Any World War II buffs here?

[thucythucy]

3. This is also an issue.

Just one example--the Germans stripped the St. Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) bare when they were forced to retreat. To this day no one knows where the Amber Room is--well, whatever billionaire now has it knows, but it's lost to the rest of the world. The German government paid to have a new Amber Room constructed, restoring it as closely as possible to the original, but the original has never been recovered.

Then there's the Elgin marbles at the British Museum. I think that's still an ongoing issue between the Brits and the Greeks.

Then again, sometimes it's necessary to move cultural treasures from their homes, at least temporarily, in order to preserve them. The rescue of the library in Timbuktu from Islamic extremists would be one example, art smuggled out of Tibet during the Cultural Revolution would be another.