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40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

24. Horst von Wachter Returned Art Looted by His Family During the War

Horst von Wachter handing over stolen art to Polish officials. The Guardian

In December of 1939, the wife of Baron Otto von Wachter, the recently appointed German governor of the Polish city of Krakow, walked into that city’s National Museum, and methodically looted it of every item that caught her fancy. In 2017, her son Horst von Wachter, who had spent his life trying to clear his father’s name, returned three of the stolen paintings that his mother had taken back home to Austria when the Germans were forced out of Poland.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.