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February 24, 2014 - November 17, 2019
And every piece that was brought out of a hole had to be taken somewhere.
Heinrich Hoffman,
The furnace was powered by coke, a coal product, and since there was an excess of coke at the mine, the nearby glass factory was up and running, too. Amid all the destruction and sorrow, where even a scrap of food or decent bed was difficult for most people to come by, the factory was churning out thousands of Coca-Cola bottles.
Eventually, the decision was made that all cultural objects, even those that belonged to Germany, would be returned to their country of origin.
James Rorimer received the French Legion of Honor, becoming the first Monuments Man bestowed with such a high honor.
More than anything, the Nazis robbed families: of their livelihoods, their opportunities, their heirlooms, their mementos, of the things that identified them and defined them as human beings.
That night, a Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz and a buck private in the U.S. Army—a former German Jew who had been forced out of his homeland by the ruthless Nazi purges—slept in beds reserved for the Kaiser of Germany. Even Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were never afforded such a luxury.
Monuments Man Stewart Leonard delivered the news to Göring and said afterward that he “looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.”4 The Reichsmarschall had fancied himself a Renaissance man; in the end, he was revealed to be nothing more than an unsophisticated and greedy fool.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Gestapo leader,
Hans Frank, the notorious Nazi governor-general
Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect and friend who had almost managed to take a stand against the Führer’s Nero Decree,
August Eigruber
Hermann Bunjes,
Bruno Lohse,
In May 2007, a safety deposit box he controlled was discovered at a bank in Zurich, Switzerland. Inside was a Camille Pissarro painting stolen by the Gestapo in 1938, as well as paintings by Monet and Renoir. Records showed that at least fourteen other paintings had been removed from the box since 1983. An international investigation continues.
Dr. Herbert Seiberl,
Karl Sieber,
unknown hero of Altaussee, mine director Dr. Emmerich Pöchmüller.
Dr. Hermann Michel,
Jacques Jaujard
Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich,
Rose Valland,
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States was transformed from a cultural backwater to the center stage of world culture and the arts. World War II had exposed millions of young American men and women to the art and architecture of Europe and Asia and almost overnight created an interest in and appreciation for the arts that would normally require generations to nurture. The “new” nation of America for the first time—and suddenly—had a broad audience that wanted to learn, to be exposed and thrilled, and to simply enjoy painting, music, and sculpture.
In fact, search the leadership rolls of any major U.S. cultural institution during the 1950s and 1960s and you are almost sure to find a former member of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the U.S. Army. And yet when I speak to these organizations, few of them are aware that one of their former directors or curators helped to preserve the world’s cultural heritage during and after the Second World War.
Harry learned another story about the mines in Heilbronn and Kochendorf. The lower levels of the mine, Harry knew, had been used as factories. The sixty-foot-wide by forty-foot-high chambers had been lined with concrete floors and electric lines to power the machinery. In the Kochendorf mine, one or more chambers had been designed as secret manufacturing centers for the mass production of a crucial Nazi invention: the jet engine. If the Nazis could have gotten the factory at Heilbronn running—they were supposedly just weeks away when the Americans arrived—it might have radically changed the
