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In the spring of 1945 the Gemäldegalerie lost about 400 of its paintings in a matter of days. The largest works, canvases too big to fit down the mine shafts where the rest of the collection had been hidden, had been left in a huge concrete anti-aircraft tower in Berlin's Friedrichshain park. After the fighting stopped, two fires broke out in the tower, no one is quite sure how, and ten Rubenses, several Caravaggios and works by Veronese and Van Dyck were gone. What survives of them is a set of black-and-white photographs taken in the 1920s, when a museum photographer had been sent to record every picture on the walls.

The paintings that were spared are why the gallery still ranks among the great collections of European art, roughly the 13th to the 18th centuries. It sits today in the Kulturforum, a cluster of modernist buildings near where the Berlin Wall once ran, its holdings rebuilt and reunited after the city itself was split and rejoined.

The rooms hold Rembrandts by the dozen and Vermeer's 'Woman with a Pearl Necklace', catching the light at a window. There is also the so-called 'Man with the Golden Helmet', a soldier's gleaming helmet emerging from shadow, admired for generations as a Rembrandt until close study in the 1980s reassigned it to a painter working in his circle. The museum kept it on the wall under its old nickname.