One of the best-known works is “The Flag Bearer,” painted by Hubert Lanzinger a year after Hitler came to power. The paintings stored on high metal racks in Fort Belvoir’s warehouse were part of a different project, meant to give the Reich’s predations a patina of high culture. Much of Nazi propaganda was ephemeral: posters and flyers, designed to be mass-produced and spread quickly. In 1982, Congress decided that it could return any art that did not overtly glorify the Reich. It was like prying open a time capsule from a very dark time. One afternoon, before the pandemic struck, I drove inside the base to a cavernous warehouse where the collection is stored.
Army Center of Military History, which maintains the Nazi art, along with thousands of other relics of wars past. Much of it is virulent most of it is never seen by the public.įort Belvoir is home to the 29th Infantry Division and also to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Today, one of the world’s largest collections of Nazi propaganda sits in a climate-controlled warehouse at Fort Belvoir, in northern Virginia. Two years later, after Gilkey completed his mission, he put the art he had recovered-thousands of pieces of it-on a ship bound for the United States. “They had eaten the ends off many pictures, large holes in a few, and gave all the cabin pictures an uneven deckle edge,” Gilkey wrote. The cache had survived the strafing, only to be afflicted by mildew and a family of hungry mice. Gilkey tracked the smugglers to an abandoned woodcutter’s 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’s high command. 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. The train ground to a halt in a forest, where German soldiers spirited the cargo away. 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.