The Monuments Men (19 page)

The works weren’t stolen or missing. In fact, the Germans hadn’t touched them. They were even now secure in the repositories to which the French had moved them in 1939 and 1940, just before the German invasion. The evacuation had been an extraordinary operation, overseen by one of the great heroes of the French cause, Jacques Jaujard, director of the French National Museums.

Jaujard may have been a French government official, but he was also one of the most respected museum men in Western Europe. He was only forty-nine, but with his swept-back jet black hair and handsome chiseled face, he had the look of a youthful grandfather, the vibrant partriarch, perhaps, of some French wine-making clan. He was a bureaucrat—but a man not afraid to get his hands dirty with work. During the Spanish civil war, Jaujard had been instrumental in evacuating the contents of Madrid’s world-class museum, the Prado. In 1939, he was promoted to director of the National Museums and immediately began to plan the evacuation of the French museums, at a time when few thought the Nazis would attack, much less conquer, a country like France. Under his watchful eye, thousands of the world’s great masterpieces had been crated, loaded, driven, and stored. Even the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the massive ancient Greek statue that had stood at the head of the Louvre’s main staircase, was removed by means of an ingenious pulley and inclined wooden track system. The almost eleven-foot-tall marble statue of the goddess Nike, her wings outstretched (but her head and arms lost over the centuries), appeared solid, but in fact consisted of thousands of shards of marble that had been painstakingly reassembled. Jaujard must have held his breath, Rorimer thought, as the statue slid down the staircase on its wooden track, her great wings trembling slightly in the air above her. If she crumbled to pieces, Jaujard would be held responsible. But he had always been a man who welcomed such challenges. Like Rorimer, Jaujard believed it was better to assume the burden of leadership than to drift along in the shadows.

Rorimer stopped and, turning, stared up and down the Louvre’s long, empty Grande Galerie. So much irreplaceable art, all gone, he thought. So much danger. He stepped toward a shallow alcove, framed by pillars, where two words had caught his eye. The words
La Joconde
seemed to float on the wall inside an empty frame.
La Joconde
, the French name for the
Mona Lisa
. Most of the works were transported en masse, sometimes over bomb-blasted roads, but the
Mona Lisa
, the world’s most famous painting, had been loaded by ambulance stretcher into the back of a truck in the dead of night. A curator climbed in the back as well; the truck was sealed to provide a stable climate. Upon arriving at its destination, the painting was fine but the curator nearly unconscious. There hadn’t been enough air for him to breathe.
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There were other stories. The great Géricault painting
The Raft of the Medusa
was so large it became tangled in the streetcar wires of Versailles. At least they learned their lesson. In the next city with low-hanging wires, the truck was accompanied by telephone repairmen walking before it and lifting all the wires with long, insulated poles. The image was amusing: the truck creeping along with its pole-wielding escorts, the evacuating citizens racing around it, perhaps staring in wonder at Géricault’s painting of the dying faces of victims stranded on a sinking raft. But the situation wasn’t amusing at all. These were masterworks, not parade floats. And under Jaujard’s careful guidance, there was no major damage.

But even Jaujard had not foreseen the lightning strike of the German blitzkrieg or the humiliating collapse of the French army. The placement of art in temporary repositories, mostly country châteaux and remote castles, was intended to prevent war damage, primarily from aerial bombardment. At the Château de Sourches near Le Mans, the curators had even spelled out on the lawn in huge white letters the words “Musée du Louvre” so that pilots flying overhead would know artistic treasures were housed inside and avoid bombing it. As the French army melted, Jaujard ordered the artwork moved to repositories farther west and south. The advancing Germans found him at the repository at Chambord southwest of Paris, directing the evacuation. “You are, sir,” they told him, “the first top French civil servant we find present on duty.”
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Nothing was harmed, thank goodness, by bombs and artillery, but there was not much that could be done about the Nazi occupiers. They knew almost every work of art comprising France’s patrimony, and they acted quickly to seize it. Paris was occupied on June 14, 1940. On June 30, Hitler ordered his representatives in Paris to safeguard works of art from the French National collections, and also artwork and historical documents belonging to individuals, in particular Jews. These cultural objects were to be used as collateral for the peace negotiations. France had signed only an armistice; Hitler was planning to use the formal peace treaty to “legally” seize the country’s cultural assets, much as Napoleon had used one-sided treaties to seize the cultural treasures of Prussia almost 150 years before. It was widely acknowledged, and with only slight exaggeration, that without the spoils of the Napoleonic campaigns the Louvre would be a mere shadow of what it had become.

The powerful Nazi ambassador to Paris, Otto Abetz, sprang into action, declaring that the Nazi-controlled occupation government would provide “custody” for the cultural assets. Three days after Hitler’s order, Abetz ordered the confiscation of the holdings of the top fifteen art dealers in Paris, most of whom were Jewish. Within weeks, the embassy was overflowing with “safeguarded” artwork. And that, Jaujard told James Rorimer during one of their frequent chats, was when a true hero emerged: the art official Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich.

“A German?” Rorimer had asked in surprise.

Jaujard had nodded, a twinkle in his patrician eyes. “Not just a German,” he said. “A Nazi.”

In May 1940, Count Wolff-Metternich had been appointed head of the Kunstschutz, the German cultural conservation program. The Kunstschutz had originally been created as an army-based protection unit during World War I—the only true precursor to the Western Allies’ MFAA—but had been reconstituted in 1940 as a branch of the Nazi occupation government, operating primarily in conquered Belgium and France. Wolff-Metternich, an expert on Renaissance architecture, especially that of the Rhineland of northwest Germany where he was born and raised, was plucked from a professorship at the University of Bonn for the top job.

Wolff-Metternich was chosen because he was a respected scholar whose credibility brought a sense of professionalism and legitimacy to the Kunstschutz program. He was not an avid member of the Nazi Party, but in instances such as this the Nazis were often more concerned with selecting qualified professionals than with their political associations. That the Wolff-Metternichs were a prominent German family, with a title dating back hundreds of years to the Prussian empire, was also an appealing factor.

Wolff-Metternich was given no instructions, but he had a clear idea what his Kunstschutz should do. “At all times,” he would write, “we took as our legal determinant the relevant paragraphs of the Hague Convention.”
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His definition of cultural responsibility, therefore, was the internationally recognized one, not the Nazi version. “The protection of cultural material,” Wolff-Metternich wrote, “is an undisputed obligation which is equally binding on any European nation at war. I could imagine no better way of serving my own country than by making myself responsible for the proper observance of this principle.”
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“Count Metternich stood up to the ambassador,” Jaujard had told Rorimer. “He went over his head to the military authorities. It was really a tug-of-war then to see who would control France, the Nazi military or the Nazi occupation government. Within days, the military forbade the embassy to seize any further cultural objects. At my suggestion, transmitted through Wolff-Metternich, most of the objects in their possession were transferred to the Louvre. When they arrived, many were already crated for shipment to Germany.”

Jaujard took little credit for this success. He was a man who believed in discretion; that those who do not speak of their actions are the ones who actually perform them. But Rorimer knew the stories of his bravery; he had heard many times and from many different sources the awed reverence for the director’s opposition to the Nazi threat. Defeating the ambassador merely meant the battle wasn’t lost in the first days; it certainly didn’t win the cultural war. Jaujard had worked closely with Count Wolff-Metternich on the ambassador affair—much closer than he had acknowledged—and he would continue to work with him through a long string of Nazi attempts to seize the patrimony of France. An official charged with confiscating French government documents also tried to confiscate its movable artwork. Other Nazis claimed the artwork was stored improperly at the repositories, and therefore needed to be moved to Germany for its own safety. Wolff-Metternich refuted that claim with personal inspections. Dr. Joseph Goebbels demanded almost one thousand “Germanic” objects held in the French state collections. Wolff-Metternich actually agreed with Goebbels that many of these objects rightly belonged to Germany; he did not agree with the propaganda minister that they should be sent immediately to the Fatherland. “I never hid my idea that this delicate problem,” he wrote, “which touches the sense of honor of all people so deeply, could only be solved at the Peace Conference by a full agreement between peoples with equal rights.”

“He risked his position, maybe even his life,” Jaujard had told Rorimer during a previous meeting praising the Kunstschutz official. “He opposed Goebbels the only way possible, through a strict interpretation of the Führer’s order of July 15, 1940, which prohibited the movement of artwork in France until the signing of a peace treaty. The order was meant to keep us French patriots from hiding artwork before the Nazis could claim it, but Wolff-Metternich quite cleverly applied the order to his fellow Germans as well. Without that principled stand, there would have been no hope.”

“Not that we told them ‘no’ exactly. A straightforward ‘no’ would have only brought down Goebbels’s wrath. We always told them ‘yes,’ ” Jaujard told Rorimer, “but… there was always a detail that needed clarifying. The Nazis were—what is that delightful English language phrase?—paper-hangers. They were very bureaucratic. They couldn’t make a decision without sending five or six letters to Berlin.”

That’s all Jaujard would say, that he and Wolff-Metternich killed the Nazi threat against the French state collections with a thousand paper cuts. He wouldn’t acknowledge the difficulty of that task: the long years of guarding against forced entry; the threats of violence; the secret code Jaujard established with a friend to secret himself from Paris if the Nazis ever came to arrest him. The many calls to Wolff-Metternich in the middle of the night, urging him to come at once to throw paperwork in some Nazi looter’s face, a call Wolff-Metternich always answered despite being seriously ill with kidney problems. His illness would have forced his retirement, in fact, but he stayed on “primarily because of confidence placed in me by persons of the French Art Administration.”
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And Rorimer could not know, because Jacques Jaujard never spoke of it, that the museum director’s influence went in other directions than into the Nazi hierarchy. That he had a network of museum personnel who worked as his eyes and ears; that he had contacts within the French bureaucracy; that one of his closest associates, the art patron Albert Henraux, was an active member of the French Resistance. Jaujard gave Henraux travel passes and museum authorization as a cover for his work in the Resistance; Henraux took Jaujard’s information, gathered by his museum spies, and passed it through to the guerrilla fighters. And Wolff-Metternich almost surely knew of the whole thing.
He risked his career, maybe even his life
, Jaujard had said of him. The statement was true for both men.

The “good Nazi,” as Rorimer liked to think of him, was relieved of his position in June 1942, but not before besting Goebbels, who gave up his attempts to seize the thousand “Germanic” objects at the end of 1941. The stated reason for the dismissal was Wolff-Metternich’s public opposition to the most brazen theft of the Occupation: the seizure of the Ghent Altarpiece, under Hitler’s direct order, from the repository at Pau. In reality, certain Nazis, most under the influence of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the Nazi Party’s second in command, had been undermining Wolff-Metternich for months. Their reasons ranged from claims his work was “exclusively in French interest,”
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to complaints that he was too Catholic. The real problem was that Wolff-Metternich was not the man they wanted him to be. The Kunstschutz was supposed to provide a veneer of legality. They wanted a man who would bend the rules for the benefits of the Fatherland, but Count Wolff-Metternich would not. In the end, he was a “lost soul in the wasp nest of the Hitlerian gang.”
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Soon after, Jaujard’s violent denunciation of the theft of the Ghent Altarpiece cost him his position, too. In protest, the staffs of all the French museums quit en masse. That’s how important Jacques Jaujard was to the French cultural community. The Germans were stunned; Jaujard was reinstated. Thereafter, his position was nearly inviolate. In the end, the Nazis secured only two objects from the national collections, both of German origin and of middling importance.

And yet it wasn’t a total victory. The French state collections were safe, but the private collections of French citizens had been unprotected prey for the Nazi vultures. Himmler and his Waffen-SS. Rosenberg and his Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). And worst of all, Reichsmarschall Göring. Hanging over everything, always, was the threat of Hermann Göring.