to send out agents rather than to travel himself to make purchases, or to make dealers bring works to him. Hitler's relationship with Voss was not as warm as with Posse. The two men met only on several occasions, and Voss was not given authority over books, armour and coins, as Posse had been. Voss is said to have remarked after one meeting with the Führer, "He's even worse than I thought." Voss attempted to mend his fences with Hitler with an elaborate gift for his birthday in 1944, accompanied by a list of his acquisitions in which he claimed to have bought 881 items, compared to 122 paintings that Posse had collected the year before. Voss did indeed spend money more profligately than Posse had, and his budget was later reduced near the end of the war. Under interrogation after the war he claimed to have acquired 3000 painting for the Führermuseum between 1943 and 1944, although the records do not support this figure, and many of the artworks were of distinctly secondary importance. In April 1943, the German public first heard about the Linz project in a special edition of Heinrich Hoffmann's art magazine Kunst dem Volk ("Art to the People"). It revealed both the intention to build a great art gallery in Linz and the existence of the collection which had been amassed for it, although, of course, nothing was said about the methods used to acquire many of the pieces. The magazine featured colored plates of works in the collection by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Breughel and Vermeer, among others. Up to that time, only two works which had been collected for the Linz museum had been seen by the public – but without disclosure of where they were eventually designated to go – the first was Myron's sculpture Discobolus ("The Discus Thrower"), which Hitler obtained surreptitiously in 1938 through the Berlin State Museum, but ordered to be displayed at the Glyptothek in Munich, where he proudly told his invited guests at the unveiling "May you all then realize how glorious man already was back then in his physical beauty". The other work was Makart's triptych The Plague in Florence, which Hitler acquired as a gift from Mussolini, who, when the owners refused to sell it, seized their villa and confiscated the painting, which he presented to the Führer at the train station in Florence. Results