Paintings, sculptures, books: trophies inherited by the USSR after the war

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Soviet troops in 1945 brought unusual trophies to their homeland. Paintings, sculptures, books, gold are the world's cultural heritage that survived the flames of war.

1. Collection of the Dresden Gallery

In February 1945, Allied troops - Great Britain and the United States - carried out a massive bombing raid on one of the most beautiful German cities, Dresden.

It seemed that the treasures of the famous art gallery could have perished in a terrible fire - the collection of the Saxon Electors included canvases by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Giorgione and Vermeer, Botticelli and Cranach, Rubens and Holbein, Titian and Van Dyck. From the vaults, works of art were moved to quarries and adits. There they were found by Soviet troops in May 1945.

Something lay just like that, and the pearl of the collection - the "Sistine Madonna" by Raphael - was hidden in a plywood box with padlocks. The masterpieces were moved to Moscow, to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, where they were restored, and in the spring of 1955 they were presented to the audience in 14 halls. For four months, more than 1.2 million people have seen the exhibition of the rescued paintings. For people to see them, the museum worked every day: it opened its doors at 7:30 and received visitors until 23:00.

After that, the collection returned to Germany: “Of course, everyone was outraged,” Irina Antonova, the ex-director of Pushkinsky, recalled. - But, after finding myself in Dresden a few years later, I was able to look at this situation in a different way. I realized that the Dresden Gallery is Dresden."

2. Pergamon altar

Among the museum trophies was the huge altar of Zeus from the city of Pergamum, decorated with a massive frieze depicting the battle of the gods and giants. It is believed that John the Theologian mentioned it in Revelation, calling the altar "the throne of Satan." The altar was discovered in the 19th century by the German archaeologist Karl Human and transported to Germany, and by 1920 a special museum was built for the antique relic in Berlin.

After the war, the Pergamon Altar was taken to St. Petersburg - for 13 years it was in the storage of the Hermitage, and only in 1954 the audience could see it. Four years later, the altar was returned to Germany - to this day, the altar is in the Berlin Pergamon Museum, and a plaster copy of the relic was created for the USSR. Since 2002, it has been exhibited at the Stieglitz Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.

3. Otto Krebs collection

Among the trophy art were the works of the Impressionists. In his home near Weimar, the entrepreneur Otto Krebs has assembled an exceptional collection of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Pissarro, Monet and other artists. In the spring of 1945, the Soviet military administration in Germany was housed in his mansion. It was then that our soldiers discovered a special storage facility in the basement. A surprise awaited them inside: a complete inventory of the collection and the masterpieces themselves, in full accordance with the list. 102 paintings and 13 drawings, eight sculptures, a dozen porcelain items.

The Hermitage staff, who received the Krebs collection, immediately understood that they were looking at not just a collection, but a real mini-museum, so excellent were the works. From 1949 to 1996 the collection was kept in the Hermitage storerooms, then it was exhibited here as part of the museum collection.

4. Books and manuscripts

The small town of Gotha in Thuringia was considered a real treasure before the war. The oldest library in Germany was located here. The Dukes of Saxe-Gotha diligently supplemented it: the illuminated Bible of Otto Heinrich, the Great Mainz Bible, books with autographs of Martin Luther, Calvin's manuscripts and even the Russian "Alphabet" by Ivan Fedorov, printed in Ostrog. After the war, a significant part of the library was transported to the USSR. For ten years, unique books were in the same boxes in which they arrived. In 1956, most of the books returned to Germany.

Two Bibles printed by Johann Gutenberg also went to Moscow from the Leipzig German Museum of Book and Type. Out of 180 copies, only 47 have survived to this day, so one can imagine how rare these editions are. One of the Bibles is in the Lomonosov Moscow State University, and the second, as it turned out only in the 1990s, in "Leninka" in Moscow.

5. Collection of the Bremen Kunsthalle

Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh - more than 1,700 works of great masters from the collection of the Bremen Kunsthalle were hidden during the war in the basements of the Karntzov castle. When in May 1945, Soviet troops entered the possession of the Counts of Königsmark, they found folders with graphics and boxes with paintings.

Captain Viktor Baldin managed to save a significant part from looting and transport it to Moscow. In 1947, the collection settled in the Moscow Museum of Architecture, and since 1991 - in the Hermitage. Then the world learned that the Bremen collection is stored in Russia. Now she bears the name of the person who saved her from destruction - Viktor Baldin.

6. Gothic collection

In the Friedenstein castle in Gotha, Germany, Lucas Cranach Sr. served as the court painter for Elector Frederick III the Wise. Here, one of the first museums in Germany with the richest collection arose - Jan Lievens, Frans Hals, Jan Brueghel the elder and, of course, Cranach.

After the war, the meeting moved to the Soviet Union: some returned to Germany in the 1950s. About twenty canvases by Cranach, including "Mister Burgomaster", "The Fall", "Adoration of the Magi" and others, have been in the funds of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts for more than 70 years.

7. Treasures

One of the treasures of museum Berlin was the treasure of Troy, found by Heinrich Schliemann. The valuable find, which consisted of gold jewelry, silver and gold utensils, axes and daggers, was named the Treasure of Priam. A significant part of it ended up in the Berlin Collection of Antiquities, but with the outbreak of the war, valuable exhibits were hidden in the zoo.

After the end of the war, the museum collections were handed over to the Soviet troops. This is how the treasures of Troy ended up in the Soviet Union, but few people knew about it - it was only in the early 1990s that the secrecy label was removed from the trophies. It was all the more surprising to see them with my own eyes at the exhibition in the capital's Pushkin in 1996. Schliemann's unique find is in the collection of the museum today.

Among the trophies were other treasures, including Bronze Age jewels from the Eberswald Treasure, and gold from the Frankish Merovingians, also in the Berlin Museum of Ancient and Early History.

8. Film Fund of the Reichsfilmarchive

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, foreign films appeared on the screens of Soviet cinemas - the extensive collection of the Reichsfilmarchive was among the spoils of war. By 1945, there were more than 17 thousand paintings in its funds, and not only of German production, copies from the film archives of France, Norway, Yugoslavia, Poland and even the United States were kept there.

As a result, more than six thousand films were transferred to the Soviet State Film Fund, and from there many migrated to the cinema screens. For example, "The Big Waltz", "Serenade of the Sun Valley", "One Hundred Men and One Girl", musical films with Caruso, adventure films with Eric Stroheim.

Many before the show were watched by Joseph Stalin himself. Some of the paintings were remounted, changing the ending or removing everything “harmful” for a Soviet person, even the title. The screening was preceded by special titles: “taken as a trophy after the defeat of the Nazi troops by the Soviet Army near Berlin in 1945”.