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jevo fame), had to be kept heavily coated with grease because of the tendency of the metal to oxidize. The chambers were also equipped with facilities for restoration, racks for 14,000 paintings and adequate flooring. Plans were completed for reception of still more treasure. In addition to the 10,000 paintings brought to Alt Aussee in the two last years of the war, the nazis had assembled masses of sculpture in the form of altarpieces, religious statues and hundreds of 18th-century French and Italian furniture, rugs, tapestries, etc. There was so much in the mine that it took two and a half months to clear it out through the single tunnel available.

ART COLLECTING POINTS ESTABLISHED

   The Armed Forces, anticipating the problem of restitution of these vast collections and restoration of the German national treasure which had been so protected from bombardment, were prepared to establish collecting points for art and other cultural material as soon as suitable and strategically located buildings could be found. Thus there are now in the U.S. Zone collecting points at Munich, Marburg, Wiesbaden, and Offenbach, which are currently processing arts and documents being evacuated from six main underground repositories, of which Alt Aussee is the largest. These points, now housing both cultural material requiring evacuation as a protective measure, or material suspected of being loot, will ultimately become clearing houses through which
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displaced works of art can be appropriately redistributed.

   Munich is the largest of the four collecting points, and its establishment and operation is the most complex. By reason of the vast amount of looted art objects in the Third Army area, the urgent need for a large, central collecting center was felt early in the occupation of Germany. The two enormous nazi buildings in Munich were chosen as the site (in one of these landmarks the Munich Pact was signed) and urgent repairs and construction, including the blocking off of a network of underground passageways, were completed by the end of June. Because the Munich collecting point employs a large number of Germans (who have been carefully screened) and its treasures are of inestimable value to to all of Europe, extraordinary securitiy measures were instituted.

   The processing of such vast amounts of art, still growing as apparently endless convoys reach the Collecting Point daily, involves complicated clerical and statistical procedures. An Arts Documents Center has been established in Munich to record information on suspected loot. Such documents as the records -- photographic and otherwise -- of the notorious Einsatzstab Rosenberg, which handled works of art taken from Jewish private collections, form a large portion of the documentary material. Likewise, detailed information on the far-reaching activities of Göring's agents in their combing of Europe for the purpose of building the Reichsmarschall's collection is
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The Cracow altarpiece, one of Poland's great national treasures, was dismantled by the Poles early in the war and subsequently removed to Germany. It was discovered in an underground repository in Nürnberg, where it had been stored together with other religious art. Done by a German, Veit Stoss, who had been called by the King of Poland in 1477 to execute the work, it required ten years to complete its central panel and eighteen sections, twelve of which are shown here. When assembled, the altarpiece stands 25 feet high and 15 feet wide. The figures, which are ten feet high, are carved in lindenwood. The Germans considered that since a German artist had created this work it rightly belonged to the country of his origin.

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