"The wooden top came off without trouble," Lindsay later wrote, "after which I carefully uncovered the wrapping of jet black tar paper. Beneath the tar paper was a sea of pure white spun glass, and within it the beautiful face of the renowned Queen, serenely looking up at us." He lifted the heavy bust onto a pedestal. "Within an instant, every man in there fell hopelessly in love with her." The bust remained in Wiesbaden until it was returned to Berlin's ancient history museum in 1955.

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The planned destination of another group of artwork sparked an extraordinary controversy at the Wiesbaden Collecting Point in November 1945. A directive arrived ordering the Monuments Men to ship to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. — purportedly for safekeeping — 202 of the most valuable paintings being held in Wiesbaden. Lindsay remembered that his boss Walter Farmer "flew into a rage" and immediately called a meeting of other Monuments Men officers in Germany. They prepared a letter of protest, which became known as the Wiesbaden Manifesto. It was signed by 25 officers and sent up through channels. The directive, the manifesto suggested, resembled the kind of looting for which Nazi war criminals would be prosecuted.

Many years later, after a distinguished career as a professor of art history at Binghamton University in New York, Lindsay recounted the controversy in a scholarly journal. "To the men safeguarding these national treasures," he wrote, "the directive was seen as nothing less than a betrayal of their purpose." Lindsay did not sign the manifesto because he was "only an enlisted man." But he was in full accord — as were his German workmen, who composed "a letter similar in spirit to our Manifesto." With Lindsay's permission, "they tacked it carefully to the inside" of one of the 45 shipping crates containing the paintings. After more than three years of being stored and exhibited in the United States, the paintings — by such masters as Botticelli, Rubens and Rembrandt, and then valued at $80 million — were returned to Wiesbaden in April 1949. Lindsay believes the manifesto was the only protest of an official order lodged by American officers in the European theater.

While millions of stolen or displaced artwork passed through the Collecting Points in the months after the war, the Monu­ments Men continued to pursue masterworks known to be still missing. Much of what they tracked down was referred to as "second-generation loot." This consisted of objects origi­­nally stolen by the Nazis and then wrongfully acquired by the German populace through random looting or transactions on the black market.

Such items occupied much of the attention of Lieutenant Bernard Taper, an art intelligence officer for two years after the war in Europe. Early in the summer of 1946, Taper was persuaded by a Monuments officer to switch over from the intelligence staff of the Third Army. Though he had no background in art, he saw that his job would be like a detective's, and as an aspiring journalist, he at least knew how to ask questions. He also liked the idea of the relative freedom from military routine — "wearing civilian clothes, driving a nice car and enjoying the glamour associated with art."

What Taper called "loot twice removed" was especially difficult to locate because it rarely left a paper trail. When Munich fell to the Allies, for example, a mob broke into the Verwaltungsbau — Nazi party headquarters and later a Monuments Men Collecting Point — and sacked it. Among the art treasures taken was a collection of small works, mostly Dutch and Flemish masters confiscated from the Adolphe Schloss family after the fall of France and kept in Munich for Hitler's personal enjoyment. "Most of the Munich looters had no idea what they had gone off with," Taper said. He remembers one woman who had taken an 18th-century Dutch landscape and placed it under her mattress for extra support. She had cut it to fit but told the American soldiers who came to retrieve it, "I didn't cut off anything important — just some sky and clouds."

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