Image copyright EPA Image caption The head weighs about 60kg and is in good condition after its years underground 
 
 A marble sculpture of Adolf Hitler's head has been unearthed by construction workers in the Polish city of Gdansk. 
 
 The bust, which is 50cm (20in) high, was found buried in a garden at the city's National Museum, Radio Poland reports. It bears the inscription "Thorak 1942", identifying it as the work of Josef Thorak, one of the Third Reich's official sculptors. 
 
 It's not yet clear how it came to be buried, but it likely happened in 1945 as the Soviet army approached the city, according to Lech Lopuski, a curator at the museum. "Had it been found right after the war, it would have definitely been destroyed," he tells the Dziennik Baltycki website. "Somebody made an effort to properly hide it, it was buried some 60cm underground." Mr Lopuski notes that the sculpture remained concealed in the garden despite repeated digging over the years to install a fountain and flower beds. 
 
 The museum says it currently has no plans to put the piece on display. "For the time being, it goes to a warehouse," says Wojciech Bonislawski, the museum's director. "It needs to be studied scientifically to find out who ordered it, where it stood and how it ended up in the museum." 
 
 Thorak's sculptures were often enormous, designed to adorn official buildings and public spaces. In May, two 33ft-long (10m) bronze horse statues, which had stood outside Hitler's chancellery in Berlin, were recovered by German police, having been missing since 1989. 
 
 Image copyright EPA Image caption Thorak became a favourite sculptor of Albert Speer - Hitler's chief architect 
 
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 Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter. ||||| Warsaw (AFP) - Polish construction workers have dug up a marble bust of Adolf Hitler by one of the Third Reich's official sculptors during work at a museum in the northern city of Gdansk, officials said Thursday. 
 
 Measuring 50 centimetres (20 inches) in height, the bust by sculptor Josef Thorak was buried in the ground and was hit by a shovel during work in the interior garden of the National Museum in Gdansk, according to Lech Lopuski, an official in the sculpture department. 
 
 "We can see it was hidden on purpose," he told AFP of the bust signed Thorak and dated 1942. 
 
 "It's an important sculpture because we didn't know it existed. Thorak was a gifted sculptor and we can see that he did a good job." 
 
 Gdansk, or Danzig in German, was a free city between the two world wars, with mostly German residents. The building where the bust was found was at the time home to the municipal museum. 
 
 "The bust was perhaps part of the (museum) director's office furnishings, but it's still too early to tell," Lopuski said. 
 
 "We still don't know whether it will go on display. It's a delicate issue." ||||| Model of the Reich Chancellery building, designed by Albert Speer: The bronze statue of “Trabenes Pferd,” or “Trotting Horse,” is by sculptor Josef Thorak. (Heinrich Hoffmann/ullstein bild via Getty Images) 
 
 Struggling artists often crave official recognition. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts or designation as a poet laureate doesn’t just help financially — government support can help creative types build a career and burnish a reputation. 
 
 Unless that government is the Third Reich, and the patron is notorious Nazi Albert Speer, who took a shine to the work of a sculptor named Josef Thorak in Germany before the outbreak of World War II. 
 
 “Thorak worked on statues intended to represent the folk-life of Germany under Nazi coordination; these works tended to be heroic in scale, up to 65 feet,” according to Holland’s German Art Gallery. “… Albert Speer referred to Thorak as ‘more or less my sculptor.'” 
 
 Recently recovered bronze sculptures and granite reliefs made for Adolf Hitler's imposing Reich Chancellery have been transported to a police depot. (Reuters) 
 
 Now, one of Thorak’s works has been unearthed in a black-market raid. German police discovered two massive bronze Thorak sculptures, dubbed “Walking Horses,” during an investigation targeting eight suspects in an illegal art trafficking ring, Berlin police spokesman Thomas Neuendorf told the Associated Press. The dealers wanted some $5.6 million for the statues, according to Bild newspaper. 
 
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 Thorak’s “Walking Horses” — standing 16 feet high and 33 feet long — once guarded Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, planted on either side of the stairs to the building. During World War II, they were relocated and, in the 1950s, popped up on a Red Army barracks’ sports grounds in Eberswalde, a town northeast of Berlin in the communist German Democratic Republic, according to Agence France-Presse. The sculptures showed signs of the battle they had been through, painted gold to mask their bullet holes. 
 
 Then when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the horses went missing. Some speculated they were sold by the GDR. Police recently started investigating when they learned someone was attempting to sell them on the black market. 
 
 Police raided homes in Berlin, Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein, seizing several other pieces of Nazi-era art, including a massive granite relief by German sculptor Arno Breker depicting muscled, shirtless fighters wielding swords in what police called “typical Nazi style,” according to BBC News. 
 
 “Typical Nazi style” was an aesthetic championed by Adolph Hitler, a former art student, and Speer, his architect. 
 
 
 
 Adolf Hitler inspecting plans with Albert Speer, far right, in 1937. (AP) 
 
 “For all departments of art Hitler regarded the late nineteenth century as one of the greatest cultural epochs in human history,” Speer wrote in a memoir, “Inside the Third Reich.” “That it was not yet recognized as such, he said, was only because we were too close to it in time.” 
 
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 Visual art of the 19th century was free of the Dadaism, surrealism and abstraction the Nazis viewed as degenerate. It was heroic. It was triumphant. And by the 1930s, it was a throwback. Thorak’s stuff fit right in. 
 
 “Two enormous naked male figures, models of so-called ‘Aryan’ man with bulging muscles and chiseled faces, stand defiantly side-by-side, one clasping the hand of the other in expression of a unique comradely bond between race brothers and soldier-companions,” Richard Overy wrote in “The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia” of another Thorak work chosen for the German pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937. “… It is a statue of racial warriors.” 
 
 Though Thorak had experimented with modernism and was a former left-winger who married and had a child with a Jew, it seemed he wanted to fit in with the boys in brown. Indeed, he disavowed his family to keep in the Reich’s good graces. 
 
 “There were many cultural figures who viewed, with good reason, the Nazi leaders as generous patrons,” Jonathan Petropoulos wrote in “Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany.” “The kleptocratic leaders who enriched themselves during the Third Reich subscribed to a trickle-down philosophy with regard to wealth, especially because so much of it involved state funds, not to mention plundered assets.” Thorak, who got what was called a “Fuhrer-Donation” — a tax-free cash gift equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars — benefited from this “trickling-down.” 
 
 Until he didn’t. After the war, Thorak “retired to semiobscurity in Bavaria,” as Time magazine put it in 1950. Though he went through de-Nazification, he “continued to travel in radical right-wing networks and remained favorites of old Nazis, whose publications … would frequently feature” the work of Thorak and his neo-classical co-horts, as Petropoulos wrote. 
 
 [How the world’s most wanted Nazi evaded justice for more than 60 years] 
 
 Two years before his death, Thorak even had an art show. It was not well-received. 
 
 “One critic suggested that Thorak’s jumbo-sized statues would have been more appropriate as small porcelain figurines to ‘decorate a small table,'” Time wrote. “Said another: ‘It shows how low our taste has become, that this ‘art’ of the dictatorship still finds acknowledgment today.'” 
 
 But, to the end, Thorak had kind words for Hitler. 
 
 “He understood me,” Thorak told Time, “and if what I do is art, he understood art.”
– It was just another day of typical garden work at a Polish museum when a worker's shovel clanked against something hard buried in the ground. The find: a 20-inch-high marble sculpture of the head of one Adolf Hitler, AFP reports. "Somebody made an effort to properly hide it, it was buried some [2 feet] underground," Lech Lopuski, a curator at Gdansk's National Museum, tells the Dziennik Baltycki website, via the BBC. Inscribed on the bust is "Thorak 1942," designating it as the work of Josef Thorak, who was known as one of the Fuhrer's favorite sculptors, per AFP. "It's an important sculpture because we didn't know it existed," Lopuski notes. "Thorak was a gifted sculptor, and we can see that he did a good job." Thorak's works were known to be monumental, designed for use in official buildings and public spaces, per the BBC. While museum officials still aren't sure how this Hitler head ended up in the garden—and remained hidden for 70 years, even when work was done to install a new fountain and flower beds, Lopuski says—there's been speculation it was buried in 1945, just before the Soviet army infiltrated Gdansk. Lopuski theorizes the sculpture may have been part of the furnishings for the office of the museum director at the time, per AFP. But just because the Hitler head was found on museum grounds doesn't mean it will be up for display anytime soon. "For the time being, it goes to a warehouse," the museum's director says, per the BBC. "It needs to be studied scientifically to find out who ordered it, where it stood, and how it ended up in the museum." Lopuski adds, per AFP: "It's a delicate issue." (Hitler's long-lost bronze horses were just found in May.)