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Josef Thorak s horses are recovered from their hiding-place in 2015
Credit: AFP
In the Thirties, Adolf Hitler commissioned his favourite artists, such as Josef Thorak, Arno Breker and Fritz Klimsch, to produce a number of huge bronze sculptures that depicted German power and mastery. They included Thorak’s Schreitende Pferde (“Striding Horses”), two 10ft tall equine statues that were placed on either side of the steps to the garden at the rear of Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin. “Whenever he stared outside,” writes Arthur Brand, “hatching plans to conquer the world, his view would include Thorak’s horses.”
Brand, an art detective from Amsterdam, believed (like the rest of the art world) that the horses had been destroyed in the Battle for Berlin at the end of the Second World War. Until, that is, he was shown a colour photo of them by a shadowy former art fraudster who had been asked to facilitate their sale. Thus began Brand’s quest for the truth: were the hor
In Saturday’s Mail, we told how in 2014 Arthur Brand the Indiana Jones of the art world was drawn into a shadowy world of neo-Nazis, ex-Stasi agents and crooked art dealers, after a friend with criminal contacts showed him a photo of the huge bronze horses that stood outside Hitler’s office window. They were being secretly offered for sale by a dealer called Steven. At first, Arthur was convinced they were fakes, as the Red Army had blasted to pieces all the statues outside the Reich Chancellery in 1945. Then he took a closer look at the last known film footage of Hitler. To Arthur’s astonishment, a plinth behind Hitler, which should have contained one of the horses, was empty which meant they had been moved to safety. He discovered that the Red Army had moved them to an army barracks in East Germany. But where were they now?