"Hitler believed modernists couldn't see color as it was in nature, or humans as they were in life," remarks one of the scholars interviewed in The Rape of Europa [1] — a documentary on the artistic pillaging perpetrated by the Nazi army during World War II. "He viewed this as a racial deficiency."

And with that, we learn yet another aspect of the Führer's demented psychological make-up, thoroughly extrapolated over the two-hour course of this captivating film. Religion, race, politics, and apparently artistic leanings - Hitler was thorough in his prejudices. And with art, just as with all his other biases, his distastes seem to stem from his own insecurities.

In 1907, an eighteen-year-old Adolf Hitler was rejected from Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. The film would have it that this occurrence was the seed for his misanthropic leanings: "Many of the members of the academy were Jewish," we're told, and it's suggested that this may have fueled his resentment later on. Perhaps it's a tad over-speculative, but nevertheless one wonders what path young Hitler might have taken had he been admitted to the school.

More disturbing (and convincing) than the film's psychoanalytic probing into Hitler's iniquity is its analysis of raw data and records. We see the dictator as he composes a list of paintings and sculptures he wants for his collection, which he will eventually exhibit in a national museum of the Third Reich. Before raiding a given country, a team of art historians and forensic specialists pinpoints what masterpieces to plunder before letting the troops wreak their havoc. According to the film's website, by the end of the war, the Nazis had looted one fifth of all the known artworks in Europe. (Perverse as it may be, I found myself wishing that our nation's leaders had such a high regard for the fine arts.)

In addition to dismantling their military and political infrastructures, Europa clearly depicts Hitler's desire to dismantle nations' cultural infrastructures, too. In France and Italy a certain delicacy is shown (as Hitler respected their traditional artists), but in Russia and most of all in Poland, the seizing of art is meant to symbolize the felling of an ‘impure' society. Decimating a population is one thing, but annihilating its art is tantamount to annihilating its collective memory; Hitler contrived — actually contrived — not just to destroy countries, but their histories as well. Cultural obliteration is usually a by-product of war; here it was the plan. This is exactly what made Hitler so evil, and The Rape of Europa for the most part does an effective job showing it.

Speaking now strictly from a cinematic standpoint, the film endeavors to be perhaps a bit too thorough. While all the stories herein are captivating, they do get repetitive. The evacuation of Russia's Hermitage Museum, for example, is a reiteration of the Louvre's evacuation, which is shown earlier in the movie. While both have their tragically fascinating aspects, and both were incredibly important events, on screen one does not reinforce the other, but merely echoes it.

Later on, the narrative strays when we come to Italy, and the Allies are shown to be the ones destroying the art in the air raids on Axis positions. In this instance, the destruction is incidental, and the segment does little to prove the documentary's central thesis of art appropriation being an integral part of the Nazi's plot.

Nevertheless, this meandering by no means detracts from the overall impact of the film. The Rape of Europa is a shocking — but easily palatable — study of an otherwise unexplored phenomena of the Holocaust, and proves (yet again...despite what certain Iranian politicians might say) that we still feel the reverberations of World War II today.