The Monuments Men: Rescuing Art Plundered by the Nazis
By Ronald H. Bailey

World War II  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Private Harry L. Ettlinger celebrated his 19th birthday on January 28, 1945, by boarding a truck in the bitter cold at a camp on the border between France and Belgium. He was a raw draftee of five months, untested in combat, and now assigned with hundreds of his comrades to the 99th Infantry Division, joining the American counterattack following the Battle of the Bulge.

Before the convoy could move beyond the camp gates, a sergeant dashed out of the office, halted the trucks and barked out an order: “The following three men will get off the truck with their gear.” Ettlinger heard his name called and stepped obediently off the truck. The change in marching orders resulted in Ettlinger’s “most memorable birthday ever,” for he had escaped some of the fiercest fighting of the war in Europe. The Battle of the Bulge — Adolf Hitler’s last great counteroffensive in the West — and the subsequent Allied invasion of Germany claimed the lives of three of his eight closest buddies from basic training and wounded the other five.

Ettlinger’s good luck came about because he was fluent in German. The Army initially included him in a pool of translators for the planned Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals but soon transferred him to duty that received little public attention but was arguably of even greater long-term historical significance. He would join an extraordinary outfit known as the “Monuments Men,” whose mission was nothing less than to help find, recover and preserve the artistic and cultural heritage of Europe.

Formally titled the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section, the elite organization eventually numbered more than 350 men and women from the armed forces of the United States and a dozen other nations. Its ranks consisted largely of art historians, museum curators, artists, architects and other such specialists. They were dubbed “Monuments Men” because their primary task after the 1944 invasion of France was to protect statues, historic buildings and other important cultural landmarks.

Harry Ettlinger’s role resulted less from any passionate interest in art than the circumstances of his birth, which gave him his facility for Ger­man. He was born a Jew in Germany and fled the country for the United States in 1938 along with his parents and two younger brothers. Ettlinger joined the Army as an infantryman in 1944 and was assigned to the Monuments Men at Seventh Army Headquarters in Munich at the beginning of May 1945. By then, more than 90 percent of the cultural landmarks in Germany had been hit by Allied bombing, and 60 percent were destroyed. So the Monuments Men focused on the even more monumental task of tracking down, protecting and restoring to their rightful owners the great paintings, sculpture and other artistic treasures systematically looted by Nazi Germany or otherwise displaced by the war.

The head of the Seventh Army task force, the late Captain James J. Rorimer, was on leave as director of the medieval collection at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art — and would become the museum’s director a decade after the war. He had joined the infantry as a 38-year-old private, driven a truck and then, as a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the Monuments Men, terrorized Allied commanders in France who wanted to billet their troops in historic castles. Rorimer at first tried to keep them out by posting off-limits signs, and when the signs proved ineffective he switched to white tape, a warning that the premises contained unexploded bombs or land mines. Rorimer was so brash and green in those early days that he even confronted a colonel on the staff of the Allied supreme commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and badgered him into returning 11 important paintings requisitioned from the Palace at Versailles to furnish Ike’s new Paris headquarters. “The disparity between [Rorimer’s] knowledge of medieval art and his knowledge of the Army in which he found himself somehow caused his immediate superiors to dub him ‘Jimsey,’” wrote his commanding officer, Major Stratton Hammon.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, People, World War II

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