LONDON — We live in turbulent and frustrating times: In the Middle East, parts of our most precious cultural heritage are being wiped out while we watch, while in Europe an unwanted bequest has suddenly resurfaced, and its rightful owners — the German government — are at a loss for how to respond.

What have arisen from the past are various exterior ornaments from Hitler’s monumental Chancellery in Berlin, which opened in January 1939. After the Russians took the city in May 1945, the sculptures were confiscated as trophies by the Red Army, which decided against shipping them back to the Soviet Union and deposited them on the sports field of a barracks at Ebersfelde, near Berlin on the Oder River. There they remained for more than 40 years, until shortly before the East German regime keeled over in 1989 and men with fistfuls of cash appeared and the sculptures were taken away. That was the last anyone saw of them until the middle of last month, when they were found in a storage facility in Bad Dürkheim in the Pfalz region.

When the news of this discovery broke, it was assumed that the sculptures in question were just fixtures from the Chancellery’s garden facade: two massive bronze horses by Josef Thorak, a large relief by Arno Breker and a couple of nudes by Fritz Klimsch. But since the police found the horde and made a series of arrests, two more Breker works have been mentioned, and there have been unconfirmed reports that the police may have recovered one or both of perhaps the most famous Nazi sculptures of all: Die Wehrmacht and Die Partei, two male nudes by Breker that flanked the front door to Hitler’s haunt. Apparently some of Hermann Göring’s treasures have surfaced, too, sculptures from his country house at Carinhall that was blown up as the Russians approached that spring.

Much of the art produced in the 12-year life of the Third Reich was destroyed by bombs or lost in the chaos of defeat. Thousands of others were burned (particularly in the American-controlled zone) as a result of a Joint Chiefs directive that targeted the trappings of Nazism and militarism. Another 8,722 works were collected by Captain Gordon W. Gilkey and shipped to the Pentagon as trophies. (Most of them have now been returned to Germany.)