page_title: Kunstschutz
section_title: Kunstschutz activities
hierarchical_section_title: Kunstschutz / History / World War II / Kunstschutz activities
caption_attribution_description: Information added by Wikimedia users.English: Rome, Italy, 4 January 1944. German soldiers of the Division "Hermann Göring" posing near the main entrance of Palazzo Venezia showing a picture taken from the National Museum of Naples Picture Gallery (today at the Museo di Capodimonte) before the city liberation, during a propaganda ceremony aimed to prove that the artworks are being "devolved" to the RSI. (Source: Silvio Bertoldi, Salò, una storia per immagini Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1992, p. 57). The picture shown is by Giovanni Paolo Pannini and represents "Carlo III di Borbone visiting the Pope Benedetto XIV in the coffee-house of the Quirinale, Rome" (Museo di Capodimonte inv. Q 205). Italiano: Soldati tedeschi della "divisione Hermann Göring" in posa di fronte a Palazzo Venezia a Roma con un quadro prelevato nella Pinacoteca del Museo Nazionale di Napoli (oggi nel Museo di Capodimonte) prima dell'ingresso delle truppe alleate nella città, durante la cerimonia di restituzione delle opere alla RSI. 4 gennaio 1944. (fonte: Silvio Bertoldi, Salò, una storia per immagini Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1992, p. 57). Il quadro in oggetto è di Giovanni Paolo Pannini e rappresenta "Carlo III di Borbone che visita il papa Benedetto XIV nella coffee-house del Quirinale a Roma" (Museo di Capodimonte inv. Q 205).
context_page_description: Kunstschutz is the German term for the principle of preserving cultural heritage and artworks during armed conflict, especially during the First World War and Second World War, with the stated aim of protecting the enemy's art and returning after the end of hostilities. It is associated with the image of the "art officer" or "art expert".
  The Allies instituted a Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program tasked with identifying, locating, securing, storing, and returning stolen art after the war.
context_section_description: Kunstschutz's altruistic image in World War I aided its reinstatement in World War II. On the initiative of Marshal Hermann Göring, a specialist military corps known as the Kunstschutz was reactivated following the Armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces of September 1943 to requisition Italian artworks and transport them to Germany, under the pretext of saving them from Allied bombing. In Florence 58 crates of marble and bronze statues (by Donatello and Michelangelo among others), 26 ancient Greek statues, 291 large paintings (including works by Titian, Botticelli and Raphael) and 25 crates of smaller paintings set out for Germany and Austria in convoys which many Italian intelligence officers secretly followed and reported back on to their government and thus to the Allies. One of those officers was the antifascist Rodolfo Siviero, who transmitted his reports to the Allies via his partisan contacts and continued to hunt down and return looted and illegally acquired Italian artworks from Germany after 1945. One of those he returned was the  Spiridon Leda (1505–1515) from the Leonardo da Vinci school, acquired by Göring before the war. In Naples the national museums were looted, with paintings taken including the Danaë by Titian, The Blind Leading the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Portrait of a young woman, known as Antea by Parmigianino and the Apollo Citharoedus from Pompeii.
  Goebels had also edited a 1000-page inventory of French artworks in the occupied zone of France. Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich was responsible for the Kunstschutz in France from 1940 to 1942 and most works in French museums were taken Collections belonging to Jews such as the Rothschilds and the David-Weill family were evacuated using the funds of the French national museums and gathered together in the Musée du Jeu de Paume, where Göring took his pick before putting them all in special trains bound for Berlin. Rose Valland, one of the French curators, took secret notes on the contents of each train out. Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, tried to get hold of Diana Bathing by François Boucher, whilst Hitler himself took part of Alfred Schloss's collection of 300 Dutch paintings for his personal museum at Linz.
  German art looting also occurred in every state invaded and occupied by Germany, but especially Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and elsewhere.
caption: Kunstschutz troops of the Hermann Göring Division display artwork relocated from Naples, the most-heavily bombed Italian city during World War II,[3] in a January 1944, ceremony in front of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome.  The painting, Carlo III di Borbone che visita il papa Benedetto XIV nella coffee-house del Quirinale a Roma by Giovanni Paolo Pannini,  was taken from the Biblioteca del Museo Nazionale di Napoli; it hangs today in the Museo di Capodimonte (inv. Q 205)
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