The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, And The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History

by Robert M. Edsel

ad hoc

A general guidebook to conservation procedures had been culled from Stout’s expertise and writings on the subject. But the Monuments Men had no formal training. Most of the effort was being put into basics like listing the protected monuments in the various countries of Europe.

Geoffrey Webb,

Lord Metheun

Dixon-Spain,

Ronald Balfour,

He could be considered the archives and manuscripts expert of the group, the one among them more concerned with the safety of historical papers than the visual arts, and his greatest triumph—as Balfour himself had said on more than one occasion—was the accumulation of an eight-thousand volume library by the age of thirty-five.

Marvin Ross, a Harvard graduate and expert on Byzantine art,

Ralph Hammett and Bancel LaFarge, both architects and experts on buildings.

Walker Hancock, early forties, was a renowned sculptor of...

He was the artist of the group, and perhaps, George Stout realized, its most decorated member.

In 1925, Walker Hancock had won the prestigious Prix de Rome. In 1942, while in basic training, he received word that he had won a competition to design the Air Medal, one of the military’s highest honors. That award had unknowingly been his ticket

James Rorimer,

No one at Shrivenham had worked harder to get into the MFAA, and no one was working harder to hone his skills. If you put a job in front of James Rorimer, he would kill himself to get it done.

Robert Posey,

anyone could tell he wasn’t particularly well known in his field, which was architecture.

also claimed, in a lighter moment, to be the only person ever to destroy a tank in Pennsylvania. It turned out that, in his earlier military duties, he had designed an experimental bridge. It didn’t work, and the first tank to try to cross it had plunged straight into the river and sank. The other Monuments Men, Stout knew, didn’t know quite what to make of Robert Posey, but George Stout understood him. Posey was a quiet, blue collar, by-the-book farmboy from the hinterlands of America: much like Stout himself.

Balfour the British scholar. Hancock the good-natured artist. Rorimer the bulldog curator. Posey the Alabama farmboy. And, lurking somewhere in the back, dapper, pencil-mustached George Leslie Stout. Stout

Woolley took inordinate pride in the fact that only three people ran the command office for the whole conservation operation—and one of them was Lady Woolley, his wife. With that staff, how could the effort be taken seriously? “We protected the arts at the lowest possible cost.”5 That was Woolley’s motto.

To be successful in the field, a Monuments officer would need not just knowledge; he would need passion, smarts, flexibility, an understanding of military culture: the way of the gun, the chain of command.

The MFAA list of Protected Monuments was rejected by field officers as too comprehensive and detrimental to battlefield maneuvers.

To most soldiers, war was circumstance.

The watershed event came soon after, when the Nazis seized the Veit Stoss Altarpiece—a Polish national treasure—and transported it to Nuremberg, Germany.

But even that was enough for the art world to know that museums and collections, large and small, were being systematically dismantled and transported to Germany.

War did not come like a hurricane, Rorimer realized, destroying everything in its path. It came like a tornado, touching down in patches, taking with it one life while leaving the next person unharmed. There was only one constant, it seemed, in that wilderness of destruction and reprieve: the churches.

In violation of the Rules of Land Warfare set forth in the Hague Conventions, German snipers and observers regularly hid in the towers, picking off troops and calling down mortar fire on advancing units. The

The 29th Division had lost more men at Saint-Lô than they had on Omaha Beach.

anything, even more terrible than Rorimer described. Later estimates put the destruction at 95 percent, a scale of annihilation rivaled only by the worst of the firebombed German towns. The great Irish writer Samuel Beckett, an expat in France, described Saint-Lô as “the Capital of the Ruins.”3

Rorimer’s inventory of destroyed objects included not just the town’s ancient architecture but hundreds of years of archives, an astonishing collection of ceramics, numerous private art collections, and, perhaps most sadly, a large selection of illuminated manuscripts prepared and collected by the monks at the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel.

The capture of Saint-Lô was a linchpin of Allied success, giving them the high ground from which they could pinpoint artillery

There weren’t enough “Off Limits” signs, someone said, for all the damaged churches, much less the other buildings. Cameras had supposedly been ordered for Hammett and Posey, but they still hadn’t arrived. And nobody had a radio. Theirs was a solitary task. They weren’t a unit; they were individuals with individual territories and individual goals and methods.

am impressed with the slightness of difference between nations, at least between civilized nations.

Bruges Madonna, the only sculpture by Michelangelo to leave Italy during his lifetime,

Walker Hancock

Stewart Leonard,

Captain Robert Posey,

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, more commonly referred to as the Ghent Altarpiece, was Belgium’s most important and beloved artistic treasure. Almost

It would transform painting and usher in the Northern Renaissance, a golden age of Dutch culture that rivaled the Italian Renaissance farther south.

Hitler knew it was impossible to steal renowned masterpieces on the scale of the Ghent Altarpiece without drawing the condemnation of the world. While he had the conqueror’s mentality—he believed he was entitled to the spoils of war, and he was determined to have them—Hitler and the Nazis had gone to great lengths to establish new laws and procedures to “legalize” the looting activities that would follow. This included forcing the conquered countries to give him certain works as a term of their surrender. Eastern European countries like Poland were destined under Hitler’s plan to become industrial and agricultural wastelands, where Slavic slaves would produce consumer goods for the master race.

Kümmel Report

The inventory listed every work of art in the Western world—France, the Netherlands, Britain, and even the United States (which Kümmel said possessed nine such works)—that rightly belonged to Germany.

Under Hitler’s definition, this included every work taken from Germany since 1500, every work by any artist of German or Austrian descent, every work commissioned or completed in Germany, and every work deemed to have been executed in a Germanic style. The Ghent Altarpiece was clearly a touchstone and defining emblem of B...

The seizure of the Compiègne railcar was proof that Germany had overturned the disastrous “crime of Compiègne,” and had crushed its hated neighbor. But it also proved something else: that nothing was too big, or too sacred, for the Nazis to steal.

The Ghent Altarpiece, that great masterpiece that had changed the course of painting forever, thus represented two of Hitler’s enduring quests: to right the historic “wrongs” of the Treaty of Versailles, and to add an undisputed world treasure to his Führermuseum in Linz.

The Louvre was so massive that counting each bullet hole would have taken them a year.

The evacuation had been an extraordinary operation, overseen by one of the great heroes of the French cause, Jacques Jaujard, director of the French National Museums.

Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous painting, had been loaded by ambulance stretcher into the back of a truck in the dead of night. A curator climbed in the back as well; the truck was sealed to provide a stable climate. Upon arriving at its destination, the painting was fine but the curator nearly unconscious. There hadn’t been enough air for him to breathe.

a true hero emerged: the art official Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich.

protection of cultural material,” Wolff-Metternich wrote, “is an undisputed obligation which is equally binding on any European nation at war. I could imagine no better way of serving my own country than by making myself responsible for the proper observance of this principle.”

The Nazis were—what is that delightful English language phrase?—paper-hangers. They were very bureaucratic.