Gemäldegalerie

This guide to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin follows its Old Master paintings into the last chaotic weeks of the war, when curators hid the finest works inside a concrete anti-aircraft tower in Friedrichshain park while roughly four hundred large canvases, too big for the salt-mine shelters that saved the rest, stayed behind. It traces the smuggling of the rescued paintings out to Thuringia, where American soldiers later found them intact, and the desperate scramble as Soviet troops closed in on the city.