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

by Robert M. Edsel

Defeatism was not an option, but neither was complacency.

Several survivors, shrunken to mere skeletons, pulled themselves up on shriveled legs and saluted the generals as they passed. The generals walked on in stony silence, their lips drawn tight. Several members of their staff, all of them hardened by war, openly wept. The hard-nosed Patton, “Old Blood and Guts,” ducked behind a building and threw up.

The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room where they [had] piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’ ”4 He wrote more simply to his wife, Mamie, “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could exist in this world! It was horrible.”5 Eisenhower had no intention of allowing the Nazis any refuge or scrap of hope.

“A number of our officers went up to see the camp,” he wrote. “I did not go, because much of my work depended on friendly relations with German civilians, and I feared that after seeing the horrors of the camp my own feelings toward even these innocent people would be affected. (Numbers of our officers who did go could not eat for some time afterwards; some survived on whisky alone for days.)”

history is more often than not a messy combination of intention, courage, preparation, and chance.