The Ghent Altarpiece, Part III - The Toothache That Saved the Ghent Altarpiece

Adolf Hitler believed the Ghent Altarpiece contained a coded map to supernatural relics that would grant him power. He and Hermann Göring competed to possess it. They built a state-of-the-art storage facility a mile underground in an Austrian salt mine to house it alongside 6,577 other stolen paintings—works by Michelangelo, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and, most importantly, Van Eyck.Then, in April 1945, SS soldiers placed bombs in the mine. Six 500-kilogram aircraft bombs positioned to collapse the entire facility and bury everything inside.What happened next involved a toothache in a small German town; four Austrian double agents parachuting onto the wrong mountain; a Nazi collaborator who helped the Allies, then killed his family; competing resistance groups who all claimed credit for the rescue; and a storm that nearly prevented the painting from making it home.This episode explores what happens when obsession becomes industrial-scale plunder, and how the Ghent Altarpiece survived not because of perfect heroism, but because chaos eventually undoes even the most organized theft