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

by Robert M. Edsel

When Germany overran France in June 1940, Hitler was determined to exact a symbolic measure of revenge by ordering his troops to locate the railcar in which the humiliating armistice had been signed in 1918, ordered the walls of the building in which it was housed torn down, and had the railcar hauled to the precise spot in Compiègne, France, where it had been positioned twenty-two years before. Sitting in the exact same chair as Marshal Foch, the French hero of World War I who had been the victor that day, Hitler forced the French to sign an armistice. After the signing ceremony, Hitler ordered that the railcar be taken to Berlin where it was towed down the city’s historic street, Unter den Linden, through the Brandenburg Gate, then put on display at the Lustgarten on the banks of the river Spree. 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.