The Baldin Collection is a group of 364 masterpieces removed from Germany to the Soviet Union by Soviet Army officer Victor Baldin at the end of World War II. The ensemble consists of 362 drawings and two paintings by Dürer, van Gogh, Manet, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and other famous artists. Historically part of the collection at the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Baldin group came from a much larger cache of artworks stored by the Germans in a Brandenburg castle to protect it from air raids. In 1945 the castle was occupied by the Red Army and the storage vaults were looted, mainly by Russian soldiers but also by the local German population. The works Baldin took were then hidden at a Soviet Research Institute for many years. In 1991 the collection was moved to the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg where its existence was revealed to the world in 1992. It remains there today. Since then the Baldin Collection has been regarded as looted art and is the subject of fierce debate among experts, between Germany and Russia, and among politicians inside Russia itself. While Victor Baldin did steal the works, he is also credited with having saved them from destruction. For decades he appealed to senior officials, including Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev, to get them returned to Germany. In 1989 Baldin even traveled to Bremen, West Germany, to reveal the existence of the secret collection to the Kunsthalle. In the 1990s the government of Boris Yeltsin finally agreed to return the works, but subsequent Russian governments have blocked such plans. Today the Collection has been called "of singular importance to the entire issue of trophy art" by the Russians and a "cause célèbre of German-Russian Restitution Politics" by those who support its return. History Kunsthalle Bremen Collection At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Bremen Art Museum (German: Kunsthalle Bremen) was closed and its priceless paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture were stored in the basement. Bremen, an important manufacturing center, became an early target for Allied strategic bombing. On the night of 5 September 1942, a fire bomb destroyed the central staircase and six gallery rooms of the museum. It also burned a version of Emanuel Leutze's famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which because of its size could not be moved. After this damage, the Kunsthalle collections were moved to more secure storage