Read Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis Online
Authors: Robert M. Edsel
Crimes are being committed in the name of military necessity that I think could be avoided by some pronouncement from you. . . . We have been running many articles in the States as to the good work the Armies in Italy are doing toward respecting the great monuments of Italy, but I was a bit shocked at the way the thing was operating in Naples itself. . . . Could not some expeditious method be setup whereby the military government people [Monuments officers] could have authority to veto the use of the great monuments for billeting unless overruled by the Commanding General? Now they have to yield in practically every instance.
The cumulative weight and momentum of General Marshall’s mid-October admonition about the importance of protecting Italy’s cultural treasures, followed by successive warnings from McCloy and Woolley and the reports of Monuments officers themselves, finally produced a change. On December 29, General Eisenhower issued a directive that placed the responsibility of protecting cultural property squarely upon the shoulders of
every
commander and, in turn,
every
officer and
every
soldier. It also, for the first time, introduced the Monuments officers (referenced as “A.M.G. officers”—Allied Military Government) to everyone in uniform.
To: All Commanders
Today 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. We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows.
If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the building must go. But the choice is not always so clear-cut as that. In many cases the monuments can be spared without any detriment to operational needs. Nothing can stand against the argument of military necessity. That is an accepted principle. But the phrase “military necessity” is sometimes used where it would be more truthful to speak of military convenience or even of personal convenience. I do not want it to cloak slackness or indifference.
It is a responsibility of higher commanders to determine through A.M.G. Officers the locations of historical monuments whether they be immediately ahead of our front lines or in areas occupied by us. This information passed to lower echelons through normal channels places the responsibility of all Commanders of complying with the spirit of this letter.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Ike’s directive was bold; it was concise; and it was now official policy. His Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, issued an accompanying order that provided more specific details on how this new policy should be implemented. Woolley remarked that Ike’s words “made it clear that the responsibility for the protection of monuments lay with the army as a whole and not with the [Monuments officer] specialist.” Even Churchill weighed in on the matter: “The weakness of the Monuments and Fine Arts organization in the past was . . . due to the fact that it had . . . depended on an external civilian body not in touch with the Army. . . . The new arrangements which have been worked out in the light of experience are well calculated to promote, as far as military exigencies allow, a more effective effort to protect historical monuments of first importance in the future.”
Many problems lay ahead for implementing this new order. Mistakes would continue. The order would be put to the test in a major way within just six weeks. But it marked the turning point for the Monuments officers and their work. For the first time since Mason Hammond had landed in Sicily, the Monuments Men had the backing of the Commander-in-Chief. Their work contributed greatly to the experience Eisenhower would take with him to England to plan the invasion of Western Europe as the newly appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force.
SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1943
D
espite General Eisenhower’s historic order, the Western Allies were not the only army to conceive of protecting cultural treasures during war. Ironically, so too did Germany, the same nation that since 1939 had systematically looted the countries it had conquered and occupied.
On August 25, 1914, less than a month after Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium and the outbreak of World War I, German soldiers patrolling the “open” and undefended university town of Louvain, near Brussels, were shot and killed. Believing their deaths to be the act of partisan snipers, German military authorities first rounded up and executed 248 citizens and then ordered other residents to stand in the streets while German troops burned their homes, one by one. The soldiers then torched the University of Louvain’s library, one of Europe’s oldest and most distinguished collections. The blaze destroyed 250,000 books—some eight hundred of which had been printed before the year 1500—and five hundred illuminated manuscripts. The destruction of the Louvain library became a notorious example of wanton wartime destruction.
The world reacted with swift and united indignation. So, too, did alarmed German cultural officials. Within three weeks, Wilhelm von Bode, Chief Superintendent of the Prussian Museums, proposed that Otto von Falke coordinate efforts with Belgian officials to protect that nation’s movable works of art. The following month, Dr. Paul Clemen, a distinguished professor of Art History at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn, was appointed to formally develop a system to protect the monuments of Belgium and later France.
*
Clemen’s role as Provincial Conservator of the Rhineland, and his pioneering work in art conservation, uniquely qualified him to become the first leader of the
Kunstschutz
, Germany’s “art protection” unit. On January 1, 1915, he received a commission from German military officials that coordinated his art protection responsibilities with front-line commanders. Although hardly well known, the name of Paul Clemen became favorably associated with the protection of cultural property during World War I. So, too, was the name of Bode, best known for his leadership of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. “Cultural goods and art have to be saved for every cultivated country,” Bode once stated, “and . . . the protection of arts and monuments has to be executed the same way on enemy territory as it is in our own country.” But his vision would prove short-lived.
ON MAY 10, 1940,
Nazi Germany invaded Western Europe and, for a second time, occupied Belgium. Incredibly, seven days later, the University of Louvain Library—having reopened in 1928 after ten years of rebuilding—was again reduced to ashes. Of the nine hundred thousand books destroyed that day, some two hundred thousand had been donated to the library by Germany per the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The painful irony was that many of those books contained bookplates with a Latin motto,
Sedes Sapientiae non Evertetur
(The Seat of Wisdom Shall Not be Overturned). German forces claimed that British troops fleeing the town of Louvain had started the fire; a subsequent investigation attributed the source to German artillery. The appointment, less than a week earlier, of Professor Dr. Franz Graf von Wolff-Metternich as the leader of the Kunstschutz, with a mandate to advise German High Command on the preservation and protection of works of art and monuments in occupied territories, had begun badly.
The challenges Clemen faced in establishing the Kunstschutz in 1914 seemed meager by comparison with those confronting Wolff-Metternich in 1940. By the time of his involvement, Hitler and Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had set in motion the greatest looting operation of the twentieth century. Much of Eastern Europe’s cultural wealth had already been stolen or destroyed. Soon Wehrmacht troops would march into the artistically rich cities of Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris, where the ERR (
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg
—Special Task Force Rosenberg, named for its leader, Alfred Rosenberg) would begin operations, all outside Wolff-Metternich’s authority.
As an aspiring student of painting and architecture, Hitler had been rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but his interest in art endured. If anything, the rejection motivated him to prove his “underestimated” gifts to the world. Working with young but established architects, including Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler, Hitler developed plans to rebuild entire cities, including his hometown of Linz, Austria. Beginning in May 1938, inspired by a tour of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence during a state visit to Italy, Hitler approved plans that led to an extraordinary museum—the Gemäldegalerie Linz, commonly referred to as the Führermuseum—that would contain what he considered to be the world’s most important objects.
Under Hitler’s leadership, art became a weapon of propaganda. Art was used to promote Nazi racial policies. During a 1937 visit to “The First Great German Art Exhibition,” Hitler was infuriated by works of art he considered “degenerate” and removed them from the walls himself. He used the occasion to explain:
Certain people’s eyes show things differently than they are . . . men who see, or as they may say, “experience,” the present-day body shapes of the people of our Nation only as degenerated retards, who generally perceive meadows as blue, skies as green, clouds as sulfurous yellow, and so on. . . . I just want to prohibit in the name of the German people that these poor unfortunate individuals who clearly suffer from bad vision, try to forcefully sell the results of their misconceptions to their contemporaries, or even declare it as being “art.”
Out the doors of German museums went paintings by German and Austrian Expressionist painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, and Oskar Kokoschka. Works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, and Renoir, among many others, soon followed, all part of the sixteen thousand objects declared “degenerate” and later sold, traded, or burned.
Hitler’s taste ran toward German-speaking nineteenth-century painters, including Makart, Spitzweg, Böcklin, and Grützner, who in his view had been misjudged by those without his artistic talent. He also admired and sought works by such Old Master artists as Leonardo da Vinci, Jan Vermeer, and the great German Renaissance painters Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach. Hitler intended that some of these masterpieces reside in the Führermuseum; others would be distributed to a network of regional museums throughout the Reich.
Each year Hitler added to his collection. Agents acquired works for him through legitimate purchases, forced sales, and confiscations. The Nazis issued decrees to maintain legal cover, in particular for items looted from Jews. But the enterprise grew larger; hiding the nature of the crime became an exercise in paperwork. Upon establishing operations in Paris, the ERR and other Nazi agencies began targeting works of art owned by preeminent dealers and collectors in France, including David-Weill, Rothschild, Bernheim-Jeune, Seligmann, and Kann. Often they characterized the confiscations as “safeguarding.” ERR staff then created elaborate, brown leather-bound albums containing photographs of the works of art, each caption identifying the family from whom the object was taken and noting the inventory number assigned to that particular object. For paintings, the number would be stamped on the back of the stretcher. (For example, “R-4888” referred to the 4,888th item stolen from the French branch of the Rothschild family.)
Presentation of these albums, which included sculpture, furniture, jewelry, paintings, and other art objects, allowed Hitler to select those items he wanted for the Führermuseum, or another museum he designated. These albums regularly accompanied him—from the Reichschancellery in Berlin to the Wolfsschanze on the Eastern Front to his home in Berchtesgaden.
Over time, the Nazi looting agencies built their operation to industrial scale. The Führer, like Napoleon and other conquerors before them, believed that the possession of art projected power and a sense of superior knowledge, thereby placing him among the great men of history. But power alone didn’t explain Hermann Göring’s motivation; he was also driven to possess beauty. “Perhaps one of my weaknesses has been that I love to be surrounded by luxury and that I am so artistic in my temperament that masterpieces make me feel alive and glowing inside,” he once said.
Seldom had greed found a more compatible host than Göring, whose very existence became defined by abundance. The expansion of his residence couldn’t keep pace with that of his collection. Like Hitler, Göring also coveted works by the Old Masters, but his taste ran much broader than the Führer’s. His collection included fifty-eight works attributed to the Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder (thirty-two and twenty-six, respectively), thirty paintings by the French Rococo master François Boucher, and sixteen works by the Venetian colorists Titian and Tintoretto. Göring cornered the market for works by the German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, some sixty paintings in all.
*
But his collecting became indiscriminate, too often focused on quantity over quality.
In contrast to Hitler, who relied on advisers and purchasing agents, Göring took an active, personal role in his acquisitions. The thrill of the hunt became inseparable from the pleasure of each purchase. From November 1940 through 1942, Göring had made twenty separate visits to the primary ERR depot of works stolen in Paris, the Jeu de Paume Museum, to make selections for his own collection. He then had them loaded onto his private train and shipped to Germany. In August 1942, Göring plainly stated his intentions: “It used to be called plundering. . . . But today things have become more humane. In spite of that, I intend to plunder and to do it thoroughly.” Metropolitan Museum Director Francis Henry Taylor characterized it differently, noting that “not since the time of Napoleon Bonaparte has there been the wholesale looting and destruction of art property that is going on today in the occupied countries of Europe.”
NAZI LOOTING IN
Italy unfolded very differently from that in the occupied countries of northern Europe. Hitler made his first official state visit to Italy in May 1938. Residents of Naples welcomed Hitler with hundred-foot-long banners bearing Nazi swastikas hanging from the balconies of buildings overlooking the path of his motorcade. In Rome, he and many of the senior Nazi leaders walked through the ancient Colosseum retracing the steps of the gladiators. He reveled in the splendor of the Villa Borghese and its important collection of paintings and sculpture. But it was Florence, a city German General Alfred Jodl later referred to as “the jewel of Europe,” that held Hitler’s fascination.
After arriving at the Santa Maria Novella train station on a resplendent late spring day, Hitler joined Mussolini in the back of an open-top Lancia Astura Cabriolet limousine for a tour of the city. The motorcade carried the two leaders past tens of thousands of Tuscans who lined the parade route, chanting Hitler’s name. Never had the city appeared more stately. Oversize red flags and banners emblazoned with the black Nazi swastika alternated with those bearing the city’s emblem—a red fleur-de-lis on a white background—from every building and windowsill, some 4,340 in all. No detail of the visit had been overlooked.
The motorcade route had been designed to condense what would normally be a day-long tourist experience into thirty minutes—passing the Duomo, driving south on the city’s legendary shopping avenue, Via Tornabuoni, then across the Arno River over the Ponte Santa Trinita, one of the city’s key bridges. After a short rest at the Pitti Palace, the two leaders headed north once again through the Piazza della Signoria and then passed by the church of Santa Croce on their way to the Piazzale Michelangelo for a quick panoramic view of the city.
In great contrast to the breakneck pace of the city tour, almost two hours had been set aside for the main attraction, Hitler’s visit to the extraordinary collections—which included jewels of Renaissance painting—of the Pitti Palace and the Uffizi Gallery. Professor Friedrich Kriegbaum, Director of Florence’s
Kunsthistorisches Institut
(Art History Institute), and the world authority on the Ponte Santa Trinita, accompanied Dr. Marino Lazzari, Director General of Fine Arts, the official guide.
After a brief walk through the Pitti collection, past such masterpieces as Raphael’s
Madonna of the Chair
and
La Donna Velata
, Caravaggio’s
Sleeping Cupid
, and Andrea del Sarto’s
The Holy Family,
the group entered the Vasari Corridor, a passageway built atop the Ponte Vecchio and named for its architect, the noted sixteenth-century biographer and artist Giorgio Vasari. Kriegbaum paused at one of the west-facing windows to point out to the Führer the beauty and importance of the nearly four-hundred-year-old Ponte Santa Trinita, with the weight of its three catenary arches—the shape of a hanging chain, inverted—gracefully resting on a pair of prow-shaped stone piers. This marvel of functional elegance had always been attributed solely to Bartolomeo Ammannati, a sixteenth-century Florentine architect and sculptor. Kriegbaum, however, had recently concluded that Michelangelo contributed to the final design, perhaps as a “last gift to his . . . native city.” The adjacent Ponte Vecchio, while substantially older, had been rebuilt on two previous occasions after being swept away by floods; it could only stand in the shadow of such greatness. But the Führer didn’t want a history lesson; his favorite bridge was the Ponte Vecchio. He also admired the Vasari Corridor, its hallways lined with self-portraits of the great artists whose works fill the Florentine museums.
The large group finally reached the Uffizi, then made a tour of its collection in reverse order to that of a tourist. After passing Titian’s
Venus of Urbino
and Michelangelo’s
Doni Madonna
, they paused at a section of hallway overlooking the Arno, this time to get a better view of the Ponte Vecchio and admire the hills of San Miniato and Bellosguardo. Then came the rooms containing paintings of
Adam
and
Eve
by one of Germany’s most talented painters—and Göring’s favorite—Lucas Cranach the Elder; Leonardo da Vinci’s
Adoration of the Magi
; and Botticelli’s
Birth of Venu
s.