The “Walking Horses” are two-ton sculptures, standing 16 feet high and 33 feet long and are worth millions. They were custom-made for Adolf Hitler by Austrian sculptor Josef Thorak. The bronzes disappeared from the former East Germany shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and were recovered again in 2015 during a raid of a ring of illegal art dealers. Following a lengthy legal battle that ended on 26 July 2021, the two bronzes will now be returned to the German Government.
New Reich Chancellery: garden portal, 1939. Walking Horses Sculpture in courtyard of Hitler’s New Chancellery, www.walled-in-berlin.com. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1985-064-24A / CC-BY-SA.
History of the Walking Horses
At the peak of the Nazi regime, Hitler commissioned thousands of artworks. He intended to exhibit them in Berlin, Germany, as part of the transformation of the city into the world capital of “Germania“. Among the artworks were the twin “Walking Horses,” which once guarded the courtyard of Hitler’s New Chancellery. In 1943, when the first Allied bombs fell on Berlin, Hitler had the bronzes evacuated to an unknown location. The New Chancellery was badly damaged in World War II and later destroyed by Soviet forces.
Lost and the Found
In 1988, a West German art historian discovered the two horses on a sports field at a Soviet base near Eberswalde, approximately 35 miles northeast of Berlin. However, within a year, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the sculptures disappeared without a trace. In 2015, West German police found the long-lost masterpieces in a warehouse in southern Germany. An illegal art dealer had acquired them from the Soviets and smuggled them out of East Germany in pieces, disguised as scrap metal. The German government plans to put the twin Walking Horses on exhibit.
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Walled-In is my story of growing up in Berlin during the Cold War. Juxtaposing the events that engulfed Berlin during the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall and Kennedy’s Berlin visit with the struggle against my equally insurmountable parental walls, Walled-In is about freedom vs. conformity, conflict vs. harmony, domination vs. submission, loyalty vs. betrayal.
