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

James A Leach (Photo Courtesy of NEH)

One sure sign of demonstrable progress is the ongoing public recognition by key government officials of our efforts to recognize and preserve the legacy of the Monuments Men.  Last week the recently appointed Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a great friend and supporter of the Monuments Men Foundation, Jim Leach, spoke at a conference on cultural heritage at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  One key aspect of his speech concerned the work of the Monuments Men and the role of the Foundation in making their story broadly visible.  Below is an excerpt of that portion of his remarks.  Those wishing to read the full text of his speech may do so by clicking on the following link: http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/speeches/04102010.html

As preservationists know, one of the most respectful cultural moments in our history came at a signal moment at the end of World War II when a small cadre of American military officers came to be cultural heroes. Subsequently dubbed the “Monuments Men,” they led in cataloguing and returning works of looted art from Nazi hands to countries of origin. It is only in the last dozen years or so that historians and filmmakers—one supported by the NEH—have begun to bring perspective to the unprecedented displacement of cultural artifacts that the Second World War precipitated. Unlike other nations that have too frequently absconded with art treasures as booty of war, the American military wisely recognized that cultural objects belonged to original owners rather than conquering armies. It would have been a public insult of unpardonable dimension to have taken a culturally punitive tack.

As chairman of a House Committee with jurisdiction over banking matters, I held four years of hearings in the mid-1990s on the greatest mass theft in history, a subject which for decades had been historically slighted because Nazi avarice was so overwhelmed by its accompaniment with the greatest mass murder in history. What we unearthed in stories of victims and from perspectives applied by historians and philosophers to the shadowy corners of the Holocaust where greed reined was an axiom about the nature of evil: The genesis of evil may begin with perpetrators of violence and injustice, but complicity too frequently lies beyond the perpetrator with those who cloak themselves in the legitimacy of private business and genteel society. Indifferent to the most unpardonable ramifications of human prejudice, many of the seemingly best and brightest in civilization’s most advanced cultures manipulated with little compunction manifestly oppressive circumstances in furtherance of self-interest.

Our Congressional hearings helped galvanize many European parliaments to hold comparable reviews and led to an international conference which I chaired at the State Department on Holocaust era displacement of art. These hearings and the art conference, as well as the work of an extraordinary Under Secretary of State, Stuart Eizenstat, sparked increased attention not only to the war-time role of international banks and insurance companies where symbolic additional victim compensation packages were developed, but led to the drawing up of new national and international art provenance standards for museums.

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.

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).

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.

Monuments Men Foundation Announces that Famous Murillo Paintings Stolen from Rothschild Family in Paris, later discovered by the Monuments Men during World War II, have been Identified at SMU’s Meadows Museum

Dallas, TX (October 22, 2009) — Based on new evidence about the systematic looting of art from Jewish owners in the course of hostilities in Europe during World War II, a pair of famous paintings on display at SMU’s Meadows Museum created by Spanish master Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1618-1682) of Seville’s Patron Saints Justa and Rufina, estimated to be worth more than $10 million, are believed to have been stolen from the Rothschild family in Paris in 1941. The Nazi ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) code evidencing Rothschild ownership is still visible on the stretcher bar of one of the paintings; it appears to have been rubbed off the other. The Monuments Men Foundation, recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal for its work preserving the legacy of these unknown heroes, which it received from the President of the United States at a White House ceremony, is continuing its research to document conclusively whether both paintings were properly restituted to the rightful owners prior to donation to the Meadows Museum.

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German poet Heinrich Heine said: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bucher verbrennt, verbreent man auch am Ende Menschen.” (“This was only foreplay. Where books are being burned there will eventually be humans burned.”)  That was in 1821!!!!  How did he foretell the events that 110 years later would lead to the greatest war the world has ever known?

Of course, the gap between burning books out of fear and ideology and the taking of human lives is thinner than any of us want to consider.  Events in Nazi Germany proved that point in painful detail.  Heine could have also expanded his observation to include the burning of paintings because that, too, was part of Hitler’s determination to influence how people thought, what they believed in, and who they obeyed.

The importance of Heine’s observation is timeless:  they are words of warning to us all…to pay attention…to think for ourselves, and to speak up and act when the very freedoms all people of good will cherish are under attack.

I am very excited to announce the launch of our new website as we prepare for the release of my new book entitled The Monuments Men:  Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History.  This site has been designed to provide visitors with an overview of the Monuments Men story and a sense of the excitement and heroism they experienced during their efforts to save the greatest and most beloved works of art and other cultural treasures from the destruction of World War II and from theft by Hitler and the Nazis.  It also provides an insight into just how big this story is becoming with links to our speaking engagement site and related activities.  We’ve included a fantastic one minute and a half promotional video about the book which shares the excitement of this unknown and hugely important story about World War II.

As a compliment to the incredible letters and documents included in my new book, this website provides visitors with many additional letters and documents from the Monuments Men and women, many never before seen since they were written in 1944 and 1945, oftentimes during combat.  Also included are additional authentic copies of Nazi documents and letters including orders issued by Hitler and Goering.  We have added a great collection of photos as well.

A complete list of all the 350 or so Monuments Men from 13 nations is included with those biographies we have assembled and photos of each man and women where we have them.  This is an important part of our ongoing story:  to gather and make publicly available a complete summary with photo of each of these heroes of civilization.  It is just one example of how the public can play a key role and make a significant difference by helping us write the final chapter of this story.

We have provided a number of links to related parts of this story and components that might be of further interest, such as Rescuing Da Vinci, a photographic telling of the Monuments Men story, Nancy Yeide’s recently released book about the collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering entitled Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection, and the 9 hour, 3 disc The Rape of Europa: Collector’s Edition.  We also have details on The Greatest Theft in History Educational Program. These are all unique and important resources to further the telling of this amazing story which we hope you will visit and share with others.

Today also marks my resumption of blog entries after quite a hiatus due to work on finishing the writing of The Monuments Men book.  OUR BLOG NOW ALLOWS FOR READERS TO PROVIDE THEIR COMMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS, OR TO SHARE SOME CONNECTION THEY HAVE TO THIS GREAT STORY.  We want to hear from you often.  The blog has been incorporated into our new web design to make it easy to read and participate in this story and all the events that continue to unfold each day, especially as we march towards the launch of the new book.  We have created a Facebook Fan page for those that follow Facebook with a prominent link to make it easy to participate….and Twitter for those that are connected to this new and rapidly unfolding medium.  New entries and content from me, every day, and lots of photos as I travel and continue with research for my next book!

So please visit and motor your way around.  We’re excited to present to you this historic and currently unfolding story using all the modern tools of communication available to us!!!  And don’t forget…we want your participation and involvement so please share your comments and reactions with us.

Tonight PBS will broadcast to the nation our documentary film, The Rape of Europa. This wonderful film will be seen by millions of people unfamiliar with the subject of Hitler and the Nazis’ premeditated looting of Europe and their use of art as a weapon of propaganda to promote their racial theories. Making any film is a challenge. Making a great film, one good enough that PBS would allocate such a prominent slot for its airing during “sweeps” week, is a rare achievement which speaks to the importance of the subject matter. While this is a significant milestone, it is only the first of several that will follow.

We are very excited about providing that PBS audience, and of course people everywhere, the opportunity to learn more about this important story…about the heroes who saved so much of the art, the Monuments Men…about the behind the scenes stories we filmed…about the lessons learned, and those that were ignored…about how the events of World War II should have prepared us for the events that unfolded after the looting of the Iraq National Museum in 2003. These stories couldn’t be told in just two hours and for that reason, and for that reason we created The Rape of Europa Collector’s Edition which contains almost 7 additional hours of interviews, archival footage, and in-depth analysis of key events that were only briefly covered in the two hour film. One example of this extended content is our interview with Corine Wegener, a retired Army major who served in Iraq working to repair the damage to not only their national museum, but our country’s image. This unique DVD is only available on Amazon and is being offered at a special introductory price for a limited time. You can link to order that DVD by clicking on http://www.rapeofeuropa.com.

Of far greater importance is our educational program which is named The Greatest Theft in History Educational Program! This Educational Program is innovative and comprehensive providing a resource not currently available to educators and students. It provides on-line lesson plans customized for classroom instruction by our nationally acclaimed group of educators under the supervision of our Educational Advisory Board members. (To see the names of our team of educators and Educational Advisory Board and their CV’s, please click on the following links: http://www.greatesttheft.com/advisoryboard and http://www.greatesttheft.com/writingteam). This program will enable teachers to concentrate their time on teaching, not on looking for materials to teach. By making clips from our Educational DVD and other material we will be continually adding to the website along with other unique features, we have constructed a “one-stop does all” destination for anyone interested in learning more about the protection of cultural resources during armed conflict, the events of World War II and how critical a factor art was to Hitler and the Nazis’ plans, and of course the heroes of the story, the Monuments Men. Our hours of extended interviews and other materials will allow students and interested parties of all ages to participate in the writing of this final chapter to World War II. The students of today will be the ones assisting us in solving the remaining riddles and mysteries of this amazing chapter of the war including developing clues as to the whereabouts of so much of the still missing art and other cultural treasures stolen during the war.

We have constructed this Educational Program with affordability in mind by pricing the entire program at $35/ program which includes the almost 9 hour Educational DVD and access to the custom designed website which contains lesson plans and other teaching resources making it accessible for people of all ages and interests. Already the responses from teachers and other organizations has been gratifying and rewarding…but it is just the beginning.