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The M.F.A. & A. was among the smallest outfits, and was certainly the most recherché one, in the Allied armies. Once, in the autumn of 1945, shortly after the German capitulation, it swelled to eighty-four officers and men, but while the fighting was on, no such number, it was felt, could be spared for art. About half of the Americans in the M.F.A. & A. had been recommended by the Roberts Commission for transfer to Monuments on the basis of their civilian backgrounds. They were largely youngish art professors, museum curators, sculptors, painters, and architects, and occasionally talented dilettantes. Their chief adviser to SHAEF was the Slade Professor of Fine Art from Cambridge University, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Webb. Some of the luminaries among the earlier American Monuments men were—in addition to LaFarge, who had been a New York architect, and Stout, who had been an expert on conservation at the Fogg Art Museum—Lieutenant Lamont Moore, National Gallery, Washington; Lieutenant Sheldon Keck, Brooklyn Museum; Lieutenant Calvin Hathaway, Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration; Captain Everett Lesley, Art Professor, University of Minnesota; Pfc. Lincoln Kirstein, art patron; Captain Robert Posey, architect; Captain Walker Hancock, Prix de Rome sculptor; Lieutenant James Rorimer, Metropolitan Museum; Captain Walter Huchthausen, Art and Architecture Professor, University of Michigan; and Captain Ralph Hammett, architect.
The first of these professional art experts were sent off to their Normandy-invasion jobs carrying directives sprinkled with such helpful hints as “A castle is usually defined as a large fortified building and a palace as an unfortified stately mansion or residence of royalty,” of which republican France has none. The Monuments men’s own definition of a palace was, according to one of them, “the local honey on the Supreme H.Q. protected list, where the blasted colonels will certainly billet their troops unless a wandering Monuments man gets there first with an ‘Off Limits’ sign and his neck stuck out.” In their billeting-overseeing job, the Monuments men were like frantic boarding-house keepers, trying to put thousands of lodgers into the right rooms and out of the wrong ones and, above all, trying to prevent them from pocketing everything pretty that belonged to the house. “Off Limits” signs were tried and didn’t work, so “Protected Monument” signs were stuck up to discourage our uniformed souvenir hunters from liberating art items to send home to Mom. And the cynical Monuments men marked off really attractive debris and important buildings with white tape, falsely indicating the presence of unexploded mines. It was the worry of our State Department, especially after the Liberation idyll began to fade, that the prestige of the United States Army and the American idea would decline still further if our troops and officers manhandled or lawlessly occupied the western democracies’ historic properties. As long as our armies remained in Europe, “the greatest single” M.F.A. & A. problem, an official report declared, was saving the Continent’s art “from spoliation and damage by the U.S. Armed Forces.” A great deal of minor damage was, it seems, done to châteaux by billeted Americans who nailed pinup girls to highly valued, highly carved antique boiseries. This was, however, literally only a pinprick among all the wounds art suffered.
The worst billeting jam occurred in the autumn of 1944, while the war was still on, in the Paris sector—the part of France that is richest in palaces and châteaux—when American troops were pouring toward the front. Improper billeting became almost as big an M.F.A. & A. pain as the unwarranted demands for fancier billets by outfits that were already billeted. One colonel of a replacement group aspired to billet his fifty officers in Mme. de Pompadour’s historic mansion at Fontainebleau—a demand that was easy to refuse because another outfit had accidentally just set fire to the Henri IV wing of Fontainebleau Palace. The Monuments people also received endless intimate requests from the French: that a Quartermaster trucking battalion billeted in the Château de Celle please respect the collection of stag antlers belonging to its owner, the Duc de Brissac; that the room in which Cardinal Richelieu once slept in the Château Fleury-en-Bière be marked “Off Limits”; that an Air Forces unit near Chantilly abandon its project to practice-bomb a camouflaged hunting lodge on an island where the Vollard art collection was hidden. There was a claim that all the furniture of the Château Voisenon had disappeared with a certain distinguished bombardment group, famous also for liking comfort. There was a protest that American troops billeted in the Château de Frémigny, built for a friend of Napoleon, had done more harm in the two months they were in residence than the Germans billeted there had done in four years. However, the M.F.A. & A. report on the gutted Château de Chamerolles, where Germans had also been billeted for four years, noted the owners’ complaint that the Boches had carted off seven hundred valuable paintings and drawings, a hundred and forty-seven sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Oriental rugs, some seventeenth-century tapestries, and masses of rare silver—the most Herculean cleaning out accomplished by any unit in Europe in the entire war.
The Battle of the Bulge produced a great number of front-line billeting disasters. Surprise, confusion, danger, and bitter cold drove our men into any shelter, no matter how artistic; those who weren’t freezing in foxholes were sweating it out in Belgian châteaux almost as fine as those in Touraine. The Château de Pailhe, the finest Louis XV structure in Belgium, was burned to the ground when the Americans used gasoline cookers on a parquet floor. Chimney fires and ruined marble mantelpieces were frequent. Most of our men had had no experience with elegant, ancestral open fireplaces; they had been brought up on comfortable steam heat.
An unexpected secondary war duty of the Monuments men consisted of acting as an ambulant lost-and-found department for art. In 1940, as the Germans started invading, western Europe frantically began hiding the treasures it loved, burying them in gardens the way dogs cache bones, hiding them in haylofts, in church steeples, in slaughterhouses, in bank basements or lunatic asylums, in any place of concealment that seemed logically safe or so absurd that it was unlikely to be discovered. City people sent their valuables to the country for safety and country people carted their stuff to town. The first reaction of the populace in the Liberation, after the cheers, was to hunt for their things. As the Monuments men moved around, they made lists of lost-and-found art, sent reports to one another, dispatched inquiries, and filed good news of discoveries and clues.
They also took notes on the gigantic, yawning destruction of the architectural face of war-struck Europe—of those now lost features of beauty, art, and picturesqueness, of housed history or charm, whose disappearance makes the profile of the Continent unrecognizable and will necessitate the rewriting of all the Baedekers. The first handful of Monuments officers, by thumbing rides and not standing on professional dignity, covered a tremendous amount of territory and compiled, often on borrowed typewriters, reams of notes that could serve the guidebook editors well. They didn’t see everything, but they saw a lot. In the twelve weeks before Christmas of 1944, one man travelled thirteen thousand miles in France and inspected two hundred and twenty-four monuments. The M.F.A. & A. notes showed that in the most badly injured regions of the occupied countries, damage ran to about 45 percent. In Germany, inventor of the blitz, 45 percent of the great historical monuments were struck and 60 percent were blitzed to nothingness. The Monuments men also observed a fact that would have gratified the medieval building trades: the fragile-looking Gothic constructions, with their airy, resilient flying buttresses and broken surfaces, resisted the shock of bomb concussion better than the solid, unbroken surfaces of the Renaissance constructions, which—being built on the modern, four-square principle—were bashed flat by modern blast.
The Monuments reports were brief and melancholy. Of Boulogne, after Patton’s Third Armored had fought its way in, the summarizing note read, “On M.F.A. & A. requests, engineers scraped 14th-century cathedral ruins from street functioning as Red Ball highway between Omaha and Utah beaches.” A British note read, “Antwerp, Musée Plantin-Moretus, world’s most famous printing museum, 18th century façade st
ruck by buzz bomb.” Major the Lord Methuen, Royal Scots Guards, the M.F.A. & A. officer in the Brussels region, kept a diary in the best travelling-Englishman manner, with appreciative observations on art (“Aerschot, inspected Béguinage, pleasant building dated 1636, badly damaged by bombing. Thielt, inspected charming Renaissance Belfry with tower and spire shot up in ’44”) as well as notes on whom he’d lunched with and the latest difficulties with his sinus, which was troubling him in the Lowlands climate. In Holland, the notes of Major Ronald Balfour, Fine Arts Officer for the Canadian First Army and former Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, were also personal, but they had a severer tone: “To appoint an officer for a whole area and to expect him to cadge lifts is not only faintly ludicrous but gives the Netherlands authorities a clear and perhaps accurate impression that we are not interested in their monuments at all.”
The M.F.A. & A. men who followed the Allies into Aachen and the Rhineland became simply obituary writers, since dead art lay in every direction: “Cologne, circa 80 percent of monuments and churches destroyed, including St. Maria im Capitol, famous Romanesque landmark …” “Kleve, Stitskirche, mid 14th century, air bombed Oct. ’44, again Feb. ’45, an eliminating operation. Church shattered.” After completing his mortuary report on Kleve, including a two-page epitaph on architectural details of the church alone, Major Balfour, the Canadian First Army Monuments officer, was killed by Nazi shellfire. From the town of Xanten came this note: “St. Victor’s cathedral, rated most beautiful Gothic complex of buildings in the Rhineland, is wrecked. Shot, shell, blast.” Another note recorded: “Münster, remarkable for assembly of fine buildings 14–18th century, is gone for good. Aerial bombardment Sunday March 25, 1945.” A Münster postscript, written by an M.F.A. & A. archivist, said, “Münster city records on methods of Nazi treatment of Jews as well as future plans in that regard reported intact in Schloss Nordkirchen.” From Trier: “Dom, 11th century, oldest church in Germany, heavily bombed Xmas week, ’44. Karl Marx House, birthplace, used as Nazi newspaper H.Q., direct bomb hit, destroyed.” Near the Ruhr pocket, Captain Huchthausen, the peacetime Professor of Art and Architecture at the University of Michigan, was killed by machine-gun fire on an Autobahn. Like all Monuments men, he felt that his job was concerned not only with the death of art but occasionally with its resuscitation. He was killed in a borrowed jeep while answering a hurry call to come inspect a newly found art cache.
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It was the discovery of one underground art cache after another and the unexaggerated reports that they were worth millions of dollars that presently gave European art its place on the front page, along with the battles, and made it unnecessary for the Monuments men to go on being apologetic about their work. The first underground cache our armies encountered was a specially constructed art air-raid shelter in a deep subterranean sandstone chamber outside the Dutch town of Maastricht. There the Dutch had stored their most valuable museum pictures, with Nazi approval. The fact that the art had been hidden by our Allies decreased the excitement of the discovery for our men, though they took sightseeing tours underground to stare at some Rembrandts—once it had been explained who and how important Rembrandt was. For the next fortnight, every Dutch daub found in a farmhouse attic was called a Rembrandt, and the nearest Monuments officer was sent for, posthaste, to authenticate it.
Then, in April, 1945, in the mountains of Germany and Austria, our armies made the first of a series of spectacular, melodramatic discoveries of enemy-hidden subterranean treasure troves, which turned out to be the most dazzling, rich, compact underground depots of art in history. The first buried cache was found on April 2nd by elements of the Eighth Infantry Division, in the Westphalian copper mine at Siegen. As a matter of fact, Lieutenant Stout had already discovered it, at long distance (and had tipped off Headquarters to be on the lookout for it), while studying an annotated Nazi art catalogue he had come on in Aachen, whose rich cathedral treasures had been hidden at Siegen. He had also borrowed the cathedral’s curate as a sort of guide. When the Monuments men finally entered the mine with the curate, its corridors were without light and reeked of the mine’s sulphur and the stench of a vast, departed German civilian population, which had hidden there in semi-suffocation for two weeks, first from the Amerikaner bombs and then from the incoming Amerikaner soldiers, who butchered children, the German radio had warned. Deep in the mine, behind a locked door, the Monuments men found the German caretakers and the art they took care of—among other things, more than four hundred great pictures.
Later, when the Eighth Infantry turned the mine into an exhibition place, it posted at the mouth a sign, bearing its insigne (a golden arrow), that read, “Golden Arrow ART MUSEUM (Siegen Copper Mine). Europe’s Art Treasures RESTORED. Paintings of the OLD MASTERS, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Delacroix, Van Gogh, Holbein. Bones and Crown of CHARLEMAGNE. Original Music of BEETHOVEN. Discovered and Guarded by the 8th INFANTRY DIVISION.” The manuscript of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, taken from the Beethoven House in Bonn, was indeed in the mine; the Charlemagne crown there was only a modern exhibition copy, which our officers and troops tried on as happily as if it had been the real thing; Charlemagne’s bones were merely a part of his skull, imbedded in a silver, jewelled, life-size bust. The mine had been equipped with a dehydrating plant, but our bombs had wrecked it in January, and in the interim some of the damp pictures had become encrusted with a green, plush-like mold that made the people in them look as though they were suffering from a novel skin disease. The art—much of it still carefully packed in boxes sitting comfortably on floor boards, since the Nazis never spared labor in fitting up their underground art repositories—was again somewhat disappointing to our soldiers, because it hadn’t been stolen from one of our Allies: it was merely Kraut riches, which included the Aachen Cathedral’s tenth-century gemmed cross and twelfth-century crosier and enamelled gold shrine; canvases by Stephan Lochner; church and museum treasures from Münster and Alsatian Metz (which the Germans had always rated German); and the best of the contents of the Rhineland’s wealthy museums, including the Essen Volkwang Museum’s collection of French moderns, which was among the finest in Europe.
On April 6th, four days after the Siegen find, the American Army uncovered its second German cache—the Kaiseroda salt mine, at Merkers, in Thuringia. This discovery satisfied everybody and definitely put art on the war map. The Merkers art got a high ranking because it was mixed up with the colorful personality of General Patton and with a new type of treasure that really made sense—millions of dollars’ worth of gleaming, solid gold. The Merkers mine was a lucky discovery of the 347th Infantry of Patton’s Third Army. An M.P., Private Mootz by name, was told by a couple of French deportee women that what looked like a sawmill on yonder hill was the entrance to a salt mine filled with gold and other treasures so vast that when, a few weeks before, they had arrived from Berlin, it had taken scores of slave laborers seventy hours to carry the stuff into the place of hiding, seven hundred metres underground. The first visit by one of the M.P.’s officers disclosed that the mine also contained a Prussian State Collections curator and a British war prisoner, who had helped to tote the gold and knew exactly where it was. Before many hours had passed, the mine was bristling with extra M.P.s, a tank battalion to guard the mine head, a reinforced rifle company thrown around its four other entrances, and jeeps everywhere, armed with machine guns. The area also boiled with excited reconnaissance parties, special details, and Intelligence and Counterintelligence. When a number of officers, accompanied by an American banker, a gold expert who had been hastily flown in from Paris, descended into the mine and reached the cache, they saw a breathtaking sight: five hundred and fifty canvas bags, each containing a million reichsmarks in gold; four hundred smaller bags, containing brick gold; and, to one side, sordid boxes of gold fillings from Jews’ teeth and their gold wedding rings, which the Nazis had thoughtfully saved from the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. On second glance, the officers
also noticed some art. According to German bankers, with which Army Intelligence seemed to find the countryside teeming, Patton’s Third had discovered the entire gold reserve of the Nazi State’s Reichsbank. This was the first instance in modern military annals of a belligerent’s capturing his enemy’s every red cent. The American banker appraised the gold at $250,000,000. It was known that Germany started the war with a gold reserve of $50,000,000, so the Nazi conquests had really paid. Part of the Merkers bullion was identified as belonging to Belgium, which in panic had passed it to France in 1940, which had later passed it to Dakar, from which Vichy later ordered it passed to the insistent Germans.
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 34
