Lynn H. Nicholas

Lynn Nicholas' The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (Vintage, 1994) chronicles the chilling effects that the Nazi regime and World War II had on the art world of Europe. Using a wide range of archival sources from America and Europe, as well as contemporary media accounts and correspondence/interviews with surviving participants, Nicholas weaves a narrative that is at once fascinating and horrifying.

Nicholas meticulously chronicles show more Nazi efforts to obtain desired art from wherever it was, by just about any means necessary: outright confiscation, bribery, extortion, special military operations, &c. The efficiency with which Hitler and his minions gathered, transported, and stored the artistic masterpieces once held in private and public collections alike. She spends much time on Goering and his collecting habits, which bordered on the maniacal and sometimes even brought him into conflict with Hitler (and, as we've seen from the recent books on the van Meegeren forgeries, once or twice led him to purchase outright fakes).

Efforts by collectors, curators and dealers to protect their artworks also fall under Nicholas' wide purview; some of the steps taken are really quite remarkable. Here we learn of the vast removal projects that saw artworks taken from their comfortable galleries and stashed in remote chateaux, manor houses, even mines (with varying degrees of success, depending on the place).

Once Nicholas has managed to chronicle the dispersal of the art, she begins to put it back together again, tracking Allied troops as they took back territory from the Nazis (whose turn it then was to hide the art they'd pilfered from all across Europe), and the small core of "Monuments Men" who were tasked with protecting the found art. And then came the political and diplomatic rigamarole involved with determining how to return the pieces to their rightful owners, if they could be found (a process which continues to this day). Finally, she examines a few of the great treasures that remain missing to this day, perhaps still stashed in some sealed-off German salt mine, or hanging in a remote Russian dacha.

Dense, but entirely readable and completely captivating, filled with a cast of larger-than-life characters and great art.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/07/book-review-rape-of-europa.html show less

Very well written and engaging, for the most part. About one-third of the way through the book, I was struggling to keep focusing on the story--I think that was because the cast of characters is overwhelming, and it was hard to remember who these hundreds of people were. Once the Americans came on the scene it became easier to keep up with the action. I feel like there should be a web page devoted to this book which shows the connections between people. There are so many nasty villains among show more the Nazis and so many collaborators among the populaces conquered by the Nazis that it can become fairly sickening.

One comment I came across noted that one should not spend too much sympathy on the art looted and destroyed because of the horrifying numbers of people destroyed by the Nazis. I agree with that. It is important to not lose sight of the genocide. One thing I feel helps me keep perspective is that there are survivors (a few) and their descendants (many more) who have still not been reunited with family artwork or compensated for the loss of their possessions.

This book in particular has been fundamental in shining a much-needed light on the countries like Switzerland and Austria in particular which have not made restitution of artwork to the descendants of the original owners. If only for that, the author of this book deserves our thanks. show less

If you’ve ever watched “The Monuments Men” movie and wondered ‘How did all the art the Nazi’s looted end up in those mines?’ Well this is the book that answers that question.

But it covers so much more in its densely packed, detailed research driven pages of which The Monuments Men is just a small part.

While the Nazi art confiscation is well documented and told, this book also covers the less talked about destruction of art by both sides (the Allies being particularly destructive show more in Italy), the bargaining and using of art to buy things such as transit visas, the boom in the world-wide art trade as items previously held in museums or private collections came on the market. While the Nazis did steal a lot, they were also the most rapacious buyers of art and dealers, and forgers, around the world made fortunes off them.

I found it fascinating to read how certain parts of the German infrastructure would hinder the confiscation and transfer of looted art, such as the Army in Paris refusing to supply trucks, or people starting shell companies that could then claim certain collections were “German owned” and stop them from being moved.

There are also stories of ingenious methods used to hide art treasures (sometimes in plain sight), and not so clever (a member of the Rothchild family in Holland burying art under a sand-dune and not marking it or even writing down its location!)

Academic in tone it can be a bit of a slog to get through, but it’s full of interesting stories. show less

An epic chronicling the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazi Party against the art, history, and culture of Europe. Nicholas has painstakingly recorded with impeccable detail the looting of museums, confiscation of personal collections of Jewish citizens and fleeing refugees, and the burning and systematic destruction of countless works and artifacts deemed "degenerate" by Hitler and his Nazi underlings. The Rape of Europa simultaneously highlights the triumphant resistance efforts show more and quiet heroism of dedicated museum curators and their assistants, publishers secreting away manuscripts marked for destruction by fire, gallery owners hosting back room exhibitions of banned works, and countless civilians dedicated to the conservation of their cultural icons. Heralded as the "true story" behind the international efforts of the now-famous Monuments Men to spare historical sites and locate hidden and missing works, this is only a single component of this expansive text. A haunting masterpiece of WWII nonfiction. show less