One and a half years before the begin of the Second World War during the annexation of Austria in March of 1938, Hitler conceived the megalomaniac idea of creating the largest European art center in his home town of Linz. ... more »At the beginning of the war on the 1st of September 1939, not only did his armies advance but also his art thieves began to fan out in their great foray of art plundering; an expedition on a previously unheard of scale began. Not only did the task forces of diverse National Socialist organizations pillage the occupied countries; Nazi bigwigs like Goering also took whatever they felt was valuable.When the war's tide finally turned, Stalin exhibited the same behavior and had countless works of art taken from German art collections to the East. The Western allies tried their best to limit the damage. Equipped with lists of missing works of art, they searched for and rescued some of what Eisenhower called the great Symbols of Civilization .This documentary relates the long and eventful journey of an exceptional masterpiece of European art: the Ghent Altar, created by van Eyck, which for the Belgian people represents a national shrine. No other stolen European work of art was brought to so many places and passed through so many hands. The Ghent Altar represents a case study in the history of the art pillaging that went on during the Second World War.A film by Hannes Schuler« less