Robert Edsel's Blog

Ken Lindsay (1919 - 2009) (Photo Courtesy of Agon Arts & Entertainment)

A year ago today, the world lost a great man – Monuments Man Ken Lindsay. His legacy still lives on at the Monuments Men Foundation.

Ken Lindsay was as polite and kind a person as he was passionate and articulate about art. When I first met him and his lovely wife Christine, I was so captivated to hear him recount his experiences as a soldier and Monuments Man that I laid my pen down and just listened. The twinkle in his eyes belied his age, for his words were clear, precise and empowered with youthful energy.

(Photo Courtesy of Robert M. Edsel Collection)

Like many MFAA personnel, Lindsay did not initially join the military as a Monuments officer, rather he was drafted and first served with signal intelligence at SHAEF headquarters. He marched through France with the U.S. 3rd Army and was later appointed to the Wiesbaden Collecting Point under the directorship of Monuments officer Capt. Walter Farmer. Because Lindsay was not an officer, he was not among the signatories to the “Wiesbaden Manifesto,” a document which expressed opposition to the removal of German-owned artworks to the United States for safekeeping. However, he did strongly agree with its sentiment.

One of his most memorable experiences at Wiesbaden was the uncrating of the ancient Egyptian Bust of Queen Nefertiti (seen in the photo on the left), which had been evacuated for safekeeping from the Berlin museums towards the end of the war. Lindsay recalled the moment the bust was removed from its protective casing: “Within an instant, every man in there fell hopelessly in love with her – that face – absolutely beautiful.”

Ken Lindsay reading (Photo Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration)

After the war, Lindsay was a professor of art history at Williams College, Williamstown, MA. He left in 1951 to become professor and later chair of the art history department at Harpur College, Binghamton University (SUNY) until 1990. During his retirement, Dr. Lindsay remained busy. He wrote an article about the Wiesbaden Manifesto and the controversial decision to transfer German-owned artworks to the United States, entitled “Official Art Seizure Under the Military Cloak,” in the journal Art, Antiquity, and Law (vol. 3, no. 2, June 1998).

New Orleans is the place to be….Saints mania abounds, and rightfully so!!!  But there’s another exciting event which has brought me here today:  the opening of the first exhibition by the Monuments Men Foundation!  And what more fitting location could there be:  the stunning National World War II Museum!  On display are two irreplaceable historic documents which are the smoking guns of Hitler and the Nazi’s greatest theft in history:  the Gemaldegalerie Linz Album XIII, and the ERR Album 6, both of which were removed from Hitler’s home in Berchtesgaden, known as the Berghof, by U.S. Army soldiers.

This is the first time these documents have been together since being in Hitler’s possession, and the only opportunity the public will ever have to see them together.  The ERR Album 6 contains photographs of paintings stolen by Alfred Rosenberg and his notorious Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg unit from the great collectors in France including families such as the Rothschilds, Seligmanns, David-Weill, and others.  It was presented to Hitler along with as many as 100 albums in that series.  Until the Monuments Men Foundation located Album 6, it was believed there were just 39 of these albums which, interestingly, were the chief prosecution exhibit at the Nuremberg Trials for the portion pertaining to Nazi theft of cultural property.

This 90 day exhibition marks the second leg of the journey home to Berlin for the Gemaldegalerie Linz Album XIII.  It began a week ago when I presented it to Germany’s Ambassador to the United States, Mr. Klaus Scharioth, at the United States State Department (for related story click here).  This Album, one of 31 such albums created of which only 19 were believed to have survived the war, is extremely important because it contains photographs of the works of art personally selected by Hitler for the museum he intended on building in his hometown of Linz, commonly referred to as the Führermuseum.  Album XIII is particularly significant because it contains works by German 19th century painters so beloved by Hitler.  Not only was this and the other still missing 11 albums thought to have been destroyed, but scholars believed their last known location was the Wolfsschanze or Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s headquarters on the eastern front.  That this album was located at Berchtesgaden was quite a revelation and makes it increasingly likely others will eventually be found.

The Monuments Men Foundation believes that many of the missing albums from both series survived the war and will surface in the months and years ahead.  These documents are only the most recent examples of the millions of still missing works of art and other objects from the World War II period.  We encourage anyone with information about a missing object, or concern about some item in their possession, to contact the Monuments Men Foundation.

And an enormous “thanks” goes to all our friends at the National World War II Museum who have done such an outstanding job installing the exhibit and supporting this important display.  For all those who haven’t been to the Museum, it is truly one of the most amazing, interactive and fascinating museums in the world. For more information on the National World War II Museum visit http://www.nationalww2museum.org/.

I will be speaking at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., this Sunday, January 17 at 2 pm. If you are in the D.C. area, I hope you will attend! The lecture is free and open to the public, it will be in the East Building Concourse Auditorium.

Today, The Monuments Men Year-End Newsletter for 2009 was released to the general public. Inside this newsletter, you can read about the various creative content we have produce, our ongoing engagement with the public through the media to bring much need attention to the Monuments Men, the various honors bestowed upon the Monuments Men Foundation, and all the incredible memories bringing this story to life.  Many thanks to all that have worked on this project through the years.

Please take a minute to read the The Monuments Men Year-End Newsletter.

If you would like to sign up for future newsletters, please click here (fill out form on the right side to submit).

With veteran John Pistone during our first visit

Today the Monuments Men Foundation announced the discovery of an album containing photographs of Hitler’s most beloved works of art by German painters destined for his Führermuseum in Linz, Austria.  This item, formally called the Gemaldegalerie Linz Album XIII, was taken by an American soldier from Hitler’s home in Berchtesgaden in early May, 1945.  The veteran, Mr. John Pistone, in a wonderful act of grace, has worked with the Monuments Men Foundation to identify what the album was and it’s return to Germany.

For the full story please click on the link to the Associated Press story. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_hitler_s_album)

Today’s news was extraordinarily well received.  In fact, it was the most popular, most viewed and most emailed news article on Yahoo! today.  I hope and believe that this news, and the example set by Mr. Pistone, will bring the much needed visibility to our efforts to finish the mission of the Monuments Men and assist others who may be in the possession of items “liberated” or stolen during the World War ll period.

Left to Right: Mary Regan Quessenberry, Mary Churchill and Unknown

Today the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal, announced they have identified a second living female member of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section (“MFAA”), or “Monuments Men” as they were more commonly known: Mary Regan Quessenberry of Boston, Massachusetts.

The Monuments Men were a group of 345 men and women from thirteen nations, many of whom were museum directors, curators, artists and architects, who together worked to protect monuments and other cultural items from the destruction of World War II. In the last year of the war they tracked, located and ultimately returned more than five million artistic and cultural treasures stolen by Hitler and the Nazis.

Regarding this important occasion, Robert M. Edsel, author of The Monuments Men, and President of The Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art stated, “This news makes Veterans Day even more special for the Monuments Men Foundation. The men and women who collectively comprised the Monuments Men set the standard for the protection of cultural treasures during armed conflict. Although we hope our ongoing research efforts identify other living Monuments Men and women, today we know of only 10, including Mary Regan Quessenberry, who played an important role in the post-war work of the Monuments Men, assisting with the efforts to return millions of works of art to the countries from which these treasures had been stolen. This significant occasion underscores the importance and urgency of our research to recognize the contribution and preserve the legacy of these remarkable men and women who saved so much of our cultural heritage during World War II.”

Mary Regan Quessenberry and Robert M. Edsel

After watching an interview with Robert Edsel on BBC regarding his new book, The Monuments Men, Ms. Quessenberry’s niece contacted the Monuments Men Foundation about her aunt’s role as a Monuments officer. Mr. Edsel immediately traveled to Boston to meet with Mary, and presented her with a flag of the United States which had flown over the United States Capitol in honor of the Monuments Men, as well as a gold leaf copy of the Congressional Resolution that was passed in both the House and the Senate recognizing for the first time in the United States the heroic efforts of the members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section.

Born in Boston on October 10, 1915, Mary Regan attended Radcliffe College and later received a master’s degree in Fine Art from Harvard, where her professors included Monuments Men Paul Sachs, Langdon Warner, and Mason Hammond, all key figures in Mr. Edsel’s new book, The Monuments Men. The United States entered World War II in December 1941. By July 1942 Mary had given up her job as a high school art teacher and was in uniform serving with the WAAC (Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps). Over 400,000 women applied to be part of the first group of women to serve in the US military; only 450 were chosen. She would later become a recruiter for WAC (Women’s Army Corps), where one of the highlights was meeting the Churchill family when they visited Boston. Mary was sent overseas in 1943. Prior to becoming a Monuments officer, she trained with the U.S. Army 8th Air Force under General Doolittle; she was also sent to the Royal Air Force base at Medmenham as part of the Central Interpretation Unit and later, Mary received orders to report to General Carl Spaatz. At that time he commanded the 8th, 9th, and 15th Army Air Corps and led the strategic bombing campaign against Germany reporting directly to General Eisenhower. Mary became “company commander of the 550 WACs who ran Spaatz Headquarters.” For her service as company commander, Mary received a Bronze Star.

Following the Allied victory, Mary read in Stars and Stripes that officers with an art history background were needed as Monuments Men. Despite having more than enough points to return home, Mary traveled to Berlin to volunteer for service with the Monuments Men. As a Monuments officer stationed in Berlin, Mary traveled to the Munich Collecting Point, Wiesbaden Collecting Point, various repositories, and badly damaged cities. She worked with fellow Monuments Men Bancel LaFarge, Rose Valland, Charles Kuhn, Calvin Hathaway and others to restitute stolen works of art to their rightful owners. She served as a Monuments officer until 1948, when she retired as a Major after an extraordinary and accomplished military career.

Mary returned home to the United States and taught humanities at the University of Florida, and married her husband Tim Quessenberry in 1965. Mary Regan Quessenberry currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

About the Monuments Men Foundation

The Monuments Men Foundation was created to raise public awareness of the 345 or so men and women from thirteen nations, many of whom were museum directors, curators, and educators, who protected monuments and other cultural treasures from the destruction of World War II. By 1945, these heroes of civilization tracked, located and later returned more than 5 million artistic and cultural items stolen by Hitler and the Nazis. The Foundation intends for their rich legacy to serve as a beacon for the preservation of such treasures in future armed conflict and to finish the task of locating and returning some of the hundreds of thousands of stolen and missing works of art and documents to the victims of the greatest theft in history. The Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art was one of ten recipients of the 2007 National Humanities Medal, the highest honor given for excellence in the Humanities field.

For more information about the Monuments Men Foundation, please visit www.monumentsmenfoundation.org.

To speak with Robert Edsel or for further details, Please Contact:
Christy Fox
Telephone: 646-246-3743
Email: christyfox1@aol.com

I have been asked to write a guest entry for the blog.  Before I began working here, I did not know much about the Monuments Men.  I knew they saved art during WWII, but that was all I knew.  They were a pretty incredible group of people.  From Ettlinger to Valland, there are some great people with some incredible stories.   I wonder what Rose Valland was thinking when she decided to keep notes on these works of art.  Did she know that it would lead to finding them later?  Did she think they were for her own personal records and memories?  I wonder, what was the initial spark that forced her to begin to document what was going on with the art pieces?  Minus the actual combat part, their work must have been fascinating.  I wish I was getting a paycheck to discover the stolen art hidden by the Nazi’s.  Talk about thinking outside the box, wow!

Though there are many different inspirational stories between the Monuments Men, there is one unifying theme.  They all felt the need to serve a purpose greater than themselves.  In today’s society, for the most part, all people care about is themselves and their latest bell or whistle.  I don’t think our society cares how many innocent people we kill on a daily basis, much less saving the cultural treasures in the Middle East.  A childhood buddy of mine was in the first platoon into Saddam’s main house and they did some terrible stuff to that house including the relics and treasures there.  I can only imagine what has happened to other cultural treasures in one of the oldest regions in the world.  If more people knew about The Monuments Men and their mission, we could have a special unit deployed in the Middle East focused on saving the cultural treasures of the region.  Maybe the people in charge of our nation’s foreign policy do not want to save the cultural treasures.  Maybe they do not want to preserve the culture from that region.  No W.M.D.’s and oil isn’t cheap, one has to wonder, what are we doing there?

I’m grateful that someone had the foresight to see the importance of saving the cultural treasures for future generations before they were destroyed.  In the times of World War II, people were more educated and understood the importance in saving cultural treasures for future generations.  Nationwide, our public school systems cut back funding for the arts before any other subjects.  Today, MTV and all the rest of the filth on television, teaches our children that cultural treasures are pieces of jewelry that Paris Hilton wore.  When you see how little importance our nation puts on the arts and culture, it’s not hard to see why this has not become a bigger issue.  It is going to take the masses getting educated, rising up and demanding that we save the cultural treasures in the Middle East before anything will change.  So I’m here doing my small part, helping Mr. Edsel and the Monuments Men Foundation in raising awareness and educating people about The Monuments Men and their mission.

The upcoming week is filled with media appearances that highlight The Monuments Men. Please feel free to click the links to find out where and when these programs will air in your area.

Television

C-SPAN BOOK TV (http://www.booktv.org/monumentsmen)

• Saturday, October 17th at 4:45pm (ET)
• Sunday, October 18th at 7:00am (ET)

CBS Up to the Minute (http://www.cbsnews.com)

• Taping Tuesday, October 20

MSNBC – Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough (http://www.morningjoe.com)

• Wednesday, October 21 at 8:45am (ET) – Broadcast Live

Radio

Travel with Rick Steves (NPR)

• Saturday, October 17 – Broadcast to over 120 radio stations nationwide.  Please check this link for times and affiliates near you. (http://www.ricksteves.com/radio/whereitairs.htm)

Newspaper

I was also interviewed for an article about Vermeer’s The Astronomer, currently of view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

• October 16, 2009 – Robert interviewed about the Monuments Men’s rescue of Vermeer’s The Astronomer during WWII. Article running in conjunction with a new exhibit in Minneapolis. Click o read the article (http://www.startribune.com.html)

Chief Archivist of the United States, Professor Allen Weinstein and Robert M. Edsel standing before one of the two "Hitler Albums" (Photo Courtesy of Robert M. Edsel Collection)

Hundreds of thousand of works of art and millions of cultural treasures, including library books, manuscripts, and religious objects, stolen by Hitler and the Nazis, or taken by others during World War ll, remain missing.  The collective value of these items is well into the billions of dollars! Does anyone really believe they were all destroyed during the war?

Two years ago we located the Hitler Albums, two albums filled with photographs of paintings stolen by the Nazis from French collectors, many of whom were Jewish, that were presented to Adolph Hitler for his enjoyment and selection of the best works for his Führermuseum in Linz.  These albums were found in his home – the Berghof – in Berchtesgaden by an American soldier and taken as war booty.  They had been sitting in the attic of his home ever since.

Years later they surfaced when a family member contacted us seeking assistance with determining what they were and their importance. In time they expressed a desire for us to put them to their best use.  We – me personally and the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art – subsequently donated them to the National Archives at a ceremony in Washington in 2007.  Allen Weinstein, Chief Archivist of the United States, hailed their discovery as “the most significant find related to Hitler’s premeditated theft of art and other cultural treasures to be found since the Nuremberg trials.”

I believe there are many more such albums that will surface in the coming years along with missing paintings, drawings, books, and tens of thousands of other items displaced by the war or stolen during those years.  As the World War II generation passes, their belongings will be distributed to family members and, in many cases, sold.  During this sorting and identification process, many missing items from the war will surface.

The internet is also proving invaluable in helping both claimants and others seeking to find such stolen items recover their belongings.  Still, there is much to be done, by certain governments, museums, collectors, even the public at large.  It begins, however, with a far greater public awareness of the volume and importance of what is missing from World War II.

Everyone can participate!  Everyone can help us write the final chapter to this amazing story, the final chapter to this part of World War II, and in so doing, complete the mission of the Monuments Men.

To learn more about how you can help please contact me.

A group of Monuments Men and Women standing in front of the Munich Collecting Point in 1945. From Left to Right: Capt. Marcelle Minet, France; Lt. Craig Hugh Smyth, US; Capt. Hubert de Brye, France (above); Lt. Col. Alphonse Vorenkamp, the Netherlands (below); Lt. Doda Conrad, US; Lt. Jean Lemaire, Belgium; Lt. Charles Parkhurst, US; and Maj. Pierre Duchartre, France. (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.)

I am frequently asked by people, “who are the Monuments Men and if they are so important, why haven’t we heard about them before now?” It’s an excellent question with a simple but seemingly improbable answer.

First, who they were. The Monuments Men were a group of museum directors, curators, artists, architects, and scholars who volunteered for service during World War ll to protect the most important cultural treasures of Europe from the destruction of the war and theft by Hitler and the Nazis. This was an unprecedented effort to fight a war and at the same time mitigate damage to cultural items during combat. (If anyone has any doubt about why this is an important concept, consider the damage to the reputation of the United States and its allies over its handling of the aftermath of the looting of the National Museum of Iraq after the invasion of Baghdad in 2003!)

These men and women left their families and quite established careers to go into combat to save some of mankind’s most beloved works of art and other important items including paintings (by artists no less well known than Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo), sculpture, drawings, stained glass, church bells, religious objects, and of course some of the most important and famous structures in the world. They had virtually no resources allocated to them by the Army; creativity and resourcefulness was their guide. Their success was remarkable: within five years of the end of the war, they located and recovered more than 5 million cultural items stolen and/or hidden by the Nazis.

By the end of the war there were less than 60 Monuments Men in all of Europe. In fact, there had been only a dozen or so on the ground within a few months after the D-Day landings. Because such a few number of men and women were charged with the awesome responsibility of protecting the innumerable cultural riches of our western civilization, their service and mission was lost in the fog of history. They had no spokespersons to preserve their legacy so to speak…and it was almost lost. For that reason, few knew of the Monuments Men and fewer still wrote about them or their achievements until now.

Their heroic achievements didn’t end with the war either. As they returned home from combat, these gifted men and women helped build the cultural world we enjoy today, especially in the United States. In the United Kingdom their leadership impacted world renowned institutions including the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Tate Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Courtauld Institute, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the United States these visionary leaders impacted the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Frick Collection, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and the San Francisco Legion of Honor, just to name a few.  We owe them all our respect and admiration, especially when we visit a museum whose existence today is due in part to their sacrifices of long ago.

I hope you will take a few minutes to delve further into our new website, watch the promo video for my new book on the Monuments Men, and WRITE ME to tell me about your connection to this amazing story. I will pick some of the most interesting responses to share with everyone in future blogs.