The Monuments Men

The Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section of the Western Allied armies, established in 1943 and active across the western and central European theatres from the Sicily landings of summer 1943 through the German occupation of 1949, was the first organised military programme in history dedicated to the protection of cultural property in wartime. Around three hundred and fifty officers and men served in the section over the war and the immediate postwar period, drawn from the museum, library and academic professions of the United States, Britain, Canada and the dominions. They were known to themselves and to the press as the Monuments Men. Around two thousand of the most senior figures in postwar American and British art and museum administration spent the war in the section.

The section was created in 1943 after lobbying by the American Council of Learned Societies and the British Council, in response to the early Allied bombing campaigns against Italian and German cities and the realisation that the war would do extensive damage to the cultural heritage of western Europe if no organised effort was made to protect it. President Roosevelt established the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas in August 1943, under the chairmanship of Justice Owen J. Roberts of the Supreme Court. The British equivalent, the Macmillan Committee, was established the same summer. The Allied military command put the academic experts of both organisations into uniform and assigned them to the field armies as Monuments Officers. The first deployments were to Sicily and Italy in autumn 1943.

The Italian campaign was the first test. The Monuments Men identified the cultural heritage at risk in each combat zone, advised commanders on which buildings to spare from artillery fire, ran emergency repairs on bomb-damaged churches and palaces, and recovered art and archives from German evacuation depots in northern Italy. The most spectacular Italian recovery was at Castel Sant’Angelo and the Vatican-owned Villa Bonaparte at Rome in summer 1944, where the Monuments Men recovered around forty thousand items that had been crated for evacuation to Germany by the German Kunstschutz, the German army’s own cultural property office. The Monuments Officer Frederick Hartt, an art historian who had taught at Yale before the war, ran most of the Italian operations and is the author of the standard postwar account.

The northwest European campaign of 1944, 1945 was the larger operation. The Monuments Men landed in Normandy in June 1944, behind the assault troops, and worked across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and into Germany over the next eleven months. The major French recovery was at the Jeu de Paume and the Louvre, where the Monuments Men received Rose Valland’s clandestine documentation and used it to trace the works the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg had shipped to Germany. The German campaign produced the larger finds: the Altaussee salt mine in Austria, the Merkers salt mine in Thuringia, the Bernterode mine in the Harz, the Heilbronn salt mine, and around fifteen hundred other depots across the Reich. The American Monuments Officer George Stout, a Harvard-trained conservator, oversaw the Altaussee operation. The British officer Ronald Balfour was killed in action at Cleve in March 1945, the only Monuments Man to die in combat.

The numbers are large. By the end of the operation in 1949 the Monuments Men had recovered, inventoried and processed around five million looted cultural objects across the European theatre. The Munich Central Collecting Point and the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point handled the bulk of the inventory and the restitution. The works were returned, in principle, to the country of origin under the Allied policy of external restitution; the receiving country was then responsible for finding the original owners and, where they had been murdered and no heir could be found, for transferring the works to national museums. The receiving countries varied widely in how seriously they conducted the second stage. France’s restitution to original Jewish owners was inadequate; around five hundred works held by the French state as MNR works are still listed as awaiting restitution eighty years on. The Netherlands’ record was mixed; restitution to original owners was incomplete and many works ended up in Dutch state collections. The Soviet authorities took a different approach altogether: works recovered in the Soviet zone were treated as compensation for Soviet wartime cultural losses and removed to the Soviet Union, where most of them remain.

The Monuments Men’s record was largely forgotten in postwar America until the late 1990s, when the journalist Lynn Nicholas and the American businessman Robert M. Edsel began to recover the wartime documentation and the personal papers of the surviving members. Edsel’s books, beginning with Rescuing Da Vinci in 2006 and The Monuments Men in 2009, brought the section back into the public conversation. The 2014 George Clooney film, with a screenplay by Clooney and Grant Heslov, brought the men’s work to a still wider audience, although with the standard Hollywood adjustments. The Monuments Men Foundation, founded by Edsel in 2007 and now based in Dallas, has continued the work of locating still-missing pieces from the wartime inventories and of pressing for the return of works held by museums whose provenance research has been incomplete. The work continues. Around one hundred thousand works from the wartime inventories are still listed as missing.

See also

Sources

  • Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men, Center Street, 2009
  • Robert M. Edsel, Rescuing Da Vinci, Laurel Publishing, 2006
  • Robert M. Edsel, Saving Italy, W. W. Norton, 2013
  • Frederick Hartt, Florentine Art under Fire, Princeton University Press, 1949
  • Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa, Knopf, 1994
  • Monuments Men Foundation, archive of personal papers and oral histories
  • Records of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments, US National Archives, Record Group 239