In the spring of 1945, Allied troops descending into Austrian salt mines found gold bullion stacked beside thousands of masterpieces by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. This episode unpacks the bureaucratic machine behind that scene: a systematic Nazi campaign to strip a people of their art, books, and identity, driven by Hitler's rejection from the Vienna Academy, his hatred of degenerate modern art, and his plan for a Führer Museum in Linz that would overshadow Vienna and Berlin.

We follow the ERR from seizing Jewish and Masonic documents to plundering collections like the Rothschilds', the Jeu de Paume in Paris as a militarized clearing house that Göring visited twenty times, the 1939 Lucerne auction that sold banned modern art for foreign currency, the theft of millions of books across Europe, the plunder of 173 Russian museums and ...