Artworks Stored in a Potash Mine in Merkers (April 15, 1945) In early April 1945, members of the U.S. 90th Infantry Division discovered an extensive German depot in the Merkers-Kaiseroda potash mine in Thuringia. Among other things, it contained gold bullion and gold coins worth 250 million dollars, 2.7 billion Reichsmarks in cash, large stores of foreign currency, as well as many art objects. Infantry members also discovered valuables belonging to Jews who had been murdered in the Holocaust.

The photograph shows Master Sergeant Harold Maus looking at the etching El buitre carnivoro [The Carnivorous Vulture] by Francisco de Goya. It is part of the series The Horrors of War and was among the artworks sent to Merkers for safekeeping by the Berlin Museum of Prints and Drawings [Berliner Kupferstichkabinett]. (via GHDI - Image)

The Führer and Youth (Adolf Hitler with a Little Girl), Postcard (1933) Goebbels’s most successful propaganda tool was the “Führer cult” that revolved around the person of Adolf Hitler. Articles in magazines and newspapers, books, films, posters, postcards, and paintings presented Hitler as both universal genius and ordinary man of the people. The parallels with Jesus Christ were not coincidental. Apparently, God had predestined Hitler to lead the German people out of its misery; it was a matter of Divine Providence. This propaganda photo shows the new “savior of humanity” with a little girl. Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann. 

Much is documented — if little remembered — about Goebbels’s gift on Feb. 22, 1943. But the origins of the violin itself remain a mystery. Was it confiscated property, one of thousands of musical instruments plundered by the Nazis, or otherwise obtained under duress from those persecuted during the Nazi era?

Nejiko Suwa and Joseph Goebbels’s Gift - NYTimes.com

The #openingceremony of the 1936 Olympics (from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia)

Luftschiffwalzer (Klaus Koblitz, 1934)

Riefenstahl and Hitler.

Berlin 1936, in color.

An ancient statue of the god Vaisravana that was recovered by a Nazi expedition in the 1930s was originally carved from a highly valuable meteorite.

Leni Riefenstahl at the 1936 Olympics

Goebbels’s Speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin (February 18, 1943) On February 18, 1943, Joseph Goebbels delivered the most famous speech of his career at the Berlin Sportpalast. The speech came shortly after the German capitulation at Stalingrad. In it, he praised the German dead of Stalingrad as heroes and emphasized that their sacrifice had not been made in vain. (He had nothing to say, however, about the tens of thousands who had been captured.) Goebbels urged Germans to commit anew to an all-out war effort – or what he described as “total war.” The members of Goebbels’s carefully chosen audience responded to the speech with fanatical enthusiasm. This photograph shows the interior of the Sportpalast during Goebbels’s speech. The banner in the background reads: “Total War – Shortest War” (“Totaler Krieg – Kürzester Krieg”).

It is the combination of physical flawlessness and the blind celebration of danger that leads Siegfried Kracauer, in his From Caligari to Hitler, to claim that the mountain films, so beloved of the young Hitler, were “rooted in a mentality kindred to Nazi spirit”.

The photo shows filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl witnessing a massacre in Poland in the early days of World War II. Riefenstahl never admitted having observed any war crimes. Click for a larger image.

At the beginning of the 1930s it became clear to Kurt Tucholsky that his warnings were falling on deaf ears, and that his actions in favour of the Republic, for democracy and human rights were apparently to no effect. It was a crushing blow to him, as he recognised the danger approaching with Adolf Hitler. “They are preparing to head towards the Third Reich” he wrote, years before Hitler’s Machtübernahme in 1933, and was under no deception as to where Hitler’s chancellorship would take the country.