The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the “Special Task Force” headed by Adolf Hitler’s leading ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, was one of the main Nazi agencies engaged in looting cultural valuables in Nazi-occupied countries during the Second World War. The detail with which the ERR documented the art, archives, books, and other Judaica it plundered has proved essential for the recovery of cultural valuables after the war and their return to victims or heirs.

Presented here are a series of interlocking, major complex projects that provide information on the location of the records of the ERR, access to images of many of those records, and research on specific items that were plundered. Attention also focuses on key records of postwar U.S., French, British, and Soviet agencies seeking to retrieve the ERR loot, providing improved access to a major component of the record of wartime plunder and retrieval of cultural loot.

This page last updated 2015-10-20

Former Nazi Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg in the witness box at the International Military Tribunal war crimes trial at Nuremberg
Former Nazi Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg in the witness box at the International Military Tribunal war crimes trial at Nuremberg
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park