Before his rise to power, Hitler was a mediocre painter who applied for acceptance into an Austrian art school at the same time as modernist artists Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoshka. Hitler was famously denied while the other two men got in. (Kokoshka once joked that if he had been rejected and Hitler had been accepted, he, Kokoshka, would have run the world somewhat differently.)

Filmmakers Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen make it clear that Nazi looting was not an incidental by-product of war. Hitler had a wish list of Rembrandts before he invaded Holland. The demolition of Warsaw castle was deliberately planned and carried out as a blow to Polish national pride. The wholesale thievery of Jewish property was not just greed but also an attempt to wipe out all traces of the Jewish people in Europe, to make it seem as if they had never existed.