This project follows the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany and the United States through the treatment of artwork produced under the Nazi regime at the official governmental level, in the press, academic circles, and among the wider public from the postwar era to the present. It argues that the path taken through time and space of the Nazi-era artwork, including the German War Art Collection, is an important lens through which to understand Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Germany. Furthermore, it shows that this process comprised emotionally charged political and cultural processes that occurred in West Germany and the United States from the immediate postwar era through the Cold War to today – Vergangenheitsbewältigung is not just a German story, and instead has taken, and continues to take place within an international setting. The U.S. steered, consciously and unconsciously, the process of “coming to terms with the past” in Germany through this artwork. The works’ historical trajectory was a mirror for both the U.S. government’s and public’s fears and desires, especially as inflected by the Cold War, regarding the relationship between Germany’s past and the U.S.’s present and future, and one that was heavily inflected by the Cold War. The first chapter focuses on the case of Gordon Gilkey and his seizure of Nazi-era artwork from occupied Germany, as well as his subsequent relationships with many of the artists whose works he confiscated in the postwar and nascent Cold War era. In the next chapter, the focus shifts to a seminal exhibition of Nazi-era artwork in the turbulent wake of the progressive 68er movement in West Germany. The penultimate chapter returns to the United States to trace the return and repatriation of thousands of works in United States custody back into West German custody. Finally, the last chapter examines the role of leftist German politics and the Green Party in posing the question of “what to do with Nazi-era art” in a country that continues to debate how to confront and work through its past.