I was told a story once in Prague about WWII. I am not sure if it is true.
Reinhard Heydrich was a loyal Nazi and loved the music of Richard Wagner. On 27th September 1941, Heydrich was appointed acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. He commandeered as his headquarters the Rudolphinium, Prague’s centre of classical music, by the Vltava river.
When Heydrich heard that there were statues of famous composers on the roof of the building, he demanded to have the statue of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy removed, as he wasn’t prepared to have a Jew in the same building.
His henchmen went to the roof and looked at the statues, but found that none of them had any identification. They reported this fact to Heydrich, who was angered by their incompetence.
“Fools,” he said, “fools, it is evident what you have to do, why do I have to tell you these things? You measure the noses of all the statues and the one with the biggest nose is obviously Mendelssohn. You throw this statue into the river.”
His associates found some calipers that had been used in Prague to assess Jewishness. They went to the roof, measured the noses, and threw the statue with the biggest nose into the Vltava.
On 27th May, 1942, as Heydrich’s car slowed to round a sharp bend it was ambushed by Free Czech agents. They shot at Heydrich and threw an explosive device which wounded him. He died a week later. On 10th June, 1942, in one of the worst atrocities of WWII, all 172 men and boys over 16 in the village of Lidice were shot in retaliation. All the women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most died. The missing statue was forgotten about.
At the end of WWII, Prague came under Communist rule and the Czechoslovak authorities returned to the Rudolphinium. One day an official was walking on the roof and noticed that a statue was missing. He found an inventory that the Germans hadn’t understood and checked to see which statue was no longer there.
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was still there, nose and all. Mozart was still there, Beethoven too. However, Richard Wagner couldn’t be found.