Looting By The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union engaged in systematic looting during World War II, particularly of Germany – seeing this as reparations for damage and looting done by Germany in the Soviet Union. The Soviets also looted other occupied territories; for example, looting by Soviets was common on the territories theoretically assigned to its ally, communist Poland. Even Polish Communists were uneasy, as in 1945, the future Chairman of the Polish Council of State, Aleksander Zawadzki, worried that "raping and looting of the Soviet army would provoke a civil war." Soviet forces had engaged in plunder on the former eastern territories of Germany that were to be transferred to Poland, stripping it of anything of value. A recently recovered masterwork is Gustave Courbet's Femme nue couchée, looted in Budapest, Hungary, in 1945.
Read more about this topic: Looted Art, Looting By Perpetrator
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