President Roosevelt had made clear his own sympathetic attitude towards art three years earlier, at the dedication ceremony of the newly founded National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His words encapsulate the capacity for art to inspire, the basic freedom of the mind that it represents, and the need for its preservation.
Whatever these paintings may have been to men who looked at them a generation back, today they are not only works of art. Today they are the symbols of the human spirit, and of the world the freedom of the human spirit made. . . . To accept this work today is to assert the purpose of the people of America that 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.
The audience of this speech would have had fresh in their minds the ruthless Nazi censorship and “Degenerate Art Cleansing” of recent years. Whereas art, to the Nazis, was a propagandistic tool to be controlled, censored, stolen, and sold, art for the democratic world was an expression of human freedom and the greatest capability of any civilization.
In the spring of 1943, Francis Henry Taylor and his associates established the world’s first program of study on the protection of monuments. Held in Charlottesville, Virginia, the program, first taught by the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, Theodore Sizer, would train officers in the protection of art and monuments in conflict zones. The program was a great success, even if it began before the U.S. government had determined how best to use the skills taught there. Sizer wrote: “[The government doesn’t] know just how to tackle the problem yet, but it is the sort of thing that the likes of us should be concerned with, if Uncle Sam is to use our services to the utmost. . . . They will need all of us as they
can lay their hands on. As you can imagine, every half-baked ‘art lover’ is trying to get in. Let’s hope for the best.”
Also in the spring of 1943, the American Council of Learned Societies, led by Francis Taylor and William Dinsmoor, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, began an extensive project to catalogue important cultural heritage sites in possible European war zones and to superimpose these sites on military maps provided by the armed forces. Teams worked in New York’s Frick Art Reference Library and at Harvard to create the maps in time for the Allied invasion of continental Europe. These two initiatives, the academic program and the mapmaking, worked to both draw attention to the problems of the protection of cultural heritage in conflict zones and give the future officers charged with protecting cultural heritage a significant head start. That an impressive committee, consisting of the cream of the American art community, with connections throughout the U.S. government, spearheaded this initiative proved critical in its success.
Roosevelt eventually brought into being the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, established 23 June 1943. This committee was chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts and therefore became known as the Roberts Commission. By the summer of 1943, the Roberts Commission had finished 168 maps covering all of Italy, its islands, and even the Dalmatian coast. A total of around 700 maps would be produced, covering all of Europe, including detail maps of the major cities, and a significant number of Asian cities, as well.
The Roberts Commission was further charged with protecting cultural properties in conflict zones, provided that their preservation did not impede active and necessary military operation. The commission’s first project was to compile exhaustive lists of European cultural treasures within current or possible future war zones, in the hope that these objects would be preserved whenever possible. The map project, began at the initiative of Francis Taylor and William Dinsmoor, was absorbed into the Roberts Commission.
The Roberts Commission then established the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives branch of the Civil Affairs and Military Government sections of the Allied army, to act as their agents in the field. Referred to as the MFAA or the Monuments Men, this division consisted of approximately 350 officers, primarily architects, art historians, historians, artists, and conservators in civilian life. Several Monuments Men were assigned to each of the Allied armies. These officers had exceptional knowledge of art or archaeology and fluency in the language of the territory in which they would work; to appease those officials who were dubious of shifting manpower away from the fighting force, these arts officers had to be older than the age for fighting eligibility; most were in their late thirties or older.
The establishment of the MFAA was a significant victory in what had become a tug-of-egos between the laissez-faire Sir Leonard Woolley working alone in England and the huge committee of American art historians and museum directors led by Francis Henry Taylor. Woolley lobbied with the War Office in England not to send out field officers, and at first succeeded—the Macmillan Committee only handled restitution of displaced artworks after the war. But it was not quite as Woolley hoped, as he was obliged to act as British representative to the Roberts Commission, which set up the MFAA for field work.
Monuments Men were charged with following just behind the front line as the Allied army liberated parts of Europe, doing their best to protect all cultural heritage in the wake of warfare. This included conservation of architecture damaged by fighting, preservation of archives, and the protection of libraries, churches, museums, and their artistic content. Though they did not realize it at the time, the Monuments Men would also be charged with the detective work of hunting thousands of stolen masterpieces across bullet-torn Europe.
The central operative figure among the American Monuments Men was an ingenious Fogg Museum conservator called George Stout. He would be the de facto leader of the otherwise largely undersupported MFAA. Stout was a pioneer among art conservators. He had worked with
Paul Sachs in envisioning the need for field conservators who might accompany the Allied army and mitigate the damage that was inevitable in the wake of fighting. In the summer of 1942, Stout published a short treatise entitled
Protection of Monuments: A Proposal for Consideration During War and Rehabilitation
, expressing what he perceived as the greatest concerns for art and monuments during the war effort.
As soldiers of the United Nations fight their way into lands once conquered and held by the enemy, the governments of the United Nations will encounter manifold problems. . . . In areas torn by bombardment and fire are monuments cherished by the people of those countrysides or towns: churches, shrines, statues, pictures, many kinds of works. Some may be destroyed; some damaged. All risk further injury, looting or destruction. . . .
To safeguard these things will not affect the course of battles, but it will affect the relations of invading armies with those peoples and [their] governments. . . . To safeguard these things will show respect for the beliefs and customs of all men and will bear witness that these things belong not only to a particular people but also to the heritage of mankind. To safeguard these things is part of the responsibility that lies on the governments of the United Nations. These monuments are not merely pretty things, not merely valued signs of man’s creative power. They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man’s struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God.
With conviction that the safeguarding of monuments is an element in the right conduct of the war and in the hope for peace, we . . . wish to bring these facts to the attention of the government of the United States of America, and urge that means be sought for dealing with them.
When it came time to nominate MFAA officers, Stout was clearly the man for the job.
The establishment of the MFAA and Eisenhower’s statement about the need to preserve cultural heritage were historic firsts. Sir Leonard Woolley acknowledged this:
Prior to this war, no army had thought of protecting the monuments of the country in which and with which it was at war, and there were no precedents to follow. . . . All this was changed by a general order issued by Supreme Commander-in-Chief [General Eisenhower] just before he left Algiers, an order accompanied by a personal letter to all Commanders. . . . The good name of the Army depended in great measure on the respect which it showed to the art heritage of the modern world.
Eisenhower did add a caveat to his original statement: “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 buildings must go.” He was a pragmatic general, for all his artistic sympathies, but few could argue with this statement, especially from a soldier’s-eye view. A general could not tell his soldiers that he would swap a number of their lives to preserve what many would dismiss as some four-hundred-year-old pigment daubed on canvas.
There was an additional reason for this caveat. At the Italian monastery of Monte Cassino, the Allies spent weeks trying to extract entrenched Germans whom they believed to have been hiding in the ancient cliff-top monastery. Dozens of ground offensives failed to make headway, as German snipers cut down Allied assaults. The weighty decision was finally made to send in an air strike. Allied bombers dropped 1,400 tons of bombs, decimating the monastery that had been founded in 529 by Saint Benedict—shattering the frescoed walls and destroying the masterpieces stored there—only to learn afterwards that the Germans were not in the monastery itself. Further, German paratroopers took up defensive positions in the ruins that resulted from the Allied air attack, and the Battle of Monte Cassino raged on from 15 January until 18 May 1944. The treasures and the monastery had been destroyed for naught.
Eisenhower’s 26 May 1944 general directive to all Allied Expeditionary Forces continued:
In some circumstances the success of the military operation may be prejudiced in our reluctance to destroy these revered objects. Then, as at Cassino, where the enemy relied on our emotional attachments to shield his defense, the lives of our men are paramount. So, where military necessity dictates, commanders may order the required action even though it involves destruction to some honored site.
But there are many circumstances in which damage and destruction are not necessary and cannot be justified. In such cases, through the exercise of restraint and discipline, commanders will preserve centers and objects of historical and cultural significance. Civil Affairs Staffs at higher echelons will advise commanders of the locations of historical monuments of this type, both in advance of the frontlines and in occupied areas. This information, together with the necessary instruction, will be passed down through command channels to all echelons.
A world war would inevitably result in unavoidable tragedies like Monte Cassino. But Eisenhower’s conscientious recognition that, whenever possible and even where it seemed impossible, art and monuments should be preserved set an important precedent. For the Allies, this was not a war of obliteration, of pillage, of empire. It was an intervention against the actions of an evil enemy. That enemy army and its leaders would be incapacitated, but its people, its country, and its civilization would be neither plundered nor eradicated.
Despite Eisenhower’s words of support, from the start, the MFAA was sidelined and often dismissed by the commanders of the Allied armies. It was a well-meaning but undersupported and incompletely conceived effort that frustrated its officers. The MFAA generally followed the policies that Wheeler and Ward-Perkins had improvised back at Leptis Magna in 1943. When a Monuments Man reached a new site, his duty
was first to survey previously identified monuments and artworks to assess the damage. He was then to organize on-site repairs as best he could, often by recruiting the locals to help when military personnel could not be spared. He was finally to secure the sites and objects if at all possible. But Monuments Men often had no equipment to aid them, frequently having to bum rides off of fellow soldiers, while others assigned to the MFAA were left for months at base camps, all but forgotten, before they were finally deployed.
At a practical level, the main weapon in their arsenal was a sign that read “Off Limits to All Military Personnel; Historic Monument: Trespassing on or Removal of Any Materials or Articles from These Premises Is Strictly Forbidden by Command of the Commanding Officer.” This was meant to keep their own soldiers away from sensitive sites, for fear of souvenir-hunters and postfighting vandalism. When they ran out of “Off Limits” signs, Monuments Men would occasionally improvise, erecting instead signs that read “Danger: Mines!” a perhaps even more effective means of keeping people clear of a protected area. The MFAA’s strength was its person-to-person intelligence operation. Monuments Men interviewed locals (in the local languages) in the wake of the fighting, in an attempt to learn the location of missing treasures.
It was only when the Allies finally captured Paris that the MFAA found a wealth of documents relating to Göring’s personal activities and the ERR cache at the Jeu de Paume Museum. Most of this valuable information came from one source: a mousy clerk at the Jeu de Paume named Rose Valland, who, unbeknownst to the Nazis, understood German and worked as a spy for the French Resistance during the occupation of Paris, reporting directly to Jacques Jaujard. Thanks to her passion for art, her ingenuity, and her bravery, when the Allies rolled into Paris, she had a trove of information, including copies of receipts, photographs, and inventories, to pass on to the Monuments Man stationed in Paris, Second Lieutenant James J. Rorimer. They began to understand the extent of the Nazi looting, though the overall plan, to sweep all of Europe to fill the Linz museum, would not become clear for another six months.
In November 1944 the MFAA was aided by the newly established U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by General “Wild Bill” Donovan. The OSS was an intelligence service, the direct predecessor of the CIA. Along with its British counterpart, the OSS launched several programs aimed at Nazi economic destabilization by severing the stolen art assets. A subdivision of the OSS was formed, called the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU). This group embarked in August 1944 on the Safehaven Programme, an Allied operation to seek out and seize Nazi assets hidden in neutral countries, particularly Switzerland, where it was known that Nazis had been selling stolen art to raise funds.