In its early years the Nazi regime conducted no major initiatives involving the mass movement, conservation, or destruction of cultural material, save for the mass burnings of books. By 1937, as discussed in Chaps. 4 and 5 , this situation was changing. The regime had initiated both the seizure of ‘degenerate art’ from state collections, put into law ex post facto in 1938, and embarked on its campaign to ‘conserve’ and document tens of thousands of historic church records with a view to gleaning ‘racial’ information. By November 1938, the nationwide pogrom not only facilitated the mass destruction of Jewish-owned or occupied homes, shops, and places of worship, by civilians and the Nazi paramilitaries, but also enabled the theft of household goods, cultural property, religious ritual objects, and archives. This was accompanied by serious bodily harm, deaths by suicide, and murder. It is noteworthy that eye-witness accounts of the violence include observations of the destruction of works of art. Damage to paintings was specifically and repeatedly described in terms of canvases being cut up into rectangular shapes with bayonets, slashed more irregularly with steel rods or axes, or ripped.