Back in 1907, Adolf Hitler was an 18-year-old aspiring painter. Assembling a modest portfolio of his work, he applied to Vienna’s prestigious Academy of Fine Arts.
He was rejected.
Hitler was furious. And decades later, after he had switched his aspirations to politics, and became Fuhrer, he decided to exact revenge by banning Europe’s “degenerate” modern art — while stealing its old masterpieces for his personal, future museum.
And that’s the startling starting point of Robert M. Edsel’s “The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History: The Story of the Monuments Men.”
Edsel has written about this piece of World War II history before. One of his books inspired the 2014 George Clooney movie, “The Monuments Men.” But this book, aimed at slightly younger audiences, focuses the story on the quest itself, as the Allies rushed to recover the Germans’ astonishing spoils of war, even as the bombs still fell.
The Nazis started looting Europe almost as soon as they came to power. Teams picked through public galleries and ransacked the private collections of wealthy Jewish people. Often, greedy Field Marshall Hermann Gőring would accompany them, selecting pieces for his own home.
Sometimes, though, the Germans got there too late. When they arrived at the Louvre in 1940, they found it mostly bare; dedicated curators had already removed the treasures for safekeeping. The museum’s most famous resident, the Mona Lisa, waited out the war hidden in a home in southwestern France, where it graced the bedroom of a teenage girl.
But as World War II continued, the Allied armies realized that not only were millions of pieces of art disappearing, but millions more would soon be at risk. What would happen to them once all of Europe became a bombed-out battleground?
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower even sent a memo to his commanders, reminding them that, once they landed in Europe, “inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to preserve and respect these symbols whenever possible.”
Helping them do that would be a new Allied unit formed in 1943, the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section.
Nicknamed the Monuments Men, and mostly made up of British and American artists, architects, archaeologists and academics, they would make their way across a ravaged Europe with two daunting goals.
First, they were to protect the masterpieces that were still standing. Sometimes that meant finding a safe home for a treasured wooden altarpiece. Sometimes it meant trying to persuade a commander not to billet his tired soldiers in a historic chateau, or not to bomb a particularly picturesque city.
The second, and more difficult, part of their mission was to try to undo the damage the Nazis had already done. For years the Germans had been stripping museums and seizing private property. But where had it all gone? It was up to the Monuments Men to track it down — and, if they could, return it to where it belonged.
The work was difficult and dangerous.
Although the Monuments Men were noncombatants, supposed to stay behind battle lines, those boundaries were often hard to draw. Enemy planes would suddenly appear, strafing roads. The fight for a city would seem to cease, then it would resume. When the Germans did finally retreat, they would often leave lethal booby-traps.
Still, the Monuments Men worked tirelessly to safeguard whatever the Reich hadn’t already stolen. In La Gleize, Belgium, a 14th-century statue was gently removed from a bombed-out church and stored in a villager’s house. In Pisa, a makeshift roof was hurriedly constructed to protect the remains of the partially destroyed Gothic cloister, the Camposanto Monumentale.
But what about the treasures the Germans had already taken? Finding them would be an even more difficult job.
Making it easier was a courageous woman, Rose Valland. The custodian of the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, she had been ordered by the invading Germans to help them catalog the thousands of works of art they already looted. With little choice to do otherwise, she agreed. But she secretly made notes of the works’ new destinations.
In the last days of the Occupation, when the Germans rushed to ship their spoils out of France, Valland grew even bolder. Contacting friends in the Resistance, she alerted them to a train about to leave with five boxcars of paintings. It was a terrific moment of bravery as French patriots sabotaged the locomotive, forcing the Germans to abandon 148 crates of stolen art.
Once the Monuments Men arrived and began returning some of what they found to Valland’s museum, she decided she could trust them with the precious information she collected. They soon found priceless treasures and heartbreaking evidence of Nazis barbarism. In Paris, the Reich’s official Warehouse for Enemy Property turned out not to have artworks, but merely the sad remains of Jewish households — frying pans and radiators, nightgowns and children""s toys.
The Monuments Men grew even busier in the spring of 1945, as Allied forces pushed farther into Germany. One day, they received a communiqué from General Patton headlined TOP SECRET NO PRESS. Investigating the town of Merkers, the Third Army had discovered a gargantuan salt mine, more than 2,000 feet deep and containing 35 miles of tunnels.
These tunnels held more than salt, too. There was gold — literally tons of it, ranging from official Reichsbank ingots to, gruesomely, the fillings pried from the mouths of Holocaust victims. There were billions of dollars in currency. And there were immortal works of art — ranging from Impressionist masterpieces to an ancient bust of Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti.
Caves in other towns soon revealed other treasures and, sometimes, morbid secrets.
In a mine in Bernterode, the Army broke open a locked vault and found four caskets, waiting for some yet-to-be-built mausoleum. One box held the bones of Prussia’s King Frederick William, dead for more than two centuries; another contained the remains of his son, Frederick the Great. In the third was the body of Germany’s last president, Field Marshall Paul Von Hindenburg.
The fourth casket bore a swastika, and the name “Adolf Hitler.”
That coffin was still empty, though, and would remain so. Ironically, the day after the Army’s gruesome find, a despairing Hitler, knowing the invasion of Berlin was imminent, shot himself. Aides took the corpse outside, doused it in gasoline, and burned it, following the dictator""s wishes.
His reign was finally over. Soon, his war would be, also.
The work of the Monuments Men went on for another six years, though, as they crisscrossed Europe, searching for stolen artworks and striving to return them to their rightful places. Of course, some of the museums these masterpieces had hung in now lay in ruins. Many of the private collectors who owned them had perished in the camps.
But the unit still succeeded in finding more than 4 million stolen objects. And in doing something far more — proving not only that art mattered, but that beauty survives.