"History of Napoleon's art looting of Italy and the subsequent formation of the Louvre"--

Argues that through a campaign of organized theft, the proceeds of which were channeled into generous social programs at home, Hitler and the Nazis "bought" the allegiance of ordinary Germans.

"This is a tragedy that begins in the halls of psychiatry and modern art and ends in the Nazis' first gas chambers. In the early 1920s, Hans Prinzhorn, a psychiatrist and aesthete, sought insight from the art of mental patients such as Franz Buhler. Buhler was a brilliant, well-known ironworker until his schizophrenia diagnosis, and his work was compared to that of Munch and Duhrer. Prinzhorn collected and published their work, inspiring the Modernist...

Traces the lesser-known effort by an Allied division to find and secure European art that had been looted by the Nazis, outlining how they risked their lives and raced against time with limited supplies and scraps of information.

"The story of art is integral to the story of the rise of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler, an artist himself, was obsessed with art--in particular, the aesthetic of a purified regime, scoured of 'degenerate' influences that characterized Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. When they came to power in 1933, Hitler and Goebbels set their aesthetic vision into motion and removed degenerate art from German life: artists fled the country; museums were purged;...