Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis by Robert M. Edsel Page A
Authors: Robert M. Edsel
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normal channels places the responsibility of all Commanders of complying with the spirit of this letter.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Ike’s directive was bold; it was concise; and it was now official policy. His Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, issued an accompanying order that provided more specific details on how this new policy should be implemented. Woolley remarked that Ike’s words “made it clear that the responsibility for the protection of monuments lay with the army as a whole and not with the [Monuments officer] specialist.” Even Churchill weighed in on the matter: “The weakness of the Monuments and Fine Arts organization in the past was . . . due to the fact that it had . . . depended on an external civilian body not in touch with the Army. . . . The new arrangements which have been worked out in the light of experience are well calculated to promote, as far as military exigencies allow, a more effective effort to protect historical monuments of first importance in the future.”
Many problems lay ahead for implementing this new order. Mistakes would continue. The order would be put to the test in a major way within just six weeks. But it marked the turning point for the Monuments officers and their work. For the first time since Mason Hammond had landed in Sicily, the Monuments Men had the backing of the Commander-in-Chief. Their work contributed greatly to the experience Eisenhower would take with him to England to plan the invasion of Western Europe as the newly appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force.
7
A TROUBLED BUNCH
SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1943
D espite General Eisenhower’s historic order, the Western Allies were not the only army to conceive of protecting cultural treasures during war. Ironically, so too did Germany, the same nation that since 1939 had systematically looted the countries it had conquered and occupied.
On August 25, 1914, less than a month after Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium and the outbreak of World War I, German soldiers patrolling the “open” and undefended university town of Louvain, near Brussels, were shot and killed. Believing their deaths to be the act of partisan snipers, German military authorities first rounded up and executed 248 citizens and then ordered other residents to stand in the streets while German troops burned their homes, one by one. The soldiers then torched the University of Louvain’s library, one of Europe’s oldest and most distinguished collections. The blaze destroyed 250,000 books—some eight hundred of which had been printed before the year 1500—and five hundred illuminated manuscripts. The destruction of the Louvain library became a notorious example of wanton wartime destruction.
The world reacted with swift and united indignation. So, too, did alarmed German cultural officials. Within three weeks, Wilhelm von Bode, Chief Superintendent of the Prussian Museums, proposed that Otto von Falke coordinate efforts with Belgian officials to protect that nation’s movable works of art. The following month, Dr. Paul Clemen, a distinguished professor of Art History at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn, was appointed to formally develop a system to protect the monuments of Belgium and later France. *
Clemen’s role as Provincial Conservator of the Rhineland, and his pioneering work in art conservation, uniquely qualified him to become the first leader of the Kunstschutz , Germany’s “art protection” unit. On January 1, 1915, he received a commission from German military officials that coordinated his art protection responsibilities with front-line commanders. Although hardly well known, the name of Paul Clemen became favorably associated with the protection of cultural property during World War I. So, too, was the name of Bode, best known for his leadership of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. “Cultural goods and art have to be saved for every cultivated country,” Bode once
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Ike’s directive was bold; it was concise; and it was now official policy. His Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, issued an accompanying order that provided more specific details on how this new policy should be implemented. Woolley remarked that Ike’s words “made it clear that the responsibility for the protection of monuments lay with the army as a whole and not with the [Monuments officer] specialist.” Even Churchill weighed in on the matter: “The weakness of the Monuments and Fine Arts organization in the past was . . . due to the fact that it had . . . depended on an external civilian body not in touch with the Army. . . . The new arrangements which have been worked out in the light of experience are well calculated to promote, as far as military exigencies allow, a more effective effort to protect historical monuments of first importance in the future.”
Many problems lay ahead for implementing this new order. Mistakes would continue. The order would be put to the test in a major way within just six weeks. But it marked the turning point for the Monuments officers and their work. For the first time since Mason Hammond had landed in Sicily, the Monuments Men had the backing of the Commander-in-Chief. Their work contributed greatly to the experience Eisenhower would take with him to England to plan the invasion of Western Europe as the newly appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force.
7
A TROUBLED BUNCH
SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1943
D espite General Eisenhower’s historic order, the Western Allies were not the only army to conceive of protecting cultural treasures during war. Ironically, so too did Germany, the same nation that since 1939 had systematically looted the countries it had conquered and occupied.
On August 25, 1914, less than a month after Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium and the outbreak of World War I, German soldiers patrolling the “open” and undefended university town of Louvain, near Brussels, were shot and killed. Believing their deaths to be the act of partisan snipers, German military authorities first rounded up and executed 248 citizens and then ordered other residents to stand in the streets while German troops burned their homes, one by one. The soldiers then torched the University of Louvain’s library, one of Europe’s oldest and most distinguished collections. The blaze destroyed 250,000 books—some eight hundred of which had been printed before the year 1500—and five hundred illuminated manuscripts. The destruction of the Louvain library became a notorious example of wanton wartime destruction.
The world reacted with swift and united indignation. So, too, did alarmed German cultural officials. Within three weeks, Wilhelm von Bode, Chief Superintendent of the Prussian Museums, proposed that Otto von Falke coordinate efforts with Belgian officials to protect that nation’s movable works of art. The following month, Dr. Paul Clemen, a distinguished professor of Art History at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn, was appointed to formally develop a system to protect the monuments of Belgium and later France. *
Clemen’s role as Provincial Conservator of the Rhineland, and his pioneering work in art conservation, uniquely qualified him to become the first leader of the Kunstschutz , Germany’s “art protection” unit. On January 1, 1915, he received a commission from German military officials that coordinated his art protection responsibilities with front-line commanders. Although hardly well known, the name of Paul Clemen became favorably associated with the protection of cultural property during World War I. So, too, was the name of Bode, best known for his leadership of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. “Cultural goods and art have to be saved for every cultivated country,” Bode once
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