page_title: Robert M. Edsel
section_title: Photograph albums
hierarchical_section_title: Robert M. Edsel / Photograph albums
caption_attribution_description: English: Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein with Edsel after the donation of Nazi photograph albums.
context_page_description: Robert Morse Edsel is an American businessman and author. He has written three non-fiction books - Rescuing Da Vinci, Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History; and Saving Italy - chronicling the recovery of artwork stolen by Nazi Germany during World War II. A film based on his book, The Monuments Men, directed by and starring George Clooney, was released in February 2014.
  Edsel is the co-producer of the documentary film, The Rape of Europa. He is also founder and Chairman of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, which received the 2007 National Humanities Medal under President George W. Bush. The foundation has donated four albums of photographic evidence of the Third Reich's theft of art treasures to the United States National Archives.
context_section_description: During the course of their research into the whereabouts of lost art, Edsel and the staff of the Monuments Men Foundation discovered four large, leather-bound photograph albums which documented portions of the European art looted by the Nazis. The albums were in the possession of heirs to an American soldier stationed in the Berchtesgaden area of Germany, in the closing days of World War II.
  The albums were created by the staff of the Third Reich’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a special unit that found and confiscated the best material in Nazi-occupied countries, to use for exploitation. In France, the ERR engaged in an extensive and elaborate art looting operation, part of Hitler’s much larger premeditated scheme to steal art treasures from conquered nations. The albums were created for Hitler and high-level Nazi officials as a catalogue and, more importantly, to give Hitler a way to choose the art for his art museum in Austria. A group of these photograph albums was presented to Hitler on his birthday in 1943, to "send a ray of beauty and joy into [his] revered life." ERR staff stated that nearly 100 such volumes were created during the years of their art looting operation.
  In November 2007, at a ceremony with Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein, Edsel announced the discovery of the first two photograph albums and, separately, donated the albums to the National Archives.  Weinstein called the discovery "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."
caption: Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein with Edsel after the donation of Nazi photograph albums.
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