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'Hitler Album' of stolen art unveiled
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WASHINGTON (Map, News) - A decades-old tattered brown leather album with photographs of 18th century paintings offers a rare glimpse into Adolf Hitler's massive looting of artwork during World War II.
The album, unveiled Thursday at the National Archives, is a compilation of some of the thousands of paintings the Nazis pillaged from their victims and rounded up for Hitler.
"This material is one of the most significant finds related to Hitler's premeditated theft of art and other cultural treasures to be found since the Nuremberg trials," Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States, said at a press conference.
The newly discovered album is one of two that were found in the attic of the family of an American soldier who had been stationed in the Berchtesgaden area of Germany at the end of World War II, according to Robert Edsel, who acquired both albums.
Edsel, the president of Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, said the soldier had removed the albums from Hitler's home as a souvenir of war.
"These albums, albums 6 and 8 of the series, contain photographs of some of the earliest thefts of works of art from the most prominent collectors and dealers in Paris at the beginning of the war," Edsel said.
He donated "album 8" to the archives and said he plans to donate "album 6" at a future date.
Edsel declined to say how much he paid for the albums, nor would he identify the family that sold them. He would say only that the family lives in the southern United States.
The albums were among nearly 100 such volumes that were created by a Third Reich unit called the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. The unit looted and catalogued collections for Hitler, who would then choose treasures for the Fuhrer's Art Museum in Linz, Austria.
The archives already has the 39 albums that were used as evidence of Nazi looting during the Nuremberg trials. Until recently, the archives said, it was believed that the missing albums had been destroyed during the closing days of World War II.
Album 8, the latest acquisition, contains about 50 pages of black-and-white photos of artwork by French artists Hubert Robert and Francois Boucher. The paintings include portraits, landscapes, and pictures of cherub-like children.
Edsel said he believed that most of the paintings detailed in the two albums were returned to France and then on to their rightful owners.
Edsel's Monuments Men Foundation, based in Dallas, was founded in honor of the "Monuments Men" of World War II - museum directors, curators and others who worked to help protect monuments and other cultural treasures from destruction during the war.
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