Paintings from the Berlin Museums Exhibited in Co-operation with The Department of The Army

In April 1945, soldiers of General Patton’s Third Army discovered more than 200 paintings from Berlin’s Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum hidden 2,100 feet underground in the Kaiserroda salt mine near Merkers, Thuringia, alongside 100 tons of Reichsbank gold. The works had been evacuated from Berlin during the war to protect them from bombing. Later that year, despite protests from Monuments Men officers who signed the “Wiesbaden Manifesto“ warning against the removal of a nation’s cultural heritage, the US Army transferred all 202 paintings to the National Gallery of Art in Washington for storage.

In 1948, at the request of the Department of the Army and the Senate Armed Services Committee, the paintings were sent on a tour of major American museums. The Boston showing at the Museum of Fine Arts, 14–31 August 1948, was one stop on a circuit that covered 14 cities and attracted approximately 7 million visitors in total, raising $190,000 for German Children’s Relief. Vermeer was represented by two works from the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin: Woman with a Pearl Necklace (catalogue no. 138, then titled “Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace”) and The Glass of Wine (catalogue no. 139, titled “Lady and Gentleman Drinking Wine”).

All 202 paintings returned to Germany by spring 1949. After a period at the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point they were reunited with the rest of the Berlin collections at the Dahlem museum complex in West Berlin, where they remained until the opening of the new Gemäldegalerie at the Kulturforum in 1998.