WWI Relic and the Monuments Men: Uncovering the History of a Fokker D.VII

The Monuments Men and Women not only helped return priceless works of art but also played key roles in safeguarding historically important treasures! Beginning this fall, the National Military Museum of the Netherlands will display a Fokker D.VII aircraft, a notable fighter plane produced near the end of World War I and used in the interwar period. It will be on loan from the Deutsches Museum in Munich. An earlier restoration has led to an ongoing provenance investigation, which has revealed the plane's connection to World War II and the MFAA’s restitution operations.

Lieutenant Göring poses next to his Fokker D.VII fighter plane during World War I. (Public domain image via Wikipedia)

This particular fighter plane was taken from the Netherlands during World War II, with plans to display it in a proposed aviation museum in Berlin—a vision of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the supreme commander of Germany’s air force. While its full identity remains uncertain, research between the Netherlands and Germany is ongoing as experts continue to piece together its wartime provenance and understand how the plane ended up in a repository in Vilsbiburg, Germany, just northeast of Munich, by the end of the war.

May 1949 memo to MCCP director Stefan Munsing concerning the repository at Vilsbiburg. Paragraph 3 details the transfer of the “Fokker.” (Record Group 260, National Archives via Fold3)

Transferred to the custody of the Allies and MFAA after the war, Monuments Man H. Stewart Leonard,

the chief of the MFAA Section for the Office of Military Government for Bavaria and director of the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP), entrusted the plane to the Deutsches Museum, effective July 22, 1948. These findings, along with other brief details about the Vilsbiburg repository, were shared in a May 1949 memo to later MCCP director Stefan Munsing.

This partnership is an example of how the vital work of the Monuments Men and Women continues today through the individuals and institutions still completing their mission of restitution, one object at a time.