The Goering Collection - The Consolidated Interrogation Reports

Reading these reports on the Goering interrogations, long kept secret, and prepared by the Art Looting Investigation Unit, or Project Orion, illustrates how much art was stolen in the war years, and how many dealers, museums, etc. benefited from the German occupation. The best collections in museums the world over consist of stolen goods. Adolf Hitler's grand project, the Sonderauftrag Linz, or Museum of World Art at Linz was but one example. The conflicts between Hitler's acquisitiveness and Goering's own, termed in the reports 'Finders Keepers' agreements are interesting, and indicative of reasons why Hitler imprisoned Goering in 1945.

Post the War, Stalin's own Palace of the Soviets, had a Museum of World Art, built up by re-retrieving stolen art, or perhaps re-stealing it, with the help of the Extraordinary Commision. Then there's the Elgin Marbles and all the treasures of the British, not least the Kohinoor.

Perhaps I'll expand this into a more detailed article sometime.