The Monuments Men

by Robert M. Edsel

  Not enough “Off Limits” signs? Rorimer would handle having five hundred printed immediately. There wasn’t much electricity in Normandy, but the army had a printing press in Cherbourg they turned on at night. In the meantime, the rest of the men could make them in the field.

  Soldiers and civilians tended to ignore handwritten signs? Stout had the solution for that one, too: use white engineering tape around important locations. No soldier would scavenge in a site clearly marked “DANGER: MINES!”

  The general MFAA directive called for the use of French civilians to hang signs when possible, to counter the impression that the Allies were invaders. Children, Rorimer suggested, were often the most useful. They were eager to please, and usually wanted nothing more than a stick of gum or piece of chocolate. “The local cultural authorities are good, too,” he said. “A little direction and encouragement, and they can handle all but the most complicated tasks.”

  As for cameras, everyone agreed the job couldn’t be done without them, but for now they would try.

  Communication was another issue. They were isolated in the field, with no way to contact headquarters and no way to share information among themselves. Their official reports took weeks to reach anyone, and by then they were not good for much but the files. Too many times, after hard and dangerous hours on the road, a Monuments Man had arrived to find the protected site already inspected, photographed, placed off-limits, and in the midst of emergency repairs. And what if a sudden German counterattack moved the front lines while a Monuments Man was out in the field?

  “It’s worse with the British,” murmured Rorimer, who had become quite frustrated by the errant wandering of the British Monuments Man Lord Methuen. “They don’t stay in their zones. And there’s no communication.”

  “The British are working on it,” Captain LaFarge said.

  “As to the reports,” Stout suggested, “let’s start making additional copies for each other when we send them to Ad Sec.”

  That brought up the subject of assistants. Every man needed at least one qualified enlisted assistant, Stout still thought, and preferably a pool of specialists at headquarters to select from, too.

  The most pressing problem, though, was the lack of transportation. LaFarge had his beat-up car and Stout his topless VW, but everyone else was wasting precious hours hitching rides, and even more time stuck in the inefficient routes hitchhiking required.

  “The army always has the same reply,” Rorimer grumbled. “The Roberts Commission in Washington should have arranged adequate tables of organization and equipment.”

  “And the Roberts Commission says the army will brook no interference,” Stout replied, summing up the ad hoc, between-the-cracks situation of the whole mission. Still, always optimistic, Hammett and Stout had managed to arrange a meeting for August 16 with the duty officers of U.S. Twelfth Army Group, at which they would address all the issues discussed.

  With the basics covered, the conversation drifted to more general observations. Everyone agreed that, despite the obvious problems, the mission had been a surprising success. They were lucky: The area to cover was small and Normandy, although beautiful, had relatively few monuments designated for protection. It was a perfect place to start. They would have to be much more efficient in the future, they knew, but for now they were satisfied. The French were valorous, stoic, and appreciative. The Allied soldiers were considerate of French culture and open to suggestions. There was a bottleneck one level up from the field; the army bureaucracy simply refused to support the mission. But the commanders on the ground were, despite the occasional pain in the ass, largely respectful of the work. Their experiences confirmed George Stout’s original belief that a man on the ground, talking face-to-face, was the only way for the mission to succeed.

  Their real worry now was the Germans. The more the Monuments Men learned of their behavior, the more worried they became. The Germans had fortified churches. They had stockpiled weapons in areas inhabited by women and children. They had burned houses and destroyed infrastructure, sometimes for strategic purposes but often simply because they could. Their commanders, it was rumored, shot their own troops if they threatened to retreat. James Rorimer, after a moment of searching, produced a business card. On the front was a name: J. A. Agostini, a French cultural official in the town of Countances. On the back, the man had scrawled, “I certify that German military personnel used Red Cross trucks for pillaging and that sometimes they were accompanied by their officers.” 7

  “An ominous warning,” George Stout said, putting voice to all their thoughts. No one even bothered to agree.

  “You idiot,” James Rorimer’s new and much less understanding commanding officer replied a few days later when the Monuments Man requested permission to travel a hundred miles out of the way to inspect Mont Saint-Michel, a medieval fortress on a rocky tidal island off the coast of Brittany. “This is twentieth-century war. Who gives a damn about medieval walls and boiling pitch?” 8

  This was another problem. The army was always shifting commanders, and Rorimer never knew who his CO would be when he returned to HQ—or their attitude toward cultural preservation. Still, the Monuments Men had the backing of General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, something the officer suddenly seemed to remember.

  “All right,” he huffed. “Get going. But let me tell you, Rorimer, you’d better get there in a hurry and come back fast. If you get left behind… ” 9

  Rorimer turned so the officer wouldn’t see his smile. He imagined the end of that sentence was that would be no loss, and he enjoyed the thought. He always took a bit of pleasure in tweaking the brass.

  Unable to secure official transportation, but intrepid as always, Rorimer hired a civilian car—the French driver had hidden it in a haystack during the German occupation—to take him to the Brittany coast. A German counteroffensive had nearly cut through Patton’s lines outside the town of Avranches, but the battle for Normandy was now all but over and the countryside west of Avranches was quiet. As they drove, Rorimer thought of the Mont Saint-Michel he had visited in years past. “The Mount,” as the rocky island was known, was connected to mainland France only by a narrow, mile-long causeway. Around the edges of the island clung a small village; at the top sat the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel, the renowned medieval “City of Books.” Rorimer cringed at the thought of how many of those books were lost at Saint-Lô. If the monastery was gone too… He remembered the thirteenth-century cloister; the soaring abbey; the underground labyrinth of crypts and chapels; the Salle des Chevaliers, with its pointed vaulting supported by a triple row of columns. It was such an extraordinary building that Monuments Man Bancel LaFarge told him it had inspired him to become an architect. The Mount had withstood a thousand years of attacks and sieges, due in no small part to the protection afforded by the surrounding water and its rapid tide, but the power of modern warfare could bring it all down with a single bombing run.

  He didn’t have to worry long. Mont Saint-Michel, he could see from a mile away, was still standing. At the entrance to the causeway, three “Off Limits” signs had already been posted by Captain Posey, the Monuments Man for Patton’s Third Army. Unfortunately, they hadn’t kept the island from being overrun. Troops were everywhere, fighting, shouting, and most of all drinking. Mont Saint-Michel, Rorimer soon realized, “was the one place on the continent which was unguarded, undamaged and open for business-as-usual…. Each day more than a thousand soldiers came [on junket leave], drank as hard and as fast as they could, and, feeling the effects, became boisterous beyond the power of local control.” 10 The restaurants were running low on food and, even worse, booze. The souvenir shops were empty. And despite the fact that a British brigadier general was supposedly shacked up at the local hotel with a female companion, James Rorimer couldn’t find a single officer to take charge of the situation.

  That night, after searching the monastery and ancient building, rousting troops from historic areas and padlocking the doors, Rorimer had
dinner with the mayor, whose souvenir shop had been stripped clean days before. The men decided that, although arguments to the contrary were abundant, Mont Saint-Michel should stay open for business. It had been a long three months, and more than 200,000 Allied soldiers were wounded, dead, or missing. The stench of death—civilians, soldiers, farm animals, horses—had saturated the air, the water, the food, and the clothes. But it was over, at least for now. The battle of Normandy was a brutal, decisive, hard-fought, hard-won Allied victory, and there wasn’t much one Monuments officer could do to keep the troops from celebrating. So when the weary mayor headed off to his wife, Rorimer went to a bar, propped his boots on a table, and considered the future between sips of beer.

  Normandy was behind them, but the real work lay ahead. He thought of the German soldiers hauling away artwork in Red Cross ambulances. The Nazis had committed horrible crimes, he was sure of that, and if he was going to truly be a part of putting the art world right, he would need to find a way to get transferred from Comm Zone to the front. The evidence lay out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered. And he was the man to do it. The first step, though, was getting to Paris.

  The next morning, Rorimer was approached by an air force military policeman. The officer demanded to see his papers. The papers seemed to confirm his suspicions, because the soldier smiled, nodded, and placed the Monuments Man under arrest. “No officer of such low rank would have the responsibilities you claim,” he said. “And no officer, of any rank, would travel without his own transportation.” Even at the local headquarters, the officers were convinced they had stumbled on a German spy. The MP was jubilant, no doubt envisioning promotions and commendations. The young man escorted the “spy” all the way back to Rorimer’s headquarters before receiving the crushing news: there really was an MFAA, and Second Lieutenant James Rorimer really was a member of it. The Monuments Men may have considered their first months in Europe a success, but clearly the mission had a long way to go.

  Letter from George Stout To his wife, Margie

  August 27, 1944

  Dear Margie:

  I found an air mail envelope and so can spread myself a little. It’s been a week since I’ve got to my headquarters and had a chance at any mail. With a break of luck I may reach it tomorrow and have some new word from you, darling.

  Work has been pretty consuming this week but not at all depressing. For two days I’ve billeted in a city, quite a decent-sized city, and have enjoyed a good room with a nice family…. A charming household of people like many we know and I am impressed with the slightness of difference between nations, at least between civilized nations.

  As the front rolls along and the evidence piles up, the score against the Germans grows heavier. They have behaved very badly, and in the last days of their occupation, savagely. From here, now, they do not look like a simple innocent people with criminal leaders. They look like criminals. And I wonder how long it will take to get them to live fairly with the rest of the world.

  Being in a city I feel very slouchy and ill-kempt in my field clothes—a steel hat, no necktie, generally dirty from the dust of the road, and carrying a gun. Keeping clean is always a problem. Lately, I’ve not had time to do my own washing and, with short jumps, I can’t farm it out.

  There is no end to the friendliness of the welcome we get. In another town today, I saw a jeep roll in covered with flowers. The corporal driving said, “Jeez, you’d think we’d won the war.” Yesterday in a village hardly damaged by war a girl brought up a little sister, about two, to give me an apple. She wouldn’t take it back, nor would a little boy in another village, who gave me a tomato. They all want to shake hands all around, at least twice.…

  Do take care of yourself. By the time this reaches you, summer will be about over and you’ll be looking grimly at teachers’ meetings. Don’t try to carry anything else after school starts. I’ll try to get my pay straight one of these days and send you some money.

  I suppose you hear much talk of fatalities. We hear none at all and seem not the worse.

  I love you and think of you much.

  Yours,

  George

  CHAPTER 12

  Michelangelo’s Madonna

  Bruges, Belgium

  September 1944

  By the last week of August 1944, the northern European campaign had turned into a rout. The Germans had thrown almost all their reserves into preserving the “Ring of Steel” around Normandy, and once the ring was broken a wide open field of advance lay before the Western Allies. Racing forward with almost no resistance, they found millions of pounds of abandoned food, hundreds of carloads of coal, countless abandoned vehicles and wounded German soldiers, and even traincars full of looted lingerie and perfume. The villages were decorated with flowers, the townspeople openly cheering and handing out food and wine to their liberators. The surviving Germans had essentially thrown down their arms and were racing for home.

  By August 28, the front lines had advanced more than one hundred miles, liberating Paris and pushing past its eastern outskirts. By September 2, the Allies had reached Belgium, and a day later cut through more than half the country and liberated Brussels, Belgium’s capital and largest city. Four days later, very late in the night of September 7 or possibly in the early-morning hours of September 8, the sacristan of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the Belgian city of Bruges was roused from sleep by a knock on his door. When the sacristan, tying on a robe, was slow to answer, the knock became louder and more urgent. By the time he reached the door, someone was pounding. “Patience, patience,” he muttered under his breath.

  Two German officers were standing outside, one dressed in the blue uniform of the German navy, and one in field gray. Behind them, in the dark street, the sacristan could see armed German sailors from the local barracks, at least twenty but possibly more. They had come in two trucks marked with the insignia of the Red Cross.

  “Open the cathedral,” one of the officers demanded.

  The sacristan took the Germans to see the dean.

  “We have orders,” the German said, holding up a piece of paper. “We’re taking the Michelangelo. To protect it from the Americans.”

  “The Americans?” The dean laughed at the audacity. “The British are said to be outside the city. I haven’t heard anything about the Americans.”

  “We have orders,” the German commander repeated, pushing into the doorway. A few sailors with guns stepped forward, too. There was no mistaking the message. The dean and sacristan accompanied the soldiers back to the cathedral, unlocking the massive doors with the old iron keys. Behind them, the street was quiet. Under the German occupation, nobody but partisans moved about at two in the morning, and they, of course, kept to the alleys. The blackout may have hindered Allied night bombings, but it was a great help to the Resistance as well.

  “You’ll never get her out of Bruges,” the dean told the commander as he pushed opened the ancient doors. “The British are already in Antwerp.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” the German countered. “There is still a way.”

  Once inside, the Germans moved quickly. Guards were posted on the door. Soldiers circled the sanctuary, shading the windows, while two more stood watch over the dean and sacristan. The rest proceeded directly to the north aisle of the church, where the sculpture sat in a sealed room specially constructed by Belgian authorities in 1940. The Germans tore open the doors. In the light of their pocket lamps, the only light, it seemed, in all of Bruges, the Madonna glowed. She was life-sized and radiant, the gentle face and robes of a young woman carved by the young master, Michelangelo, from the richest, whitest marble in Italy. In the glow of her enemy’s lamps, the Madonna seemed to look down with an almost serene look of sadness; the Christ Child, looking nothing like a helpless baby, seemed to step defiantly out of the alcove into the light.

  “Get the mattresses,” the commander ordered. Four days before, Dr. Rosemann, the head of the Belgian section of the Kunstschut
z, the German arts and monuments protection organization, had visited the cathedral. He needed to see the Madonna one last time, he said, before he left Belgium. “I have kept a picture of her on my desk all these years,” he told the dean. After viewing the sculpture, Dr. Rosemann ordered his men to place several mattresses in the room. “For protection,” he said, “from Allied bombs. The Americans are not like us; they are savages. How can they appreciate this?” The mattresses were protection, the dean realized now, but not from bombs. They were the quickest and safest way to carry the statue to the trucks.

  “What about the paintings?” a sailor asked. Near the Madonna hung many of the cathedral’s most magnificent works.

  The commander considered them for a moment. “You there,” he said to one of the soldiers near the door. “Go bring another truck.”

  The dean held his breath as the men climbed onto the base of the precious statue. He couldn’t look away, for fear any moment might be her last. Beside him, the sacristan crossed himself and muttered prayers, not daring to look as the statue started to teeter off its pedestal. The sailors were holding the mattress as the four-foot-tall sculpture slid forward, the weight of the marble pushing them all to the floor. But she was safe, at least as far as the dean could tell. She was lying facedown on a mattress, but at least she was safe.

  As a dozen sailors moved the Madonna slowly toward a side door, others set up a ladder. The soldiers started removing paintings as the commanding officer paced and flicked spent cigarette butts onto the floor around him. Back and forth, back and forth.

  “This one is too high,” a sailor shouted. “We need a taller ladder.”

  “Keep your voice down,” the commander ordered. It was still pitch-black outside; there was plenty of time. “Try again.”

  The Madonna was nearing the door. The sailors took the second mattress, as they had clearly been instructed beforehand, and placed it over the sculpture. It wouldn’t offer much protection, but it might conceal the theft from prying eyes.