I just saw this, on the recommendation of a friend, and I have to say it was an excellent film.

The Rape of Europa tells the epic story of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction and miraculous survival of Europe’s art treasures during the Third Reich and World War II.

On the one hand it’s a fascinating modern tale of tragedy. The movie does a fine job working within a narrow band of time. However, I couldn’t help but wonder on the other hand about the larger picture (pun not intended) of conquest throughout the ages. For example, many of the items in modern galleries around the world, such as the British archives, were looted from foreign lands during times of conquest and conflict. But I guess the point is that if we limit our scope to the 1930s and 1940s, the Germans (and maybe the Russians) turned out to be the undisputed bad guys of the (art) world.

Needless to say, the movie also focused in on physical objects of treasure but not the ideas of art or the intellectual capital. Countless brilliant poets and their poems were destroyed, but the film made no mention of their fate…