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In addition to the brutal horrors of the holocaust, the Nazi legacy includes the organized plunder of some of the world's greatest art during the Second World War. Beginning with the Occupation of Paris in June, 1940, Hitler, Goering and a host of carefully selected and highly motivated assistants, arranged for the looting of every museum, large and small, throughout Europe and Russia. Not only were the museums ransacked, but private galleries and personal collections were pillaged as well, many of which were owned by wealthy Jews and other collectors and patrons of the arts. With his eye set on stocking a personal museum in his native city of Linz, Austria, Hitler and his crew methodically stole thousands of paintings, sculptures, rare pieces of furniture and antiquities, and carted them back to Germany by train where they were sequestered until the fall of Berlin. Many pieces were lost or stolen along the way, by mid-level soldiers involved in the plunder, and other pieces were stashed in churches, hotels, mines and castles awaiting transport back to the Fuhrer and Goering. When the war ended, a group of American and British officials, curators, art scholars and historians (the Monuments Men) were able to locate and preserve thousands of the stolen pieces. But thousands, literally, remain lost, out of the public eye for over half a century.
Spoils is set in Paris during the first months of the Occupation. It is a fictional work based on real characters, many of whom played a small or great part in the Nazi theft. I have tried to capture the settings, including the Rothschild Mansion, the German Embassy, the Jeu de Paume, the Louvre, and streets of Paris, as precisely as I could.
Perhaps in the end, I will be accused of placing too human a face on those who could have conducted such a savage and inhumane plunder. These were, after all, the same faces that planned and executed the Final Solution. But I imagined that there must, at the very least, have been the slightest pang of conscience in some of them (Korpsman Richter in the book), the tiniest shred of decency, a passing notion that what they were engaged in was beyond evil. We can only suppose. And to appease ourselves with the notion that such atrocities will never again occur, one need only look to front pages of the newspaper, even today, to understand that we are still capable of doing terrible things to one another.
Please send me feedback, good or bad. And by all means, check out the resources page for interesting and comprehensive overviews of the Nazi theft of art. I hope you enjoy the read!
Best wishes,
Steve Palumbo
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