasions

of these countries.

The plans to create the f hrermuseum,

the plans to steal,

were inextricably linked with these plans to conquer.

Hundreds of Polish artworks were on Hitler's wish list.

But for the Nazis,

most of Poland's slavic cultural patrimony

wasn't even worth stealing.

Because the Nazis considered the slavs, like the Jews,

to be subhuman, Polish culture was declared "degenerate"

and marked for destruction.

In the capital, Warsaw,

even historic architecture was targeted,

particularly the Warsaw royal castle,

home of the Polish kings for six centuries,

seat of the parliament, and a national cultural treasure.

In 1939, Hitler ordered his forces to, quote,

"kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children

of Polish descent and language"

in the "invasion and extermination of Poland."

On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

As German troops advanced,

they deliberately targeted civilians,

toppled statues, and leveled historic buildings.

The Nazis sent special "fire units"

to burn Poland's libraries floor by floor.

The Nazis planned to take Poland

and clear out the indigenous populations

and then repopulate the whole area with germanic peoples.

Poland, basically, as a civilization and a country,

ceased to exist.

They were not only to be eliminated as a people,

but their whole culture was to be eliminated.

During the attack on Warsaw,

Hitler personally ordered the shelling of the royal castle.

He had been told of a Polish anthem that said,

"as long as the Warsaw castle stands,

Poland is not yet lost."

Damaged by shelling and stripped bare

of art and furniture by Nazi looters,

the castle still stood as the Germans took over Warsaw.

But knowing the Poles' deep patriotic attachment

to the castle, the Nazis bored holes in its foundation

and filled them with explosives

to create a permanent threat of complete destruction.

After years of oppression, the people of Warsaw rose up

to take back their city from the Nazis.

The Germans crushed the uprising,

killing over 200,000 Poles.

And the Nazis made good their threat:

The dynamite charges that had been placed four years earlier

were detonated, destroying the Warsaw castle completely.

In cracow, the heart of the old city was preserved,

because unlike slavic Warsaw,

the Nazis considered cracow to be germanic.

But cracow was home to the art masterpieces

most coveted by the Nazis.

And here, systematic looting would begin in earnest.

Veit stoss was a bavarian

who came to cracow early in the 15th century.

For this altar, he used as models his neighbors from here.

So it was a shock for cracovians when it was opened.

They saw the normal, regular faces of their neighbors

being now saints, apostles.

The Nazis believed that all germanic works of art

should come back to the fatherland,

and among these was the veit stoss altarpiece.

Now, it didn't matter that it had been commissioned

for the church by the king of Poland.

The thing that was important was that it had been done

by a German artist and therefore should not be in the hands

of an alien race, which was the slavs.

The Poles had dismantled the 43-foot-high altarpiece

and its life-size wooden figures

and hid them in the countryside.

But within weeks of the invasion,

the Nazis tracked them down,

and the altarpiece was shipped to Berlin.

It was a true loss for cracovians.

They were so accustomed that it belonged to this place

that they couldn't find their way to the prayer without it.

Meanwhile, Nazi art plunderers were busy looting hundreds

of Poland's other masterpieces.

They were compiled in an elaborate catalogue

meant only for the eyes of Adolf Hitler.

At the top of the list were

Leonardo da Vinci's lady with an ermine,

Rembrandt'slandscape with a good samaritan,

andportrait of a young man by Raphael.

The three priceless paintings were all

in a small, private museum in cracow,

owned by a noble family, the czartoryskis.

The czartoryskis decided to hide the paintings

at their country estate 100 miles outside of cracow.

The objects were brought down here to this cellar

and one of the... are placed in one of the alcoves,

which was then walled up and covered over with plaster.

Unfortunately, the comings and goings did not escape attention,

and when the Germans arrived, they broke down the wall.

And, of course, being soldiers,

what they took was all the gold objects.

They left the pictures lying around on the floor.

The Leonardo actually had a boot Mark on it.

The three paintings were intended

for Hitler's Linz museum, but the new Nazi governor of Poland

kept them in his private apartments in cracow.

After the war ended, the Leonardo and the Rembrandt

were returned by the allies

to the czartoryski museum in cracow.

The Raphael has never been found.

If this Raphael were to come up for sale at auction today,

it would be $100 million, definitely.

It has a strange quality of fascination,

and so that's why I suspect it's still out there somewhere.

It could have been painted over,

which people did in order to smuggle things,

and have fallen into the hands of somebody else

who may not know what they've got.

Or it may have gone into the underworld,

the criminal underworld,

which does use this kind of object as currency.

Inside the Polish ministry of culture,

Monika kuhnke and her colleagues

have compiled a database of artworks stolen during the war

that are still missing.

The program contains 59,000 items,

estimated to be just a tenth of Poland's total loss.

Perhaps the most celebrated collection of art

ever assembled under one roof,

the louvre museum in Paris spans eight miles of galleries

and contains about 400,000 priceless works of art,

the cultural patrimony of the people of France.

After Germany conquered Poland,

the French feared that Paris would become

the next target of Luftwaffe bombing raids,

and sitting at the heart of the city was the louvre.

Museum staff gathered around

the winged victory of samothrace

as the museum director gave the order to evacuate

the great treasures of the louvre

to castles outside Paris.

Within hours of the evacuation plan being announced,

the louvre became an enormous packing yard.

Since many of the museum staff had been called to the front,

volunteers were recruited from all over Paris to help pack,

from secretaries to department store clerks to truck drivers.

The greatest challenge was moving

the 2,000-year-old winged victory,

which now had to descend the long staircase

on her way to safety.

An eyewitness later recalled,

"the statue rocked onto an inclined wooden ramp.

"We were all terrified, and the silence was total

"as thevictory rolled slowly forward,

her stone wings trembling slightly."

The curator of sculpture "sank down on the stone steps,

murmuring, 'i will not see her return.'"

Thirty-seven convoys of eight trucks each

departed from the louvre,

leaving the vast museum virtually empty.

In may 1940, the German army swept through Belgium,

Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and into France.

It was a shock to the French, who had prepared for air raids

but not a full-scale invasion of their country.

All the works of art had to move

in really chaotic conditions,

along with millions of refugees who were on the road.

There would be a truck full of louvre paintings,

and next to it would be another truck from the French treasury

full of gold bars,

and the government ministers speeding by in limousines.

It was just total chaos,

and the miracle is that the French collections

really did survive almost intact.

Themona Lisa had her own vehicle.

She was put in an ambulance that was specially sealed

to maintain a constant level of humidity.

There was a curator who rode in the ambulance with her,

and it was so well sealed up that the curator,

when they opened the ambulance, was unconscious,

but the Mona Lisa was absolutely fine.

Themona Lisa and other louvre masterpieces

arrived at castles and abbeys in the south of France.

They would be periodically moved throughout the war

to stay a step ahead of the Germans.

The curators lived in the castles

alongside the artworks.

One married couple brought along their teenage daughter.

Six weeks after the start of the invasion, France fell.

Germany now controlled most of the European continent.

The day after France surrendered,

Hitler secretly flew to Paris before dawn,

accompanied by his architect Albert Speer.

It was his first and only visit to the city.

Hitler remarked to Speer,

"it was the dream of my life to see Paris.

"I cannot say how happy I am

to have that dream fulfilled today."

Hitler told Speer that he had often considered

destroying Paris.

And with that, he ordered his architect to resume work

on his grandiose plans for the rebuilding of Berlin.

When they were completed, he said,

"Paris will only be a shadow, so why should we destroy it?"

Unlike his harsh treatment of the slavic cities of Poland,

Hitler preserved Paris as a sophisticated playground

for German military officers.

While the Nazi high command enjoyed the pleasures

of the city, they hadn't forgotten about

the French national collections,

still sheltered in castles in the French countryside.

Hitler wanted many of the artworks

for his museum in Linz,

and g ring wanted others for himself.

The Nazi authorities knew that these works

they wanted on their hit list were in chateaus,

but they refrained from seizing works in state collections.

The Germans didn't want to antagonize the French

or to incite open rebellion.

They did not have the resources

to control every corner of France at that time,

so the takeover of France was much more gradual.

First, they would steal from the Jews,

and then later, they would acquire the works

that they wanted from French state collections.

There were a number of notable Jewish collections in France.

Paris was the capital of the art market,

and one had these great art-dealing dynasties,

and they had huge collections.

A month into the Nazi occupation,

gestapo teams raided the galleries

of the 15 leading Jewish art dealers.

The seligmann family was right up there

among the top dealers in Paris.

This is a photo of my father, before the war,

when he started his business.

Goodness.

I was quite young when the war started.

My father specialized in old masters.

And g ring visited the gallery in 1938, before the war,

and my father actually threw him out of the gallery

because he knew who g ring was and what he was trying to do.

So as a result, he... that was the first gallery they looted

during the war.

The amount of art stolen from Jewish collectors

soon grew so large that the jeu de paume museum,

in the center of Paris, was requisitioned for storage.

The operation would be overseen

by the anti-semitic task force known as the e.R.R.

The Nazis made sure to keep up the appearance of legality.

According to the new occupation laws,

Jews who fled or were deported to death camps

were stripped of their citizenship.

The Nazis could then declare their property "ownerless"

and available for plunder.

Inside the archives of the national museums of France

is a volume of handwritten notes which traces the journey

of the 16,000 paintings stolen from Jewish parisians

during the war.

Compiled in great secrecy, it notes each work

that entered the jeu de paume

and the name of the family from which it was stolen.

It is the work of rose Valland, a dedicated curator

who is today considered a heroine of France

and certainly its most unlikely spy.

Nobody knew that every night when she went home,

with her remarkable memory, she kept a secret diary

of what French paintings, owned publically or privately,

were taken by whom, sent where.

Rose Valland managed to stay at the jeu de paume

despite the constant danger of deportation or execution.

In November of 1940, she became concerned

about unusual activity that swept over the museum.

Rose Valland noticed it was great excitement,

that the pictures weren't just being inventoried,

but all of a sudden they were being hung up on the walls

and there was clearly going to be a party

or an opening of some kind, and indeed there was,

because g ring himself came to the jeu de paume

to see what was available

for his collections and for Hitler's.

He, of course, was clever enough to know that major works,

such as vermeer's astronomer,

which had been confiscated from the rothschilds,

should go to the f hrer for the Linz museum,

but still this opened up many possibilities of items

that he could then take himself.

Over the next few years,

g ring would visit the jeu de paume 20 times,

taking over 700 works of art for himself.

Hermann g ring spent a great deal of time in Paris.

Sometimes there's a disconnect.

The battle of Britain is raging,

and Hermann g ring, overseeing the Luftwaffe

in their critical moment, is taking breaks in Paris,

where he's visiting art dealers and restaurants and nightclubs,

drinking champagne and eating oysters.

The loot from g ring's pleasure trips to Paris,

the Netherlands, and Belgium was shipped by boxcar load

to the door of his palatial hunting lodge, carinhall.

Carinhall was g ring's country estate

which was built outside Berlin.

It was also the primary repository

for his art collection.

It started off as a rather woodsy chalet,

and it was very homey.

It had a big fireplace

and it had a lot of stone built into it,

but gradually it grew in size, and he redecorated,

and it became utterly opulent and ostentatious.

It was added onto and there were massive galleries:

Vast corridors with marble and tapestries and rugs

and paintings and sculptures.

We're talking about a collection of paintings alone

that was probably about 1,700 paintings.

As a comparison, that's more than

the national gallery of art's European paintings collection.

Historian Nancy yeide is trying to compile

the first complete inventory

of Hermann g ring's art collection.

One of yeide's goals is to locate paintings

looted by g ring that went missing after the war,

including a small painting by Fran Ois Boucher,

stolen from andr seligmann in Paris.

We were looking for this boucher,

and we were surprised to find an image

on the Utah museum of fine arts web site

that matched the lost seligmann boucher.

The Utah museum had no idea

that this was a confiscated and unrestituted picture.

Well, I first became aware that the boucher painting was found

when a woman came to see me.

And she said, "we've found a painting of yours,

and it's in a museum, and they're willing to cooperate."

A painting stolen by Nazis and recovered in Utah is going home.

The story, coming up on 2 news.

The museum's executive director calls it an important day.

The art loss register provided evidence

that we did not have rightful ownership,

and on that basis, we initiated the decision

to return the painting

to the rightful heirs of andr seligmann.

Good morning.

I'm the daughter of andr seligmann.

This is a very emotional day for me.

We are very excited to get this painting from the museum,

and they have been really...

I can only use the word "adorable"... about this.

Are you ready?

One, two, three.

You know, my father would have wanted me to have this painting,

and it's just a shame that he didn't live

to see any of this going on.

I was a little sad when I began

to think about returning the painting.

It's been an important part of our permanent exhibits,

but I also saw the larger moral responsibility.

We can't make amends

for the millions of lives that were taken,

but we can do something simple: Return something stolen

and confer a little humanity back on all of us.

In occupied Paris, trains packed with stolen art

continued to leave for Germany.

More than 22,000 items would be shipped to the reich.

But the theft of fine art was just the beginning.

Now, the e.R.R. Began a new, more radical project.

The union of parisian movers was forced to supply 150 trucks

and 1,200 workers a day to help carry out the operation.

Jacques Altman, a young parisian Jew,

was about to be deported to a death camp in Poland

when he was held back and transferred

to a new slave labor camp

set up at a train station in the center of Paris.

At the camp, Jewish prisoners were forced to sort, clean,

repair, and pack stolen Jewish belongings

that were then sent to families in Germany.

Train after train rolled eastward,

many carrying Jews to concentration camps.

Others followed, loaded with their property

and works of art.

For years, the very best pieces of art and furniture

looted from the Jews of France

were delivered to the Neuschwanstein castle

in the remote Alps of southern Germany.

By the summer of 1941,

Hitler had Western Europe under firm control.

Now he looked to the east

to expand the Nazi empire even further.

In a surprise attack on the Soviet Union,

Hitler diverted millions of troops

to a new 2,000-mile front.

The Soviet Union was a target in the same way that Poland was.

It was a primarily slavic nation.

In fact, it was subjected to even harsher treatment

because it was communist-run.

Hitler ordered his generals to wage a war of annihilation.

It was a scorched earth campaign

that struck at the very heart of Russian art and culture.

The for Russia is not only an art museum.

It's the symbol of Russian state history.

The Russian empire began here and ended here.

So because of this,

the is a great symbol for every Russian.

There is a great museum which belongs to them,

which is something which Russia is very proud of

and which is one of the essence of what Russia culture is.

When news of the invasion reached the museum,

officials cleared the crowded galleries of visitors

and began the frantic evacuation

of its immense collection.

We are kind of not accustomed.

You can't be accustomed to wars,

but we know how to behave in wars.

The was evacuated during the first world war.

By the way, it was also evacuated

during the war with the French in the 19th century.

So when Germans invaded in the second world war,

the was prepared to evacuate.

Compared to the louvre in Paris,

the had over four times

the number of objects to evacuate.

The vast collections of the Russian czars

included everything from paintings and furniture

to porcelains and antiquities.

The also got a late start,

but the white nights of Leningrad's summer

helped to make up time,

as packing could go on around the clock.

Within a month of the invasion, Soviet trains had carried

over a million of the most prized treasures

1,100 miles away to Siberia.

But half the museum's holdings would remain in peril

when the Nazi forces encircled Leningrad just weeks later.

The enemy was now only eight miles from the museum.

It was the start of the 900-day siege of Leningrad.

In the first two months of the siege,

the Nazis fired over 12,000 shells

and dropped over 60,000 bombs on Leningrad.

In October, Hitler ordered his generals

"to wipe the city off the face of the earth."

staff and the city's artistic community took shelter

in the network of cellars underneath the museum.

During the first winter of the siege,

2,000 people inhabited this freezing, subterranean world.

Throughout Leningrad, reserves of fuel were running out

just as the days began to grow shorter and colder.

Starvation set in.

During November and December of 1941,

70,000 people died.

In the cellars of the ,

staff workers were dying,

but the survivors kept up the exhaustive effort

to protect the museum and its remaining works of art.

Through the bitter winter, blizzards sent snow

through thousands of bomb-shattered windows,

and for three months,

the starving museum workers used crowbars

to chip away 80 tons of ice and broken glass

that had frozen to the walls, ceilings,

and parquet floors of the ornate galleries.

Work was one of the ways to prevent from dying.

You have bombs, you have no windows,

you have snow, you have rain,

you have people dying.

So it was museum work in extreme situation.

When the snow melted with the first spring,

a burial squad came to the .

From an improvised mortuary in the cellar,

they removed 46 corpses that had stayed frozen

through the winter.

The dead were taken to a plot of wasteland

on the outskirts of the city that would become,

over the next two years, the common grave

for a half million Russian victims of the siege.

From France to Russia,

the whole of Europe was under attack,

and alarming reports about Nazi theft and destruction

were reaching art professionals at a brand-new museum

far from the .

To accept this work today is to assert the purpose

of the people of america,

that the freedom of the human spirit

which has produced the world's great art

shall not be utterly destroyed.

The United States was about to declare war on Nazi Germany.

And from the national gallery of art in Washington,

a group of museum officials and academics

known as the Roberts commission

warned president Roosevelt of a grave problem

facing the allied armies: How to save Europe

without further destroying its historic buildings

and cultural treasures in the process.

The primary concern was buildings and monuments,

because this was the first war

in which bombing was a major problem.

Everybody had seen what happened in england

during the blitz, so they knew that when armies invaded

that this would be a major issue.

The first invasion came in the summer of 1943,

when america and its western allies

launched a massive attack

against German occupation forces in southern Italy.

We had a tough time.

The Germans put up a great deal of resistance,

so in the process, we pretty much destroyed Italy.

Many of the villages and towns were actually just leveled.

For civil affairs officers reporting back

to the Roberts commission in Washington,

the collateral damage to monuments was shocking.

Although from the military point of view

the damage wasn't overwhelming,

for a person who was interested in classical architecture

and art, it was devastating.

In Italy, and later elsewhere in Western Europe,

some battle-hardened G.I.s only added

to the problem of destruction.

Local officials complained of allied soldiers

making off with books, coin collections,

and even stuffed monkeys from a natural history museum.

General Eisenhower worried that this misconduct

was bringing on bad publicity.

And worse, he saw that his army threatened to harm

the artistic heritage of Italy.

So six months into the invasion,

he ordered all field commanders

to "respect monuments so far as war allows."

Just two weeks later,

Eisenhower's order was put to a severe test.

Eighty miles south of Rome,

the allied advance was blocked by a heavily defended mountain.

On top of that strategic mountain

stood the historic monastery of monte cassino.

Italy is pictured as a sunny place,

but you get up in the mountains, and it's cold, windy, and wet.

And you're out there 24 hours a day,

it's really difficult to live,

let alone have someone shooting at you at the same time.

I wasn't concerned about the monastery,

I was concerned about the people trying to kill me.

All the way up this mountain ridge,

we have Germans at different levels

all dug in and all shooting at us.

The battle to control the mountains around cassino

became a bloody stalemate.

Allied field commanders, who for weeks had held back

from attacking the monastery directly,

argued over its fate.

And back home in the United States and Britain,

parents protested that they didn't want their sons dying

to save a building.

All I knew was that we were not permitted

to fire on the monastery.

In hindsight I know that the allied command

wanted to appear like good guys

in the eyes of the public and the world.

But to you as an infantryman where your life is at stake,

no, it didn't make sense.

Since 529, the monastery had been the home

to the benedictine order of monks.

During its 1,400 years,

it had been destroyed by earthquakes and invaders,

and each time the massive complex had been rebuilt

from the ashes of its ruin.

Now, allied commanders, hoping to drive the German army

from the mountain once and for all,

decided to bomb it.

It was the most bombers the allies had ever sent

against a single building,

but not one enemy soldier was killed.

The German army had been around the monastery, not in it.

And after the bombing, they turned the ruins

into a defensive fortress.

In the end,

over 50,000 soldiers and civilians would die

before the allies finally broke through the German line

three months later.

To me, the monastery is a horrible mistake.

If you think that the art is so valuable,

then don't attack it in the first place.

Don't waste the lives of your men.

If you think that taking it is so important militarily,

then I don't care what's in there,

if you need to destroy it, you take it and destroy it.

From then on, every allied bombing mistake

was trumpeted loudly in newsreels and pamphlets

with titles like "the war against art."

The Italian fascist government even issued

a set of postage stamps that commemorated monte cassino

and other historic monuments

that had been destroyed by allied bombing.

Of course, the German and Italian propaganda

did have a point, because things were damaged.

In Milan, the last supper was almost lost

because a bomb fell on the building where it was.

And some bombs had fallen on Rome, on San Lorenzo,

one of the most famous churches in Italy.

Although stray allied bombs fell on the outskirts of Rome,

the ground war bypassed the city

when the German army withdrew to the north.

Rome's people and ancient monuments were spared.

But after Rome, perhaps no city had cause for more concern

than Florence, whose museums housed

the greatest artworks of the Italian renaissance.

Here, as in France, cultural officials early on

had taken moveable works of art to the presumed safety

of country villas and castles.

But the precious city itself...

Its bridges, its renaissance palaces and churches,

and its public sculpture... Still remained vulnerable

as the war moved up the boot of Italy.

Everybody was thinking that a town like Florence

that was considered a Jewel of art and of beauty,

that it would be a so-called open town,

not to be touched by the war.

Art is the atmosphere of this town.

As a matter of fact, one gets so used to it

that it's part of your soul.

I never thought they could be destroyed.

But city officials feared the worst.

Unsure that the Nazis would give up Florence

without a fight, they mobilized workers to build structures

around the city's most important public art.

The della robbia ceramics that adorn

the first orphanage of Europe

were housed in protective wooden sheds,

the marble tombs of the medici chapel

were shielded with sandbags,

and Michelangelo's six marble slaves

and his 14-foot-highdavid

were entombed in massive brick capsules.

When the allies started bombing Italy,

Florence was a difficult problem

because it has all of its extraordinary monuments

but also is a very important railroad center.

With trepidation, allied command decided

to disrupt the German supply lines

by sending its very best air squadron

to bomb the florentine rail yards.

By now, the army's art advisors at the Roberts commission

had begun providing special aerial photographs

that highlighted for pilots and crew

the important monuments they were not to hit.

Gentlemen, this morning we have a target

that's going to take the best that every one of us has.

We've been hitting targets around Florence for a long time,

but we haven't actually hit in the city itself

because approximately 10% of the world's art treasures

are located right here in Florence.

To this small group of young airmen

was entrusted the fate of historic Florence.

When the formation turned wide over the city,

the great dome of the cathedral passed under their bombsights.

The crews held their breaths as their entire payload dropped

into a narrow sliver of rail yards

2,000 feet long by only 400 feet wide...

Missing the monuments of Florence entirely.

It was one of the most precise missions of the war.

By this time, the Roberts commission

had persuaded the army to take on art experts

who would serve near the front lines,

where they could salvage and protect monuments and art.

Recruited into the ranks

of the new monuments, fine arts, and archives task force

were young artists, historians, and curators

who would later become leaders of the post-war art world.

Men like James rorimer,

who would go on to run the metropolitan museum of art,

and Lincoln Kirstein,

who would found and direct the New York City ballet.

G.I.s called them "the Venus fixers."

Later they came to be known as "the monuments men."

There was no one unit that was a monuments men's unit.

They were individual officers

who were put with the separate armies,

and they never, never had enough people on the ground

to do what they wanted.

There were less than 200 during the whole war,

and at some points there were only 12 in the front lines.

The feeling I had about doing something

to salvage western culture, it was exhilarating.

Finally, we could do something positive.

We were charged with much more

than we could encompass in our minds even.

We had no trucks, no jeeps, nothing but our shoes,

and no support of any kind from officialdom.

And here were these monuments people saying,

"what about the safety of this important structure?"

And to some of our fighters,

people that had seen their... Their buddies killed, you know,

why should they worry about that?

Captain Deane Keller was among the first monuments men

sent to the war.

A portrait and landscape painter,

Keller had lived in Italy during the 1920s.

Now, at the age of 42, he returned,

not as a studio artist this time,

but as the monuments chief for the advancing fifth army.

As a Yale professor in battle fatigues,

Keller felt at first like a fish out of water.

In a letter to his parents, he joked,

"it is all so very new.

"I shave, bathe, and wash out of my helmet.

Can you imagine that for me?"

You could imagine what it would be like

to be responsible for all the monuments of Siena, Florence,

et cetera, of Tuscany, or of a whole section of Italy.

And it was a rather terrifying responsibility.

Always on the move,

Deane Keller checked hundreds of towns,

where he secured monuments and art

from further damage and looting.

Often among the first to arrive after a town's capture,

he struggled to gain the cooperation

of traumatized locals,

who railed against the destruction.

Alone and with scarce resources for his work

coming from the army,

Keller had to beg, borrow, and steal his way

up the Italian peninsula.

My father's experience in the war was not a pleasure trip.

This was war, and yet he saw that time

as a very fulfilling time for him,

artistically, professionally,

but also as an officer of the United States army.

Every city had its challenges,

but "the city of Pisa," Keller wrote,

"presented in concentrated form about all the difficulties

that ever faced a fine arts officer."

But tragically, the people were wrong.

The allies bombed Pisa again and again.

Then, their ground forces fought the Germans

through the city for 40 days.

With German shells still falling,

captain Keller followed American G.I.s

through the booby-trapped ruins to find out

if the city's famous monuments had survived.

The cathedral and leaning tower were damaged but still intact.

Nearby, however, stood the burnt-out shell

of Pisa's most important monument, the Camposanto.

The Camposanto is a medieval cemetery

with huge gothic galleries that once enclosed

one of the most important collections of frescoes

in Europe.

When Deane Keller entered the Camposanto,

he found a fire-blackened shambles.

American shells aimed at German observers in the leaning tower

had missed their target.

The Camposanto had caught fire,

melting the building's lead roof down

over the paintings and marble tombs.

What Deane Keller found in Pisa was a microcosm

of what monuments officers would find throughout Europe,

the most important objects of western culture

on the verge of totally disappearing.

You know, one rainstorm, and they would all be gone.

And so they had to invent ways to save them.

Within a month, Keller recruited Italian soldiers

to remove the melted lead and to gather up

the thousands of fresco and sculpture fragments

that littered the floor.

He asked army engineers to design a temporary roof

to protect the surviving frescoes

and then scrounged the materials to build it.

And from Florence and Rome he brought in experts

to take proper care of whatever remained.

The wounded frescoes were ultimately removed

from the walls of the Camposanto.

And to this day, art conservators carry on

the formidable restoration effort begun by Deane Keller.

By the summer of 1944, the tide of the war had turned.

German forces were retreating all over Europe.

Along the way they carried out acts of vindictive destruction.

The Germans weren't good sports about losing the war,

and time and time again,

they would trash the areas they were leaving,

and Florence was one of the worst examples of this.

At 10:00 on the night of August 3rd,

two days before the German army withdrew from Florence,

a series of great explosions shook the heart of the city.

Thenew York times would later report,

"Florence as the world knew it is no more."

On Hitler's orders, the German army had blown up

the city's central bridges.

It took three tries to bring down the ponte Santa trinit,

with its arches designed by Michelangelo.

The ponte vecchio was spared,

but thousands of yards of ancient Florence

had been demolished on either side.

It was not only the bridges, those two main streets

that go from the ponte vecchio into the town.

Those were enormous, big, beautiful medieval towers

that fell all down.

I remember my English grandmother

leaning over the parapet at the uffizi

and crying and crying and crying,

because her Florence had gone.

Nearly half of the best art of Florence was also gone.

With total disregard for their one-time Italian allies,

the German army had diverted a convoy of trucks from the front

to take Michelangelos, Botticellis, Raphaels,

and every other masterpiece they could haul away.

The Germans packed things very badly,

and they were moved during battle in open trucks,

often in the rain, just covered up with straw.

It's a miracle that they survived at all.

By now, the Soviets had stopped the invasion of their country

and begun to take territory back from the Germans.

In the wake of the Nazi retreat,

the red army found nothing of value left

in the museums of their recaptured cities.

In the suburbs of Leningrad,

the treasured palaces of the Russian czars

had been ransacked and destroyed.

From the Catherine palace,

the Nazis had stripped everything of value,

including the panels of the legendary Amber Room.

Even the immense gilded fountains

at the palace of Peter the great

had been dismantled and transported to Germany

along with nearly 5,000 pieces of antique furniture

and 35,000 works of art.

As in Poland, the Nazis went out of their way

to trash slavic cultural figures.

At the home of composer Peter Tchaikovsky,

Nazi troops tossed original manuscripts to the wind

as they turned his museum into a motorcycle repair garage.

People sometimes don't understand how deep this war is

in the hearts of every Russian.

We remember this war very vividly

because it was a great effort to save us.

Between 20 and 30 million Soviet soldiers and civilians

died in the war.

Thousands of cities and villages

were completely destroyed.

As the red army pushed the invaders back into Germany,

Soviet leaders rallied their forces

with a call for vengeance.

As the red army fought its way westward and invaded Germany,

they seized everything that they could,

from industrial infrastructure down to toilet seats,

but they also seized millions of cultural objects.

Stalin put trained art experts into so-called trophy brigades

to track down Russian art stolen by the Nazis.

But soon they were taking trainloads of German art

and shipping it eastward, back to the Soviet Union.

While the Soviet trophy brigades

removed works of art from eastern Germany,

the allied monuments officers were closing in on Germany

from the west.

Once the monuments men got to Germany,

their mission changed entirely.

There was very little they could do about buildings in Germany

because they were just basically all gone.

For months, allied bombers had been attacking

the industrial and urban centers of Germany.

The British royal air force alone

dropped a million tons of bombs on enemy territory.

The devastation was enormous.

Our blanket bombing knocked out block after block

after block of domestic homes.

Walking around among those ruined cities

was very distressing.

No matter how guilty their government was,

to think that we had smashed those cities with our airplanes.

But in the monuments and fine arts section,

we were trying to restore something that was worth saving.

They shifted their work to the protection

of movable works of art, which they found

in innumerable hiding places all over Germany.

There was lots of German art hidden

where they thought it would be safe during the fighting.

And it was our duty to search and find and save.

A hundred miles inside the German border,

stored among refugees living in squalor,

monuments officers found their first

of the hidden German museum collections.

Further east, British officers discovered a cache

that had already been rifled through by common thieves.

And in a salt mine in central Germany,

generals Eisenhower, patton, and Bradley were called in

to tour the biggest find yet.

Stored along with the entire gold reserves

of the third reich were 400 tons of art

from the great museums of Berlin.

Daily, the monuments men were rescuing thousands

of vulnerable artworks

that German museum authorities had sent away for safety.

But their discovery of the Nazi plunder was still to come.

The castle Neuschwanstein housed a great part

of the art treasures stolen by the Nazis.

Not content with robbing people of their freedom

and their lives, the Nazis tried to make off

with their symbols of culture.

Here, far from the ruined cities,

the allies finally reached the first of three

staggering hordes of stolen art.

They found Neuschwanstein castle packed

with property taken from the rothschilds

and other prominent Jews of Paris.

It was just one room after another of paintings,

household items, China, silverware.

The number of objects that had been taken from the victims

in France were measured into the thousands.

This was all E.R.R. stuff

that Rose Valland had notified people of.

She even had, in some cases,

receipts from the local shipping company that shipped it.

It took us a year to empty that castle,

49 train car loads.

That's a lot, all packed tightly.

My knowledge of the holocaust started in Neuschwanstein.

The taking of lives, I learned much later.

But Neuschwanstein, as I look back,

was the start of really opening up that...

That part of history that should never be forgotten.

Not far from Neuschwanstein castle,

American troops recovered Hermann g ring's

art collection, which he had evacuated from Berlin

to his mountain retreat.

Monuments officers discovered the train carrying

his last shipment abandoned on a railroad siding.

But others had gotten there first.

The word had got around among the peasantry

that the g ring train was there,

and it had schnapps on it.

And so people came running and started...

Went in there, into the train,

and started taking whatever they could get.

So the first ones did... Got schnapps,

and the ones that followed had to be satisfied

with whatever else they could put their hands on,

like 15th-century paintings.

What remained after the locals looted

g ring's massive collection was a logistical nightmare.

Hundreds of paintings and sculptures were scattered

in at least six different structures.

Hordes of press arrived at the scene.

G ring's curator, hofer, was making the most of this,

and lifemagazine was there taking his picture.

And he was saying, "oh, this is a wonderful collection

we've put together completely legally."

By the time Hermann g ring was arrested,

he had amassed over 2,000 paintings, sculptures,

tapestries, rugs, and other works of art.

His collection had grown by more than ten times

since the start of the war.

Now, most of it was in the hands

of the 101st airborne division.

By late April 1945, the Soviet red army was fighting its way

through the streets of Berlin itself.

In the final weeks of the third reich,

sealed in an underground bunker,

Hitler spent time every day obsessing

over his architectural model for the Linz project.

Often, he would invite his few remaining generals in

to see the model and hear about his plans for the town.

Before shooting himself on April 30th,

Hitler dictated his last will,

expressing his wish that the f hrermuseum still be built

to display his art collection after his death.

On the day the allies declared victory in Europe,

the American third army reached a small town

high in the Alps of Austria.

There, hidden deep in an ancient salt mine,

Hitler's art hoard was waiting in vain

for its final delivery to Linz.

My trip into that mine

reminded me of Alice following the rabbit

down the rabbit hole into wonderland.

We headed down this dark passage illuminated only

at great intervals by a single bulb.

When we finally reached the end of our journey,

I found myself gazing into the vast...

The vastness of a cavern

with works of art two or three balconies high.

We were a quarter of a mile underground

in the company of all of Europe's great art.

It was cold as cold can be,

and here's a G.I. on his knee looking at...

Hold your breath... the ghent altarpiece from Belgium.

It's been called the great-grandfather

of all flemish painting.

It was a mountain full of art.

Among the artworks that the monuments men recovered

and inventoried were vermeer'sastronomer

from the rothschilds collection in Paris,

paintings heisted by the Hermann g ring division

from Italy, and art taken from Jews in Vienna

and other cities all over Europe.

The mine had been fitted with wood-lined offices,

restorers' studios, and endless racks of art

in chamber after chamber:

6,500 paintings, over 3,000 drawings and prints,

100 sculptures, and countless more tapestries,

furniture, and books.

All of this accumulated beauty had been stolen

by the most murderous thieves

that ever existed on the surface of the earth.

How they could retain the nicety

and have appreciation of great art

and be exterminating millions of people nearby

in concentration camps, I couldn't understand then,

and I can't understand it today.

At last, the war was over.

After six long years and 50 million dead,

somehow, in cities all over Europe,

the weary survivors found the energy to celebrate.

And in Italy, Deane Keller gave the people of Florence

even more to cheer about.

High in the Italian Alps,

Keller found the stolen art treasures of Florence

inside an abandoned small-town jail.

It appeared to Keller that the collections were on their way

to join the rest of Hitler's plunder.

And with relief, he reported back to his superiors

that while some of the art was damaged, it was now all safe.

Keller escorted the train that brought the Raphaels,

Botticellis and Michelangelos back to Florence.

The waybill valued the shipment at $500 million

and listed the contents simply as "art treasures."

In a letter to his family back in Connecticut,

Deane Keller wrote, "we went through the streets,

"people clapping and weeping, bells of San Michele ringing,

"florentine trumpeters, then a banquet at noon.

"I had three martinis.

"The stuff is all in uffizi, pitti, and bargello now,

and the mission is accomplished."

But in post-war Germany,

the monuments men were still responsible

for the legacy of centuries of western civilization.

Their first task was to bring it all together

at central collecting points.

When I got to Munich,

the main part of the city had really lost its roofs,

and it was jagged buildings everywhere.

But oddly enough, the place that should have been bombed

was still there, the Nazi party headquarters.

That's what turned out to be the collecting point.

I had to get it ready to receive works of art in 14 days.

And the idea that the ghent altarpiece

was going to be coming and the Michelangelo Bruges Madonna,

that did leave a very strong impression.

You had to be sure you were ready to receive them.

North of Munich, in the city of Wiesbaden,

monuments men set up another collecting point

just in time to receive their first big shipment.

They were 56 trucks that came over a period of four days,

all protected by machine guns on weapons carriers and the like.

Each object had to be inspected, catalogued,

photographed, and in many cases restored.

Arriving at Munich and Wiesbaden were the collections

of Adolf Hitler, Hermann g ring,

the national museums of Germany and Austria,

and art looted from across Europe.

The two collecting points probably at that time,

with all the stuff they had in them,

may have been the greatest museums in the world.

There were 27 rembrandts in that collection...

27 rembrandts...

A number of rubens' paintings,

Botticelli, masaccio,

and then go right down the list.

Oh, correggio's leda.

Oh, that was a beauty.

In that office on the front wall,

there was a wonderful degas

that has become my favorite degas of all.

Just that office alone was worth the price of admission

to world war ii.

There was so much to do that you didn't have time to rejoice.

The responsibility of having these items under us

really gave you cause to think.

Maybe a little shaky at times, but we had to do it.

There was no other way.

There was nothing else to do but just do our job.

The army wanted out of the art business as soon as possible

and ordered the collecting points

to turn over responsibility for the tons of art

to government authorities in countries

from which they were taken:

Shipments in bulk were made

from the Neuschwanstein castle back to France,

paintings looted from Italy returned home,

and Leonardo da Vinci's lady with an ermine

made its way back to cracow with the veit stoss altarpiece

and 27 train cars full of other Polish treasures.

It was sort of like running a movie backwards.

All the trainloads that had gone to Germany and to the mines

and whatnot now started coming back.

But at the collecting points there still remained

more objects for which there were few surviving claimants:

Ornate menorahs, silver sacramental cups, torah crowns,

and other precious objects

stolen from decimated Jewish communities.

We had one whole room filled with torahs,

one on top of another like a mountain.

By this time, the full recognition

of what had happened in the camps had come out.

We knew it.

And you couldn't pass that room without almost shuddering,

thinking of all the people that died in the route

that that torah took to finally get to our place.

Eventually, the torahs and religious art objects

were entrusted to Jewish museums and libraries

around the world.

By the time the collecting points closed down in 1951,

the monuments men had processed millions of items

and restored much of what remained

of Europe's artistic heritage.

But despite those accomplishments,

today, more than half a century later,

unfinished business still remains in the aftermath

of the cultural upheaval of world war ii.

Near nuremberg, Germany,

historian Ralf Rossmeissl is working to honor and restore

what has survived of the forgotten Jewish culture

that once thrived in the area.

At abandoned synagogues like this one in Cronheim,

Rossmeissl looks for evidence

of what Jewish life was once like here.

Rossmeissl recently acquired

a collection of silver torah crowns

that had passed secretly through several hands

since the war.

Rossmeissl is trying to track down surviving families

of the original owners.

The torah crowns themselves can offer clues

to their histories.

Census and holocaust records

and even old Jewish cemeteries often fill in the blanks.

While Rossmeissl works to return objects

stolen from Jews in Germany,

in Pisa, work continues to restore life

to the battle-scarred frescoes of the Camposanto.

For now, only a three-dimensional

computer model can offer a glimpse

of how the vast collection of medieval paintings

once appeared.

For 25 years, Dr. Clara Baracchini has led

the team of conservators working to restore the frescoes

to the walls of the Camposanto.

Decades after the Camposanto burned,

conservators are finally restoring fragments

of the salvaged frescoes

to the walls of its immense galleries.

Monuments officer Deane Keller

did not live to see the restoration,

but after his death in 1992,

he was honored with a final resting place

among Pisa's historic leaders buried in the Camposanto.

The tragedy that Keller confronted here

half a century ago now moves toward closure.

But in the former Soviet Union,

a different sort of cultural wound still festers.

In St. Petersburg this morning,

one of the more exciting developments

of recent art history:

Pictures unveiled that no one barring a handful of bureaucrats

has seen in half a century.

For 50 years, no one was sure the paintings even existed.

That doubt has now happily been laid to rest.

Hugh Schofield, BBC news, St. Petersburg.

In 1995, the museum revealed for the first time

that 74 important paintings taken from Germany

by the red army trophy brigades were in its possession.

It was the latest in a series of revelations by Russia

that had stunned the art world.

While there was great excitement

about the revelations concerning the trophy art,

there was also an element of accusation

concerning the Soviets and the Russians,

what they had done with these cultural objects.

Beginning in 1949, Soviet authorities returned

over a million and a half works of art,

mostly to eastern bloc countries

like Poland and east Germany,

but the returns had stopped in the early 1960s.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991

came the first reports about secret storage rooms

where ten of thousands of trophy artworks remained

out of public view.

Critics in Germany and elsewhere

called for the return of the art.

Keeping the trophy art is very popular in Russia.

The population really supports the retention of this art,

but there is no basis in international law for doing so.

Russian hardliners defiantly passed a law

declaring the art to be Russian property, once and for all.

But a fierce debate goes on to this day

between communists and reformers.

Art belongs to humanity.

Without this, we are animals:

We just fight, we live, we eat.

Art is... it's what makes us human.

Like refugees from battle, most of Europe's art

found its way home after the war.

And like every soldier and civilian who lived or died,

every work of art has a story to tell.

Never before had art been moved, hidden, and plundered

on such a vast scale.

Thousands of artworks remain unaccounted for.

Many, the innocent victims of war,

will never be seen again.

Others are sure to resurface in years to come.