When art historians went to war

Alumni were key in efforts to save Europe’s art treasures

By W. Barksdale Maynard ’88
Published in the June 2, 2010, issue

"Monuments Men” examine relics of the Holy Roman regalia upon their return to Vienna in 1946. Lt. Ernest DeWald *14 *16 is at far right, and Lt. Perry Cott ’29 *37 is third from left. Photo courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

Late in World War II, the Allies prepared for their bloody ­invasion of Fortress Europe. Many observers expected to see heartrending destruction of art and architectural treasures as bombs rained from the sky and soldiers ransacked and looted. Culture had suffered grievously in countless wars of the past; why should this, the most horrific conflict in all human history, be any different?  

But it was different: The Allies took remarkable measures to protect threatened art. “Shortly we will be fighting our way across the continent of Europe in battles designed to preserve our civilization,” Gen. Dwight Eisenhower told his commanders just before D-Day in a historic message signaling an enlightened new attitude. “Inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve” — and so he ordered his commanders to safeguard those treasures as their armies swept violently forward. It was a first in military history.  

Key to this noble effort were art historians serving in the ranks of the American, British, and Canadian forces, including more than a dozen young Princetonians. As described in a new book by Robert Edsel, a former Texas oilman who recently set up the Monuments Men Foundation to honor their memory, and co-author Bret Witter, these soldiers volunteered for the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Service (MFAA). They tagged along with the advancing troops, warning them of art landmarks to avoid and performing emergency restorations as needed to paintings, sculpture, and architecture. After the Third Reich collapsed, MFAA officers undertook the daunting task of finding lost art, which the enemy had scattered for safekeeping across more than a thousand secret locations in Germany alone — including deep underground in salt mines. Assembling this jumbled material at “collecting points,” they began the tedious process of repatriating 5 million objects, a herculean task that took until 1951 to complete.  

Monuments Man Sgt. Kenneth C. Lindsay and the bust of Queen Nefertiti, now housed at the Neues Museum in Berlin. Photo courtesy of the Kenneth C. Lindsay Collection.

Edsel calls their efforts “a completely overlooked part of history,” so little public attention have they received. But 60 years later, the records MFAA kept are still used regularly by museum professionals like Nancy Yeide of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., who researches the ownership history of paintings — their “provenance.” The contribution of MFAA was, she says, “absolutely inestimable. It should be a source of pride to Americans. Especially when you consider there were a lot of things the U.S. military had on its plate, like feeding and clothing Europe.”  

It seems especially admirable when compared to the actions of the Soviet Union, which dispatched a Trophy Commission in 1945 to steal 2.5 million art objects in reparation against Germany, including the famous gold artifacts excavated by Schliemann at Troy (which didn’t surface again until the 1990s). Berlin’s Museum Island was systematically ransacked. Russia still refuses to return many of these looted items. By contrast, the 350 or so members of MFAA were selfless and disinterested in their efforts to return art to its proper owners, including those in the former Reich — even though the U.S. government didn’t always follow MFAA’s lead.

Princetonians figured prominently in MFAA. The Univer­sity’s Department of Art and Archaeology was nearly 60 years old when the war began and was rivaled only by Harvard’s as the finest in the nation. Many professionals had trained in McCormick Hall and the Art Museum, including the innovative director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred Barr ’22. He became the first American to warn of the threat to art by Nazi “sons-of-bitches,” as he called them after witnessing a Stuttgart rally in 1933 — the Nazis routinely burned paintings they considered “degenerate” and looted Europe’s treasures for their personal aggrandizement. Hitler, a frustrated artist himself, planned a megalomaniacal museum for Linz, Austria. In assembling his trove, the Führer competed against Washington’s National Gallery of Art (opened in 1941) and other world museums — but he had persuasive powers of acquisition they lacked. At his death he owned an astonishing 8,000 paintings, double the number the National Gallery has been able to amass over the past 70 years.  

When the war ended, MFAA established a collecting point in bomb-cratered Wiesbaden, Germany, in a building that had served as a state museum before the war and later housed Luftwaffe headquarters. Conditions were grim in the building, where every window was shattered and doors had been blown off their hinges. A ring of U.S. Army tanks kept looters away. As crates arrived daily in trucks, Capt. Patrick “Joe” Kelleher *47 and fellow officers were staggered to find that they contained some of the greatest masterpieces in art history, including Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. For Kelleher, it was like returning to the McCormick Hall classroom where he had studied these very works as a master’s-degree student just before enlisting.

Nestled in one box was a glittering treasure: St. Stephen’s Crown, a talisman held sacred by the Hungarian people for 700 years. Kelleher seized the opportunity to study the seldom-seen crown up close, and later he wrote his Princeton dissertation on it. The U.S. government refused to send the crown back to Communist Hungary, so it languished at Fort Knox until being repatriated in 1978 — after Kelleher, by then retired as director of the Princeton University Art Museum, had been invited to examine it one more time.  

Boyish and high-spirited, Kelleher liked to needle Capt. Walter Farmer, the brusque and jumpy director of the Wiesbaden collecting point. At Christmas 1945, Farmer went out of town, leaving strict orders that no more crates should be opened — the German museum curators had packed the artworks carefully before hiding them in the salt mines, and Farmer wanted them to remain undamaged. But Kelleher invited fellow art lovers for a bibulous dinner party and, with great fanfare, pried open a lid to extract the most famous of all Egyptian sculptures, the bust of Nefertiti. Delighted to find her unbroken, they raised their glasses to a woman whose beauty was undimmed after 3,300 years.  

When Farmer found out, he fulminated about this “outrageous act of disobedience by a fellow officer.” He knew that the ravishing Nefertiti was dogged by controversy already: She had been whisked to Berlin within months of her discovery by archaeologists in 1912, and now the Egyptian government was clamoring for her return. Nefertiti remains a sore point even today: Over strident objections from Cairo, the bust has just become the centerpiece of Berlin’s Neues Museum, gutted by bombs during World War II and not reopened until last year.  

Given MFAA’s mission to return all artwork to its rightful owners, Farmer was incensed when top generals ordered him to pack up 202 of the very best paintings for shipment to the National Gallery of Art for safekeeping, including 15 Rembrandts. Would they ever be returned to the German museums that formerly housed them? he wondered. Kelleher and other MFAA officers grimly assembled “The 202” for shipment, but not before 32 of them signed the “Wiesbaden Manifesto” on Farmer’s desk Nov. 7, 1945. This letter of complaint to the military higher-ups warned that the German people would see this as “a prize of war” confiscation: No other act “will rankle so long, or be the cause of so much justified bitterness.”  

Author of the Wiesbaden Manifesto was feisty Capt. Everett “Bill” Lesley *37, later an art history professor at Old Dominion University. A seasoned MFAA veteran, he had followed the advancing armies after the Normandy invasion and reported on the condition of art-rich places along the way: Chartres was mercifully intact, he found, but La Gleize Cathedral in Belgium had been pulverized. Other Princeton signers of the manifesto included Kelleher, Lt. Charles Parkhurst *41, and 1st Lt. Robert Koch *54, the last familiar to many alumni from his long career teaching art history at Princeton. “We believed first of all that the language was the same the Nazis had used when they looted, which was ‘protective custody,’” Parkhurst later said in explaining why he signed the manifesto. “We thought that was a bad omen.”

Art historians in the United States were unhappy about “The 202” confiscation as well. Truman’s secretary of state received a stern letter from Rensselaer Lee ’20 *26 on behalf of the College Art Association, a professional organization representing artists and academics. Lee had advised President Franklin Roosevelt on cultural treasures in the theater of war and later became an esteemed professor at Princeton. But despite all objections, “The 202” were delivered to America as ordered, where nearly a million visitors saw them on display at the National Gallery in the first “blockbuster” show in history, military police sternly standing guard. Lee and others were gratified when all the paintings finally were returned to Germany in 1948, a positive outcome that the Wiesbaden Manifesto perhaps helped ensure.

MFAA officers at the Munich collecting point, including Lt. Craig Hugh Smyth ’38 *56, second from left, and Lt. Charles Parkhurst *41, second from right. Photo courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives.

Among the young curators at the National Gallery of Art was serious-minded Craig Hugh Smyth ’38 *56, who supervised the wartime removal of that museum’s contents to Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C. As a naval lieutenant, he went on to establish an MFAA collecting point in Munich just a month after the city fell to the Allies, housing it in former Nazi administration buildings still draped in green fishnet camouflage. (Nearby museums had been destroyed by bombing.) Smyth held conferences in the room where hapless Neville Chamberlain had signed the Munich Accord that promised “peace for our time.” He found framed portraits of Hitler heaped in the basement, along with booby-trap explosives that blew one workman to bits.  

Trucks constantly rumbled across the courtyard, bringing art found deep in Austrian salt mines. Smyth was joyous at the arrival of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” and Jan van Eyck’s “Ghent Altarpiece,” among thousands of works the Nazis had intended to destroy to prevent their capture by the Allies at war’s end — but time suddenly ran out. Not every shipment was greeted with delight, however. One day a box arrived filled with gold teeth and children’s orthodontic braces, discovered at Dachau.

Recent years have brought heightened interest in the problem of looted art from the Holocaust era. Major museums, including Princeton’s, have reinvestigated their collections to be certain they do not contain stolen works. To assist in this global effort, the National Gallery’s Yeide has assembled a catalog of the collection of top Nazi Hermann Goering. His nefarious trove included 2,000 paintings, Yeide has proven — not 1,300 as previously thought. She could not have completed her work without the diligent records of Smyth and his Munich collecting point. “They did a fantastic job, a monumental job,” she says, “especially if you think about the situation they were dealing with” amid the devastation of a bombed-out city. Smyth’s distinguished career was only beginning: In later years he served as director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.  

MFAA in Italy was headed by another Tiger, Lt. Col. Ernest DeWald *14 *16. Genteel and effortlessly polylingual, he had attended Rutgers before coming to Princeton for his Ph.D. After service in World War I he considered a career as a singer, but Dean Andrew Fleming West 1874 convinced him to enter academia instead, so he joined the Department of Art and Archaeology in 1925. Starting in 1943, he worked with MFAA in North Africa, identifying what ought to be preserved in the coming invasion of Italy. Then he moved north with the conquering armies through Sicily and the Italian mainland, overseeing emergency repairs to damaged buildings and finding museum art hidden in the countryside. Ready with expert assistance was his Princeton departmental colleague Charles Rufus Morey, founder of the Princeton-based Index of Christian Art (now the world’s largest archive of medieval art), who was serving as a cultural attaché in Rome.  

DeWald’s pocket diary, little-noticed today in Firestone Library, records the excitement and danger of these tumultuous times. Air-raid sirens howled as he reconnoitered medieval towns for endangered art. DeWald often came upon Army engineering units bulldozing fallen buildings out of roadways, using the debris to patch holes in blown-up bridges — until he frantically waved them to stop, pointing out fragments of historic sculpture, fresco, and manuscripts mingled with the rubble. “It’s amazing what Italian experts can piece together from what appears to be just a pile of smashed rock,” he told PAW in a wartime letter.  

DeWald decried needless Allied bombing, including an attack on the ruins of Pompeii. But American transgressions paled beside the destructiveness of the Wehrmacht, he repeatedly said. He was horrified by their dynamiting of venerable campanile towers and thousands of bridges, all across Italy. As curators watched helplessly, they had poured benzene and sulfur on the historic state archives of Naples and lit a match. He blamed them too for the burning of the huge Roman ships recently excavated from the bed of Lake Nemi, south of Rome. Of these priceless nautical remains that Mussolini had drained the lake in order to salvage, nothing was left now but heaps of blackened nails. The Germans also had wreaked havoc on the elegant Palazzo Ruspoli nearby, where, DeWald told his diary, “every stick of furniture remaining was hacked to pieces and the pictures slashed to ribbons.”

DeWald was proud of his record in tracking down lost art, including Titian’s “Danae” and Pieter Bruegel’s “Blind Leading the Blind,” both filched from storage at Monte Cassino abbey (later pounded to dust by American bombs) as gifts for Goering and eventually found in the bowels of the Austrian salt mines. To forestall looting and vandalism by Allied troops, DeWald wrote the Soldier’s Guide to Rome, which fresh-faced GIs carried through the Forum as they gawked at historic ruins. Subsequently, he was transferred to Austria, where he helped sort out Hitler’s artwork, working with yet another Princeton-trained expert — S. Lane Faison *32 of the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit. Later a legendary professor at Williams, the pistol-carrying Faison interrogated shady dealers who had rounded up art for the Führer. Some swallowed cyanide rather than be questioned by this mild-mannered academic.

Back at his desk in McCormick Hall, DeWald wrote the introduction for the 1946 book Lost Treasures of Europe, a photographic catalog of the continent-wide destruction wrought by six years of pillaging and bombs. “The loss or destruction of these prized heritages of the past becomes in fact a personal loss comparable to that of a friend,” he said mournfully. Appointed as director of the Princeton University Art Museum in 1947, he bought an ancient sculpture of a goat’s head — “Princeton Billy,” the students called it — that turned out, ironically, to have been snitched from a collection in Rome during the war. DeWald promptly returned it, though Italy soon gave it to Princeton as a gesture of friendship.  

After his service with the Monuments Men, Patrick “Joe” Kelleher *47 served as director of the Princeton University Art Museum from 1960 to 1972. Photo courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum; Naomi Savage, American, 1927–2005; “Patrick J. Kelleher” 1975; Gift of Naomi Savage; © 1975, Naomi Savage; Photo: Bruce M. White

After his service with the Monuments Men, Patrick “Joe” Kelleher *47 served as director of the Princeton University Art Museum from 1960 to 1972.

In 1950, the Austrian government honored his personal contributions to MFAA in their country by briefly exhibiting Vermeer’s “The Art of Painting” at the Art Museum.   Perhaps the greatest of the 34 works surviving by that legendary Dutch artist, it had been purchased by Hitler himself with proceeds from Mein Kampf. Rescued by American troops from the salt mines at Altaussee, Austria, it ultimately was repatriated to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna — not to the aristocrat who had sold it to Hitler, Jaromir Czernin, who complained bitterly. Today, Czernin’s descendants are demanding to have the painting back, saying that he only parted with it under threat. The Austrian government hopes to avoid giving up its beloved Vermeer, which may now be worth a quarter-billion dollars. It is still smarting from the loss of five Gustav Klimt paintings in 2006: Stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family and displayed in a Vienna museum for decades, they finally were repatriated by court order to a California woman after lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg ’88 successfully pleaded her case.

Many MFAA men — Princetonians and others — later became museum directors, including Charles Parkhurst, who headed the Baltimore Museum of Art. Joe Kelleher replaced DeWald as director of the Princeton Art Museum (his esteemed predecessor later dropped dead from a heart attack in Palmer Stadium parking lot at the 1968 Columbia game). Working with Barr and other experts, Kelleher selected the artists for the Putnam Collection of modernist sculpture scattered across campus and wrote the guidebook Living With Modern Sculpture.  

Today, the World War II generation is fast exiting the scene, with nearly 6,000 U.S. veterans dying every week. The loss of Faison and Smyth in 2006 and Parkhurst in 2008 leaves just one living Princeton MFAA man, Robert Koch, now 90 and unable to be interviewed because of failing health. Many Tigers fondly recall Koch’s courses on Northern Renaissance art, which he taught for 42 years. Koch grew up in academe as the son of drama professor Frederick Koch of the University of North Carolina, whose Carolina Playmakers pioneered the American “folk play” and whose star student was Thomas Wolfe. The younger Koch earned a master’s degree at the University of North Carolina before enlisting in 1942. Years later in conversations with undergraduates, he sometimes mentioned, in his modest Southern way, his MFAA service and how those unspeakable Nazis had intended to blow up the salt mines, incinerating the “Ghent Altarpiece” and so much else.

But now, two decades after he retired, his stories largely have been forgotten. Current Princeton faculty recall almost nothing about his wartime service — “I didn’t really know Bob Koch and certainly never heard him mention that subject,” says one professor who passed him in the hall daily for several years. “He talked a lot about retrieving stuff from the salt mines outside Salzburg, I think,” a former student says with the vagueness typical of all who were asked. “That’s disheartening, but it doesn’t surprise me,” says Robert Edsel of the Monuments Men Foundation. He has interviewed the few remaining veterans of MFAA — just nine of the 350 survive — and he travels the country giving talks about their unsung achievements, which the soldiers were usually too humble to brag about themselves.   “Sometimes their own families didn’t know what they had done,” says Yeide.  

The general amnesia about Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives seems unfortunate, especially among art historians, whose livelihood comes from studying and interpreting the works their predecessors bravely rescued (two Monuments Men were killed in combat). We all owe them a great debt, Edsel believes — “for saving these great cultural treasures that people now travel the world to go see” and then for coming home and helping America go from “cultural backwater to cultural epicenter” in the 1950s. That trajectory continues today, when the students of MFAA men occupy key positions in scores of museums and universities nationwide. In 1945, amid widespread destruction and horror, a few khaki-clad lovers of art lit a small flame of humanity amid the ashes by helping to safeguard great masterpieces. That’s a proud legacy well worth recalling. 

W. Barksdale Maynard ’88 wrote his senior thesis under MFAA veteran Robert Koch *54 and subsequently taught art history at Delaware, Johns Hopkins, and Princeton.

http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2010/06/02/pages/3664/index.xml?page=1

One of the many joys of serving as a trustee of the National World War II Museum is the occasional touching email I received which grabs the heartstrings and reminds all people of good will why we honor these heroes who contributed to winning World War II.

This story was written by persons unknown. If anyone does know who wrote it please let us know and we’ll more specifically credit the piece.

Bill Mauldin stamp honors grunts’  hero.

The post office gets a lot of  criticism. Always has, always will.

And with the renewed push to get  rid of Saturday mail delivery, expect complaints to intensify.

But the United States Postal Service deserves a standing ovation for something that’s going to happen this month: Bill Mauldin is getting his own postage  stamp.

Mauldin died at age 81 in the early days of 2003. The end of  his life had been rugged. He had been scalded in a bathtub, which led to  terrible injuries and infections; Alzheimer’s disease was inflicting its  cruelties. Unable to care for himself after the scalding, he became a  resident of a California nursing home, his health and spirits in  rapid decline.

He was not forgotten, though. Mauldin, and his work,  meant so much to the millions of Americans who fought in World War II, and  to those who had waited for them to come home. He was a kid cartoonist for  Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper; Mauldin’s drawings of his muddy,  exhausted, whisker-stubbled infantrymen Willie and Joe were the voice of  truth about what it was like on the front lines.

Mauldin was an  enlisted man just like the soldiers he drew for; his gripes were their  gripes, his laughs were their laughs, his heartaches were their heartaches.  He was one of them. They loved him.

He never held back. Sometimes,  when his cartoons cut too close for comfort, his superior officers tried to  tone him down. In one memorable incident, he enraged Gen. George S. Patton,  and Patton informed Mauldin he wanted the pointed cartoons — celebrating  the fighting men, lampooning the high-ranking officers — to stop.  Now.

The news passed from soldier to soldier. How was Sgt. Bill  Mauldin going to stand up to Gen. Patton? It seemed impossible.

Not  quite. Mauldin, it turned out, had an ardent fan: Five-star Gen. Dwight D.  Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe . Ike put  out the word: Mauldin draws what Mauldin wants. Mauldin won. Patton  lost.

If, in your line of work, you’ve ever considered yourself a  young hotshot, or if you’ve ever known anyone who has felt that way about  himself or herself, the story of Mauldin’s young manhood will humble you.  Here is what, by the time he was 23 years old, Mauldin had  accomplished:

He won the Pulitzer Prize. He was featured on the cover  of Time magazine. His book “Up Front” was the No. 1 best-seller in  the United States .

All of that at 23. Yet when he returned to  civilian life and he grew older, he never lost that boyish Mauldin grin, he  never outgrew his excitement about doing his job, he never big-shotted or  high-hatted the people with whom he worked every day.

I was lucky  enough to be one of them; Mauldin roamed the hallways of the Chicago  Sun-Times in the late 1960s and early 1970s with no more officiousness or  air of haughtiness than if he was a copyboy. That impish look on his face  remained.

He had achieved so much. He had won a second Pulitzer  Prize, and he should have won a third, for what may be the single greatest  editorial cartoon in the history of the craft: his deadline rendering, on  the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, of the statue at the  Lincoln Memorial slumped in grief, its head cradled in its hands. But he  never acted as if he was better than the people he met. He was still Mauldin  the enlisted man.

During the late summer of 2002, as Mauldin lay in  that California nursing home, some of the old World War II infantry guys  caught wind of it. They didn’t want Mauldin to go out that way. They thought  he should know that he was still their hero.

Gordon Dillow, a  columnist for the Orange County Register, put out the call in Southern  California for people in the area to send their best wishes to Mauldin; I  joined Dillow in the effort, helping to spread the appeal nationally so that  Bill would not feel so alone. Soon more than 10,000 letters and cards had  arrived at Mauldin’s bedside.

Even better than that, the old soldiers  began to show up just to sit with Mauldin, to let him know that they were  there for him, as he, long ago, had been there for them. So many volunteered  to visit Bill that there was a waiting list. Here is how Todd DePastino, in  the first paragraph of his wonderful biography of Mauldin, described  it:

“Almost every day in the summer and fall of 2002 they came to  Park Superior nursing home in Newport Beach , California , to honor  Army Sergeant, Technician Third Grade, Bill Mauldin. They came bearing  relics of their youth: medals, insignia, photographs, and carefully folded  newspaper clippings. Some wore old garrison caps. Others arrived resplendent  in uniforms over a half century old. Almost all of them wept as they filed  down the corridor like pilgrims fulfilling some long-neglected  obligation.”

One of the veterans explained to me why it was so  important:

“You would have to be part of a combat infantry unit to  appreciate what moments of relief Bill gave us. You had to be reading a  soaking wet Stars and Stripes in a water-filled foxhole and then see one of  his cartoons.”

Mauldin is buried  in Arlington National Cemetery . This month, the kid  cartoonist makes it onto a first-class postage stamp. It’s an honor that  most generals and admirals never receive.

What Mauldin would have  loved most, I believe, is the sight of the two guys who are keeping him  company on that stamp.

Take a look at it.

There’s Willie.  There’s Joe.

And there, to the side, drawing them and smiling that  shy, quietly observant smile, is Mauldin himself. With his buddies, right  where he belongs. Forever.

As part of the 65th Anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE-Day) celebration at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas, I will be discussing my new book, The Monuments Men and presenting a completely revised presentation that focuses on General Eisenhower’s role concerning protection of the arts during World War II. Ike’s policies were implemented by the Monuments Men. In conjunction with the presentation I will be bringing with me one of the “Hitler Albums” which will be on display during the weekend. The presentation starts at 7pm in the Visitors Center Auditorium, with audience Q&A to follow. On Saturday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will be the other keynote speaker beginning at 1pm.

If you would like to attend the events, please click on the following link for more information: Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum: VE-Day 65th Anniversary

Left to Right: Generals Bradley, Patton, and Eisenhower (Photo Courtesy of National Archives)

Having heard about the extraordinary discovery of most all of Nazi Germany’s gold reserves and paper currency, along with its vast cultural wealth from Berlin’s greatest museums and libraries, in a salt mine in Merkers, Germany, Generals Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley left SHAEF headquarters in Rheims, France and made a several day visit to see it firsthand.  As the Monuments Men, led by George Stout, were urgently crating the works of art for removal from the mine, the generals descended in a rickety elevator manned by a lone German operator.

Their sense of disconnection was palpable:  billions of dollars (in today’s currency) of gold bars and bagged coins sat stacked in one chamber adjacent to some of the world’s greatest works of art. Chests filled with gold fillings pulled from the mouths of murdered victims of the Nazi genocide sat idle, not yet smelted into bars to sit atop the Reichsbank horde.  Suitcases of silverware, another reminder of property stolen along with the lives of the owners, lined several walls.

General Eisenhower at Ohrdruf Concentration Camp (Photo Courtesy of National Archives)

Later that afternoon, the generals visited Ohrdruf, the first Nazi work camp liberated by American forces. Strewn before them were the corpses of the dead and emancipated figures of those near death.  General Patton, old “Blood and Guts”, had to lean against the side of one of the bunkhouse sheds as he was sick to his stomach from the horrors and stench of what he was witnessing.

President Franklin Roosevelt attending Yalta Conference in February 1945, less than 2 months before he died. (Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

After dinner, as the generals returned to their respective tents, General Patton overheard on the BBC the announcement of President Roosevelt’s death earlier that day.  At age 63, 12 years into his presidency, having led the nation through its most perilous fiscal crisis and a world war, Roosevelt was gone. He did not live to see the fruits of his leadership – victory – which would follow 26 days later in Europe, and 125 days later in Japan.

April 12:  a day that had momentous implications for our nation, the world, and the Monuments Men.  (For a more detailed account of this story, please read The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History).

It’s hard to believe that this is our 20th newsletter! So much has happened in the last 3 years. I hope you enjoy our latest publication – just click to download the PDF version.

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/.

Gemaldegalerie Linz Album XIII

Augsburger Geschlechterbuch or “Augsburg Book of Nobles”

On Friday we gathered at the State Department for a ceremony marking the return of two irreplaceable documents, one of which was located by the Monuments Men Foundation.  The Gemaldegalerie Linz Album XIII was a prized possession of Hitler and documented German 19^th century works of art he had accumulated, both through purchase and theft, for the Fuhrermuseum he planned to build in his hometown.  The other document is known as the Augsburger Geschlechterbuch or “Augsburg Book of Nobles” which belongs to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.  While each item was taken by a U.S. Army soldier, the circumstances of their respective returns couldn’t have been more different.

Mr. Robert Edsel, Mr. John Pistone, and Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth, and Minister of the Interior for Baden-Wuerttemberg, Heribert Rech

This great occasion also honored one of those veterans, Mr. John Pistone, who upon learning about the importance of the Gemaldegalerie Linz Album agreed to work through the Monuments Men Foundation to ensure its return to Germany.  In contrast, the person in possession of the Augsburg Book of Nobles refused to return it and only through years of litigation was it eventually delivered to the State Department.

Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew, Minister Heribert Rech, German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth and Mr. Robert M. Edsel

Mr. Robert Edsel, Ambassador Klaus Scharioth, Minister Heribert Rech, and Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew

Ambassador Christian Kennedy, the U.S. Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues hosted the event and introduced each of the speakers after making poignant remarks about the importance of these two items being returned to Germany. His comments were underscored by Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew.  Accepting these items was German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth, and Heribert Rech, Minister of the Interior for Baden-Wuerttemberg, the state in which Stuttgart is located.  Both gentlemen spoke eloquently and candidly about this period of Germany’s history and the commitment Germany has today to doing everything possible to assist those victims of the Nazi era in recovering their stolen belongings.  At the same time, they expressed their desire to see items belonging to Germany returned home.  Minister Rech had tears in his eyes when he expressed the satisfaction that this important relic of his city’s history was finally going home.

Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, Ambassador Christian Kennedy, and Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew

Each speaker commented on the important role of the Monuments Men during and after World War II and expressed their sincere appreciation for the work of the Monuments Men Foundation in not only preserving their legacy but in helping to locate and return items of such historic importance.  After all our hard work, these remarks were quite gratifying to hear.  Compliments were also directed to Mr. John Pistone for his role in coming forward to set the example for all veterans and their relatives who, like him, may have some item that was taken during the war that is a cultural object which should be returned.  When I first met with Mr. Pistone many months ago, I encouraged him to be a visible presence in the return of this document both to allow him to receive the credit he was due, but also to set the example for others.  He graciously agreed.  It was a very happy moment for the Monuments Men Foundation team to witness this fine veteran receive such praise in the presence of his family.  He later told me it was one of the proudest moments of his life…and that speaks volumes about what we at the Foundation are all about.

Mrs. Verna Pistone and her daughters Joan, Julianne and Laura

Photos courtesy of United States State Department

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).

Merry Christmas to all! Below is the Christmas menu that the 3rd army enjoyed in France in 1944, 65 years ago. We hope that everyone enjoys this holiday season and we look forward to continue the work of the Monuments Men in 2010.

65 years ago this was the greeting to our troops stationed in France who had just liberated that country 4 months earlier.  It was a fierce winter with more snow and colder temperatures than had been seen in any living person’s memory.  The Battle of the Bulge was raging with desperate conditions for fighting men and the local populace; some feared the outcome of the war hung in the balance.  But our troops then, just as they had in too many conflicts past, endured.  Many found a way, even if for a fleeting moment, to pause and recognize the day and its importance.  Some had the luxury of receiving gifts from home, others  a chance to write a loved one a message on an Army issued Christmas card such as the one below.  We came across this card in the course of my research for The Monuments Men and set it aside for use this year as a way of reminding us all how fortunate we are….to not be in a combat zone, to be able to enjoy this day with family and loved ones without risk of life or hardships of a winter outdoors with no shelter or food.  I also wanted it to serve as reminder to us all about the millions of young men and women in uniform who are stationed all over the world, walking a wall, on duty, doing their best—many at risk of life—to preserve the freedom and way of life we enjoy.

The official U.S. Army Christmas Card that Monuments Man Robert Posy sent home to his wife and son in December 1944.

So this Christmas in particular, on behalf of our team and the Monuments Men and women, we say “Merry Christmas to all; peace and safekeeping”.

Until the new year, be well.