The Pergamon Altar frieze, taken from a Berlin bunker

On 13 July 1945 a Berlin building firm, Philipp Holzmann AG, sent an invoice to the administration of the city’s state museums. The bill was for the removal of the Pergamon Altar. It covered taking down, packing and lowering the carved marble parts. In June 1946 the firm sent a reminder, because the Russian commission had not paid. The archive of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin holds the papers.

The parts were the Great Frieze, a marble relief of the battle between the gods and the giants. It was made at Pergamon, now Bergama in western Turkey, in the second century BC. The frieze is about 113 metres long and 2.30 metres high, and single slabs weigh more than two tonnes. Carl Humann, a German engineer, led the dig from 1878. From 1879 his team took 94 slabs and about 2,000 fragments to Berlin, about three fifths of the frieze. The museum says the Ottoman authorities allowed this.

The museum closed when the war began in 1939. Google Arts and Culture, which carries the museums’ own account, says that in 1941 the altar was first protected with sandbags and boards, then taken down and stored in the flak tower at the Berlin Zoo. Air raids badly damaged the museum building, but the frieze was not in it and came through the war unharmed.

Red Army troops took the Museum Island on 1 and 2 May 1945. Soviet trophy brigades began to seize museum holdings a few days after the war ended. The Arts and Culture text says the slabs were taken as war booty to the Hermitage in St Petersburg, then Leningrad, where plaster casts were made. The museum’s blogs say only that they went to the Soviet Union, so the Hermitage rests on one text. In all, the Soviet Union took more than 2.6 million works of art from Germany, says the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the body that runs Berlin’s state museums.

The Soviet Union returned about 1.5 million works to the East German government in campaigns up to 1960. The largest, in 1958 and 1959, included the frieze slabs. They reached Berlin in 1958. The whole Museum Island then lay in East Berlin. The museum reopened with the altar room in October 1959, for the tenth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, according to the Arts and Culture text. A full restoration ended in 2004.

The altar is also the subject of a dispute with Turkey. The Art Newspaper, in a report reposted on 20 January 2023, says Turkey has long demanded its return. Germany says it acquired the altar under an agreement with the Ottoman government, dated 1878 or 1879 depending on the source. Hurriyet, a Turkish daily, reports that the German side points to an Ottoman antiquities regulation of 1874, which split finds in thirds between the excavator, the state and the landowner. Turkish academics suggest Humann sent the altar before the agreement. No court has tested that claim.

In December 2022 Saraya Gomis, Berlin’s state secretary for anti-discrimination, said she personally favoured returning the altar, and that the decision was not hers. In January 2023 the Berlin senator Lena Kreck told a state parliament committee that there were different views on the justice of the possession, in the legal and the moral sense. Berlin officials said there were no plans to return it. The Pergamon Museum has been in renovation since 2013. On 4 May 2026 the museums announced that it will reopen on 4 June 2027, with the altar visible again.