From Jean Edward Smith's biography of Lucius Clay, the U.S. military governor of occupied Germany from 1945 to 1949:
When World II ended, the United States Army became the custodian of what Clay described to Secretary Stinson as "the greatest single art collection in the world." This collection included not only the various masterpieces of Rembrandt, Rubens, Tintoretto, and El Greco (to name but a few) looted from Nazi-occupied Europe, but almost all of the really valuable German artworks that had been removed from their museums during the war and stored for safekeeping in that portion of western Germany liberated by U.S. forces.
Clay took an immediate personal interest in preserving the artworks the Americans captured. He expanded military government's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives branch to include some of America's most celebrated art historians and curators (including James Rorimer, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and instructed them "to identify, salvage, and restore everything worth saving." And Clay told Stinson he hoped to get immediate approval to return to their original owners the works the Nazis had looted throughout Europe, and to preserve the prewar German art collections in trust for the German people.
Stinson applauded Clay's plan and assured him of his support. To Stinson, the preservation of Europe's cultural treasures and of Germany's own important artworks bespoke the dignity of America's war aims....
Donald Rumsfeld, April 11, 2003:
The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, "My goodness, were there that many vases? [Laughter from press corps.] Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?"