Movies

The story of Nazi art plundering is relatively little known. The Rape of Europa, a documentary from last year co-produced by Dallas' Robert Edsel and based on Lynn Nicholas' 1994 book of the same name, seeks to rectify that. It does so through period footage (much of it riveting), newly shot material and talking heads.

FILE 2007/Staff

Robert Edsel, co-producer of The Rape of Europa , holds a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Lady With an Ermine .

The movie includes several astonishing stories, any one of which merits a film of its own. Hitler's dream of a mammoth Fuhrermuseum for his hometown of Linz, Austria, is at once dizzying and pathetic. The evacuation of The Winged Victory of Samothrace from the Louvre during the early days of World War II is a veritable cliffhanger.

One of the true heroines of the war was Rose Valland. Hired by the Nazi art gatherers to do clerical work, she secretly compiled a comprehensive catalog of what they stole. (Her new employers failed to notice she spoke German.) Or there's the story of the "Monuments Men," U.S. soldiers assigned to accompany front-line units to preserve damaged art and retrieve looted objects.

Unfortunately, these stories get buried among too many talking heads (Ms. Nicholas is one) and a larger, diffuse account of the devastation the war wrought. Note that both the Samothrace evacuation and the Monuments Men are peripheral to the Nazis' pillaging. The documentary has nearly as much material about the ruinous effect of World War II on cultural artifacts, per se (the Allied bombing of Monte Cassino, for example) as it does on what the Nazis did. Joan Allen narrates.