Casino Salzburg

This guide to Casino Salzburg follows art historian Imma Walderdorff as she counts twenty paintings in a stack of wartime purchase invoices, hunched over archive boxes in Berlin, Munich and Koblenz. It traces the palace back to the Anschluss of 1938, when the Nazi regime seized the baroque building and a long-accepted story credited a local Salzburg dealer with supplying its art and furniture. Her paper trail points instead toward a Berlin businessman named Arthur Heinrich Kreiser, and toward guests like Mussolini and Horthy stepping off trains at the palace's own private platform. Stand among the card tables now and you're standing inside that paper trail.