Word: karnzow
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Dates: during 1995-1995
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SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF NAZI Germany in May 1945, a young Russian field engineer named Victor Baldin was poking through the cellars of Karnzow Castle, just north of Berlin, where he and other Soviet Army officers were billeted. By the dim light of a candle, he found several bulging portfolios of drawings and watercolors. Their names leaped out at him: Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Amazed at the discovery, Baldin begged his officers for transport space to carry this abandoned trove back to the Soviet Union-to no avail. There was no room on the trucks, and the brigade...
...belonged, in fact, to a German museum--the Kunsthalle in Bremen--and was part of a group of some 1,700 drawings, 50 paintings and 3,000 prints that had been squirreled away for safety in Schloss Karnzow. Baldin made a careful inventory of the drawings he had taken and arranged for their transfer to his future place of work, the Shusev State Scientific Research Museum of Architecture in Moscow. And there they remained, unseen, under wraps, for 45 years. When Baldin became director of the museum in 1963, he began to petition first Leonid Brezhnev and then Mikhail Gorbachev...
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