Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis by Robert M. Edsel Page B
Authors: Robert M. Edsel
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stated, “and . . . the protection of arts and monuments has to be executed the same way on enemy territory as it is in our own country.” But his vision would prove short-lived.
ON MAY 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Western Europe and, for a second time, occupied Belgium. Incredibly, seven days later, the University of Louvain Library—having reopened in 1928 after ten years of rebuilding—was again reduced to ashes. Of the nine hundred thousand books destroyed that day, some two hundred thousand had been donated to the library by Germany per the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The painful irony was that many of those books contained bookplates with a Latin motto, Sedes Sapientiae non Evertetur (The Seat of Wisdom Shall Not be Overturned). German forces claimed that British troops fleeing the town of Louvain had started the fire; a subsequent investigation attributed the source to German artillery. The appointment, less than a week earlier, of Professor Dr. Franz Graf von Wolff-Metternich as the leader of the Kunstschutz, with a mandate to advise German High Command on the preservation and protection of works of art and monuments in occupied territories, had begun badly.
The challenges Clemen faced in establishing the Kunstschutz in 1914 seemed meager by comparison with those confronting Wolff-Metternich in 1940. By the time of his involvement, Hitler and Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had set in motion the greatest looting operation of the twentieth century. Much of Eastern Europe’s cultural wealth had already been stolen or destroyed. Soon Wehrmacht troops would march into the artistically rich cities of Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris, where the ERR ( Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg —Special Task Force Rosenberg, named for its leader, Alfred Rosenberg) would begin operations, all outside Wolff-Metternich’s authority.
As an aspiring student of painting and architecture, Hitler had been rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but his interest in art endured. If anything, the rejection motivated him to prove his “underestimated” gifts to the world. Working with young but established architects, including Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler, Hitler developed plans to rebuild entire cities, including his hometown of Linz, Austria. Beginning in May 1938, inspired by a tour of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence during a state visit to Italy, Hitler approved plans that led to an extraordinary museum—the Gemäldegalerie Linz, commonly referred to as the Führermuseum—that would contain what he considered to be the world’s most important objects.
Under Hitler’s leadership, art became a weapon of propaganda. Art was used to promote Nazi racial policies. During a 1937 visit to “The First Great German Art Exhibition,” Hitler was infuriated by works of art he considered “degenerate” and removed them from the walls himself. He used the occasion to explain:
Certain people’s eyes show things differently than they are . . . men who see, or as they may say, “experience,” the present-day body shapes of the people of our Nation only as degenerated retards, who generally perceive meadows as blue, skies as green, clouds as sulfurous yellow, and so on. . . . I just want to prohibit in the name of the German people that these poor unfortunate individuals who clearly suffer from bad vision, try to forcefully sell the results of their misconceptions to their contemporaries, or even declare it as being “art.”
Out the doors of German museums went paintings by German and Austrian Expressionist painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, and Oskar Kokoschka. Works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, and Renoir, among many others, soon followed, all part of the sixteen thousand objects declared “degenerate” and later sold, traded, or burned.
Hitler’s taste ran toward German-speaking nineteenth-century painters, including Makart, Spitzweg, Böcklin, and Grützner, who in his view had been
ON MAY 10, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Western Europe and, for a second time, occupied Belgium. Incredibly, seven days later, the University of Louvain Library—having reopened in 1928 after ten years of rebuilding—was again reduced to ashes. Of the nine hundred thousand books destroyed that day, some two hundred thousand had been donated to the library by Germany per the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The painful irony was that many of those books contained bookplates with a Latin motto, Sedes Sapientiae non Evertetur (The Seat of Wisdom Shall Not be Overturned). German forces claimed that British troops fleeing the town of Louvain had started the fire; a subsequent investigation attributed the source to German artillery. The appointment, less than a week earlier, of Professor Dr. Franz Graf von Wolff-Metternich as the leader of the Kunstschutz, with a mandate to advise German High Command on the preservation and protection of works of art and monuments in occupied territories, had begun badly.
The challenges Clemen faced in establishing the Kunstschutz in 1914 seemed meager by comparison with those confronting Wolff-Metternich in 1940. By the time of his involvement, Hitler and Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had set in motion the greatest looting operation of the twentieth century. Much of Eastern Europe’s cultural wealth had already been stolen or destroyed. Soon Wehrmacht troops would march into the artistically rich cities of Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris, where the ERR ( Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg —Special Task Force Rosenberg, named for its leader, Alfred Rosenberg) would begin operations, all outside Wolff-Metternich’s authority.
As an aspiring student of painting and architecture, Hitler had been rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but his interest in art endured. If anything, the rejection motivated him to prove his “underestimated” gifts to the world. Working with young but established architects, including Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler, Hitler developed plans to rebuild entire cities, including his hometown of Linz, Austria. Beginning in May 1938, inspired by a tour of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence during a state visit to Italy, Hitler approved plans that led to an extraordinary museum—the Gemäldegalerie Linz, commonly referred to as the Führermuseum—that would contain what he considered to be the world’s most important objects.
Under Hitler’s leadership, art became a weapon of propaganda. Art was used to promote Nazi racial policies. During a 1937 visit to “The First Great German Art Exhibition,” Hitler was infuriated by works of art he considered “degenerate” and removed them from the walls himself. He used the occasion to explain:
Certain people’s eyes show things differently than they are . . . men who see, or as they may say, “experience,” the present-day body shapes of the people of our Nation only as degenerated retards, who generally perceive meadows as blue, skies as green, clouds as sulfurous yellow, and so on. . . . I just want to prohibit in the name of the German people that these poor unfortunate individuals who clearly suffer from bad vision, try to forcefully sell the results of their misconceptions to their contemporaries, or even declare it as being “art.”
Out the doors of German museums went paintings by German and Austrian Expressionist painters Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, and Oskar Kokoschka. Works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, and Renoir, among many others, soon followed, all part of the sixteen thousand objects declared “degenerate” and later sold, traded, or burned.
Hitler’s taste ran toward German-speaking nineteenth-century painters, including Makart, Spitzweg, Böcklin, and Grützner, who in his view had been
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