Man Recovered Art Looted by Nazis

One man in California has made it his life's work to save art once scavenged by Nazis.

"Bernard Taper dreamed about Raphael's 'Portrait of a Young Man,' the most prized painting looted by Nazis that has never been found," said writer Jesse Hamlin. "He said it's the most valuable single thing that's still missing."

When Hamlin interviewed Taper he was sitting in a sunny living room of the Berkeley home he shared with his wife, poet Gwen Head, recalling the slippery art advisors, black marketers, and such top Nazis as Albert Speer he interrogated 60 years ago.

According to Historian Jonathan Petropoulos, the Nazis were not just the most systematic mass murderers in history, they were the greatest thieves.

Their theft is detailed by three San Francisco, CA filmmakers in The Rape of Europa, based on the 1995 book of the same name by Lynn Nicholas.

According to research, Hitler was a failed artist who begun collecting art and using it as propaganda after his rise to power in the 1930s.

"Probably the best artwork I helped recover was from Goring's train," Taper told the press. "It was abandoned on a rail siding not far from Neuschwanstein Castle where Allied troops found a huge cache of stolen art."

Taper said he learned that the Gothic statues had been taken by a cabinetmaker named Roth.

"Searching for the missing Raphael, Taper questioned many people, including the art advisors to Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of the occupied Polish area called 'General Gouvernement,'" writes Hamlin. "Taper spent many hours questioning Frank's first art advisor, the 'infamous' Kajetan Mulmann and his successor, Wilhelm Ernest von Palezieux, whom Taper found in the French occupation zone."

"Still, amid all the sickening evidence of man's depravity and destructiveness," Taper wrote, "it was good to help preserve some of the things mankind had done that one could not only bear to contemplate but even take joy in."

Taper was known as one of the Monument Men who helped recover the art.