Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Shorthand, where the minute I look down, even though I know I requested this particular topic,

hard French word, hard French name, that's try.

It's my own personal war.

Antoine de Saint-Expure.

Sure.

Once said, war is not an adventure.

It is a disease. And that goes triple for a world war.

Slowly, everyone and everything is reduced to a grinding, joyless cloud of destruction,

and everything fun and pure and beautiful is mostly forgotten.

But somehow, in the darkest hour of World War II, with the future of the entire planet at stake,

a small group of meek, middle-aged art historians, architects and museum curators, manage to make

world leaders, please think about the art.

With bombs flying willy-nilly across France, Italy, Poland and the rest of the continent,

these brave little dorks mounted a resistance.

In the thick of war, the so-called Monuments men travelled to the front lines to seek out and save priceless masterpieces across the continent.

And that's not all.

Because apart from their itchy trigger fingers, those pesky Nazis had extremely liked fingers as well.

The Nazis stole priceless art like it was going out of style. And we still don't know

where loads of it is. The orders came from the very top. The Fuhrer had extremely strong

opinions about how art would fit into his new world order. He and his top generals looted

thousands of history's most precious artefacts.

Hitler himself hoarded perhaps the biggest collection of precious art in history.

...