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February 24, 2014 - November 17, 2019
It seemed appropriate, as the statue had long been shrouded in secrecy. Michelangelo had insisted, as an item of the sale, that no one be allowed to view it without permission. In other words, it could not be simply placed out for public viewing. Some scholars thought this was out of shame at the quality of the finished product, but there’s a more likely explanation. The sculpture had been promised to the pope, but was sold secretly to a Flemish merchant family, the Mouscrons, when the young Michelangelo, only in his early twenties, received a financial offer he couldn’t refuse.
Rosenberg,” she said, showing him the first photograph in a large stack, “the man Hitler selected to oversee the spiritual and philosophic training of the Nazis. In other words, the chief racist.”
The Astronomer
This one went to Hitler. They say he coveted it more than any work in France.
castle at Neuschwanstein. “At this castle,” Valland said, “the Nazis have gathered thousands of works of art stolen from France.
Albert Speer,
official party member number 474,481—but he had been close with Hitler since the mid-1930s.
this disagrees with Wikipedia which says he joined in 1931
Speer hurriedly composed a twenty-two-page memo on the apocalyptic effects of the planned destruction.
Walker Hancock, the Monuments Man for U.S. First Army,
Cologne.
George Stout estimated 75 percent of the monuments in the area were destroyed, but that didn’t tell the whole story. Those spared were on the outskirts of town. In the center of the city, there wasn’t even anything to examine.
It was almost as if there was a message in this madness. We could have spared any building, the untouched cathedral seemed to imply. This is the only one we chose.
The Allies were angry. There was no other conclusion. The Allies were angry at Germany and everything in it. The anger had been building for months, maybe since Normandy, but it had accelerated during the terrible winter.
Those left seemed scarred and bitter, or worse.
To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won… it was unheard of, but that is exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.
Entering the dark hallway, he ascended a small wooden staircase and moments later stood awestruck in the tiny upper room where Ludwig van Beethoven had been born.
Even in Germany, slivers of hope and beauty—and happiness, and art—survived.
Ronald Balfour, had been killed by shrapnel to the spine while working in the German town of Cleves.
Balfour’s death was a reminder of the danger of the mission; his time apart from her, he knew, could very well be more than a temporary respite than the long life of love and happiness he hoped for. And Balfour’s death no doubt reinforced the loneliness of the job, the isolation from friends and companions even in the middle of a million-man army. It had been ten days since Ronald Balfour died, and this was the first time any of his fellow Monuments Men on the front had heard of it.
By the next morning, Hancock was passing detailed information on art repositories to the advanced units of First Army. Within a few days, he had transmitted to frontline troops the location of 109 repositories east of the Rhine, doubling the number of known repositories in all of Germany.
Instead of the newly unfurled tricolor as in France, each house flies the white flag of unconditional surrender.…
Trier,
one of the most historic cities in northern Europe. “Trier stood one thousand three hundred years before Rome; may it continue to stand and enjoy eternal peace,” read a famous inscription on a house on the main market square.
The founding date was a fabrication, but Trier indeed had been a garrison town even before the arrival of Roman legionnaires in the t...
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Kirstein suspected the city was in worse shape than at any time since the Middle Ages.
“The desolation is frozen,” he wrote, “as if the moment of combustion was suddenly arrested, and the air had lost its power to hold atoms together and various centers of gravity had a dogfight for matter, and matter lost. For
The home of Karl Marx, who was born in Trier in 1818, had been turned into a newspaper office by the Nazis. The Allies flattened it in an aerial bombardment.
Posey’s previous historical notes on Nancy and Metz had proven popular, so by the time Third Army reached Trier, he and Kirstein had compiled a treatise on the history and importance of the city and its buildings.
They feared the troops, having crossed into enemy territory, would be less careful with historic monuments and more inclined to casual looting. By educating them about a grander, pre-Nazi German culture, the Monuments Men hoped to create interest and appreciation, which would translate into good behavior.
The model established in Trier—education coupled with local participation—would be used by the Monuments Men of Third Army for the rest of the campaign.
Purple Hearts were for troops wounded by the enemy in combat, not for soldiers who fell into snow-covered holes. But
“Wonderful,” he’d say, coming back with food in hand. “We haven’t had fresh milk in months.”
i love this scene with the dentist
They robbed the silver service from the Rothschilds, then used it like ordinary flatware in their Aeroclub in Berlin. To see them dribbling food off those priceless forks made me sick.”
“Here,” Kirstein would write, “in the cold Moselle spring, far from the murder of the cities, worked a German scholar in love with France, passionately in love, with that hopeless, frustrated fatalism” so characteristic of the Germans.
They had no idea that they had spent the afternoon speaking with Göring’s corrupt Kunstschutz official, and one of the top men in the notorious looting operation at the Jeu de Paume.
stacked floor to ceiling, Red Cross care packages intended for American prisoners of war.
“repple depple”
She was a hero. Perhaps the hero of French culture.
man aware of his predicament but not yet capable of grasping that his empire was doomed.
Hitler, a man of lethal anger but not yet debilitating paranoia,
And after all I do not want to be one of the swine in your entourage who tell you they believe in victory without believing in it.”
did he reslly say this ?
“Nero Decree.”
People were packed in so tightly that survival under such conditions for a day seemed a miracle.
That was the strange part of the occurrence, the impact of hate and fear in hundreds of hearts close about us and we the targets of it all.
Hancock nodded, but said nothing. Sankt Maria had been destroyed. These doors, he suspected, were all that remained.
He looked back one last time. In the slanting evening light, the hill looked like any other in Germany, beaten and desolate and strewn with debris. There was nothing to indicate the marvels and the horrors inside.
Merkers,
Room #8, the great Nazi treasure room.
Perera reported an initial count of 8,198 gold bars, 711 bags of American twenty-dollar gold pieces, over 1,300 bags of other gold coins, hundreds of bags of foreign currency, and $2.76 billion in Reichsmarks, along with various foreign currencies, silver and platinum, and the stamping plates the German government used to print money.
A bank official found in the mine, Herr Veick, had confirmed that it represented most of the reserves of Germany’s national treasury.
