Objects of Wartime Looting See Rebirth in Russian Art Exhibits : Masterworks: First brought from Germany to the Soviet Union 50 years ago, hundreds of paintings were recently taken out of hiding. Thus, the debate over the spoils of war has been rekindled.

In May, 1945, after the war with Germany ended, Viktor Baldin, a Soviet army lieutenant, was summoned to a manor house 50 miles north of Berlin.

Hundreds of drawings, sketches and prints had been discovered in a basement room, and Baldin, an architect, was regarded by his comrades as an expert in fine art.

What the 25-year-old officer saw was a treasure-trove of pieces by giants of European painting: Rembrandt, Durer, van Gogh, Goya, Rubens, Titian, Cezanne, Degas. The cache had been evacuated from the Bremen museum when Allied forces began bombing that German city.

Baldin carefully packed 360 of the drawings in a suitcase and carried them back to Moscow when his unit withdrew.

Half a century later, that “rescued” art--along with hundreds of paintings brought from Germany to the Soviet Union after the war--have been taken out of hiding.

They have triggered an explosive political battle inside Russia and rekindled international debate over the spoils of war.

“World War II produced the worst cultural looting ever seen,” American art historian Lynn H. Nicholas said.

“Never had works of art . . . been moved about on such a vast scale, pawns in the cynical and desperate games of ideology, greed and survival,” Nicholas writes in a new book, “The Rape of Europa.”

Conquerors have looted and pillaged throughout history. Napoleon did it for the greater glory of the state, bringing back spoils to fill the Louvre museum in Paris.

But Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich took plundering to new extremes. Nicholas describes “a colossal wave of organized and casual pillage (that) stripped entire countries of their heritage.”

In Poland, France, the former Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy, the Nazis destroyed or confiscated art works, then hid them.

Hundreds of thousands of paintings were involved, including books, statuary, tapestries, antique furniture, coins, medals, altar pieces and carvings. The number of pieces reached the millions.

Allied liberators discovered caches of art in mine shafts, caves, bunkers, even railroad cars parked in a mountain tunnel. Contemporary newspaper accounts put the value of the German loot at $2 billion.

After the war, a corps of “monuments officers” created by the Allies spent six years searching Europe for the repositories and returning the contents to museums and their original owners.

The victors weren’t totally innocent. A U.S. Army lieutenant smuggled a small but priceless collection of medieval manuscripts and other church treasures from the German town of Quedlinburg to his family in Texas.

The articles, objects of an international search, remained hidden for more than 40 years. Their disappearance was solved after the former officer died and his heirs tried to sell a few items. A German foundation paid $2.75 million in 1990 to get everything back.

The deal evoked criticism from some art aficionados who likened it to extortion or ransom. Others pointed out that museums are full of items with shady pasts.

Wartime bounty raises a number of other legal and moral questions.

What responsibility do dealers, individuals and countries have in establishing true ownership? Is there a difference between items stolen from a national museum and those obtained by forced sale or confiscation from individuals? How can conflicting national laws be reconciled?

“Any seller who must warrant title should be deeply concerned about art taken during wartime,” warned Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, a New York-based organization that helps recover stolen art.

Historian Nicholas says that most art taken by the Nazis, including almost all of the major works, has been recovered.

A growing number of the missing pieces has surfaced in recent years. Lowenthal cites two reasons:

“A lot of the things GIs brought home are now coming out of attics and passing on to their heirs. And the collapse of communism has opened Russia and Eastern Europe.”

The Soviet Union, alone among Allied nations, had created special “trophy brigades” to confiscate art objects, books and other valuable property. Experts estimate that the Red Army took home at least 2.5 million pieces.

During the 1950s, more than 1.5 million museum objects were returned to East Germany. But rumors and suspicions persisted about art belonging to West German and other European museums and to private collectors.

The secret began to unravel in 1991, when two Russian art historians revealed in the magazine ARTnews that hundreds of thousands of works remained hidden in museum storerooms in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev.

Among them were masterpieces by Breughel, Titian, Goya, Tintoretto, Monet, Renoir and Degas. The Russians also had “Priam’s Treasure,” a hoard of gold and silver artifacts from ancient Troy that had been in a Berlin museum.

Viktor Baldin had donated the drawings he found to the Museum of Architecture in Moscow, where they had remained in storage until he became the museum director years later.

Then he began a campaign to return them to Bremen. With the support of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and Minister of Culture Evgeny Sidorov, Russia reached an agreement with Germany for the return of the items.

However, strong opposition from right-wing Russian nationalists has delayed its implementation.

The nationalists consider the German art the legitimate spoils of victory and argue that it represents compensation for Soviet museums and monuments plundered or destroyed by Nazi invaders. Russia says it is still missing about 200,000 artworks.

Negotiations between Russia and Germany continue. Meanwhile, after gathering dust for nearly 50 years, some of Russia’s booty finally is being shown publicly.

About one-third of the Bremen museum drawings went on display in November at Russia’s State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Seventy French Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings are to be exhibited there next March.

Mikhail Pyotrovsky, director of the Hermitage, says that the decision to display these objects is part of Russia’s movement toward “an open and active engagement in the world community.”

Russia, he adds, “is committed to identifying an honorable solution to the fate of these art works.”