Editor’s note: This event was scheduled for Thursday evening but has been canceled due to sudden illness. It is rescheduled for January.

World War II ended over 50 years ago, but at least one front is still contested today.

Numerous news stories over the past few years revealed a shady history of European art during the Nazi years. During the war, an incredible amount of artwork was looted from its owners as the Nazi movement marched through Europe.

This plundering was done in a number of ways: sometimes it was taken forcibly from victims, other times freedom was granted in exchange for priceless pieces of art.

And in some circumstances, Nazi officials would loot entire museums. Victims tended to be Jewish, but Nazi plundering took place all across Europe.

The process of returning these works has been in motion since the war ended, but has gained national attention within the last 10 years or so. One of the people heavily involved with restitution is Jonathan Petropoulos, professor at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

Petropoulos is a distinguished figure in the area of Nazi culture and the art world during the period of the Third Reich.

He has written two books on the subject, a slew of articles, served on a number of committees dealing with the subject and served as a consultant for various media projects.

Because of the enormous amount of property taken during the war, it can sometimes be hard to put into perspective just how large-scale the issue was. Petropoulos said the Louvre, an art museum in Paris, has about 2,000 items on display. Adolph Hitler himself had over 5,000 pieces in his personal collection alone.

“The Nazi leaders, I would estimate, stole at least 500,000 artworks,” Petropoulos says. “So we’re talking about staggering numbers of artwork that were stolen by the Nazis.”

Petropoulos currently serves as a consultant for families wanting to regain works they think might rightfully be theirs. This involves conducting research and gathering information on the circumstances of the theft.

His work takes him to Europe many times during the course of a year. There he studies documents and even interviews surviving members of the Nazi regime in order to gain as much information as possible.

He considers himself a bit of an Indiana Jones when it comes to finding information.

“Sometimes there is a certain amount of industrious ingenuity involved in discovering things,” Petropoulos says.

“I’ve been known to use hidden tape recorders and secretly take photographs of the interiors of these people’s houses and climb a few walls to try and research this history.”

But that research remains endless right now. Although much has been discovered about Nazi art plundering, Petropoulos says there is even more to be accomplished.

Millions of dollars of precious artwork is hanging on the walls of museums, sitting in museum basements or being stored in Swiss bank vaults right now.

Petropoulos says there are pieces being returned every week but there still are a number of struggles – mostly consisting of documentation – he and other historians face when researching the subject.

“I think it is a combination of a lack of records and not having access to certain records that do exist,” Petropoulos says.

“There is a lot about the arts that we don’t know about,” says Dennis Raverty, assistant professor of art history, theory and criticism at Iowa State. “A lot of the archives of the Germans are very protected because they are so embarrassed by this chapter of their history.”

And that chapter doesn’t just consist of the looting that took place either. Art under the Nazis tended to be what the Nazis wanted it to be, which Raverty describes as a more classical style and as “very boring and stationary.”

But the Nazis did have a powerful love for art, and just as powerful a hate for modern art, which they thought was a plot to overtake the German spirit, Raverty explains.

This led to them taking complete control of almost every aspect of the arts in Germany and trying to incorporate a universal style, which involved banning art criticism as a whole, for fear that Nazi art would be reviewed in a negative manner.

“In a sense the Nazis had a much more exultant view of art that we do today,” says John Cunnally, associate professor of art history at Iowa State. “We really don’t think art matters much, but the leaders of the Third Reich really felt that art was important.

“They were very much concerned with making sure that good art was promoted and bad art was suppressed, of course what they regarded as good art and bad art is very much different than what we consider today.”

And besides just suppressing art they didn’t agree with, the Nazis also successfully seduced people in the art world into helping their cause. This is the basis for Petropoulos’ most recent book, “The Faustian Bargain: The Art World of Nazi Germany.”

Faust sold his soul to the devil for glory and riches, much like the people described in this book. Like Arno Breker for instance, who quit practicing his modernism style in order to do monumental realism work, becoming one of Hitler’s personal favorite artists. The book also gives the stories of others who were critics, art dealers and museum directors, some of them who personally took part in art looting from Jewish collectors.

“They weren’t monsters, that’s the interesting thing. They were sort of regular people, and they didn’t necessarily agree with Nazi ideology but they said `Hey what a chance,'” Raverty says.

Petropoulos says he became interested in the people featured in his book because they were people just like him. Identifying with Hitler is impossible he says, but identifying with museum directors isn’t so off the wall. But these “normal people” who started to become part of the Nazi movement, and according to Petropoulos, became war criminals.

“They contributed to the persecution of Jews and other victims in the Third Reich; their work was part of the Holocaust,” Petropoulos says.

“I’ve always argued that taking away the cultural property of victims was part of the dehumanizing of people, which made it easier for the later steps.”

Cunnally says, “The Nazis felt like art was a very important branch of propaganda. They thought that if you could control art, it could go a long way toward controlling the spirit of the people.”

Interestingly enough, many articles that have been written about the looting of Third Reich victims often refer to the subject as the “last chapter of the Holocaust.”

But Petropoulos believes that it is just one chapter in a book of many chapters, which in fact, may never be closed for good.

“This is a history that we are going to continue to write for centuries, and from this vantage point I don’t think we can say that there is a last chapter.”