If you were looking for the big book of Nazi art looting, you could do a lot worse than Lynn H. Nicholas' The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War*. The book, which spawned a documentary film of the same name, is a very thorough recounting of the massive redistribution of art and archives before, during, and after World War II. It's much less sentimental than The Monuments Men, which is less about the art, and more about the manly men who rescued it, and broader in scope than The Venus Fixers, which has a similar depth but concentrates just on Italy. It's also not, unfortunately, as entertaining as, say, Stealing the Mystic Lamb or The Forger's Spell; anecdotes and human interest take a back seat to the dauntingly huge task of following the displacement of much of the art in Europe.
Huge and massive really are the operative words here: "The December 1950 summary for Wiesbaden reported that 340,846 items had been returned since its establishment, a rather meaningless statistic given the fact that one single 'item', a library, had contained 1.2 million objects, and another, 3 million." The scope of the book covers Nazi siezure of Germanic art from its own people (and censorship of 'degenerate' work of its own citizens), the outright looting of Poland and parts of the Soviet Union, the more careful and selective removal of art from occupied Austria, Belgium, Holland, and France (always with an eye on propaganda), and the constantly changing policy of 'safeguarding' Italian art, plus a whole lot of retaliatory destruction once the tides of war had turned.
Beyond the theft of property under many guises (besides simply seizing many objects, the Nazis also forced museums and people to sell or trade art for low prices or works of inferior value), Nicholas follows the trail of museum curators and gallery owners who moved their own property, sometimes multiple times, in an attempt to escape both looting and destruction. By the time the Allies and their dedicated, but comparatively tiny, team of MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives) officers, entered the picture, the task of locating and redistributing everything was impossible, and their priorities became increasingly political. Many works were never found, and many others ended up half a continent away from where they started.
I'm not going to lie, this book took me a long time to read. It's very dense, and in some places very dry, and although it does focus on an important cultural aspect of World War II, the art world can seem a bit impenetrable for those of us on the outside. Ultimately, though, the real, human stories shine through all the names, places and facts. It's easy to empathize with artists simply forbidden to paint, and it'd be hard not to cheer for Rose Valland, hero-librarian of the French Resistance. It's not difficult, either, to be appalled at the (many, and by no means all Germans) art dealers who made a fortune throughout the war years, even though my personal experience with art dealers is limited to vendors at local craft fairs.
* The title refers to a popular painters' subject; unfortunately, it's also meant to allude to the looting of art across Europe. While art looting is terrible, it's not at all equivalent to actual rape, and the title's therefore a pretty poor choice.
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