When it was deactivated in 2024, the U.S. Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot wrapped up an 82-year history dating back to World War II.

Preparing for the closure, the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant on the site had spent a year destroying the toxic stockpile safely stored there since the 1950s of more than 780,000 military chemical weapons containing more than a reported 2,300 tons of mustard gas.

As the depot continues being fully decontaminated and demolished piece by piece, the more than 23,000 acres are in a transitioned turnover to the city’s PuebloPlex for redevelopment and tech expansion.

According to army.mil, the Pueblo Ordnance Depot was built in 1942 to store supplies and ammunition during World War II. Then, as Pueblo Army Depot starting in 1962, it was expanded to “remanufacture” military material including tanks and combat vehicles until the 1995 Gulf War, when it became the Pueblo Chemical Depot chemical weapons stockpile.

The decades of wartime military supplies are a well-known part of the depot’s history, but many might be surprised that at World War II’s end, sharing the cinder block bunkers, there was an almost-secretive collection of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi propaganda art there as well. Much of the thousands of pieces of propaganda was created by German artists commissioned by Hitler.

People in the area and those who worked there and their families were aware that controversial art of Hitler and the Nazi Germans was below ground in a dry, closed-off part of the Army supply depot, but it wasn’t open to the public except for select history researchers, veterans and student field trips. And there were some quiet visits by employee families, with some members of those families, kids at the time, now posting memories on social media.

A short time of restricted public access to view the art stored in Pueblo in the 1970s and 1980s was stopped in 1987.

Credited with finding the Nazi propaganda to be quietly preserved nationwide out of the public’s eye because of its troubling subjects of undeserved Nazi glory was Capt. Gordon Gilkey, chief of the War Department’s German War Art Program in 1945-1947. Altogether he catalogued 8,722 items, many that had been hidden in unusual spots such as captured castles, bars and even a salt mine. They were shipped by the Army to sites in the United States but not to be displayed. Those deemed “inoffensive” were sent to Germany. Some propaganda had been sold privately before the government changed that policy.

Army reports were that items saved in Pueblo were for the most part chosen because the depot was a large, empty space and the paintings were extremely large, mainly life size. There was reportedly an almost 9-foot-tall Adolf Hitler and huge portraits of top Nazis in full uniform such as Heinrich Himmler and Rudolph Hess. There were paintings of supposedly triumphant German troops as they beat Allied troops.

According to employees over the years, it wasn’t a museum, instead just storage with just a few selected pieces stacked or leaning against boxes and walls with handwritten signs about who was in the art and what it depicted. They were roped off to avoid any further damage due to age and conditions where they had been hidden. Pueblo was chosen because it was in an area of no humidity, the Army said. The government restricts any photography of its collected hate propaganda.

Some of the art collected by the Army was outside the propaganda vein and could be shown and was even sold, including watercolors and architectural art by Hitler, who had planned an art career but had faced rejection. He failed entrance to Academy of Fine Arts Vienna on two occasions. Reuters Auctions called his landscapes and building depictions “of no artistic value.” Many of the non-propaganda works are in private collections and museums and were able to be sold because they didn’t contain the restricted Nazi symbols.

Over the years the restricted propaganda was being moved from storage in Pueblo to other locations, and by 2014 everything had been relocated to a Museum Support Center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. On Veterans Day 2020 the Army opened the state-of-the-art National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir, under the Center of Military History. Most egregious propaganda created by and for the Nazis as well as some of Hitler’s own paintings remain restricted and under lock and key. thenmusa.org