At the same time as Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the Western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe.

The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.

In a race against time behind enemy lines, and often unarmed, a special force of 350 American and British museum directors, curators, art historians and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.

Focusing on the 11-month period between D-Day and VE Day, this fascinating account follows the Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis.

They built their own treasure maps from scraps and hints: the diary of a Louvre curator who secretly tracked Nazi plunder through the Paris rail yards; records recovered from bombed-out cathedrals and museums; overheard conversations; a tip from a dentist while getting a root canal.

They started off moving in different directions, but ended up heading for the same place at the same time: the Alps near the German-Austrian border in the last two weeks of the war, where the great treasure caches of the Nazis were stored: the artwork of Paris, stolen mostly from Jewish collectors and dealers; masterworks from the museums of Naples and Florence.

The greatest prize of all was Hitler's personal hoard of masterpieces, looted from the most important art collections and museums in Europe and hidden deep within a working salt mine - which the Nazis had every intention of destroying before it fell into Allied hands.

Monuments Men by Robert E Edsell is a 2010 edition published by Arrow Books, London. It is a 473-page 13x20cm paperback in good condition with a big section of photographs. There is a surname on page 3 and a couple of light creases to the bottom of the covers.

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