The Monuments Men: Rescuing Art Plundered by the Nazis

By Ronald H. Bailey | World War II  | 2 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

By the time Rorimer reached Munich, he had learned a lot about Army ways, and he latched onto Ettlinger for his youthful affability as well as his linguistic skills. He took Ett­linger to a Munich prison to interpret for his interview with Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s official photographer, an art agent and a suspected collector of looted paintings. He also took him to Berchtesgaden, the south Bavarian town near Hitler’s mountain retreat, where an entire train laden with Hermann Göring’s cultural loot was discovered in early May. This and other trips lodged in Ettlinger’s memory in no small part because he had never learned to drive; Captain Rorimer had to man the wheel of their jeep while Ettlinger, a lowly private, enjoyed the scenery.

Ettlinger’s most memorable trip with Rorimer was to a veritable house of treasure, the fairytale-like castle of Neusch­wanstein. Built in the 19th century in a fantastic pseudo-Gothic style as a palace for King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the castle contained more than 6,000 items of art, jewelry and furniture. Most of it had been stolen from the Rothschilds and other prominent Jewish families in France by an organization headed by the Nazi racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg. Rorimer also discovered there a meticulous inventory of objects taken from public and private collections in Western Europe.

Rorimer had learned of the loot’s whereabouts in the castle from a French art historian and member of the French Resistance, Rose Valland. A curator at the Louvre in Paris, Valland worked during the war at the Jeu de Paume, a small museum nearby that the Nazis used as a clearinghouse for looted objects. Valland secretly kept track of everything that passed through and, just as important, its destination. After American troops secured the castle at Neuschwanstein, Rorimer put it off-limits and assigned GIs to guard it. During their visit, Ettlinger noted, Rori­mer denied access to a two-star British general while “I, an American buck private, happily toured the castle.”

That summer of 1945, Rorimer assigned Ettlinger to work in the salt mines — literally — at the city of Heilbronn, a rail center less than 50 miles northeast of Ettlinger’s childhood home at Karlsrühe. During the final weeks of the European war, Allied troops had discovered a series of mines in Germany and Austria where the Nazis had secreted untold riches — looted art as well as treasures from German museums — for safekeeping.

Thus, in early September 1945, began Ettlinger’s life underground. Four or five days a week, he descended an elevator some 700 feet into the Heilbronn mine or down the shaft at the Kochendorf facility a couple of miles to the north. At the bottom of the Heilbronn mine were a dozen or so chambers, carved out by salt mining, up to a mile long and about 60 feet wide and 40 feet high. At one end of the mine, the original function carried on: Rocks containing salt were extracted and transported to a large furnace for refining. Ettlinger performed most of his duties in a series of smaller storage chambers above the large caverns.

Ettlinger’s first priority at Heilbronn involved some stained-glass windows from the Strasbourg Cathedral. According to captured documents, authorities in this French city had removed the intricately designed windows — some of them dating from the 13th century — at the war’s outbreak and stored them for safekeeping in southern France. Later, the Nazis, who had always maintained that Strasbourg was actually part of Germany, shipped the treasured windows in 73 cases to Heilbronn. When General Eisenhower got wind of this, he ordered the return of the windows to the cathedral. They were to be the first stolen works of art restored to their rightful owners.

Promoted soon to Technician 4th Grade, Ettlinger effectively became the underground operations manager. The wooden cases containing the stained-glass windows had to be pulled out and taken to the surface for shipment by truck back to Strasbourg. This task was completed in less than two months, and he moved on to the enormous challenge of segregating other stolen works of art from German-owned property and repackaging them for return to Western Europe. Ettlinger had the assistance of two-man teams of local miners, who cooperated fully with him. “Here I was a 19-year-old Jewish kid giving orders to the Germans!” Ettlinger remembers.

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

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