Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder - A survey of the dispersed archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)

The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the special operational task force headed by Adolf Hitler’s ideological henchman Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), was the agency of the National-Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) organized specifically for plunder of cultural assets in German-occupied countries during the Second World War. Alfred Rosenberg, its chief, was hanged in Nuremberg on 16 October 1946, following conviction for “crimes against humanity,” at the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Although hardly the only culprit, the scale of systematic looting of art, archives, and libraries by the ERR from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Baltic and Black seas in the east was staggering. Memory of those crimes against culture linger on in the thousands of cultural and religious objects never returned to their owners or heirs and the hundreds of thousands of books never returned to the libraries from which they were seized.