Archives Acquire Photo Record of Nazi Art Trove

The National Archives yesterday accepted two newly discovered photograph albums kept by the Nazis to document the art they were looting from Jewish families who had owned some of the best collections in Europe.

The albums were given to Adolf Hitler so that he could select works for his personal museum.

The Third Reich organized a committee in 1940 to seize art for Hitler's personal inspection. A set of 39 albums, created by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), was displayed at the Nuremberg war-crime trials in 1945 and has been kept at the Archives.

Yet experts believed that at least 85 albums were created. The rest, with the exception of the two accepted by the Archives, are missing.

The albums turned over to the Archives this week are No. 6 and No. 8, from the early days of the ERR.

"This material is 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," said Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States.

Yesterday Robert M. Edsel, a former independent oil and gas producer who has spent six years looking into issues of art and architecture during World War II, said the albums were discovered by a relative of an American GI. The soldier took them in 1945 from Hitler's summer home near Berchtesgaden, Germany. He put them in his backpack as a souvenir and then stored them in his attic.

"These albums contain photos of some of the earliest stolen works of art from many of the most prominent collections in Paris at the beginning of the war -- names such as Wildenstein, Kahn, Seligmann and Rothschild, to name a few," Edsel said. "This connects with a story that was stalled for 60 years. For so many years people thought the 39 were all there was. These things are somewhere. I don't think all were destroyed."

The pages in the brown leather book on display yesterday reveal that Hitler had his eye on paintings by Francois Boucher and Hubert Robert from the collections of wealthy families. "It allowed Hitler to use these things as mail-order catalogues," he said. Hitler planned to build a museum with the world's great art in his home town of Linz.

A spokesman for the Archives said Edsel declined to name the family who owned the albums or the purchase price.

"We worked closely with the heirs to acquire them," said Edsel, who is president of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art. The Monuments Men was a group of men and women from 13 countries who returned more than 5 million items the Nazis had stolen.

The Archives are one of the most important stops for historians and families looking for information on Holocaust-related assets. They have 15 million pages of documents gathered from 30 federal agencies. About 1,000 researchers have requested the materials in the past decade.

According to the Archives, the ERR organized the theft of 21,903 artworks, mainly from private Jewish collections. The Nazi committee created an intricate inventory system for the works.

Album No. 8 has about 50 images, with notations in German about each work. That album is being donated immediately because it needed the most conservation, Edsel said. The information from album No. 6 is available now to scholars but Edsel is keeping the book for a time "to bring visibility to this story and encourage others who may have such documents to come forth."

"To find two of the albums at this late stage shows promise" that more might exist, Edsel said. "We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg as people gradually awaken to the fact that hundreds of thousands of items, worth billions of dollars, remain missing."