In 1995 I read a review in the Washington Post of a book called The Rape of Europa, by local Washington author Lynn H. Nicholas. The subject was fascinating – the pillage of art during the Second World War and its subsequent recovery – and one about which I knew absolutely nothing. I tore out the review to remind myself to get this book. But like so many other items I tear from papers and magazines, this got carried around for months and eventually lost and forgotten. Two years later, I was assigned the task of reviewing the wartime ownership history of paintings in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. This time I went out and bought Lynn’s book immediately and have used it as my bible ever since.

As I became more knowledgeable about the history of Nazi looting and Allied restitution, and familiar with archival resources that document this history, it became clear that while a staggering amount of original materials exist worldwide that tell the stories of hundreds of thousands of individual art objects (the US National Archives alone estimates it holds 15 million pages concerning looted assets and restitution), there was still much analysis to be done on the content of those documents. Even more surprisingly, while virtually every publication on the topic of Nazi looting mentions Hermann Goering’s voracious art collecting activities, there was no catalogue of his collection. I learned quickly the reason: no one definitive inventory exists. So, at the suggestion of my colleague Konstantin Akinsha, I decided that I would take on this project. My goal was to recreate the Goering painting collection based on an analysis of available archival materials and to provide as much additional provenance information as possible based on scholarly secondary source material. That was seven years ago. Needless to say, I underestimated the task!

When I finally considered my work to be at a stage at which it should be published, it became apparent immediately that this project could not be completed within the confines of traditional academic publishing. It was simply too massive, too complicated, and frankly too expensive. At that point I turned to Robert Edsel, author of Rescuing Da Vinci and The Monuments Men, co-producer of the film documentary of “The Rape of Europa,” and founder of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art. Robert has enthusiastically supported the project from day one and it is thanks to him that this publication exists at all.

While at times a challenge and a trial, this project has introduced me to wonderful colleagues worldwide. Among them I am proud to call many my friends, including Lynn Nicholas, Konstantin Akinsha, and Robert Edsel. I am proud, too, of the resulting publication, which I hope will be useful to provenance researchers, interesting to a more general population, and most importantly the foundation for future scholarship.