After the end of the war in 1945, the American military government set up collection points for art in Germany, the so-called Central Collecting Points (CCPs). This involved, on the one hand, the collections of German museums that had been stored in mines, tunnels or barracks during the war and, on the other, works of art that had been looted or confiscated in the German Reich or in the occupied territories. These were to be returned to their original owners. The department of the military government responsible in the American occupation zone was the "Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Section" (MFA & A).

A Central Collecting Point, which focused on restitution, was established in Munich in two buildings on Königsplatz, the former "Verwaltungsbau der NSDAP" (now the Central Institute for Art History) and the former "Führerbau" (now the Hochschule für Musik und Theater). In Wiesbaden, the trained architect and art protection officer Walter I. Farmer (1911-1997) organized another Central Collecting Point in the Wiesbaden Museum, which was primarily intended to house holdings from the Berlin museums.

These had been taken to a salt mine near Eisenach in March 1945, recovered there by the US Army and initially stored in the Reichsbank building in Frankfurt am Main. On August 20, 1945, the first transport arrived in Wiesbaden, where the slightly damaged museum had been repaired and militarily secured over the course of two months.

On November 6, 1945, Farmer received a telegraphic order to transport 202 paintings from the Berlin collection to the USA. Farmer then organized a meeting of the art protection officers stationed in Germany, at which the so-called "Wiesbaden Manifesto" was adopted just one day later. It stated: "We are unanimously of the opinion that the transportation of such works of art, carried out by the United States Army on the orders of the highest national authority, sets a precedent that is neither morally justifiable nor understandable. (...) We would like to point out that, to our knowledge, no historical offense is as long-lasting and causes as much justifiable bitterness as the removal, for whatever reason, of a part of a nation's cultural heritage, even if that heritage is perceived as a war trophy." (Farmer, p. 63)

Despite this note of protest, Farmer had to send 202 of the most valuable European paintings to America by ship. They arrived at the National Gallery in Washington in December 1945. The "Wiesbaden Manifesto" was published in various American newspapers in 1946 and provoked further protests. In 1948, President Truman finally ordered the paintings to be returned to Wiesbaden following an exhibition tour of 13 American cities.

In the meantime, Farmer had begun to present the works of art stored here to the public in changing exhibitions, partly in order to make further secret removal more difficult. In the first exhibition in February 1946, the bust of Nefertiti was presented, followed by the Guelph Treasure and works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Dürer, Watteau and Caspar David Friedrich, often grouped into thematic focuses and supplemented by loans. In 1949, the paintings returned from the USA were also shown, and the repatriation was presented as a lesson in democracy, as an act of re-education.

The Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point was also responsible for collections from Frankfurt and Wiesbaden itself, as well as for a number of objects that were to be returned to their rightful owners. A total of almost 700,000 objects were inventoried here. Further Central Collecting Points were briefly established in Berlin, Celle and Marburg in 1945/46. Another one in Offenbach took care of Judaica until 1949.

In 1949, responsibility for the works of art in Wiesbaden was transferred to the Hessian state, but the Americans continued to deal with collections of unclear origin. In 1951, a German restitution committee was set up to cooperate with the Allies in restitution cases. In 1951, the remaining Central Collecting Points in Wiesbaden and Munich were closed. The Berlin artworks remained in their "Wiesbaden asylum" until 1956, when the Hessian Trust Administration transferred them to Berlin. In 1996, Walter I. Farmer was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.