The paintings Koch chose for his own collection have yet to be fully identified. The same month of February 1945, when the art from Kyiv was burned, Koch’s SS estate manager managed to evacuate some 70 paintings and 100 engravings of Koch’s personal collection to Weimar. He returned to Weimar in April and absconded with over half the deposited art, none of which can be located today.
Adolf Hitler appointed Erich Koch Gauleiter of East Prussia already in 1928, and Oberpräsident in 1933, and then Reichskommissar for Ukraine in 1941. Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring recommended Koch’s Ukrainian appointment, after selling him many looted Old Masters from Western collections to adorn his extensive Königsberg estate. Koch commandeered the Amber Chamber to Königsberg in 1941, and a horde of art from Minsk. During German retreat from Ukraine in 1943, he acquired some of the choice art the Germans were evacuating from Kharkiv, and he ordered to Königsberg all the remaining paintings in Kyiv from the prerevolutionary Khanenko Collection and icons from the Lavra. Most of the art Koch had brought to East Prussia perished when the Red Army arrived, part by British bombing, part by Soviet warfare, while the Ukrainian component was deliberately destroyed by an SS squad in a Junker estate south of Königsberg.
