Ransacked.

From The New York Times ...

Chaos reigned in the bomb-ravaged streets of Munich on April 29, 1945. American troops were closing in. Hitler was a day away from killing himself in his bunker in Berlin. The Nazi guards who protected important buildings had fled.

Hungry crowds stormed the Führerbau, the Führer’s building. First they looted the food, the liquor and the furniture. Then they turned to the air-raid cellar, which was filled with art, climbing over piles of Panzerfaust anti-tank grenades to get at the paintings.

“By the end of the second day,” Edgar Breitenbach, an art intelligence officer in the United States Army, wrote in a 1949 report “when the looting was finally stopped, all the pictures were gone.”

It was a moment of incongruity: Hitler, the man who turned the illegal seizure of art into a national trade, had his own plunder ransacked.

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The Nazi Looting Program at The National Archives

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From Monuments Men ...



van Gogh, The Artist on the Road to Tarascon, 1888

For it is an affair of the State to prevent a Folk from being driven into the arms of spiritual lunacy for on the day that this kind of art were actually to correspond to the general conception, one of the most severe changes of mankind would have begun; the backward development of the human brain.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Enjoy every bagel.