Yesterday I saw a screening of the new documentary film The Rape of Europa, opening in Seattle next week. I can’t believe this movie hasn’t been made before. It tells the comprehensive story of the Nazi march on Europe—not through field battles, but battles for art.

That picture is of a guard at the Louvre in 1939, standing in front of an empty frame that held a Veronese painting before the museum was evacuated on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Paris.

There is plenty of eye-popping footage like this from the period: more than 6,000 paintings found hostage in a deep, dark mine; the Victory of Samothrace rolling treacherously down a flight of stairs. The interviews are also incredible. One is with the daughter of the family charged with watching over the Mona Lisa while it was in hiding.

No question: the film is a towering achievement, based on the book by Lynn H. Nicholas, narrated by Joan Allen, and written, produced, and directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newnham.

In one scene, a current docent at the Warsaw Royal Castle says people ask why the castle was rebuilt after being demolished by the Nazis. “The answer is the same as the reason it was destroyed. The Poles could not live without the castle.”

Obviously, the systematic crushing of souls is nothing compared to mass murder. But unlike murder, some crimes can be reversed. This film is the Nuremberg trials for what might be considered the misdemeanors of the Nazi regime: the theft and destruction of art and monuments across Europe. These may only be objects, but for many people, there is life in these objects, too.

There’s Maria Altmann, the old woman whose (successful) quest to see her family’s Klimt paintings returned is also her battle to expose Austria’s historic complicity with Hitler. There’s the middle-aged Christian German man dedicated to reuniting confiscated Torah ornaments with the families of their rightful owners. There’s the Utah curator who hopes that the return of his museum’s prized Boucher to the daughter of a looted Jewish dealer “will confer a little humanity back on all of us.”

Like the saga of the Holocaust, the plunder of Europe—not modern, Jewish, or Slavic art, of course, but Italian, French, and old art—is made that much more chilling by the organization with which it was carried out. Before invading countries, Hitler would compile lists of the artworks he wanted, from Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine in Warsaw (see it recovered after the war, below) to Rembrandts, Raphaels, and Vermeers in France, Russia, and Italy. At the end of the war, 49 train car loads of stolen art and artifacts were carried away from Hitler’s hiding place at the Neuschwanstein Castle.

On the other side of the equation was an equally determined army, made up of people who wanted to keep art out of criminal hands. This included museum staffers (some died in the freezing cellar of the Hermitage); the little-known American “Monuments Men,” who worked for the military but were often at odds with its attack plans; and mousy little Rose Valland, the French spy.

In many ways, The Rape of Europa is timely. New claims to recover art stolen by the Nazis are constantly coming to light, and museums are cooperating. (Seattle Art Museum returned a Matisse in 1999.) But in other ways, it represents a distant, unrecognizable time. Tragically, a time when art mattered to invaders of all kinds now seems quaint.