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21.05.2026
Gemäldegalerie
The Gemäldegalerie ‒ Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Old Masters Gallery) has completed the digitisation of historical photographs showing paintings that were lost in fires at the Friedrichshain flak bunker during the Second World War. The destroyed masterpieces are now being made publicly available as high-resolution reproductions.
As a result of the Second World War, Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie suffered the loss of around 585 paintings. The majority of these works were destroyed in May 1945 by two devastating fires at the Flakbunker Friedrichshain ‒ an anti-aircraft bunker in Volkspark-Friedrichshain in Berlin. Fortunately, images of these paintings have been preserved as large-format glass negatives in the Gemäldegalerie’s photo archives. Around 430 of them could be digitised and included in the Gemäldegalerie’s Online Collections. These photographs of the destroyed masterpieces are now publicly available in high resolution for the first time.
Commissioned by the Berlin museums, photographer Gustav Schwarz (1871–1958) photographed nearly all of the paintings in the collection between 1925 and 1944. First and foremost, they were used for reproductions in publications and for postcards. Today, the precise photographic reproductions are a unique visual record of the collection and document the inventory of destroyed paintings.
Starting in 1941, the most significant works in the Gemäldegalerie were evacuated to the control tower of the Friedrichshain flak bunker to protect them during air raids. The most important paintings were evacuated again in March 1945 and transported to salt mines in Thuringia, where American troops secured them in May 1945. Around 430 paintings, including numerous large-scale works, remained in the bunker and were lost shortly after the end of the war in two fires. The cause of the fires remains unknown. Among the lost works were masterpieces by Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Paolo Veronese and Anthony van Dyck – artists whose works have had a decisive influence on European art history.
The fragile glass negatives survived the Second World War largely unscathed at the former Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum on the Museumsinsel. After the war and the division of Germany, they remained in East Berlin, where they were preserved in what is now the Bode-Museum. As a result of the merger of the painting collections in East and West Berlin, the glass negative collection moved to the Kulturforum in 1998. The objects are in remarkably good condition, with only a few glass negatives showing signs of damage.
The high-resolution digital scans provide new insights into the lost works and make an important documentary contribution to the preservation of Europe’s intangible cultural heritage. At the same time, the glass negative collection illustrates just how outstanding these works were that once belonged to Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie.
By digitising these historical photographs, we are regaining a piece of cultural identity. The paintings, which once seemed irretrievably lost, can now be viewed and accessed again, both by our audiences and for research – at least in their photographic form.
Dagmar Hirschfelder, director of the Gemäldegalerie
Following this first step in which the glass negatives of the works lost in the Friedrichshain flak bunker have been digitised, in future, the historical negative plates of missing older loans, as well as of works stolen, destroyed and confiscated during the war, are also to be systematically documented, digitised and made accessible online.
