The Monuments Men

by Robert M. Edsel

  To safeguard these things will not affect the course of battles, but it will affect the relations of invading armies with those peoples and [their] governments…. To safeguard these things will show respect for the beliefs and customs of all men and will bear witness that these things belong not only to a particular people but also to the heritage of mankind. To safeguard these things is part of the responsibility that lies on the governments of the United Nations. These monuments are not merely pretty things, not merely valued signs of man’s creative power. They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man’s struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God.

  With conviction that the safeguarding of monuments is an element in the right conduct of the war and in the hope for peace, we… wish to bring these facts to the attention of the government of the United States of America and to urge that means be sought for dealing with them.

  And who was best able to handle such safeguarding? The highly trained corps of “special workmen” Stout had previously proposed, of course.

  September 17, 1940

  German Feldmarschall Keitel’s order concerning seizure of cultural property

  COPY

  The Chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces

  Berlin W 35, Tirpitzufer 72-76, 17 Sept 1940

  Tel: 21 81 91

  2 f 28.1.4 W. Z. No. 3812/ 40 g To the Chief of Army High Command for the Military Administration in Occupied France.

  In supplement to the order of the Führer transmitted at the time to Reichsleiter Rosenberg to search lodges, libraries and archives in the occupied territories of the west for material valuable to Germany, and to safeguard the latter through the Gestapo, the Führer has decided:

  The ownership status before the war in France, prior to the declaration of war on 1 September 1939, shall be the criterion.

  Ownership transfers to the French state or similar transfers completed after this date are irrelevant and legally invalid (for example, Polish and Slovak libraries in Paris, possessions of the Palais Rothschild or other ownerless Jewish possessions). Reservations regarding search, seizure and transportation to Germany on the basis of the above reasons will not be recognized.

  Reichsleiter Rosenberg and/or his deputy Reichshauptstellenleiter Ebert has received clear instructions from the Führer personally governing the right of seizure; he is entitled to transport to Germany cultural goods which appear valuable to him and to safeguard them there. The Führer has reserved for himself the decision as to their use.

  It is requested that the services in question be informed correspondingly. Signed: KEITEL For information: Attention: Reichsleiter Rosenberg

  CHAPTER 4

  A Dull and Empty World

  Harvard and Maryland

  Winter 1942–1943

  George Stout was not a typical museum official. Unlike many of his peers, who were the product of the eastern elite establishment, Stout was a blue-collar kid from the small town of Winterset, Iowa (also the hometown of actor John Wayne). From there, he went straight into the army, where he served during World War I as a private in a hospital unit in Europe. On a lark, he decided to study drawing after returning from war. Following his graduation from the University of Iowa, Stout spent five years in hand-to-mouth jobs, saving for the tour of the cultural centers of Europe that was the unspoken prerequisite of a career in the arts. By the time he arrived at Harvard to begin graduate studies in 1926, the year Harry Ettlinger was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, Stout was a twenty-eight-year-old husband with a pregnant wife. His Carnegie Fellowship paid him a stipend of $1,200 a year (his monthly rent was $39), which his young family soon found was enough to stay “only a little above starvation level.” 1

  In 1928, Stout joined the small art conservation department at the Fogg Art Museum as an unpaid graduate assistant. Conservation, the technical art of preserving older or damaged works, was the least popular field in the art history department, and Stout was probably its most diligent and self-effacing disciple. In fact, in a department based on braggadocio, where a student’s prospects were often based on personal relationships with superstar professors like Paul Sachs, Stout was perhaps the most anonymous student. But he was also meticulous, a trait that carried over to his personal appearance: carefully swept-back hair, trim worsted suits, and a fine pencil mustache in the style of one of the great film stars of the day, Errol Flynn. George Stout was dapper, debonair, and resolutely unflappable. But beneath his placid exterior was a brilliant and restless mind, capable of great leaps of understanding and far-reaching vision. He also possessed another essential quality: extraordinary patience.

  Soon after joining the conservation department, Stout noticed an abandoned card catalogue from the university library. The rows of tiny drawers gave him an idea. The conservation department contained an astonishing array of the raw materials of painting: pigments, stones, dried plants, oils, resins, gums, glues, and balsams. With the help of the department chemist, John Gettens, Stout placed samples in each of the card catalogue’s drawers, added various chemicals, and observed the results. And took notes. And observed. And waited. For years. Five years later, using only piles of scraps and a discarded chest of drawers, Stout and Gettens had pioneered studies in three branches of the science of art conservation: rudiments (understanding raw materials), degradation (understanding the causes of deterioration), and reparations (stopping and then repairing damage).

  “I think we got some work done, back at the start,” Gettens commented shortly before his death in 1974, “because nobody knew us, nobody bothered us—and we had no money.” 2

  The breakthrough led Stout—still known only to the handful of practitioners in his field—to a new mission. For centuries, conservation had been considered an art, the domain of restorers trained by masters in the techniques of repainting. If it was going to become a science, as Stout’s experiments suggested, then it needed a body of scientific knowledge. Throughout the 1930s, Stout corresponded regularly with the great conservators of the day, sharing information and slowly compiling a set of scientific principles for the evaluation and preservation of paintings and visual arts.

  Things began to change in July 1936, when the Spanish Fascists, supported by powerful German armaments and military training, plunged their country into a civil war. By October, incendiary bombs were landing close to El Escorial, the great monastery-museum thirty miles northwest of Madrid. Two weeks later, the windows were blown out of Spain’s national museum, the Prado. In the spring of 1937, Germany entered the conflict and unleashed, for the first time, its corps of tanks and airplanes, the foundation of its evolving doctrine of “lightning warfare.”

  The art world realized that Germany’s powerful weapons, and especially its use of massive aerial bombardment, had suddenly made the bulk of the continent’s great artistic masterpieces susceptible to destruction. The Europeans and British quickly began to develop plans for protection and evacuation, and George Stout began to slowly, letter by letter, reshape his storehouse of knowledge for a world at war. For the meeting at the Metropolitan Museum in December 1941, he created a pamphlet about air raid techniques. It was only a few pages long, but it was culled from a decade of research. It was typical George Stout: detailed, timely, and understated. Here was a man who never hurried. Who was careful. Punctual. Precise. An expert and a precisionist makes his analysis first, he always said, then his decision. 3

  He spent most of the next year and a half training curators and pushing for a national conservation plan. But nothing came together, and by the fall of 1942 the unflappable George Stout was discouraged. He had spent his entire career developing expertise in an obscure subset of art history, and suddenly world events had thrust that expertise to the forefront. This was the moment for art conservation; there was not a second to lose if the world’s cultural patrimony was going to be preserved—and nobody would listen to him. Instead, the wartime conservation movement was being controlled by the museum directors, the “sahibs” of the a
rt world, as Stout called them. Stout was a workman, a toiler in the trenches, and he had the nuts-and-bolts technician’s distaste for the manager’s world of committees, conversations, and the cultivation of clients.

  “I got damned good and tired of the personal, playhouse point of view that seemed to hold in the museum administration a fair share of the time,” he wrote a friend at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. “I tried to buck it, but that was useless…. I figure to have about 20 years more of useful time. That’s enough to work with but not enough to play with and I’m through with all that smirking and primping for rich people and making paper dolls out of policies and principles just to please them.” 4

  Stout was convinced that only his dedicated corps of “special workmen,” trained in art conservation and working through the army, could accomplish anything of lasting value in the coming war. But the museum directors were, in his opinion, smirking and primping, trying to land an endorsement from President Roosevelt for a high-level cultural committee to advise the military—a committee that no doubt would be comprised of the directors themselves.

  In early 1943, unable to make any headway in America, Stout and fellow conservator W. G. Constable of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, turned to the British. In a letter to Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery in London, the men laid out their plan for a conservation corps. Clark thought the concept ludicrous. “I find it hard to believe,” he wrote back, “that any machinery could be set up which would carry out the suggestions contained in your petition, e.g. even supposing it were possible for an archeologist to accompany each invading force, I cannot help feeling that he would have great difficulty in restraining a commanding officer from shelling an important military objective just because it contained some fine historical monuments.” 5

  Stout may never have seen the reply. By January 1943, with the nation at war and in need of men, he had given up on the conservation program and applied for active duty in the navy, in which he had been a reservist since the end of World War I. “In these last months,” he admitted in a letter home after his arrival at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, “I have not felt worthy. I was failing to get done what in these times a man ought to do. The work was hemmed in by other people and it was small and secondary. Now there is a chance to do work that needs doing, and a good deal more than any man can do.” 6

  Although he couldn’t tell his wife what he was doing because of the military censors—he was testing camouflage paint for airplanes—he assured her that he was happy. “[The job] has so much to it and so much responsibility that I am scared and pleased. If we can do what we hope to do, or any decent part of it, I’ll have no doubt about what is called ‘making a contribution.’ ” 7

  Soon after, his friend Constable wrote that Colonel James Shoemaker, head of the United States Military Government Division, had unexpectedly taken an interest in Stout’s work, requesting all his information on monuments and conservation. Constable cautioned that “though all signs point to the creation of some kind of conservation corps being in the military mind, I have not the least idea whether the idea has crystallized, and it may never do so.” 8

  Stout wrote back that “this move of the nebulous scheme into definite shape in army hands is most satisfying…. Francis Taylor telephoned me some days ago. He was on another trip to get his big scheme started. But he sounded out of sorts and fed up, as if the business wasn’t going too well. Perhaps the modest, steady effort will do more.” 9

  Stout assured Constable, however, that his navy billet was “distinctly my cup of tea” and that he had no interest in leaving it. “I’ll do anything I can to help,” he wrote, “but it’s hard to imagine what that would be, or where I’d get the time for it.” 10

  Still, the decision to enlist in the navy gnawed at him—not because of the conservation program (he considered that a dead issue), but because of his family. Stout was forty-five, married, the father of two sons. He had held out for the higher pay grade of a lieutenant’s rank, but he knew his modest military pay would barely support his family, even in the modest means to which they were accustomed by his long toils in an obscure specialty. He was a man of his time, and although Margie worked as a teacher, he believed it was his duty to provide. And he hated the idea of leaving her.

  “This seems a dull and empty world after the great experience of being at home those precious hours,” he wrote Margie after a brief furlough in July 1943. “I was so deeply touched by you and [his seven-year-old son] Tom, your valor and your incomprehensible love for me. I do not deserve it but I return it all and I swear to do my best to be worthy. I have to keep on teaching myself… that this is right and that I have not left you to struggle because of a romantic whim.” 11

  November 5, 1940

  Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s order concerning distribution of Jewish art treasures

  In carrying out the measures taken to date for the safeguarding of Jewish art property by the Chief of Military Administration in Paris and the Einsatzstab Rosenberg (Chef OKW. 2 f 28.14. W. Z. Nr 3812/ 40 g), the categories of art objects moved to the Louvre will be established as follows:

  1. Those art objects for the further disposition of which the FÅhrer has reserved for himself the right of decision;

  2. Those art objects which will serve to complete the collection of the Reichsmarschall;

  3. Those art objects and library material which appear useful for building up the Hohe Schule and for the task of Reichsleiter Rosenberg;

  4. Those art objects that are appropriate for turning over to German museums; will immediately be inventoried, packed and transported to Germany by the Einsatzstab with all due care and with the assistance of the Luftwaffe.

  5. Those art objects which are appropriate for transfer to French museums and to the French and German art trade will be sold at auction at a date yet to be fixed; and the proceeds will be assigned to the French State for benefit of the French dependents of war casualties.

  6. Further seizure of Jewish art property in France will be effected in the heretofore efficient manner by the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, in cooperation with the Chief of the Military Administration Paris.

  Paris, 5 November 1940

  I shall submit this suggestion to the Führer, pending whose approval this procedure will remain effective.

  Signed: GÖRING

  CHAPTER 5

  Leptis Magna

  North Africa

  January 1943

  While the Americans worried and planned, the British were actively engaged in combat operations against the Axis powers. In Europe, the Allied war machine consisted mainly of underground saboteurs and the brave pilots battling the German Luftwaffe over the English Channel; in the USSR, the Red Army was fighting a defensive entrenchment against an aggressive Nazi offensive; but across the Mediterranean the battle swung back and forth over the great desert of North Africa. The British held Egypt; a combined German-Italian force held Libya and Algeria to the west. For two years, starting with an Italian assault on Egypt in 1940, the battle went back and forth across the desert. It wasn’t until October 1942, and the decisive defeat of the German-Italian forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein, that the British finally broke through and began to push their way toward Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

  By January 1943, they had reached Leptis Magna, a sprawling Roman ruin only sixty-four miles east of Tripoli. It was here that Lieutenant Colonel Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler, Royal Artillery, British North African Army, beheld the majesty of Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus’s imperial city: the imposing gate of the basilica, the hundreds of columns that marked the old marketplace, the enormous sloping amphitheater, with the blue waters of the Mediterranean sparkling in the background. At the height of its power at the turn of the third century AD—when Emperor Severus had showered money on his hometown in an attempt to make it the cultural and economic capital of Africa—Leptis Magna had been a port, but in the last seventeen hundred years the harbor had
silted up and become a hardpan of clay, a dull and empty world.

  Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.

  The city was broken, wearing down and sliding back into the Sahara Desert that had been encroaching on it for the last two thousand years. Most of the columns and blocks were dull, already mirroring the color of reddish sand, but amid the ruins he could make out a few gleaming white additions, some of the many “improvements” made by the Italians over the last decade. A new empire is rising from the ruins of the old, Mussolini told the Italians time and again. We are building another Roman empire. Wheeler took a drink from his canteen and scanned the enormous sky for signs of enemy planes. Nothing, not even a cloud. For the second time, the Italians had forsaken this cornerstone of their “empire” without even putting up a fight.

  The first time was 1940, when 36,000 British and Australian troops turned back an advance on Egypt by the 200,000-man Italian Tenth Army.

  The British lost the ruins in 1941 when the Italians, buttressed by crack German troops and under the command of the German general Erwin Rommel, pushed them back to Egypt. Soon after, the Italians published the great cultural propaganda piece Che cosa hanno fatto gli Inglesi in Cirenaica—What the English Have Done in Cyrenaica. The pamphlet showed plundered artifacts, smashed statues, and defaced walls at the Cyrene Museum, the work, the Italians claimed, of British and Australian soldiers. Only with the recent recapture of Cyrene, four hundred miles east of Leptis Magna, had the British learned the Italian claims were false. The statues had been broken for hundreds of years; the pedestals were empty because the Italians had removed the statues; the graffiti was not on the walls of the museum galleries, but in a back room filled with similar graffiti by Italian troops.