Heroic Measures

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Altaussee, May 1945
After the Removal of the Eight 500 kg Bombs at the Nazi Stolen Art Repository

The sites where plundered gold and artworks were stored by German Nazis during World War II included the remote Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. Over 21,000 objects were found there, many of them confiscated artworks from Paris. Another storage site was the Siegen copper mine in North Rhine-Westphalia Germany, which, in addition to stolen artwork, contained over 400 million Reichsmarks worth of Nazi gold.

The Austrian Altaussee salt mines contained some of the most valuable works of art. The mines are 18 stories deep and remain active today, producing as much as 63,000 gallons of brine per hour. At the time of the war, they had been mined by the same family for centuries and provided ideal conditions for the storage of art with constant moderate temperatures and deep enough tunnels to be safe from overhead bombs. From 1943 through 1945, Germa…