We don’t tend to think of World War II as a setting for one of history’s biggest art thefts. Now some veterans of that war are being honored for recovering some of the most famous – and not so famous – art of the Western world: so much of it, in fact, that there’s a good chance you’ve seen some of the thousands of works they have tracked down.
As German forces bombed and invaded Europe, they also removed an estimated five million works of art and cultural objects from museums, churches, universities and homes. The take included masterpieces by Johannes Vermeer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Jan van Eyck, along with works by lesser-known artists. Precious religious items, including silver crosses and ancient Torah scrolls, were also swept up, as were valuable pieces of furniture and rare books: spoils of war that represented centuries of Western culture.
Much of the artwork belonged to Jewish families, whose possessions were deemed “ownerless.” Thousands of choice paintings were shipped to grace the estate of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s deputy, who oversaw much of the stealing. Others were earmarked for a museum Hitler planned to curate.
The looting was on a scale that appalled even those, like Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had seen the atrocities of the concentration camps and battlefields firsthand. In “caves, in mines, and isolated mountain hide-outs we found that Hitler and his gang … had stored art treasures filched from their rightful owners throughout conquered Europe,” Eisenhower told an audience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in April 1946. (Listen to the whole speech here.)
By “we” he meant the “Monuments Men” — short for the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section of the Allied military effort, a relatively unsung group of 345 men and women from 13 countries who recovered thousands of stolen artworks between 1943 and 1951.
The drama, danger and importance of this mission are set down in the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, the basis of a movie now in production starring George Clooney, who is also its director and a writer of the screenplay. The book’s author, Robert M. Edsel, is a businessman from Texas who has made this slice of history his life’s work; he also founded and runs the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art.
Mr. Edsel writes that the unit began as a small group of determined arts professionals – including architects, designers and museum staff – in uniform. During combat, their task was to identify and protect museums, churches and other significant “monuments” from damage. Often the danger came from Allied troops, some of whom bombed, marched and billeted with little knowledge of their surroundings.
As the Allies pressed farther into occupied territory, the team focused more on determining what had been stolen and where it was hidden. After 1945, about 60 members of the unit were still fanned out across Europe, joined at many points by civilians. Both during and after the war, the job required a combination of soldiering, art history and gumshoe detective work involving interrogations, dangerous travel and interminable paper trails.
Many in the unit were linked to some of the world’s foremost cultural institutions. When Second Lt. James J. Rorimer, of Comm Zone and the Seventh Army, entered the war, he was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; later he would become its director. Other members were G.I.’s handpicked for their special skills. One of them was 19-year-old Pfc. Harry Ettlinger, of the Seventh Army, a German Jew whose family had fled to New York in 1938. When he was posted in Germany in May 1945, “somebody told me that a small group needed somebody who could read and speak German, so I volunteered,” Mr. Ettlinger, 87, recalled in a recent interview, his energy, memory and soft German accent intact. He is one of six Monuments Men still living.
Mr. Ettlinger was born in Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany, about 50 miles from Stuttgart, or “Mercedes country,” as he called it. But life in the United States was difficult for the Ettlingers after they landed in Manhattan.
“Someone said to my father, ‘Go west,’” Mr. Ettlinger said. “We went west, all right: to Newark.”
His father had owned a women’s clothing store in Karlsruhe; in New Jersey, he became a night watchman at a luggage factory, and Mr. Ettlinger’s mother worked a drill press in a jewelry factory. Mr. Ettlinger and his two brothers did odd jobs to help their parents until he was drafted in 1944, after graduating from high school.
On Jan. 28, 1945, a bureaucratic technicality meant Mr. Ettlinger was pulled out of a truck near the French-Belgian border, headed for the front. It was his 19th birthday. Later, he learned he had missed the tail end of the vicious weeks of fighting known as the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last offensive. He was moved to a barracks in Germany and “totally unassigned” for several months as the war drew to a close, so he was thrilled when he heard about the Monuments opportunity. “I was like a fish out of water,” he said. “It was not very comfortable.”
James Rorimer was the first member of the unit Mr. Ettlinger found to talk to. “I told him that while I am not geared to go into the art world, I had an upbringing that let me appreciate art,” he said. Soon after meeting Mr. Rorimer, Mr. Ettlinger found himself interviewing Heinrich Hoffmann, who had been Hitler’s personal photographer, about where requisitioned art might be found. He also accompanied Mr. Rorimer to Neuschwanstein, an ornate 19th-century castle high in the Bavarian Alps, where the Germans had stored thousands of paintings. You’d recognize it: it was a model for Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland.
Mr. Ettlinger also worked for about 10 months in less glamorous conditions – two salt mines in Heilbronn, Germany, and Altaussee, Austria, where the Germans had crated and stored thousands of paintings and other items. He soon learned that the salt mines were cool, dark and neither too humid nor too dry, so much of what was hidden there was still in decent condition. But getting it out was a daunting task. Mr. Ettlinger said his first assignment at Heilbronn had been to oversee a team unearthing box after box that held the stained-glass windows of the cathedral in Strasbourg.
The black-and-white photos of Mr. Ettlinger in this post were taken for a 1946 report on the unit’s work in the salt mines, and the painting he’s holding — a self-portrait, circa 1650, by Rembrandt van Rijn — was one of several things specially unpacked for the report’s photographer. It belonged to the museum in Karlsruhe, Mr. Ettlinger’s hometown. But he had never seen it: as a Jew, he had been forbidden by law to visit the museum, where it hangs again today. “I have been to see it twice now,” he said.
Last December, Mr. Ettlinger accepted an award on behalf of all the Monuments Men from the American Jewish Historical Society in New York.
On the night of the awards dinner in Manhattan, Mr. Ettlinger looked dapper in a dark suit, surrounded by family, but he warned the many people trying to shake his hand that he had a cold, possibly picked up at a bridge tournament a few days before. Those greeting him included the 25-year-old granddaughter of Mr. Rorimer, his old boss, and the family of another Monuments man, Col. Seymour Pomrenze, who received a posthumous award.
“I personally value and respect that, as an American, I am in a country that enacted such a unique policy,” Mr. Ettlinger said. “We Americans should be proud of it, the fact that we did not act like our predecessors did for thousands of years.”
“We were not completely successful,” he said, adding, “But we were more effective in gathering the small items, sculptures and the paintings, and getting them back.”
Mr. Ettlinger referred again to Eisenhower’s commitment to the project. The general’s granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, who was on hand to present the award to Mr. Ettlinger, said he had seen it as part of “the survival of Western civilization as we knew it.”
Ms. Eisenhower said the recovery of even some artworks had required a vision that spanned centuries in both directions. “It took a kind of presence of mind of the Allies,” she said. “They had their eye on the future in a way we don’t, perhaps, as much today. They were thinking about what kind of a world they wanted when they came out of the cataclysm.”
Both Ms. Eisenhower and Mr. Edsel, the Monuments Men’s champion, stressed two points: that while the Monuments Men’s work was unprecedented, hundreds of thousands of works are still missing, and that “no similar effort has been made by the U.S. in any subsequent conflict,” Mr. Edsel said. He cited as an example the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, when looters nearly emptied the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.
The idea of having the presence of mind to protect works of art during combat, or “total war,” as Ms. Eisenhower put it, is hard to fathom — yet that is what the Monuments Men began by doing, and directed other soldiers to do as well. Art appreciation may feel like a peacetime luxury, something for which we have this team, among others, to thank. But its members also saw art as something to refresh a battered population in the midst of conflict. Here again, Ms. Eisenhower said, is something her grandfather had thought about deeply. “If you know what a people hold dear,” she paraphrased him as saying,”you know what they’ll fight for.”
