| View Larger Image | The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War | Paperbackby Lynn H. Nicholas (Author)
| List Price: | $17.00 | | Price: | $11.56 | | You Save: | $5.44 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Vintage | | Edition: | Reprintth Edition | | Page Count: | 512 Pages | | Publication Date: | April 25, 1995 | | Sales Rank: | 13,618th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780679756866
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
The cast of characters includes Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall--not to mention works by artists from da Vinci to Picasso. And the story told in this superbly researched and at times suspenseful book is that of the Third Reich's war on European culture and the Allies' desperate effort to preserve it. 90 illustrations and photos. 3 maps. |
Amazon.com Review
Every few months you'll read a newspaper story of the discovery of some long-lost art treasure hidden away in a German basement or a Russian attic: a Cranach, a Holbein, even, not long ago, a da Vinci. Such treasures ended up far from the museums and churches in which they once hung, taken as war loot by Allied and Axis soldiers alike. Thousands of important pieces have never been recovered. Lynn Nicholas offers an astonishingly good account of the wholesale ravaging of European art during World War II, of how teams of international experts have worked to recover lost masterpieces in the war's aftermath and of how governments "are still negotiating the restitution of objects held by their respective nations." |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 18 reviews)
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Great topic. A bit tedious. by Heights Curmudgeon (Brooklyn, NY United States)  3 Stars
August 01, 2009
I read this book when it came out over a decade ago.
The topic is pretty fascinating.
But the story moves slowly in many parts.
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Very Comprehensive by Julie Merilatt (Chicago, IL)  4 Stars
March 31, 2009
While the topic of this book is definitely intriguing, it contains a LOT of information. There are so many names, committees, museums and locations, I often felt bogged down by the details when I would have enjoyed a much broader perspective instead of all of the minutiae. Overall, it is a great resource cataloguing the movement of art during WWII, the various conservation efforts taken, the unscrupulous acquisitions by the Nazis, and the tedious tracking of missing works after the war. The photographs were a great enhancement. Though I found it tedious at times, it is in important aspect of history that is still relevant to this day.
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Research behind the film on Nazi greed and Post-war plunder.. by R. A. Sheehan (Boston)  5 Stars
February 18, 2009
Painstaking research behind the fascinating documentary, Rape of Europa. Lynn Nichols compelling book of the same title explores broad efforts to safeguard European masterpieces from Nazi greed and plunder. She shifts her focus from capital to countryside, from the one border to the next. While she records art historians' views on looting and valued artifacts retained by conquering nations, she also turns her lens onto the less-publicized cases of Allied looting, the cases of victorious soldiers purloined objets d'art as souvenirs. In the final chapter, Nichols describes the fate of the heirs to American military plunder finding that the stolen items, while valuable, are unsalable, Some are returning stolen items anonymously discovering that there is still a penalty attached to war-time loot; others are forced to surrender objects identified by German investigators tracking historical collections spirited beyond its borders. The German government lost paintings taken back to the Soviet Union in train loads where they are still held as compensation for monstrous ravage and destruction;, the art world as a group monitors the markets for individual pieces going for auction and ponders in general the moral dilemma posed by war loot and restitution.
The compelling moral directive still remains as one of massive concerted Allied effort from the top down to discover, identify and return thousands of pieces of stolen art to their rightful owners--if they still be among the living, a story that continues through this day.
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the rest of the story by Alexander T. Gafford (Midland, Ga United States) 5 Stars
January 01, 2009
This a both a work of considerable scholarship and also a work written with considerable understanding of human nature. Essentially it is written in two parts. The first covers the Nazi expropriation or destruction of works of art all over Europe from 1939 through 1942. The second part covers the Allied attempts to recover and safeguard the stolen/confiscated/extorted works of art. The strength of this work is that the author makes clear that this simple narrative is complicated by the fact that not all motives were entirely pure or entirely corrupt depending on the nature of the individuals involved. There were some German army officials who actually tried to safeguard and protect art though their efforts were usually overcome by rapacious National Socialist ideologists and greedy Party officials. "Collaborationist" French officials did all in their bureaucratic power to delay and obstruct the systematic looting. On the other side, not all Allied military personnel behaved correctly with personal instances of indifference and corruption against which the "Monument Men" struggled untiringly. The author is particularly clear about the role of European art dealers who, if they were in business from 1939 to 1945, did some business with the Nazis who ruled Europe. Their ethical challanges are described as is the way they met those challanges with various levels of compromise. The only flaw in the book is that there are not many illustrations of the works involved in theis huge transfer of ownership and location. Of course, such illustrations would practically describe a history of Western art, so instead we have many contemporary photos of the activities being described in the text, which are quite interesting.
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See the movie, first by KATBYTE93 (PENNSYLVANIA, USA) 5 Stars
October 12, 2008
The book is excellent as a resource after seeing the movie. For nonartistists such as myself, this is a great resource to further my understanding of the film. The film is 5 stars and really shows what happened.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| The Rape of Europa
Starring: Joan Allen
Directed By: Richard Berge;Bonni Cohen;Nicole Newnham
Studio: Repnet Llc Release Date: 09/16/2008
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| Rescuing Da Vinci: Hitler and the Nazis Stole Europe's Great Art - America and Her Allies Recovered It
by Robert M. Edsel (Author), Lynn H. Nicholas (Foreword), Edmund P. Pillsbury (Foreword)
During and following WWII, a special multinational group of more than 350 men and women served behind enemy lines and joined frontline military units to ensure the preservation, protection, liberation and restitution of the world's greatest artistic and cultural treasures. This "band of unsung heroes," formally referred to as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) section, or commonly referred to as the "Monuments Men," worked tirelessly to track down, identify and catalogue...
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| The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy To Steal The World's Greatest Works Of Art
by Hector Feliciano (Author)
During the occupation of Paris, the Nazis confiscated nearly 100,000 artworks frommore than 200 collectors, transporting most of the spoils to Germany, where Hitlerand Goering enjoyed first pick. The Lost Museum dramatizes the pillage of the mostextensive and valuable of these collections, which belonged to five renownedJewish families: Rosenberg, Rothschild, Schloss, David-Weill and Bernheim-Jeune.After the war, many works that were found were returned to their owners. But a largenumber had...
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| Nazi Plunder: Great Treasure Stories Of World War II
by Kenneth D. Alford (Author)
Stories of the looting of Europe's great treasures during World War II--and their still-unknown hideaways. World War II was the most devastating conflict in human history, but the tragedy did not end on the battlefields. During the war, Germany--and, later, the Allies--plundered Europe's historic treasures. Between 1939 and 1945, German armed forces roamed from Dunkirk to Stalingrad, looting gold, silver, currency, paintings and other works of art, coins, religious artifacts, and millions...
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| The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
by Robert M. Edsel (Author), Bret Witter (Contributor)
At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.
In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Momuments Men, risked their lives...
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