"The Rape of Europa" manages to do what most other documentaries can only dream of accomplishing: It presents multiple moments of both heartbreak and triumph.

A comprehensive look at the systematic theft of art by Nazis during World War II, the straightforward documentary makes a credible case for the idea that the war - along with its many other and better known causes - was a battle for nothing less than the proprietorship of Western culture.

And so we see the heartbreak of an empty frame, hanging in a museum, properly labeled, where a missing masterpiece by Rubens once hung. And we hear the agonizing story of a French Jew who survived the war by working as slave labor, categorizing and shipping back to Germany valuable items stolen from Jewish families - when he comes across the possessions of his own family.

These moments of sorrow are mirrored by many stories of triumph. A French woman recounts how, when she was a teenager, the Mona Lisa was entrusted to the secret care of her art-curator parents, and they would sometimes open the box of precious woods protecting it to see it sitting in a bed of red satin, smiling at them.

We watch a woman, just a few years ago, gratefully receiving a valuable painting that had been stolen from her family by the Nazis. And then there is the somehow joyful story of a mousy, middle-age woman - dubbed by one commentator "a most unlikely spy" - who worked as a curator for all the art stolen from Parisian Jews. Without the Nazis' knowing it, she kept a meticulous record of all the 16,000 pieces, what they were and from which family each was taken. She is now hailed as a French hero.

Expertly narrated by Joan Allen, the film ambitiously covers all aspects of the story. Hitler's failed early effort to gain recognition as a painter (he was rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna at the same time Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele were accepted) is cited as a cause for both his tyranny and his anti-Semitism. Some of Germany's military defeats are attributed in part to Hermann Goering's disregarding the battlefield to go to Paris to plunder art for his own collection.

In general, the film makes the viewer proud to be an American. The Nazis, it makes clear, went to war in small part as a way to steal the great works of European art. Before the invasions ever began, German art specialists drew up lists of desired masterpieces in other countries, and where they could be found. When Nazi soldiers occupied the houses of Jewish collectors, German museum curators were called in to take what they wanted and to destroy the rest.

In contrast, the Americans made a concerted effort to save and preserve art, and to return it to its rightful owners after the war. Although a long debate over whether to bomb the historic monastery of Monte Cassino ended in one of those heartbreaks, a more triumphant moment comes in the form of a precision bombing run that destroyed the rail yards of Florence but kept the city's art treasures intact.

No mention is made of Dresden, the German center of art and culture firebombed by the British and Americans in the waning days of the war.

The film goes on a little too long, but is so fascinating that anything removed from it (except a section on a contemporary German returning Jewish objects to their owners) would be to the movie's detriment. Impeccably researched, consistently surprising and always captivating, it does what a great documentary should do: It fills us with a renewed sense of outrage.