Lecture Series Lecture: Nazi Loot in the “Alpine Fortress”
Press Release No. 76/2025
3 July 2025
Concluding the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series, Kerstin von Lingen will speak on stolen art treasures and the question whether any reparation was ever made for this plundering
The robbing of artworks organized by Nazi authorities in the final phase of the Second World War is the topic of a lecture by historian Prof. Dr Kerstin von Lingen from the University of Vienna (Austria). Her contribution will conclude the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series “1945: Epochal Threshold and Experiential Space”, with which the university has remembered the end of the war in Europe 80 years ago. The event entitled “Securing Cultural Assets in the ‘Alpine Fortress’ at the End of the War in 1945” will take place on Monday, 7 July 2025, in the Great Hall of the Old University, beginning at 6.15 p.m.
In the final months of the war, the declining Nazi Reich concentrated not only its administrative offices, refugees and military formations in or near what was called the “Alpine fortress” but also art treasures of inestimable value. The latter were in some cases intended as bargaining chips for the expected peace negotiations with the Allies, Prof. von Lingen underlines. Focusing on two examples from occupied Upper Italy – art treasures from Florence’s Uffizi Gallery in the South Tyrol Val Passiria Valley and cultural possessions looted from Jewish removals in the free port of Trieste – the speaker will give insights into the history of organized art theft carried out by Nazi authorities in the final phase of the war. With an eye to the Allied post-war judiciary, she will also examine the question of whether any reparation was made for this National Socialist theft. Kerstin von Lingen is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, co-spokesperson for the research area “Dictatorships – Violence – Genocides” and a member of the Key Research Area on Global History. Prior to that she was a member of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” and held academic positions in the Department of History at Heidelberg University.
The Ruperto Carola Lecture Series is part of an approach to focal themes. With it, Heidelberg University seeks to take socially relevant research questions to a broad public twice a year in differing formats. In the lecture series of the current summer semester under the heading “1945: Epochal Threshold and Experiential Space” on the focal theme BACK & FORTH researchers have engaged with the end of the war in Europe 80 years ago and the historical turning-point of 8 May from different perspectives. The series was designed by historian Prof. Dr Manfred Berg, a researcher at Heidelberg University’s Department of History.
Recordings of the total of nine presentations are gradually being posted on heiONLINE, the central portal of Heidelberg University with lectures, panels and events in digital formats.