Here’s a recommendation for a couple of your hours. You won’t think them ill spent. The Rape of Europa is a documentary film that neither by title nor subject matter beckons one in: Rape? Stolen art? Don’t we already know the Nazis were the world’s biggest bastards? I’ll even confess, we went in one of those “obligation” moods: this is a subject we should know more about, but let’s have a good dinner afterwards… Believe me, we came away filled, amazed, ready to talk and learn more. Forget the fine wine and fancy pizza. Most of you will come away similarly, knowing how much you didn’t know about something you thought you knew a good deal about, and you’ll praise the way the film makers got you there. You’ll call your friends, as we are, and tell them: Go see it.

We all knew that among the crimes of the Nazis, small crimes perhaps, but crimes nevertheless, was the theft of culture. What we didn’t know was the extent of this theft. It was not casual or opportunistic. Enormous resources were spent locating, loading and shipping great works of art and small household goods all over Europe. Hitler himself, and his chief lieutenants spent hundreds of hours evaluating art, having it shipped to their private palaces. Even as Hitler prepared to shoot himself he was talking about his memorial art gallery planned for Linz, Austria, his birth town.

Professionals and volunteers in Paris, Florence, Krakow and elsewhere spend thousands of hours clearing the major museums as the German armies approached, spied on by informers and turncoats; they packed hundreds of thousands of objects, some of them fragile to the point of collapse, and sent them by truck, train and animal carts to distant, hidden sites, before the Nazi looters arrived. The Mona Lisa was sent in a climate controlled truck so effective that her accompanying curator was passed out upon arrival.

German and Allied bombers devastated museums, monasteries, wealthy homes filled with art. The US sent a small corps of what came to be called “The Monuments Men,” along with the Allied push up through Italy, trying to locate, preserve, mark for future recovery monuments, buildings, mosaics, paintings. Train loads of goods filled with Nazi loot were found abandoned on the tracks, cataloged and sent back to the cities of origin.

Following the war and increasing in tempo in recent years efforts have been made to find the original owners, many of them dead or disappeared in the war and concentration camps. One of the key themes of the film was the return of Gustave Klimt’s Portrait of Adele from the Austrian National museum to Maria Altman, a niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, deceased subject of the painting.

The film has an incredible range, from Klimt’s position in pre-war Austria, to the Nazi “purificiation” of art and their greed for the best, to the unbelievable devastation of Europe — incredible newsreel footage from both German and US cameras, long minutes panning over burned out buildings. Yet it doesn’t lag, isn’t simply didactic. Based on Lynn Nichols 1995 book of the same name, the film adds personal interviews, images of the art, history as it was lived. And as importantly we realize that while the real horror was the death of people, the destruction of those things they loved adds, does not distract, from those memories.

This is a film I would show on every Memorial Day: Memory of what was done; Memory of those who emerged, still decent, still able to build new lives and to remember the richness of family and culture.

The Rape of Europa is showing in Marin for as long as people keep going. Get some friends and Go!