European and non-European wars are reflected in natural history collections in many ways. Parts of the
collections themselves originate from theatres of war and can be traced back to military actors: mammals from
colonial 'punitive expeditions', insects from the trenches of the First World War, birds shot by members of the
Waffen-SS in Auschwitz, and destroyed collections bear eloquent witness to this.
Building on studies of
ethnological, botanical, and ethnographic collecting that increasingly address the entanglements of collections,
wars, and museums, I turn to the theatres of war in natural history to locate nature and natural history
institutions as central sites of military violence and geopolitical interests. My paper examines the looting of
an insect collection in Holland occupied by German troops, focusing on the justification strategies and
consequences for the museum. Central to my analysis is the question of how far the exploitation of theatres of
war for the hunting, looting and intellectual appropriation of animals can be described as a common practice of
natural history collecting.