Their initial responsibility was to mitigate combat damage, primarily to structures—churches, museums, and other important monuments. As the war progressed and the German border was breached, their focus shifted to locating movable works of art and other cultural items stolen or otherwise missing. Harvard alumni played important roles in creating and staffing the MFAA, among them Paul Sachs ’00, director of the Fogg Art Museum, Mason Hammond ’25 (future Pope professor of the Latin language and literature), Lincoln Kirstein ’30 (future founder of the New York City Ballet), and James Rorimer ’27 (future director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). But the hero of this new work is George Stout, A.M. ’29, formerly lecturer on design and conservator at the Fogg. These excerpts from throughout the book (reprinted with permission) focus on his nearly forgotten role.

The Art Army: Harvard’s Monuments Men at War

While the Royal Air Force shot down his fighter planes in the Battle of Britain, Field Marshal Hermann Goering sifted through piles of stolen pictures at Paris’s Jeu de Paume. His country palace of Karinhall had a few empty acres of wall space. The Nazis spent so much time looting art, you wonder if the war might have gone better for them had they concentrated exclusively on winning it. Instead of adorning the new Reich’s cultural citadels, the loot ended up stuffed into tunnels, mines, bunkers, caves and castles. Remarkably, thousands of works survived, thanks in part to the “Monuments Men,” who were attached to a cultural preservation unit sanctioned by President Roosevelt and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. They helped safeguard Europe’s treasures in the chaotic end and aftermath of the war.

Goering Shopped for Art as RAF Shot Down His Pilots: Interview

This gripping history of the soldiers who worked during the war to track down and save imperiled masterworks of European art seized by the Nazi’s, is very good reading. Edsel’s account takes the more general tale told in Lynn Nicholas’ excellent The Rape of Europa and makes it more personal and dramatic. A fascinating topic and well told to boot.

Non Fiction: The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History By Robert Edsel

Monuments Men's discoveries included five rail cars containing 148 crates of stolen paintings. In some of the crates were the holdings of the major art dealers of Paris seized by a special German "cultural conservation program." Two of France's greatest treasures — the Bayeux Tapestry and Da Vinci's Mona Lisa — remained in France during the war, preserved by French museum officials. But, in Hitler's view of the future, they would become treasures of the great German empire. The world's outstanding culture center would be the Fuhrer-museum in Linz, his Austrian hometown, which had became part of the Third Reich when his troops marched into Austria in 1938.

On May 26, 1944, 11 days before the one called D-Day, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an unusual order: His officers must "protect and respect" the cultural monuments that lay in the path of war. The job of carrying out that order fell mostly to the uncommon soldiers who left their work in the world of art to volunteer for a little-known U.S. Army unit, the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section. They called themselves the Monuments Men.

You know that sense of personal loss you get when you're paging through a monograph on a favourite artist, and come upon a grainy old black-and-white photo of a painting with the legend, "lost or destroyed during World War II"? If you're grateful there aren't more of those moments, you can thank a long-forgotten army corps called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section (MFAA).

A small band of Allied curators in uniform ranged across Europe in a race to save some of our highest achievements

Adolf Hitler's plan for the subjugation of the world included its culture and treasures. Art was to be taken from conquered countries and stored in Germany until Hitler could build the world's largest museum complex in his hometown of Linz, Austria. It was the job of the Monuments Men (as they came to be called) to track down these missing treasures during the latter years of the war. This story concentrates on Northwest Europe only, where men (and at least one woman) from 13 nations, largely from professional arts-related backgrounds and past combat age, effectively saved much of European culture from a gang of murderous thieves. This intriguing story, told largely through letters written by the rescuers and now in various government archives, will appeal to many general and military history readers.

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel with Bret Witter

We tend in these permissive times to embrace an expansive and often sentimental definition of heroism, in the process elevating to heroic status men and women whose actions, however admirable, remarkable and courageous, fall short of the self-sacrificial. Were the Allied (mostly American) soldiers who rescued works of art stolen by the Nazis before and during World War II really heroes, as Robert M. Edsel claims in "The Monuments Men," or were they good men -- aided by one resourceful, determined French woman -- who were simply, in the best sense of the phrase, just doing their jobs?

Tracking Nazi Loot By Jonathan Yardley

Edsel says the book gives readers a more personal glimpse into the lives of the Monuments Men than his past projects. Edsel co-produced a documentary on the subject, The Rape of Europa, which he says offers a scholarly telling of the story. "It does explain about how the Monuments Men were created, but it tells stories about these figures in academic terms," he says. "You have to tell the story in a way that people can connect with it."

Dallas author's 'Monuments Men' is a portrait of art protectors during World War II

As part of his twisted vision of the future, Adolf Hitler planned to construct the world's finest museum — the eponymous Führermuseum — in his hometown of Linz, Austria. By stocking it with the world's greatest works of art, he hoped to showcase the superiority of Aryan artists over their supposedly "degenerate" Jewish counterparts. Within months of invading Poland in 1939, Nazi troops began seizing selected pieces — including paintings by Raphael, Rembrandt and Vermeer — from churches, museums and private art collections. The artworks were then hidden in mines and remote castles for safekeeping until the war ended.

Time Magazine - "Allied Art Hunters: Saving Beauty" by William Adams

Edsel tells of search for art looted in WWII By CARL HARTMAN For The Associated Press "The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History" (Center Street, 473 pages, $26.99), by Robert M. Edsel with Bret Witter: When Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II, special units went along to seize works of art, says author Robert M. Edsel. Other Europeans hid masterpieces with limited success. The Germans' booty began what Edsel calls "the greatest treasure hunt in history" - still going on 70 years later. An American-Israeli organization estimates the Germans may have stolen as many as 1.5 million objects, with 100,000 of museum quality still missing. Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady With an Ermine" turned up in the house of Hans Frank, who ran Poland for the Nazis, and today's treasure hunters still wonder what happened to Raphael's "Portrait of a Young Man," once held by Frank. Both paintings were treasures of the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland's art capital.

Edsel tells of search for art looted in WWII By CARL HARTMAN For The Associated Press September 10 2009

"WWII was the most destructive war in history and caused the greatest dislocation of cultural artifacts. Hundreds of thousands of items remain missing. The main burden fell to a few hundred men and women, curators and archivists, artists and art historians from 13 nations. Their task was to save and preserve what they could of Europe's great art, and they were called the Monuments Men. Edsel has presented their achievements in documentaries and photographs. He and Witter (coauthor of the bestselling Dewey) are no less successful here. Focusing on the organization's role in northwest Europe, they describe the Monuments Men from their initial mission to limit combat damage to structures and artifacts to their changed focus of locating missing items. Most had been stolen by the Nazis. In southern Germany alone, over a thousand caches emerged, containing everything from church bells to insect collections. The story is both engaging and inspiring. In the midst of a total war, armies systematically sought to mitigate cultural loss."

Publishers Weekly, June 22, 2009

"The contribution of the Monuments Men in saving many of the world’s greatest cultural treasures looted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during the war stagger the imagination. This is no small story about World War II. In fact, I can’t imagine a bigger, more important story about World War II than this one. Mr. Edsel’s heroic efforts to rescue the memory and deeds of the Monuments Men is a riveting adventure in itself. This is one of the great stories in history and should be known by every American."

Dr. Bruce Cole, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and President and CEO of The American Revolutionary Center

"After World War Two I served as a British member of the 'Monuments' section in Germany. Our task, I believe, was truly important - we were restoring to Europe evidence of its own civilization, which the War seemed virtually to have destroyed - and I was lucky to have had a chance to participate. It is excellent that Mr. Edsel has now recorded this remarkable episode, and I am grateful to him for devoting so much energy to telling the stories of those involved."

British Monuments Woman Anne Olivier Popham Bell