X-Rays Revealed Nazi Symbols Hidden Beneath a Repainted Bavarian Flag After WW2

Scientists uncovered a postwar cover-up in a painting by Erich Mercker.

At first glance, the painting looks like a quaint Munich street scene.

The Feldherrnhalle rises at the edge of Odeonsplatz. A blue-and-white Bavarian flag bends in the air. Small figures move through the square, and the whole image has the familiar, postcard-like calm of a city view.

But something was wrong.

The scene did not quite match history. The painting still showed part of a Nazi memorial that had been destroyed shortly after Germany’s surrender in 1945. And around the Bavarian flag, researchers noticed faint red traces peeking through the paint.

Those details led scientists to look beneath the surface. Using X-ray fluorescence, they found that the calm postwar image was covering an older one. The Bavarian flag had been painted over a red Nazi flag. The plain wall concealed wreaths, guards and arms raised in a “seig heil” fashion. The Nazi-era painting by Erich Mercker, a Munich painter who prospered under the Nazi regime and continued working after the war, had been altered (or more like sanitized) after the war to hide its most incriminating symbols.

A Painter Who Outlived the Regime

Mercker was not among the most notorious artists of the Third Reich, and profited a lot from being taken under the wing of the party. He painted landscapes, city views and industrial scenes, and he sold works to collectors and the Nazi state. It’s believed Mercker made over 3,000 paintings, most of them landscapes.

According to the study, he exhibited at all eight Great German Art Exhibitions, Hitler’s premier official art event, and earned 126,750 Reichsmarks (a buying power equivalent to roughly $1.1 million to $1.15 million today) from sales to the German government during the Nazi period.

One of his recurring motifs was “Die Stätte des 9. November,” or “The Site of November 9.” The title refers to the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.

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Before it became a national holiday under the Third Reich, November 9, 1923, was an embarrassing failure for Adolf Hitler. His amateurish attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government at Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller collapsed in a volley of police gunfire outside the Feldherrnhalle. Sixteen Nazis died, and Hitler was hauled off to prison.

Yet, in the perverse alchemy of totalitarian propaganda, a botched coup was successfully transmuted into a holy martyrdom. Upon seizing power in 1933, the Nazi regime declared November 9 a national day of mourning for the Blutzeugen — the “blood witnesses” of the movement.

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A memorial to the event was installed at Munich’s Feldherrnhalle. It included an eagle, a wreath and a swastika. SS guards stood watch, and passers-by were expected to give the Nazi salute.

After 1945, Nazi symbols were banned in postwar Germany, and many artists like painters and sculptors who had worked under the regime adjusted their careers.

Mercker did the same, but was perhaps sneakier than others. He may have taken at least one of his old paintings, the aforementioned Die Stätte des 9. November, and essentially revised it. The Nazi flag turned into a Bavarian flag. The soldiers disappeared, and so did the formerly depicted memorial.

The painting examined in the new study sat for decades in a private home. It had been given to Thomas Schuhbauer’s parents as a wedding present in 1966. Schuhbauer, a filmmaker and producer, later noticed the oddities and contacted researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and Technische Universität Berlin.

“This collaboration was very exciting,” said Dr. Ioanna Mantouvalou, a physicist and X-ray spectroscopy expert. “We had very different areas of expertise and backgrounds.”

Reading Behind Paint Without Cutting It

The team did not scrape the painting or remove samples. Instead, they used X-ray fluorescence, a technique that can identify chemical elements in paint without damaging the work.

The instrument fires X-rays at a surface. The atoms in the pigments respond with signals that reveal which elements are present. Because X-rays can penetrate below the top layer, the method can also expose paint buried underneath.

The researchers scanned several suspicious areas: the flag, the memorial, the wall where soldiers and wreaths might once have stood, and figures in the foreground.

The flag provided the first major clue. The visible blue-and-white flag contained titanium, consistent with titanium white paint. But beneath it, the team detected cadmium and selenium, elements consistent with cadmium red. The distribution suggested that the original flag had been red, consistent with the background of the nazi flag. In places, the red still showed beyond the newer flag’s edges.

Then there was the wall of the memorial. What looked like a simple painted surface concealed two large wreaths, more wreaths with ribbons, and two likely soldiers. One passerby had an arm raised in salute and may have worn swastika armbands. Another figure in the foreground also appears to have had a raised arm, later painted over.

The overpainting used oil paint containing titanium white. Titanium white did not appear elsewhere in the painting. A tube labeled “Titanweiß 10103 Schmincke” was also found among Mercker’s preserved paint tubes, although the researchers cannot prove that this exact tube was used.

The team also examined the back of the painting. Under infrared light, a partly erased inscription appeared to read “Die Stätte des 9. November.” A number on the back, 1139034, matched a numbering pattern Mercker used between about 1930 and 1945. The authors propose that the painting was made in November 1934 and later altered sometime between 1945 and 1966.

What the Cover-Up Says

The study does not prove who did the overpainting. The authors offer two possibilities. Mercker may have kept the painting, altered it after the war and sold it. Or someone who owned it may have commissioned the changes later, perhaps from Mercker or another artist.

But the researchers lean toward Mercker’s hand. The style of the Bavarian flag resembles flags in other works by him. The revision also looks imperfect: the Nazi-era memorial remains partly visible, red paint is still exposed near the flag, and the old title on the back was only partly erased.

The painting is now held by the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism.

The new findings appeared in the journal npj Heritage Science.