The horses were sculpted by Joseph Thorak 1939 and commissioned by Hitler for the Reich chancellery. The chancellery was mostly destroyed by the end of the Second World War and the remains were then demolished by Soviet occupiers. The artworks of the chancellery were presumed to have been lost or destroyed.
Rainer Wolf, a collector of Nazi memorabilia, had read about the horses in a scholarly article whose author, a West German art historian, had discovered the sculptures on a sports field at a Soviet military base near Berlin.
Wolf then acquired them from Soviet military authorities after which the horses then smuggled out of East Germany months before the fall of the Berlin wall.In a 2015 investigation into the Nazi-art market, police searched homes in many cities in Germany and found a number of artworks in Wolf's home during the large-scale operation. They then seized the horse sculptures along with others they assumed stolen.