WASHINGTON, D.C..— Robert Edsel had already made a name for himself as the author of Rescuing Da Vinci, a 2006 book about the "Monuments Men," a group of Allied soldiers assigned to research, rescue and repatriate stolen art during and after World War II, and a co-producer of a 2006 film on the same subject, "The Rape of Europa." But last spring the former Texas oilman had the opportunity to continue the work of his heroes when he received a call about the discovery of two Nazi photograph albums cataloguing art stolen from prominent Jewish families.

Edsel eventually bought the albums and in November donated one of them to the National Archives, where it joined 39 similar volumes that have been there since the end the war; he plans to donate the second album at a later date. Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States, has described the two newly discovered albums as "one of the most significant finds related to Hitler’s premeditated theft of art and other cultural treasures to be found since the Nuremberg trials."

The phone call, Edsel says, came from an organization that had "been contacted by an heir of an American soldier" who had been stationed near Berchtesgaden, Germany, in May 1945, and who had taken the two albums as keepsakes from the ruined Berghof, Hitler’s Alpine vacation house. Edsel bought the albums and began his research. "As soon as I saw them," he says, "I jumped on a plane and flew to Washington to look at the albums in the National Archives." Like the two newly discovered volumes, the ones at the National Archives were prepared by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a Nazi unit headed by Alfred Rosenberg that was assigned to confiscate, in Rosenberg’s words, "ownerless Jewish art collections." Long thought to be the only surviving volumes out of as many as 100 prepared by the ERR, the 39 albums were found—along with a vast trove of stolen art—at Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria at the close of the war and were later used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

According to Edsel, the ERR albums are organized by medium, some focusing on paintings and others on "furniture, porcelain, silver and so on." The two newly discovered volumes contain French paintings stolen from what Edsel describes as a "who’s who of the French dealer–collector families," including the Seligmanns and the Rothschilds. The album now at the National Archives (No. 8 of the series) contains 53 paintings by François Boucher and Hubert Robert, while the second album (No. 6) includes canvases by Antoine Watteau and others.

Edsel has already tracked down a handful of the paintings, with the help of the staff of the Monuments Men Foundation, which he recently established "to preserve the legacy ... of the men and women who served in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section." As an example he cites "Landscape With an Aqueduct," by Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, which appears in album No. 6. The painting "was confiscated from the André Seligmann collection in Paris," says Patricia Teter, the foundation’s chief provenance researcher. "Following the war it was returned to the Seligmanns and was owned by the Seligmann Gallery in New York in the mid-1950s. Around that time Judge Lucius Peyton Green of Los Angeles purchased the painting, and in 1958 he donated it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The ERR code ‘Sel 88’ can still be seen on the back of the painting today." But the whereabouts of most of the paintings in the two albums Edsel bought remains unknown.

Whether these two albums will lead to any additional restitutions is also unknown, but Edsel is convinced that the story of stolen World War II art is far from over. "Hundreds of thousands of items, worth billions of dollars are still missing, and it is a folly to think that they were all destroyed," he says. "Over the next five to ten years, many people of the World War II generation will pass. As that occurs, works of art, documents and musical manuscripts will be found in basements and attics and hanging on walls and later identified as stolen or taken during the war. These two albums, long thought to have been destroyed, just underscore that point."