A Treasure Hunt : THE RAPE OF EUROPA: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, <i> By Lynn H. Nicholas (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 498 pp.)</i>

Looting, for the last 40 centuries or so, has been the inevitable companion of war. From the sack of Troy to Napoleon’s many appropriations of cultural goods, the conquerors have felt free to help themselves to whatever was most desirable. That the Nazis, then the Soviets, should have done the same during the last world war is no surprise; but even so, the scale of this vast, highly organized thieving remains hard to believe. Now, in an admirably documented book, “The Rape of Europa,” Lynn H. Nicholas has set out to give us a full account of who took what, and how. The result is a book which is at the same time fascinating and horrifying.

Uniquely, the looting began well before the war. Because the Nazis, who came to power in 1933, held that “degenerate art” must be suppressed, they demanded the removal of all such objects from the collections of the German museums, thus despoiling them of extensive holdings of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Expressionist and abstract works, along, of course, with anything made by a Jewish artist. Nor were the museums alone in being attacked by the new regime: the Jews soon found themselves not merely discriminated against, but exposed to confiscations of all kinds. So it was that the kind of large-scale, state-sponsored robbery which had, until then, been associated with military campaigns took place within the unbreached borders of a country at peace with its neighbors.

This made perfect sense to anyone who knew Hitler: A failed painter and designer, the boundlessly ignorant Fuhrer considered himself a connoisseur. That in itself might not have mattered as his taste ran to 19th-Century Academic mediocrities: any such work, taken from the national collections for the Fuhrer’s residences, was hardly likely to be missed. Far worse, kultur was an essential part of his New Order. Thus, together with the reordering of public collections, Hitler established an ambitious acquisition program--both for himself and for the Reich. Just how ambitious became clear with the takeover of Czechoslovakia and Austria: in both cases, these countries ceased to exist; in both cases all Jewish possessions were seized; as for the museums, they found themselves forced to make highly unequal exchanges when they were not altogether despoiled.

That was only a beginning. The Nazi conquest of Poland did more than give the Germans Lebensraum: All works of Germanic origin, like the admirable Veit Stoss sculpture altarpiece in Cracow, were simply sent to German museums; other desirable pieces like the Leonardo “Lady With an Ermine” were taken by the Nazi General Governor Hans Frank or sent to the planned Hitler Museum at Linz; and some, of course, were simply seized for a variety of Nazi dignitaries, Goering first and foremost.

Although some small measure of legality was preserved in Austria, Poles, being Slavs, were officially considered to be subhuman. From the Nazi viewpoint, therefore, it was positively meritorious to take their possessions, and the man put in charge of these robberies on the vastest scale was none other than the cretinous Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi theoretician and author of “The Myth of the Twentieth Century.” Still, it was not until July, 1940, that, by Hitler’s order, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Rosenberg Task Force) was created. Its mission was to seize all Jewish-owned cultural goods in the newly conquered countries of Eastern and Western Europe, while at the same time forcing state institutions, the great museums first and foremost, to make “exchanges” that would redound to the advantage of Germany. Of course, that did not prevent plain old-fashioned looting. Nicholas cites an eyewitness who visited Poland in October, 1939, for instance, and reported that “the ruins of the Royal Palace in Warsaw had become a sort of open bazaar for German officials. Governor General (Hans) Frank himself, on his first tour of the castle with a large entourage, had not set the best example when he tore the silver eagles off the canopy over a throne and pocketed them.”

That, indeed, was a typical scene. For the rest of the war, and in an area that eventually stretched from the suburbs of Moscow to those of Naples, the Nazis competed for the spoils, all the spoils. Rosenberg’s outfit, of course, had many rivals--not just the military on the scene, but the Nazi leaders as well, in hierarchical order.

First naturally, there was Hitler. Having decided to make the small Austrian city of Linz the cultural capital of Central Europe, he planned a vast complex of museums for which only the best would do, providing it was properly Aryan and Northern--Vermeer and Rembrandt were high on the list. Many works of lesser quality were also included, however: neither the Fuhrer nor his agents knew much about art. There was, for instance, the totally incompetent Frau Dietrich. “Her very special relationship with (Hitler) through Eva Braun is the only possible explanation for the amazing leeway she was given in her dealings. Between 1940 and 1944 she bought some 320 paintings in Paris. . . . A lot of these were bad pictures, and no small number were fakes.”

The Reich’s No. 2 man, Goering was no less greedy; almost any famous artist would do. In the past, his lack of knowledge had led him to buy fakes and fifth-rate works; now he found himself able to acquire famous paintings in great quantities, some from the Rothschild and other Jewish collections, others as “gifts” from leading European museums. And next in line came the rest of the Nazi hierarchy.

The result, as Nicholas points out, was an unprecedented movement of great cultural objects. From every corner of Europe, trainfuls of paintings, sculptures, furniture, tapestries and silver rumbled into Germany. Then, with the German occupation of Italy, major museums, the Uffizzi first and foremost, were emptied out.

If Nicholas had stopped right here, she would have written a fascinating book; but because she goes on to describe the eventual rescue of these artistic treasures from the ruins of the Reich, she adds a strong element of spine-chilling suspense. Almost as soon as the Allied troops breached the borders of Germany, they began to find caches containing everything from great libraries to Michelangelo sculptures and, in one case, the entire German gold reserve. Masterpieces were hidden in mine shafts and country castles; some were properly packed, others just stacked, leaning against walls dripping with water; others, in the desperate days of collapse were simply taken by the local populations.

Never before had a problem on this scale existed. As it was, neither the Americans nor the British were at first prepared to deal with any of this. Happily, they soon caught on, and men like James Rorimer, the future director of the Metropolitan Museum, worked long and hard to ensure the safety--amid total chaos--of a major part of the European cultural legacy. More amazing still, considering the eagerness with which the Germans had tried to destroy whatever they could not steal, and the justly felt resentment of their former victims, the Western powers broke the age-old tradition. Aside from perhaps unavoidable individual thefts, there was no mass-scale looting.

The Soviets, however, took a different view: anything on which they could get their hands was sent back to Russia. Amazingly, they returned much of it in the ‘50s: from the Pergamon Altar in East Berlin to the Titians in Dresden, much of the loot came back to its place of origin.

There are many villains in “The Rape of Europa,” and they include the greedy art dealers who made fortunes from the catastrophe. There are also many heroes. Although some of the looted works have disappeared, most, today, are back where they belong--a miracle we owe, as Nicholas points out, “to the tiny number of ‘Monements men’ of all nations who against overwhelming odds preserved (these masterpieces) for us.” And in the end, her book, too, adds something to them: As we see all that was so nearly lost, these great works of art, so fragile, once so endangered, take on a special poignancy.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “The Rape of Europa,” see the Opinion section.