Hanns Christian Löhr
Hanns Christian Löhr is a German historian.
Youth and education
Hanns Christian Löhr grew up in West Germany. After graduating from high school, he studied ancient, medieval and contemporary history as well as philosophy at the University of Hamburg and the University of Bonn. He completed his studies in 1988 with a master of arts degree. In 1992 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Bonn in history under Klaus Hildebrand, with a thesis on the foundation of the modern state of Albania and the outbreak of the First World War.Scientific activity
Loehr's first book described the privatization of East German agriculture by the "Treuhandanstalt Berlin". Later he concentrated his scientific research on National Socialist art theft. In the course of this work he evaluated the photo file of the special commission Linz for the Führermuseum and the so called Führerbaukartei, which he was the first to identify in the archive of the former regional tax office Berlin, which was not open to the public at the time. Both card indexes show a large part of the works of art acquired by Adolf Hitler. As a result, a monograph on Hitler's looted art organization was published in 2005. In 2009 he published an analog work on the collection of Hermann Göring. In 2018, the last work in this series to appear was a study on the art theft carried out by Hitler's chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg during the Second World War. Löhr thus published a trilogy on the three important National Socialist art thefts.The three books each contain a catalogue of lost works of art that have been missing since 1945. He published photographs of objects that had previously been largely unknown to researchers. In September 2009, the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office, together with the Central Institute for Art History in Munich, secured the painting "The Sermon on the Mount" by Frans Francken the Younger, which he had listed as a loss from Hitler's collection in his book The Brown House of Art. He supplemented his academic work on National Socialist cultural policy with a study on the architectural and cultural plans, which Hitler wanted to realize in his former hometown of Linz on the Danube.
In 2021 Löhr participated in the French database as an author.
Activity as editor
Together with the foundation German Historical Museum and the former Federal Office for Open Property Issues, Löhr published the database on the "Special Commission Linz" on the Internet in 2008, which lists all works of art acquired for Hitler between 1939 and 1945. An analogous database was published by the same working group in 2012 for the Goering Collection.Löhr lives and works as a provenance researcher in Berlin.