The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  To Hitler the Italian situation was not merely an affair of state. It was a personal betrayal. No one symbolized the duplicity of his former ally more than Princess Mafalda, daughter of the King and wife of Prince Philip of Hesse, who had procured so many works of art for Hitler and Goering over the years. When the Prince visited the Führer’s Eastern Front headquarters a few weeks after the debacle, he was politely but firmly detained there. The rest of the entourage now “avoided him as if he had a contagious disease.”1 On September 9 the Führer had the couple sent to separate concentration camps, where Mafalda eventually perished.

  How much of Italy Hitler could hold would depend on the timing and location of the Allied invasion. When the British Eighth Army finally landed in Calabria on September 3, German planners assumed that the Allies would follow up this incursion with an airborne seizure of Rome in combination with Italian forces and amphibious landings on the coast near the capital. But by September 8, when after much agonizing the Badoglio government surrendered to Eisenhower and fled south, there were no Allied troops anywhere near the Eternal City. Field Marshal Kesselring immediately broadcast the code word “AXIS,” and the crack German paratroops so fortuitously sent to Rome moved in.

  What remained of the Fascist government was evacuated to Lake Garda. Unbeknownst to them, a new frontier had been drawn in the north: the territory down to Verona and as far over as Trieste was incorporated into the Reich under the administration of the Gauleiters of the Tirol and Carinthia, negating the Führer’s generous 1938 gesture, which had left this long-disputed area in Italian hands in return for the Duce’s support for the Anschluss. One day after these arrangements had been made, Hitler’s friend Mussolini, his territories thus considerably diminished, was rescued in a daring commando raid and reinstalled as “Head of State.” These quick actions and the hesitations of the Allies had allowed the Thousand-Year Reich to be extended to a line south of Naples reaching from the beautiful beach town of Salerno across to Bari in the east.

  In the early years of the war the directors of the Italian Belli Arti, like their colleagues in other nations, had put the most precious contents of their museums in refuges, or ricoveri. The museum administration of Naples had sent theirs to the vast and isolated Benedictine monastery at Montevergine high above the city and about thirty miles to the east. There and at another repository at Cava, near Salerno, were eventually concentrated more than 37,000 works of art from the Royal Palace, the major museums, and private collections. The contents of the Civic Museum, as well as nine hundred cases of the most ancient documents from the Neapolitan Archives, went to the Villa Montesano near Nola. Transport was not easy: covered trucks were hard to come by, the roads were punctured by bomb craters, and anything that moved was the target of Allied dive bombers. Each trip to the refuges became an adventure, but the curators persisted, and by the early summer of 1943 nearly sixty thousand objects had been made as safe as seemed possible.2

  The manner of the Allied progress in eastern Sicily, where German resistance was strong, was, however, most disturbing. The troops had not just stuck to the roads as the Germans had done in France. The battle had gone from village to village, up and down mountains, with much artillery activity by both sides. It was clear that the Neapolitan repositories would be in the midst of any such battle and that Montevergine, which contained the Naples “A” list, was the most vulnerable of all.

  This fear was exacerbated by a ferocious German propaganda campaign which predicted that the Allies would take or destroy anything they could lay hands on. In an article which is admirable for its amazing inventiveness, even in the annals of propaganda, the Berliner Börsen Zeitung reported:

  The American wholesale art dealer Cadoorie and Company has given a commission for the purchase of Sicilian antiquities. This is the same business that made great purchases from European emigrants and arranged auction sales of paintings, furniture, porcelain and other art objects. The firm was also busy with this game in art treasures which were stolen during the Spanish civil war. Behind the name Cadoorie the Jew Pimpernell is hidden … the representative in Algiers, Sally Winestone, has arranged connections with the staff of the Anglo-American hospital ships who endeavor to carry out her commissions.3

  In late July, therefore, Bruno Molajoli, Superintendent of the Naples Museums, went to Rome to consult his superiors. It was now felt that deposits all over Italy should be removed from the vulnerable country ricoveri to safer spots, the safest of all, everyone felt, being the neutral Vatican, with whom negotiations for storage were immediately begun. But the Naples deposits, now closest to the battle zone, could not wait for long. In August 187 crates containing the most important things were readied for dispatch to the safest place the authorities could possibly imagine next to the Vatican: the immense monastery of Monte Cassino, remote and inviolable, at the top of a mountain fifty miles north of Naples. The precious cargo did not leave until September 6, only hours before Allied landing craft came ashore in the great assault on Salerno.

  It was not until they arrived back in Naples that the curators heard the news of Badoglio’s surrender to the Anglo-Americans and realized that Italy had overnight become an occupied country in which their erstwhile allies were as much of a danger as were the forces attacking their country. The situation in Naples was terrible: in the distance could be heard the lugubre brontolio of artillery fire. Bombs fell intermittently on the port and the city, while in an arc around it every road, track, or convoy, and some less mundane things such as the marvelous cathedral at Benevento, just east of Montevergine, were being demolished. The Carabinieri, Italy’s national police, had been disbanded by the Germans, leaving museums and repositories without guards. Water and electricity were cut off, and all communication with the country refuges, where much still remained, became impossible.

  And indeed the situation outside the city was far from ideal. Cava, near the Salerno beachhead, was filled with refugees sheltering from artillery fire, and the abbot was being held hostage by the Germans. Montevergine no longer had guards and was now directly behind the German lines, although the Benedictines managed by various subterfuges to keep troops out. At the Church of San Antonio in Sorbo Serpico, one of the last refuges to be filled, the custodian refused admission to inquisitive Nazi officers, asking them to come back the next day. In the night he called together the ladies of the village, who carried seventeen large packed crates of paintings up into the hills on their backs so that the returning Germans found nothing. His caution was justified, for on September 26, soldiers enraged at Partisan resistance in Naples soaked the shelves of the University library in kerosene and set it on fire. Its fifty thousand volumes were still burning when, on September 28, the eighty thousand precious books and manuscripts from the various archives of southern Italy were discovered at Nola by foraging soldiers and, despite two days of desperate negotiations by the custodians, deliberately burned. With them also were consumed the best ceramics, glass, enamels, and ivories of the Civic Museum, and some forty-five of its paintings. These gratuitous acts of destruction came as a total surprise to the Italians. They would have many more in the coming months.4

  American troops enter Naples.

  When, after fierce resistance by Kesselring’s forces, the Allies entered Naples on October 1, the situation did not much improve. The University now endured a second wave of destruction. Allied soldiers ransacked the laboratories, hopelessly mixing up collections of shells and stones which had taken decades to assemble. Troops soon were to be seen driving about the city in jeeps decorated with hundreds of fabulously colored stuffed toucans, parrots, eagles, and even ostriches from the zoological collection. Curators were brusquely thrown out of their offices at the Floridiana Museum. British, French, and American personnel were billeted in the Capodimonte and the Royal Palace, where, with the delighted help of Neapolitan ladies of the night, they stripped brocades from the walls, presumably to be converted into garments of one kind or another. The Museo Nazionale, whe
re despite all the evacuations five hundred objects were still in place, was designated as a hospital-supply warehouse. Eisenhower’s aide flew in to find suitable lodgings for him near the huge Caserta Palace (vacated by the Germans only days before), which had been chosen as the main Allied headquarters, and which housed most of the evacuated decorative arts of Naples.5 The Italian museum authorities could find no one who seemed responsive to their protests at the use of these historic buildings. Molajoli wrote later:

  The massive mechanisms of a vast army of occupation, still engaged in combat, came in contact for the first time with a great cultural center, and were faced with problems of unforeseen complexity. Despite the best intentions of the … organizations of cultural assistance set up by the United Nations … Naples had the unwanted privilege of serving as the experimental laboratory for these organizations.6

  Dr. Molajoli and his colleagues could not find anyone to deal with their problems because Major Paul Gardner, the Monuments officer assigned to the city, did not arrive in Naples for three weeks.

  Efforts in Washington had produced nearly a dozen officers to join the beleaguered Hammond and progress with the armies to the mainland, but they too still languished in North Africa or Sicily. Italy was divided into fixed regions, with a Monuments officer for each one; but until an entire region was taken, the officer was not sent to the theater, even though he might have been useful in already conquered areas. Nor had the ill-fated maps ever reached anyone who could use them; in fact, the set for the Naples region had been captured when the British courier taking them to headquarters by motorcycle was intercepted by a German patrol. Monuments officers wondered for years afterward what the Germans had made of these mysterious documents.7 On top of this, their section of headquarters remained in Sicily, split off from the rest, and totally out of contact with events.

  The Monuments men were not the only ones feeling frustrated. The Roberts Commission, as the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments was now mercifully known, its chairmanship having devolved upon Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts instead of Chief Justice Stone, had finally been legitimized on August 20. But as of October 20 no official information at all on events in Sicily had reached the commission members. Despite this blackout they had forged ahead. Paul Sachs, who knew more about American museum personnel than anyone, having trained a great percentage of them, was put in charge of building up the roster of suitable officers. In the absence of information from the field, David Finley kept pressure on the War Department in a long correspondence with Assistant Secretary John McCloy, insisting that officers be assigned to tactical units and that more technical assistance be given. He wondered if the maps had ever reached air crews, and demanded reports.8 The commission did not know much more than it could glean from the newspapers, and the image of the United States revealed there was not much better than that of Germany when it came to the protection of monuments.

  Although President Roosevelt had broadcast a message to the Pope on July 10 assuring him that the Vatican would not be a target, the first Allied bombing of Rome on July 19 made major headlines worldwide. American planes had departed, press observers on board, with adamant instructions not to bomb anything but the targeted railroad yards. Despite all precautions, bombs fell on the ancient and especially revered basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mure. Axis propaganda had a field day, broadcasting a long letter supposedly written by the Pope, in which he lamented the failure of his pleas to save the city, and called upon the Allies to “reflect upon the severe judgement that future generations will pronounce.”9

  After a second raid on August 13, the Badoglio government declared Rome an open city, an act ignored by all belligerents. When he fled the capital, the Germans announced that they had “assumed protection of the Vatican,” and sealed it off with armed cordons while occupying the rest of Rome with large numbers of troops. In response, the Pope announced that he would not receive Marshal Kesselring until his troops were withdrawn from the city, and mobilized his Swiss Guard, who, armed with the latest modern weaponry but still dressed in their ancient costumes, stood eye to eye with the Germans. The standoff, vividly described by the Allied press, lasted for weeks and caused widespread consternation. “How could the Allies strike the enemy without making a battleground of the Vatican?” wondered The New York Times.10

  A special report of destruction and German atrocities in and around Naples, brought back to Roosevelt by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who had just visited the battle zone, led the Roberts Commission to begin a campaign to have the Allies declare one or more of the great artistic centers of Italy open cities, to which the contents of the repositories could be taken.11 They found little support. A confidential feeler to the Papal Nuncio was met with sympathy, but regret that “practical problems” would make such a declaration difficult: according to the Cardinal Secretary of State, “the designation of any one town or city would inevitably give rise to recriminations and complaints from other localities not thus favored.”12

  Nor was Supreme Commander Eisenhower willing to limit his tactical possibilities in any way. McCloy replied to Finley that Eisenhower “felt that while such a city could be definitely spared bombing by the American or British armies, it was not possible to guarantee in advance that the movements of the armies might not require the shelling of such a city if it were held by the Germans and the advance of the Allied armies thereby impeded. It was his opinion that while the idea had propaganda value, it was not feasible to try to carry it out.” The Supreme Commander was not enthusiastic about placing Monuments officers with combat units either. In his view “every precaution to safeguard objects of art was being taken.” As for restoration and salvage, it was a civilian problem to be solved by the Italians, perhaps with the advice of one or two British or American experts.13

  But the prospect of civilian agencies working in the conquered areas had, by the time of the fall of Naples, died a slow and inevitable death. Obedient to FDR’s stated policy, the Civil Affairs Division had asked the Combined Command, in the midst of the Sicilian battles, when such agencies should be told they could arrive on the scene. The reply was that it was much too soon. But on August 30 Eisenhower cabled that “the present state of operations will shortly permit civilian agencies to go into Sicily.” The British, upon receipt of this message, were horrified. “The British government anticipates with considerable alarm the prospect of having thousands of starry-eyed American civilians running loose in Europe,” read one cable. They would accept only individuals who could be integrated into the Military Government structure. By November Roosevelt finally abandoned his insistence on combined civilian-military operations in the field.14 This was a terrible blow to the Roberts Commission, civilians all, who had envisaged themselves in action on the scene, but who were thus relegated to a purely advisory role, and not even included in the distribution list for relevant military reports.

  Pressure was now entirely on the Military Government to improve matters. This was not easy. The Supreme Headquarters were divided between Algiers, Naples, and the Lower Peninsula of Italy. Military Government likewise had various divisions with their own commands. On top of this an Allied Control Commission was created to deal with the Badoglio government, which also had three separate headquarters. Little wonder that no one seemed in charge.

  It was only at this juncture that, on October 23, 1943, the British War Office awarded Leonard Woolley the formal title of Archaeological Adviser to the Director of Civil Affairs. On about the same date, the Roberts Commission finally received its first reports from Mason Hammond, covering events in Sicily up to the end of August. But it was not until late November that the assigned Monuments officers, waiting impatiently in Palermo, began to be placed on the mainland. Rigidly confined to their particular regions and as usual lacking transportation, they often could do little.

  Meanwhile, Paul Gardner remained alone in Naples, where the administrative apparatus of the S
upreme Command continued to take over the monuments of the city. The Royal Palace became an officers’ club. At Caserta the various HQs expanded geometrically to fill the two hundred rooms packed with delicate paintings and furniture which troops moved about at will. There were frequent reports of damage to Pompeii. The buildings seemed of no importance. In one of the hunting lodges at Caserta, General Eisenhower himself, instead of resorting to more conventional methods, used his pistol to kill a rat found perched on his toilet seat. (It took three shots.15) The medical unit assigned to the Pinacoteca, its doors generally wide open, planned to cook in the courtyard and set up cots in the galleries. There were constant complaints of rude troops breaking into locked libraries and storerooms and making off with books, coin collections, and objets.

  Woolley, who had the great advantage of being a lieutenant colonel in the British Army and high up in the War Office hierarchy, arrived on this scene on December 1. In a series of meetings at Allied headquarters, and in a stiff letter to the chief of Military Government, he pointed out the negative propaganda and political effects of the Army’s destructive activity. He mentioned that the “express desires” of the President of the United States and the British Secretary of State for War were not being observed.

  The stirring up of the brass had results: a commission of inquiry was appointed to investigate the whole situation in Naples, and on December 29, 1943, Eisenhower issued to all commanders the first Allied General Order of the war on the protection of monuments: