Fort Belvoir houses thousands of Nazi objects that were seized from Hitler’s defeated regime at the end of World War Two and the collection even contains some of the dictator’s own artwork. A nondescript warehouse in the heart of America is home to the world’s largest collection of Nazi memorabilia including Adolf Hitler’s own paintings. Fort Belvoir is located in northern Virginia and is crammed full of objects from Hitler’s Third Reich that were seized by allied forces at the end of World War Two. (…) These include statues of the dictator, marble busts of his head, posters and ridiculous artwork depicting him in grand or noble situations. The most famous of these is an enormous TV-sized painting known as ‘The Flag Bearer’. In it, Hitler is shown wearing full armour riding on a horse carrying the Nazi flag. Upon the discovery of the painting in 1945, an unknown US army trooper drove his bayonet through Hitler’s eye leaving a permanent hole in the canvas
via dailystar: Top secret US bunker hides thousands of Nazi objects including Hitler’s own paintings
siehe dazu auch: A G.I.’s hunt for Nazi art (2014). Army Capt. Gordon W. Gilkey had traced the missing art to a train that left Berlin for the Czech border two weeks before the German surrender.The train had been strafed en route by American fighter planes, but the art survived. At the end of the line, a Nazi official and his wife carried much of it over a mountain trail and hid it in an abandoned cabin. And there, at the close of World War II in Europe, Gilkey found it stashed under the attic floorboards, where it was tattered and mouse-eaten. This was not the famous art the Nazis had looted from collections across Europe, the stolen treasure the Monuments Men sought to return to its owners. The art Gilkey was assigned to hunt was German-produced — portraits of Adolf Hitler, pictures of German fighting men, Nazi propaganda. The Allies believed this art had to be removed from Germany to the security of the United States. Now, almost 70 years after the war, dozens of the pieces still remain in an Army facility at Fort Belvoir, Va. As the new movie about the heroic Monuments Men opens and its creators make the rounds of Washington, little mention has been made of Gilkey’s parallel program to root out Nazi art. A kind of non-monuments man, he ranged across Germany and Austria and confiscated and shipped almost 9,000 pieces off to the United States. Most of it was not Nazi propaganda and was later returned to Germany, Army officials said. But 456 pieces remain in the Army’s Museum Support Center at Fort Belvoir. They include a huge painting on plywood of a mounted Hitler in shining armor holding a Nazi flag. The work is marred by a hole in Hitler’s face and scratches where a U.S. soldier thrust his bayonet.