The research lands just as Washington is forcing the art world to examine its culpability in Nazi-looted art. Cranach Digital Archive

In 1944, as soldiers herded Hungarian Jews into ghettos and onto cattle cars, another army went to work: clerks with pens and rubber stamps.

On typed forms and museum letterhead, they calmly recorded what they were taking: “Munkácsy, oil on canvas . . . 18th-century German oil . . . 843 carpets . . . 4,500-volume library.”

Those records survive on roughly 2,500 pages of microfilm — wartime files from the office of Dr. Dénes Csánky, Hungary’s “government commissioner” for Jewish art assets, and preserved by Holocaust scholar Randolph L. Braham.

For decades, those reels were hard to access and easy to ignore.

This year, with our urging, the World Jewish

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