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February 24, 2014 - November 17, 2019
That’s all Jaujard would say, that he and Wolff-Metternich killed the Nazi threat against the French state collections with a thousand paper cuts.
he had a network of museum personnel who worked as his eyes and ears; that he had contacts within the French bureaucracy; that one of his closest associates, the art patron Albert Henraux, was an active member of the French Resistance.
He risked his career, maybe even his life, Jaujard had said of him. The statement was true for both men.
Jaujard’s violent denunciation of the theft of the Ghent Altarpiece cost him his position, too. In protest, the staffs of all the French museums quit en masse. That’s how important Jacques Jaujard was to the French cultural community. The Germans were stunned; Jaujard was reinstated. Thereafter, his position was nearly inviolate.
Siegfried Line.
At Normandy, the Allies had crashed into the German lines in overpowering waves; at the Siegfried Line, they rolled to a stop in staggered units, their supplies and momentum spent.
Aachen was the seat of power of the Holy Roman Empire, which Hitler referred to as the First Reich.
This wasn’t France; it was Germany. From Hancock’s perspective, it seemed the prevailing attitude was that Aachen deserved everything the Allies could throw at her and more.
Suermondt’s Rosetta Stone
the items in red, which Hancock recognized immediately as the museum’s most important works, had been moved to Siegen, a city about one hundred miles east behind enemy lines.
To see a painting of this quality leaning against the wall of a command post amid the bullets and the grime was to understand that great works of art were part of the world. They were objects. They were fragile. They were lonely, small, unprotected. A child on a playground looks strong, but a child wandering alone down Madison Avenue in New York City—that’s terrifying.
George Stout had just been assigned to the Twelfth as their Monuments Man. In short, his worst fear had come true: He’d been kicked upstairs to management. Hancock had noticed Stout was in no hurry to head back to Paris to assume that command.
Before the war, much of the artistic wealth of Paris had rested in the hands of its prominent citizens and art dealers—the Rothschilds, David-Weill, Rosenberg, Wildenstein, Seligman, Kann—all of them Jewish. Under Nazi law, Jews weren’t allowed to hold property, so the collections had been “appropriated” by the German state. When the looters had exhausted those collections, the confiscations trickled down to the lower-level Jewish aristocracy, and then to the Jewish middle class, and finally to anyone who even had a Jewish-sounding name—or possessed something the Gestapo wanted. In the end, it
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The Battle of Hürtgen Forest,
Metz,
“the army is better than college for meeting people you enjoy knowing. There seems to be a closer common bond.”3 And he hadn’t been referring to his fellow Monuments Men.
As the cemeteries attested, hardly a generation had lived here in peace since Attila plunged the Roman Empire into darkness.
“The War to End All Wars.” But at Montsec the memorial to the fallen heroes of World War I had been chipped to hell by the bullets of this war.
Christmas was just another workday, just as it had been growing up in Alabama. In a good year back then, little Robert got a handkerchief and an orange. One year his father fashioned a little cart—although come to think of it that was in the spring, not at Christmastime—and the children took turns being pulled around the yard by the family goat. Then he died. His father and the goat.
im not going to lie. i laughed in spite of myself. his dad AND the goat ?!
General Patton, upon seeing the Roman ruins at Agrigento, remarked to a local expert, “Seventh Army didn’t cause that destruction, did it, sir?” The man replied, “No sir, that happened in the last war.” “What war was that?” “The Second Punic War.”5
ERR (Reich Leader Rosenberg’s Special Task Force)
The official role of the ERR was to provide material for Alfred Rosenberg’s “scholarly” institutes, whose prime objective was to scientifically prove Jewish racial inferiority. It didn’t take long for the Nazis to realize the ERR was the perfect cover for moving valuable artwork and cultural treasures out of France.
That was the way to handle Lohse. Never show fear; never back down. If the Nazis discovered they could push you, they would push you to your death. You had to be too much trouble to make it easy, but not so much they grew tired of you.
For the first time in months, he felt himself being drawn into something larger. Just seeing the warehouses the Nazis had filled with “confiscated” items brought home to him the size and complexity of their looting operation. This wasn’t accidental damage or angry retaliation, but an enormous web of deliberate deceit that stretched all over Paris and down all the roads back to the Fatherland and all the way to Hitler’s office in Berlin.
They delayed the art train for this? Rorimer thought, his heart sinking inside him. It’s all worthless. It’s all just junk. Then he stopped himself. It wasn’t worthless; these objects were people’s belongings—the detritus that had made up their lives. The Nazis had gone into people’s homes and simply cleared them out, all the way down to the family photographs.
Rose Valland
Hermann Bunjes, the corrupt Kunstschutz official who had schemed with von Behr to requisition the museum. He was stern and unkind, very young but already stooped beneath the weight of his perpetual disgust. Bunjes, who had been a minor scholar so much like Rose Valland herself, had sold out everything he believed in for the illusion of Nazi power.
Destiny is not one push, she thought as she waited to cross a quiet street on that cold Paris evening years later, but a thousand small moments that through insight and hard work you line up in the right direction, like a magnet does with metal shavings.
Hermann Göring, the Nazi Reichsmarschall and Hitler’s second in command, was a vain and greedy man.
They had no respect for Rosenberg at Nazi headquarters. The whole world, Valland thought, hated that man.
In the residential areas, almost every window also displayed a white banner featuring a blue star and a red border. The banner meant someone in the household was in the service. If the banner featured a gold star and a yellow border, someone in that household had been killed in action. When
The Madonna wasn’t art to them, he realized; it represented their lives, their community, their collective soul. Why hide her in a cellar, they were thinking, when we need her now more than ever? She had triumphed. They couldn’t acknowledge, after all they had been through, that the danger could return.
Sheldon Keck,
Lamont Moore,
Private First Class Lincoln Kirstein,
He also cofounded a literary review, Hound and Horn, which was so well respected that it published original pieces by world-renowned writers like the novelist Alan Tate and the poet e.e. cummings. Hound and Horn also published America’s first warning (written under an assumed name by Alfred Barr, the first director of the new Museum of Modern Art) about Hitler’s attitude toward art.
This was a common recurrence in his life: manic activity followed by a grinding sense of despair. His
manic periods had resulted in astonishing cultural successes, but they usually ended in a gathering gloom and sense of wasted opportunity. These depressive states resulted in a persistent wandering of attention, a seeming inability to stick to things.
the MFAA grind: finding and interviewing reluctant officials until the right person was found. It was a little like a game of ping-pong: Posey would get a name, find that person, gain a little information and a few more names, find the new people and ask more questions until, through hard work and repetition, he began to figure the situation out. Rarely would the answer come from one source. More often, through a series of mostly unhelpful interviews, a complete picture would slowly, ever so slowly, emerge.
It was punishable by death, or at least assignment to the Eastern front, which was worse than death, to suggest the Allies could ever breach the Fatherland. Even to prepare for such a possibility was treason.
There is not one type of German, went the thought. There are many who were never Nazis, but remained silent out of fear. Nor is there one type of Nazi. There are those who went along to survive, or for career advancement, or out of a sheepish devotion to the status quo. Then there are the hardcases, the true believers. It is possible we will find what we are looking for only when the last true believer is dead.
Captain Walter Huchthausen, an architecture professor at the University of Minnesota.
The variety of items stolen was exceeded only by the volume. After all, five years was an eternity to commit robbery, and there were thousands of people involved in the looting operations: art experts, guards, packers, engineers. Thousands of trains, tens of thousands of gallons of fuel. Could a million objects have been taken? It seemed impossible, but Stout was beginning to think the Nazis had done it. Their appetite for plunder was boundless, and they were, after all, a model of efficiency, economy, and brutality.
historical buildings, monuments, and works of art? Victory on the battlefield was far different than a victory in the preservation of mankind’s cultural legacy, and the results would be measured far differently, too. Sometimes Stout felt he was fighting another war entirely, a war within a war, a backward-circling eddy in a downward-rushing stream. What if we win the war, he thought, but lose the last five hundred years of our cultural history on our watch?
It is amazing how the world can change, he thought, during the life span of a fruitcake.
evacuation from Carinhall, Hermann Göring’s hunting lodge/art gallery/imperial palace located in the Schorfheide Forest northeast of Berlin.
Several astonishing small paintings—including six by Hans Memling and one by Rogier van der Weyden—went with him and his wife. They were her financial safety net, Göring told her, in case of disaster.
It was a frankly ostentatious display of abundance over quality, for the Reichsmarschall had no eye for true genius. Most
Much of the heavier statuary and decorative works had been buried on the grounds.
On Göring’s orders, Luftwaffe experts had rigged the estate for destruction. The Reichsmarschall had no intention of letting his prized possessions fall into Soviet hands—even if that meant blowing up his imperial hall and everything left in it.
