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What Lies Beneath: Nazi art, Bosnian graves and Syria’s dark secrets.
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What Lies Beneath: Nazi art, Bosnian graves and Syria’s dark secrets.

John Norris writes on the tendency of crimes against humanity to resurface—even decades later.

Treachery and crimes against humanity rarely stay buried forever. Despite all of the obfuscation and lies by their perpetrators, time has a doggedly persistent way of bringing truth to the surface — sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively. Two recent remarkable stories from Europe dramatically underscore that fact.

In Germany, a king’s ransom of an art treasure, worth more than $1.35 billion was discovered in a grotty apartment over-filled with expired canned goods. Among the 1,500 paintings were exquisite masterpieces by Picasso, Renoir, Matisse, and Chagall. So how did a national gallery’s worth of art end up in a  depressing Munich apartment behind a stack of 30-year-old canned beans owned by an almost identity-less recluse, Cornelius Gurlitt? The line traces directly back to the Nazi persecution of Jews and “decadent artists” in the run-up to World War II.

The above excerpt was originally published in Foreign Policy. Click here to view the full article.

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Authors

John Norris

Senior Fellow; Executive Director, Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative