Loot and Plunder: The Ignored Cultural Rape of Germany

Soviet Red Army with the Victory Banner in Brandenburg

U.S. Army troops in the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig

U.S. Army troops in the Schlosskirche of Ellingen

Messerschmitt Me 262 - The World's First Operational Jet Fighter

Throughout Germany, priceless art, religious and secular treasures, were violently torn from church-altars, wretched from museum walls or even stolen from private collections and homes by Soviet and Allied soldiers. Joseph Stalin's minions emptied nearly all museums, collections, archives, and sheltering depots in his zone of occupation and for decades his successors hid many of these objects from the world, treasures representing the entire German history. In 1945, as the Red Army advanced into Germany, special “trophy brigades” went out to collect the slated works in German museums and ship them back to Moscow. From 1945 to 1949, more than two and a half million works of art were carried off from Germany, mostly to the metropolises of the Soviet Union where many of them are in secret storage even today. From the time they conquered Potsdam in April 1945, where many collections had ended up, until 1946, everything that could be moved was taken to Moscow and documents dating from centuries past were destroyed or scattered. Treasures so meticulously organized through the ages in Germany, were scattered so widely they will never all be found and identified even if they survived the abysmal storage conditions. 450,000 freight-train wagon loads were received in Moscow in 1945 alone. This doesn't even touch upon the sculpture, porcelain, musical instruments, clocks, silver, furniture, prints and drawings and millions of rare books plundered by Soviet and allied soldiers alike. The real estate and whole households of the millions of expelled ethnic Germans provided loot for years to come in those areas. The Russians are unrepentant and arrogant about their thievery and seem to go down this brazen path with the tacit approval of civilized nations. The Pushkin Museum shamelessly insists, incorrectly and in violation of international law, that all looted art and cultural valuables obtained from Germany and its allies during the war are federal property of the Russian Federation. German cultural institutions issued a catalogue in 2008 detailing thousands of objects of art that disappeared from Berlin at the end of the war in the hope that foreign governments will return the stolen art to them. Over 180,000 items disappeared from itemized and inventoried German collections alone along with thousands of other cultural treasures which have never been recovered. Another lucrative plunder was scientific. At the end of World War II, both Allied and Soviet scientific intelligence experts accompanied the invading forces into Germany to plunder as much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble, and they were delighted and shocked at the advanced German technical achievements they found. Sadly, the biggest theft of all, the most massive art heist of all times, the looting and plundering of German treasures has drawn scant, if any, media attention. Credit: Researcher and writer Linda Schaitberger. Top image: according to TASS, commanding Soviet officers who stormed the Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945. Credit: Olga Shirnina. Priv.coll. FU. Second image: US GI stands in the Leipzig Monument to the Völkerschlacht, or Battle of the Nations in April 1945. US officers stole original ancient and renaissance writings from the Leipzig University Library before turning the city over to the communists in July 1945. The guardians of the fallen warriors still standing silent sentinel over the scene of the last German stand in Leipzig. Credit: Paul Kerestes. Third image: US GI stands amid crates and stacks of treasures stored in a castle church after the farming hamlet Ellingen had been bombed by US Airforce on Feb. 23 1945. US Army emptied the local church of what they considered looted art in late April 1945. Credit: Marina Amaral. Bottom image: Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe in Leipheim. Before the guns fell silent in 1945, the Allies had already drawn up plans for gathering as much German technology as they could take and.to secure the minds behind Germany's advanced weaponry. The Soviets attempted the same, but the Allies gained the lion's share of Nazi scientists, prototypes, and know-how. The USAAF had at the top of its priority targets’ list one name: Messerschmitt 262 in its fighter variant. As a fighter, the German jet scored heavily against Allied air formations. Allied bombers, however, destroyed hundreds of Me 262s on the ground. Credit: KL-Dokumentation.