{"id":109353,"date":"2021-01-13T10:31:19","date_gmt":"2021-01-13T15:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=109353"},"modified":"2021-01-13T10:31:19","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T15:31:19","slug":"inside-the-u-s-armys-warehouse-full-of-nazi-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=109353","title":{"rendered":"Inside the U.S. Army\u2019s Warehouse Full of Nazi Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo courtesy The New Yorker (Robert C. Sanchez)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The New Yorker magazine<\/a> takes a look into the loads of Nazi art confiscated by the US Army in the closing days of World War II.<\/p>\n

In the final days of the Second World War, a train loaded with relics of the collapsing Third Reich was speeding toward the Czech border when American pilots, flying P-47 fighters, spotted it and opened fire. The train ground to a halt in a forest, where German soldiers spirited the cargo away. They were pursued, not long afterward, by Gordon Gilkey, a young captain from Linn County, Oregon, who had been ordered to gather up all the Nazi propaganda and military art he could find. Gilkey tracked the smugglers to an abandoned woodcutter\u2019s hut, where he pried up the floorboards and found what he was looking for: a collection of drawings and watercolors belonging to the German military\u2019s high command. The cache had survived the strafing, only to be afflicted by mildew and a family of hungry mice. \u201cThey had eaten the ends off many pictures, large holes in a few, and gave all the cabin pictures an uneven deckle edge,\u201d Gilkey wrote.<\/p>\n

Two years later, after Gilkey completed his mission, he put the art he had recovered\u2014thousands of pieces of it\u2014on a ship bound for the United States. Today, one of the world\u2019s largest collections of Nazi propaganda sits in a climate-controlled warehouse at Fort Belvoir, in northern Virginia. Much of it is virulent; most of it is never seen by the public.<\/p>\n

Fort Belvoir is home to the 29th Infantry Division and also to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It is also home to the U.S. Army Center of Military History, which maintains the Nazi art, along with thousands of other relics of wars past. One afternoon, before the pandemic struck, I drove inside the base to a cavernous warehouse where the collection is stored. It was like prying open a time capsule from a very dark time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More at the source. I particularly like how some Third Army dog face bayoneted Hitler on “The Flag Bearer” on display at one of his retreats. Thankfully the curators did not repair it.<\/p>\n

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Fort Belvoir’s trove of historical art artifacts is also home to several artistic works by the Nazi leader himself. <\/a>\u00a0For obvious reasons, the watercolors from Hitler’s failed career as a painter have not been put on display.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker magazine takes a look into the loads of Nazi art confiscated by the … Inside the U.S. Army\u2019s Warehouse Full of Nazi Art<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[359,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-army","category-historical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109356,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109353\/revisions\/109356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}