The Monuments Men (18 page)

Five hundred and eight years later, in May 1940, the hills and meadows portrayed so vividly in the van Eyck masterpiece were blitzkrieged and captured by German forces. While half a million British and French troops retreated north, pursued by the Wehrmacht, three trucks headed south carrying the most important works of the Belgian state, including the Ghent Altarpiece. They were desperately trying to reach the Vatican and the protection of the pope, but only made it to the French border before Italy declared war on the countries of Western Europe. The trucks, buffeted by German Panzer divisions rushing north to stop the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk, changed directions and eventually found their way to a château serving as an art repository in the southwestern French town of Pau, where the weary and terrified drivers entrusted the safety of the altarpiece to the French government.

Hitler knew it was impossible to steal renowned masterpieces on the scale of the Ghent Altarpiece without drawing the condemnation of the world. While he had the conqueror’s mentality—he believed he was entitled to the spoils of war, and he was determined to have them—Hitler and the Nazis had gone to great lengths to establish new laws and procedures to “legalize” the looting activities that would follow. This included forcing the conquered countries to give him certain works as a term of their surrender. Eastern European countries like Poland were destined under Hitler’s plan to become industrial and agricultural wastelands, where Slavic slaves would produce consumer goods for the master race. Most of their cultural icons were destroyed; their great buildings leveled; their statues pulled down and melted into bullets and artillery shells. But the West was Germany’s reward, a place for Aryans to enjoy the fruits of their conquest. There was no need to strip such countries of their artistic treasures—at least not right away. The Third Reich, after all would last a thousand years. Hitler left works of comparable stature to the Ghent Altarpiece, such as the
Mona Lisa
and
The Night Watch
, untouched, even though he knew exactly where they were hidden. But he coveted the
Lamb
.

In 1940, Hitler (through Goebbels, his propaganda minister) had commissioned an inventory, later known as the Kümmel Report after its chief compiler, Dr. Otto Kümmel, general director of the Berlin State Museums. The inventory listed every work of art in the Western world—France, the Netherlands, Britain, and even the United States (which Kümmel said possessed nine such works)—that rightly belonged to Germany. Under Hitler’s definition, this included every work taken from Germany since 1500, every work by any artist of German or Austrian descent, every work commissioned or completed in Germany, and every work deemed to have been executed in a Germanic style. The Ghent Altarpiece was clearly a touchstone and defining emblem of Belgian culture, but to the Nazis it was “Germanic” enough in style to belong to them.

Even more important, six of the side panels (painted on both sides, representing fourteen scenes) of the Ghent Altarpiece had been owned by the German state prior to 1919. The Germans had been forced, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, to give the panels to Belgium as war reparations. Hitler had always hated the Treaty of Versailles, seeing it as a humiliation of the German people and a symbol of the weakness that had defined his country’s past leaders. When Germany overran France in June 1940, Hitler was determined to exact a symbolic measure of revenge by ordering his troops to locate the railcar in which the humiliating armistice had been signed in 1918, ordered the walls of the building in which it was housed torn down, and had the railcar hauled to the precise spot in Compiègne, France, where it had been positioned twenty-two years before. Sitting in the exact same chair as Marshal Foch, the French hero of World War I who had been the victor that day, Hitler forced the French to sign an armistice. After the signing ceremony, Hitler ordered that the railcar be taken to Berlin where it was towed down the city’s historic street, Unter den Linden, through the Brandenburg Gate, then put on display at the Lustgarten on the banks of the river Spree. The seizure of the Compiègne railcar was proof that Germany had overturned the disastrous “crime of Compiègne,” and had crushed its hated neighbor. But it also proved something else: that nothing was too big, or too sacred, for the Nazis to steal.

The Ghent Altarpiece, that great masterpiece that had changed the course of painting forever, thus represented two of Hitler’s enduring quests: to right the historic “wrongs” of the Treaty of Versailles, and to add an undisputed world treasure to his Führermuseum in Linz.

By 1942, Hitler was unable to resist the temptation any longer. In July, he sent a secret delegation, led by Dr. Ernst Buchner, general director of the Bavarian Museums, to the repository at Pau. This was not a mission of force—the delegation consisted of only one truck and one car—but of stealth. When the French superintendent at Pau refused to hand over the altarpiece, Buchner called the Reichschancellery. Within hours, a telegram arrived from Pierre Laval, the chief of government in Nazi-controlled Vichy France, ordering the altarpiece turned over to Buchner. By the time the proper French and Belgian art authorities learned of the order, the Ghent Altarpiece had disappeared into Germany. The Belgian government protested vigorously—even accusing the French of treason against its culture—but there was nothing that could be done. The Ghent Altarpiece was gone.

And now, more than two years later, Robert Posey sat on his bunk in the captured German barracks in France, looking at a picture of this irreplaceable treasure. He knew the world was counting on him and his fellow Monuments Men to track it down, find it, force the surrender of those who guarded or coveted or wanted to destroy it, and return it to Belgium unharmed.

CHAPTER 15

James Rorimer Visits the Louvre

Paris, France

Early October 1944

W
hile Posey found himself surprisingly pleased with his experience in U.S. Third Army, Second Lieutenant James Rorimer, the bulldog Metropolitan Museum curator, was having a similar experience in Paris. Over his beer at Mont Saint-Michel, Rorimer had wished fervently to be assigned to the City of Light; after returning to headquarters, he soon learned he had in fact received “the plum of all the jobs in Europe for one with my background.”
1
The French authorities had embraced him with “open arms and hearts” and he was regularly being feted by the rich and powerful of Parisian society.
2
They wanted his help; he wanted their information. It was satisfying to be embraced wholeheartedly as a liberator and a friend.

And Paris, that wonderful sanctuary of a city, was in fantastic shape. It was almost hard to believe, looking at her buildings and monuments, that she had been occupied by the Nazis for four years. Several landmarks—including the Grand Palais, burned by the Nazis in an effort to root out the Resistance—had been destroyed, but a stroll down any of the wide avenues revealed a city virtually unmarked and bursting with life. There was almost no gasoline, but on every corner the bicycles crowded the lockups, especially the tandems with their little carts that during the occupation had been the city’s primary taxis. In the parks, the old men were back to playing cards in their berets and fedoras. At the Luxembourg Gardens, the children floated their boats in the fountain, their innocent sails white against the water. “From the long and wonderfully empty avenues leading into the heart of the city,” wrote Francis Henry Taylor, who visited the city as a representative of the Roberts Commission, “one felt the elation which comes only to those emerging after a deep sleep from illness. The will to live had conquered. Paris as the supreme creation of the mind of man had paralyzed the hand that tried to seize her.”
3

But Taylor was only in Paris a few days. A more detailed look at the city revealed that while there was ebullience on the surface of Parisian society, it was undercut by crosscurrents of fear and mistrust. The sudden retreat of the Germans and the collapse of the French collaboration government had left the city short of civil servants like police officers, and there was no way to control the simmering emotions of an angry population. A wave of revenge had gripped the populace as citizens took the law into their own hands. Women who had slept with Germans were taken into the streets and their heads publicly shaved in front of rowdy mobs; suspected collaborators were brought before tribunals and summarily executed. Anyone reading one of the city’s newspapers,
Le Figaro
, would easily understand the gravity of the situation.
Le Figaro
had resumed printing on August 23, 1944, after a two-year hiatus. Inititally the paper was only two pages in length, but it had one recurring feature that appeared every day. The first part of the feature appeared under the heading “
Les Arrestations et L’Epuration
” (Arrests and Purges) and detailed the previous day’s developments in the pursuit of collaborators. Underneath the article appeared two lists: “
les exécutions capitales
” (death sentences) and “
les exécutions summaires
” (summary executions). Even the more civilized death sentences, Rorimer knew, must have been meted out in trials lasting a few hours, or at most a couple of days.

In this void—no working civil institutions, no working safety apparatus, and no trust in one’s fellow citizens—there was plenty of work for a Monuments Man. There were 165 Parisian monuments in the army’s
Civil Affairs Handbook
, fifty-two of which were officially protected. There were hundreds if not thousands of victims of Nazi looting. Hundreds of public sculptures were missing, especially the city’s famous bronzes, and even the nineteenth-century lights had been stolen from the Senate building. And then there was the general confusion of a city trying once again to find its feet. Finding basic information and supplies was often impossible. Procedural questions could wrap him in knots for hours. Even locating the right official for a particular area or task took an inordinate amount of energy.

Just after his arrival in August, Rorimer had been temporarily assigned to Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton’s detachment, and even in late September Hamilton wouldn’t give him up. “No one officer should be tied up with Monuments duty alone,” Hamilton had told Rorimer when he pleaded for his release, which meant Hamilton needed an aggressive, competent, energetic officer who spoke French, and he wasn’t about to let James Rorimer go.
4

And then, of course, he had to make sure the American military didn’t do anything to damage the city. In August, when he arrived in the convoy of General Rogers, Paris had seemed deserted; now there were American troops everywhere. Not that they weren’t enthusiastic to help. One detachment, assigned by Rorimer to assess damage to the Place de la Concorde, counted every bullet hole in the enormous complex. Rorimer caught them the next day counting war damage holes in the Louvre. “General assessment,” he told them. “Only the big stuff.” The Louvre was so massive that counting each bullet hole would have taken them a year.

The real problem, Rorimer felt, was that the American military didn’t understand the French. The park through which he was walking, the Jardin des Tuileries, was a perfect example. It was the heart of Paris, a great formal garden laid out for Louis XIV and familiar to all who had ever strolled this great city. On his first morning in Paris, Rorimer had seen it as few Parisians ever had: almost empty in the morning light. The abandoned German guns lining the perimeter seemed to have scared people away, but bivouacked under one copse of trees was a single American tank unit with small cooking fires going for breakfast. Otherwise, the gardens had been his alone.

A few weeks later, Rorimer discovered the Jardin des Tuileries was slated for use as a massive Allied encampment. The Germans had dug trenches throughout the park and strung them with barbed wire, but the idea of the Allies digging slit-trench latrines into the heart of Paris was too much. The Tuileries, he argued in a series of interminable meetings, were no place for Allied waste. The gardens were as vital to the health and happiness of Parisians as Hyde Park to Londoners and Central Park to New Yorkers.

The army relented. But what had Rorimer really accomplished? The Tuileries’ famous central boulevard, down which he now turned, was lined with ten-ton trucks, troop carriers, and jeeps. Nobody had declared the gardens off-limits to vehicles, not technically anyway, and they were now the largest parking lot in Paris. Six statues had already been knocked off their pedestals and the terra-cotta pipeworks, laid out in the seventeenth century, were bursting under the weight of vehicles. It had taken ten days of research and planning to find an alternative, but Rorimer was convinced the paved Esplanade des Invalides would accommodate the army’s needs. And the Esplanade, appropriately, was in a district dedicated to military history. Now if he could only convince the army it was worthwhile to move their parking lot across town.

Rorimer passed the fountain known as the Grand Bassin—even in the shadows of the military trucks young boys were out floating their sailboats—crossed the Terrasse des Tuileries, and, after showing his credentials to the armed guards, passed into the courtyard of the Louvre. On one side, the American anti-aircraft installation bristled with guns, and he could still see the fenced yard where the Allies had kept German prisoners during their first week in the city. But inside, as always, the museum was a sanctuary. In here, he couldn’t see a single gun or armed guard, much less the supplicants who came continually to his office to plead for individual care. Beneath the vaulted glass ceiling of the Grande Galerie, the museum was as still and quiet as a grave. A largely empty, hollow grave, for on these walls where millions had once come to view the world’s masterpieces, there were nothing but scribbled words in white chalk, notes to remind the curators where each magnificent painting had hung.