6th November 2007
At the end of the Second World War an American soldier who was stationed at Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat, looked around for a souvenir. He took two leather bound albums, it was uncovered in Washington that they could provide clues to art works that the Nazi’s looted.
The two albums contain pictures of art treasures that had been stolen from French dealers in Paris after the invasion of France in 1940. The stolen art works were sent to Hitler and Hermann Goering to aid them with making selections for their personal collections. Robert Edsel, the man who helped rescue the books and who donated them to national arcives said, "In their leisure time they flipped through them like mail order catalogues."
Allen Weinstein hailed their discovery as "one of the most significant finds related to Hitler's premeditated theft of art and other cultural treasures to be found since the Nuremberg trials". Allen Weinstein is the historian who heads the national achieves. He announced that such works pictured in the albums include works by Boucher.
