On June 14, 1940, the Wehrmacht marched into Paris. A week later, the occupying authorities were already visiting art galleries and the apartments of major collectors, as reported in the archives of the Préfecture de Police. From July onwards, owners of works worth more than 100,000 francs had to report them to the occupying authorities. Many Jews, who felt protected by their French nationality, declared them themselves to the Feldkommandantur. As with the wearing of the yellow star, the optimists came forward, the pessimists kept a low profile. And history, unfortunately, proved the pessimists right.

Hitler had set his sights on creating a great museum of Aryan works confiscated in the occupied countries. During the Occupation, 100,000 works of art were transferred from France to Germany with the collaboration of the Vichy regime. The looted works passed through the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris before being sent on to Germany. Thanks to the clandestine notes taken by curator Rose Valland, some 60,000 of the 100,000 artworks and objects were recovered in Germany and sent back to France. Two-thirds of these, around 45,000, were returned to their owners before 1950.

While many of these works were returned to France after the Liberation, some have surprisingly reappeared over time, as in the case of the almost 1,500 works of art, including paintings by Courbet, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso and Chagall, found at the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Hitler's art dealer, in 2014. Many thousands are still untraceable.

Our lecture will analyze the Third Reich's efforts to confiscate, plunder, censor and influence art. The history and path of these works and their, sometimes, surprising restitution.