OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit Reports 1945-1946: Guide to Online PDFs and Searchable Texts - Part 1

OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit: Where (Online) to Find All of the Reports Published from 1945-1946

This is the first part in a multi-part survey of available online resources for consulting and searching the Art Looting Investigation Unit Reports in English.
(Unfortunately, we were not able to locate translations in French, German, Spanish, Italian or Russian. If you know of a resource that has translated the ALIU Reports and Red Flag Name list into languages other than English, please add in the comments.)

Status August 2017: The ALIU reports are held by NARA. Online researchers can find pieces of the ALIU Reports on a variety of sites - LootedArt.com, NARA, Fold3, Loyola, EHRI and dfs.ny.gov, but, at present, there does not seem to be one place where ALL of the contents can be downloaded and viewed both in photographs of the original report and in searchable and machine-readable text.



This can be daunting. Especially as it is not always clear which text is taken into account in searches. Several, for example, will search on CAPITALIZED LAST NAMES that are mentioned in the reports, but not on the rest of the text.

Part 1: Accessing and downloading scans or copies of the original reports on-line.

Probably the best site for downloading complete PDFs of the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit Reports 1945-1946 is the New York State Financial Services Site which provides downloadable PDFs of photocopies of all the ALIU reports. 

http://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumer/holocaust/history_art_looting_restitution/allies_oss.htm

Below are links to PDFs of ALIU report scans from the dfs.ny.gov site:

Detailed Interrogation Reports

1. Heinrich Hoffman, July 1945
2. Ernst Buchner, July 1945
3. Robert Scholz, August 1945
4. Gustav Rochlitz, August 1945
5. Gunther Schiedlausky, August 1945
6. Bruno Lohse, August 1945
7. Gisela Limberger, September 1945
8. Walter Andreas Hofer, September 1945
9. Karl Kress, August 1945
10. Walter Bornheim, September 1945
11. Herman Voss, September 1945
12. Karl Haberstock, May 1946

Consolidated Interrogation Reports

1. Activity of The Einsatzstab Rosenberg in France, August 1945 (22 MB)
2. The Goering Collection, September 1945 (58 MB)
3. Linz: Hitler's Museum and Library, December 1945 (Supplement, January 1946) (Index only, for the full document, go to Fold3 at https://www.fold3.com/image/232002191 and click on the film icon to see all 278 pages - see detailed instructions in Part Two) For the database, you can consult http://www.dhm.de/datenbank/linzdb/indexe.html at the site of the German Historical Museum.

Final Report

• Pages 1 - 100 (~ 16 MB)
• Pages 101 - 175 (~ 13 MB)

The above documents can be searched.

Fold3, in partnership with the National Archives, offers access to a viewer of pages and, for some documents, the possibility of searching the text for certain keywords but not a global text search.
More on this in the upcoming part two.