American History Revised (18 page)

Lamarr’s Journal

1943
“We are barbarians and we wish to be barbarians, it is an honorable calling,” said Adolf Hitler. In five years the Nazi war machine had proceeded to loot many of Europe’s finest museums and churches. Hitler, the high-school
dropout who had failed admission to art school, fancied himself an arts connoisseur. With his sidekick Hermann Göring, he had embarked on the greatest art theft in history.

While the helpless Europeans dithered, the Americans sprang into action. Led by a group of museum curators and a Supreme Court justice, an ad-hoc group of concerned Americans prevailed upon President Franklin Roosevelt to create a committee with the grandiloquent name the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. Roosevelt, eager to talk about “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear,” was quick to add another freedom, saying, “The freedom of the human spirit and human mind which has produced the world’s great art and all its science—shall not be utterly destroyed.” Soon there was established a most unusual new group in the United States Army: the Monuments Men. Its mission was to protect historic and cultural monuments from war damage. Never before had there been an advancing army whose mission was to protect culture, not just kill.

The American generals fully appreciated this mission. “We are a conquering army, but we are not a pillaging army,” said General Omar Bradley. Equally clear were instructions from General Eisenhower to his officers:

“Whenever possible” did not mean “whenever convenient”—it meant: do it!

Enter the Monuments Men (also including several women and Europeans). Consisting of some four hundred museum curators and arts experts, many of whom were to go on to illustrious careers after the war, the Monuments Men were responsible for protecting monuments from bombing and vandalism. They researched areas targeted for bombing, and prepared aerial maps to help the bombers not hit churches and museums. So accurate were their maps that when the Allies bombed the art treasure city of Florence, virtually all the 160 bombs hit their precise targets—in sharp contrast to the retreating Nazis, who deliberately blew up almost all of Florence’s bridges. As part of the armed forces, the Monuments Men risked their lives on the front lines to take possession of historical sites and monuments. Signs were put up, saying, “Out of bounds. Off limits. It is strictly forbidden to remove stones or any other material from this site. Souvenir hunting, writing on walls or damage in any form will be dealt with as MILITARY OFFENSES.”

As the American troops advanced through Italy, Austria, France, and Germany, they were stunned at the war damage. As in World War I, the Germans had
disregarded the Rules of Land Warfare, and used whatever buildings were most convenient for war purposes: bell towers had become sniper positions, churches had become housing quarters and ammunition depots, and bronze statues had been confiscated to be melted down. The Monuments Men took possession of these monuments, arranged to find workmen to begin repair work on the cathedrals, and secured guards to protect the frescoes and statues.

After securing the sites and churches, the Monuments Men shifted their focus to works of art. The condition of the museums was shocking. Anything not part of the culture of Greater Germany had been systematically looted or destroyed by the Nazis. In Florence alone, 50 percent of the art was gone. All over Europe, thousands of valuable art works were missing, including masterpieces by Titian, Pieter Brueghel, Claude Lorrain, Raphael, and Vermeer. Where were they?

Utilizing local contacts, the Monuments Men and Army soldiers scoured hundreds of towns. Venturing into remote castles and underground salt mines, many of them booby-trapped with explosives—one mine had 400,000 tons of dynamite—they uncovered thousands of paintings and art treasures. The volume was enormous: in one German castle alone so many items were found it took forty-nine trainloads to remove them. One mine, called Merkers, had thirty-five miles of tunnels filled to the ceiling with Greek and Roman works, Byzantine mosaics, Islamic rugs, woodcuts, paintings, gold bars, bags of gold coins, and cartons of currency representing the bulk of Germany’s national treasury. The mine was so big that two thousand soldiers had to be called in to guard and remove the contents for safekeeping. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of other artworks that museum curators had stashed away in safe hiding places to protect them from theft or bombing. Here were found masterpieces by Botticelli, Rubens, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. Stored underground for four years and
coated with layers of mold growth, they looked “more like Camembert cheese than works of art.”

Generals Patton, Bradley, and Eisenhower are shocked at what they find in an Austrian salt mine

Taking possession of all these paintings, sculptures, and rare books was one thing; still to be done was identifying who owned them—not an easy task. The Monuments Men set up collection centers for temporary storage and record-keeping. In partnership with the OSS and its newly created Art Looting Investigation Unit, they assisted in the long and laborious process of “identifying, packing, transporting, cataloguing, photographing, archiving, and returning” lost works of art to their rightful owners. It took them six years. By the time they had finished in 1951, they had emptied 1,400 repositories and shipped 3.5 million items.

Why was protecting cultural treasures so important? In a letter to his commanders in late 1943, Eisenhower answered this question: “We are fighting in a country which has contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments which by their creation helped and now in their old age illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours.”

In winning hearts and minds, protecting the symbols of civilization counts a lot. After the war, drawing on the proven success of the Monuments Men, one of the Army officers proposed that such a team of arts specialists be made a permanent part of the Army. His suggestion was ignored.

Sixty years later, there occurred “The Rape of Iraq,” where, right after the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, the National Museum of Iraq was looted of 15,000 treasures dating back to the days of Babylon.
It was a devastating black eye for the United States at a time when it was trying to win the support of the Iraqi people. In the midst of all the uproar about how the American army could allow such a sacrilege, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld merely shrugged his shoulders and said, “Stuff happens.”

American trucks returning tons of looted art back to Florence

Back in World War II, “stuff” didn’t happen. In those days the American military did everything possible to help countries preserve their cultural patrimony. It was the right way to fight a war.

Anyone who thinks that history forgotten always stays forgotten, can consider the story of one man who displayed real initiative and get-up-and-go. In the late 1990s, after selling his Texas oil and gas exploration company, entrepreneur Robert Edsel took a sabbatical in Florence to study fine art and enjoy early retirement. But not for long. After learning about the Nazi plunder of artworks in World War II, he read Lynn Nicholas’s book
The Rape of Europa
, and jumped into action. He located and interviewed fifteen living Monuments Men and many of their children, and created a foundation to support the memory of the Monuments Men and retrieval of stolen art. He hired researchers to search throughout Europe for pictures of lost art and destroyed museums. After assembling his research, he tried to find a publisher, and when no publisher was interested, he used his own money and published the book himself:
Rescuing Da Vinci.
Edsel subsequently went on to co-produce the 2007 award-winning documentary film
The Rape of Europa
and write another book,
The Monuments Men.

“Explaining why efforts to save a cultural treasure are worth the risk of a human life is not easy,” he says. “Yet history has provided us with the best answer. The cultural heritage of the world belongs to the future. Our future is diminished without them.”

In these words he was echoing the spirit of one Monuments Man who was killed in the line of duty in 1945. In a lecture to his soldiers, this Army officer said, “No age lives entirely alone; every civilization is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it.”