Rescuing Da Vinci is a 300+ page book that exposes the “untold” story of Hitler and the Nazi theft of Europe’s greatest art – with new information on the potential locations of lost art.
Hitler was quick to capture art and artefacts during every incursion and battle.
The Nazi’s were stealing the world’s symbols, icons, sculpture, art, philosophy, writings, teachings, religious texts…. Everything. All of the world’s treasures!
It seems their goal was to produce a new Nazi version of everything in order to thereby control societies and alter the history of humanity in a new and revised ‘Reich’ – to control the thinking of the world’s people.
After WWII, the great majority had been quickly recovered while many pieces had taken years and years to find. Perhaps important objects remain lost, hidden, or in the hands of either rightful or criminal caretakers.
Rescuing Da Vinci is the first comprehensive photographic telling of Hitler’s amazing effort to gather the world’s icons and art.
It was in 1925 that Hitler first came to the Berchtesgaden area with its pretty town where the Bavarian royal family spent hunting holidays. He had just served a nine-month sentence for trying to overthrow the local government and moved to the region, where he finished writing Mein Kampf . When he became Chancellor in 1933, he bought and rebuilt the house he had rented, which he called the Berghof.
Joe Klass had a lot of time to study the Nazi character and goals. He had been shot out of the sky before the USA entered the war, I believe, and spent several years as a WWII Prisoner Of War – perhaps longer than any American.
Joe commented while we were at dinner years ago that ‘pieces will melt from the bottom of glaciers‘ because the fleeing soldiers ‘were ordered to throw everything into the glaciers‘. (Joe is the grandfather within the famous Klass Foundation.) Perhaps great treasures were flung from mountaintops near Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest”.
Simon Waldman has composed an excellent blog post that exhibits Hitler’s alpine retreat called “Eagle’s Nest” with some of the material from a 1938 Home & Garden Magazine.
The site commands the fairest view in all Europe. Lawns at different levels are planted with flowering shrubs, as well as roses and other blooms in due season.
“The Führer, I may add, has a passion for cut flowers in his home, as well as for music. …a sunny sub-alpine home, hundreds of miles from Berlin’s uproar, and set amid an unsophisticated peasantry of carvers and hunters.”
Elaborate shelter systems were built beneath the hill behind the Berghof, with tastefully furnished rooms for Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun…
The bunker systems consisted of multi-level tunnels lined with concrete and bricks, with associated power, heating, and ventilation systems, and anti-gas protection systems. Most entrances and emergency exits were covered by protected machinegun positions, and some of these were quite elaborate.
It would have been difficult for any enemy to fight his way into these systems. The anti-aircraft defense center included a concrete observation tower.
It should be noted than in addition to the traditional air-raid bunker systems, there were several systems of access tunnels linking nearly every building….
Eagle’s Nest link found at Preoccupations
Update:
Historians say Hitler was the “art dictator” of Germany because he spent an inordinate amount of time overseeing the art and design of the Third Reich.
Somewhere in the bowels of the Third Reich’s bureaucracy a designer who belonged to the graphics “culture chamber,” the official body that sanctioned Nazi designers…. [designobserver]
Steven Heller is currently writing Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State to be published by Phaidon Press in 2008. His website is hellerbooks.com.
Update:
Frederic Spotts’s book, “Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics” tries to sort the truth behind the myths, rumors, forgeries and blatant propaganda that have formed our view of Hitler’s interest in the arts. [nytimes]
Irmgard Hunt grew up in the picturesque Bavarian village of Berchtesgaden, in the shadow of the Eagle”s Nest and near Adolf Hitler”s luxurious alpine retreat. On Hitler”s Mountain offers a unique, gripping, and vitally important first-person perspective on a tumultuous era in modern history, as viewed through the eyes of a child…
Who would imagine there would be an effort to suppress a 65 year old UK magazine article about Hitler’s home in the mountains? About the “flap” here. Mirror site here.
From ThirdReichRuins.com, with much additional information.
An elevator built into the mountain goes up to the Kehlsteinhaus. The interior of the elevator has solid brass walls and mirrors to make it look less confining, since Hitler was known to suffer from claustrophobia. On his infrequent visits to the Kehlsteinhaus, Hitler would stand in the exact center of the elevator.
The “Eagle’s Nest” became a popular stop for visiting GIs. For awhile, only officers were allowed to ride the elevator, and enlisted men had to use the footpath.
The Kehlsteinhaus was the pinnacle of Bormann’s building mania on the Obersalzberg, literally and figuratively. It was an engineering marvel of its day.
From Yahoo Answers
Without doubt, the most popular tour
ist site on the Obersalzberg now is the Kehlsteinhaus. In English, this building is called the “Eagle’s Nest,” even though this is not a translation of the German name (simply “House on the Kehlstein (Mountain)”), and the Germans did not call it the “Eagle’s Nest” (or Adlerhorst or any other such name). This name seems to have been first applied by the visiting French ambassador André François Poncet, and was picked up by the Allies. It was in use by the Americans and British by 1938.
Which moustache is the most instantly recognisable – and sinister – in history?
A link to the origin of Hitler’s moustache.