Like everything else that he set about doing, however, which immediately and compulsively began to run riot, his plans for the Linz art gallery soon also assumed gargantuan dimensions. While his initial idea had only been to make the Linz gallery a worthy repository of representative examples of 19th century German art, he was evidently so overwhelmed and challenged by the richness of Italian museums after his journey to Italy in 1938 that he then resolved to erect a monumental counterpart in Linz. By now, it had evolved in his megalomaniac imagination into a project for "The Biggest Museum in the World", before even this idea escalated one final time, at the beginning of the War, into part of a plan for the redistribution of all the art on the entire European continent. This envisaged all works of art being transferred to Germany from the so-called "Germanic zones of influence" and concentrated mainly in Linz, in keeping with the city's intended status as a sort of Germanic Rome.

Fest, Joachim C.: Hitler, A Biography, Propylaen, Germany, 1973, p.726

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