Documentary a study of Nazis as master looters

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/10/2007 (6900 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BASED on the 1994 book by American historian Lynn Nicholas, this sober, scrupulously researched documentary relates the vast destruction and dislocation of World War Two through a story that isn’t widely known — the threat to Europe’s cultural treasures.

Looting has always been a part of war, admits one of the academics interviewed for the film, but “the Nazis raised looting to an industrial level.” Theft was planned by high-ranking officials, carried out by special units, and — with that fascist mania for paperwork — heavily documented.

Before his rise to power, Hitler was a mediocre painter who applied for acceptance into an Austrian art school at the same time as modernist artists Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoshka. Hitler was famously denied while the other two men got in. (Kokoshka once joked that if he had been rejected and Hitler had been accepted, he, Kokoshka, would have run the world somewhat differently.)

Hitler’s obsession with art never went away. (Many of his final hours in the Berlin bunker were spent poring over plans for rebuilding his home town of Linz as a cultural capital, a project of such monumental neoclassical kitsch it’s almost comic.)

Hitler purged the art he hated and stole the art he liked. Other Nazi leaders, such as the ostentatious vulgarian Hermann Goering, amassed huge personal art collections from plundered museums and galleries and the confiscated collections of Jewish families.

Filmmakers Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen make it clear that Nazi looting was not an incidental by-product of war. Hitler had a wish list of Rembrandts before he invaded Holland. The demolition of Warsaw castle was deliberately planned and carried out as a blow to Polish national pride. The wholesale thievery of Jewish property was not just greed but also an attempt to wipe out all traces of the Jewish people in Europe, to make it seem as if they had never existed.

Clearly, there was something at stake beyond expensive property, which is why people fought so hard for their cathedrals and museums and monuments. There are stories of the evacuation of the Louvre, as ordinary Parisians volunteered to transport works into safe hiding in the French countryside.

With its chronological structure and dry tone, the film is substantive but not stylistically interesting. It doesn’t have the emotional power or the intellectual force of the 1989 documentary The Architecture of Doom, which put forward the provocative thesis that the Nazis’ esthetic worldview was an essential part of their political program and not just a decorative gloss.

But The Rape of Europa is meticulously documented and clearly presented, its sober approach nicely matched by the quiet intelligence of narrator Joan Allen. And with an epilogue that considers some of the ongoing legal battles over raided art works, this sometimes overlooked aspect of the war proves itself topical and timely.

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Also at Cinematheque this week, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman continues with parts 3 and 4.

The Rape of Europa

Directed by Bonni Cohen and Richard Berge

Cinematheque

To Oct. 18

3 out 5 stars