Loot and found

A US government estimate suggests that the Nazis amassed as much as 20 per cent of all the art on the continent. Much of this loot was stored in places like the Nazi headquarters in Munich,but when the war began to get away from the Reich,the art and gold from the Reichsbank was moved to salt mines and caves to protect them from Allied raids. Nazi gold,which has inspired its own myths,was appropriated from Jewish homes,valuables,safety deposit boxes and even extracted from teeth to convert into bullion.

The restitution of Nazi-pilfered art and gold is hotly debated despite international conventions to facilitate the same,partly because of the difficulty of pinpointing ownership,and how cost- and effort-intensive it is to investigate ownership trails. A 2007 study by economist Sidney Zabludoff demonstrated that the vast majority of property stolen from European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II has never been returned. As far as the Munich find is concerned,the hard part of tracing the owners and their descendants to try and restore each piece to its rightful owners has just begun.