installations, were dismantled and taken away to Germany. On 4 October 1939 in Berlin, Adolf Hitler issued the order to blow up the Royal Castle. On 10 October 1939, special German units, under the supervision of history and art experts (Dr. Dagobert Frey, an art historian at the University of Breslau; Gustaw Barth, the director of museums in Breslau, and Dr. Joseph Mühlmann, an art historian from Vienna) started to demount floor, marbles, sculptures and stone elements such as fireplaces or moulds. The artefacts were taken to Germany or stored in Kraków's warehouses. Many of them were also seized by various Nazi dignitaries who resided in Warsaw. The Castle was totally emptied. Disobeying German orders, despite the danger of being shot, Polish museum staff and experts in art restoration managed to save many of the works of art from the castle, as well as fragments of the stucco-work, the parquet floors, the wood panelling, and more which were later used in the reconstruction. The great service done to Poland by Professor Stanisław Lorentz, in leading this campaign to save the castle's treasures, is well known. Wehrmacht sappers then bored tens of thousands of holes for dynamite charges in the stripped walls. In 1944, after the collapse of the Warsaw Uprising, when hostilities had already ceased, the Germans blew up the Castle's demolished walls. Leveling the Royal Castle was only a part of a larger plan – the Pabst Plan – the goal of which was to build a monumental Community Hall (ger. Volkshalle) or an equally sizable Congress Hall of NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party – ger. Parteivolkshalle) in the Royal Castle's place and to replace the Sigismund's Column with the Germania Monument. A pile of rubble, surmounted by only two fragments of walls, was all that was left of the six-hundred-year-old edifice. On one of these fragments part of the stucco decoration remained, this was a cartouche with the royal version of the motto of the Order of the White Eagle — "PRO FIDE, LEGE ET REGE" (for Faith, Law, and King). Reconstruction Immediately after the end of war in 1945, work started on rescuing the surviving fragments of the castle's walls, foundations, and cellars as well as the fire-blackened walls of the Copper-Roof Palace and the Royal Library building, from further destruction. In 1949 the Polish Parliament passed a bill to rebuild the Castle as a monument