The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  The Hertziana holdings were packed in early January 1944, and arrived at a “salt mine near Salzburg” a few weeks later. The other institutes did their packing as slowly as possible, vainly hoping that an Allied offensive would prevent shipment. The first carloads moved north as part of a troop train which was bombed while on a bridge; some cars fell into the river and others burned to ashes, but not the books. Subsequent transports also miraculously arrived in the Fatherland without damage. Hitler’s rage was now vindicated, but “his” libraries were doomed to several more weeks of harrowing adventure. As of March 4, 1944, some six freight cars of books, documents, photographic archives, and works of art still sat homeless on rail sidings in the Reich—while Bruhns desperately tried to find room for his treasures in the overflowing German refuges. In Rome no one was quite sure where they had ended up.

  The landing at Anzio and the frontal attack on the lowering mountains around Monte Cassino, which the Allies had begun with such high hopes of a rapid advance to Rome, was stopped within days by the well-prepared German defenses and the dreadful weather. In mud and rain, freezing and constantly exposed to artillery barrages on the bare mountainsides, the Allied armies lay in misery with the windows of the great abbey looking down upon them. Little wonder that it soon became a hated obstacle and the symbol of their powerlessness to advance.

  There was no question that the American commanders—aware of possible propaganda effects and bolstered by Eisenhower’s orders—considered the abbey a religious and historic monument which should be protected; nor did they consider its destruction a military necessity. In fact, reduction of the building to rubble would only enhance the German defense network in which it lay enmeshed like a fly caught in the web. But the abbey had become more than a mere building.

  Press reports in Britain and the United States focused on it more than any other of the many strong points and observation posts along the Gustav line. Repeated denials by Kesselring and von Weizsäcker that the abbey proper was being used by German forces were universally treated with scorn. Vivid reporting by Ernie Pyle and others told of the high casualty rate and truly ghastly conditions. C. L. Sulzberger of The New York Times declared on January 29 that “abstention from shelling Monte Cassino, about which reconnaissance has remarked the presence of many German vehicles, hampered our advance greatly since the whole hillside beneath it is defended.”

  In England the situation was made worse by a series of debates on the protection of monuments in the House of Lords in early February, which began with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Chichester calling for restraint in the bombing of “the constellation of lovely cities, towns and villages in Italy.” Unfortunately, the Bishops had failed to point out in their speeches that such restraint should always be subject to military necessity. A furor ensued. The Times letter columns overflowed with missives from angry parents declaring that their sons should not give their lives for a building. John Maynard Keynes, the eminent economist, wrote to John Walker at the National Gallery of Art in Washington that he feared “public discussion of this subject has started off on the wrong foot, and people are getting badly confused about it… the issue is now viewed as one between dead matter and young living bodies.”29

  Strong pressure to destroy the abbey was also forthcoming from the commanders of the New Zealand and Indian divisions whose troops would soon be ordered to take the mountain on which it stood. For days the issue was debated within the Allied commands, with the Americans and French against, and the British and New Zealanders for. Intelligence reports were studied, and the vaguest reports of a German presence taken as true. But in fact, no one really knew exactly what was behind the staring windows so far above them. Nor did anyone want responsibility for the decision; but it was finally taken by General Sir Harold Alexander, Commander of Allied Forces in Italy, on February 13.30

  The next day warning leaflets were showered over the abbey to allow evacuation of the premises by the monks and civilians known to be inside. Two days later wave after wave of bombers reduced it to a rubble heap. In the valley below, troops and reporters cheered at the sight. But the Germans entrenched round the abbey were unharmed by the bombardment, and now, as the doomed Allied troops attacking the next day would discover, moved into the ruins, which acted as a natural battlement on the mountaintop. The bombing had all been in vain: after terrible loss of life, and three more months of shelling, the abbey was finally taken on May 18 by Polish troops after the Germans had abandoned it.

  The desolate remains of the Abbey of Monte Cassino after Allied bombings

  Immediately following the bombing the American representative at the Vatican was severely taken to task by the Papal Secretary of State, who denounced the attack as a “piece of gross stupidity.”31 A few weeks later the Pope, clearly worried about the fate of Rome, appeared before a huge crowd at Saint Peter’s, and appealed to both sides to spare the city “so that their names may remain in benediction, and not as a curse through the centuries on the face of the earth.”32 Neither side wanted to be seen for eternity in such a light, and it is clear that both planned the inevitable change of hands at Rome with some care. Hitler forbade Kesselring to mine the bridges over the Tiber, and the number of German troops allowed in the city was kept to a minimum, while Allied Monuments officers had, by December 1943, drawn up elaborate preparations for the immediate protection of buildings.

  There was no further danger of bombing: in February the Allied Air Forces under General Lauris Norstad were finally supplied with special maps, showing important monuments on aerial photographs taken by the Air Forces themselves. The elusive Frick maps had proved unsuitable; the Air Force maps had the advantage of showing the bombardier exactly what he would see through the bombsight. Italian cities were divided into three categories. Category A included Rome, Florence, Venice, and Torcello, which “in no circumstances were to be bombed without authority from this Headquarters.” The Vatican City was regarded as neutral and off limits, as were Irish convents and other Papal properties scattered through the peninsula. Category B covered such cities as Ravenna, Assisi, San Gimignano, Urbino, and Spoleto, which could be bombed if it was considered essential. (“Full responsibility will be accepted by this HQ”) But Siena, Pisa, Orvieto, Padua, and scores of others in the last group, near which there were “important military objectives … which are to be bombed, and any consequential damage is accepted,” were on their own.33

  The subsequent bombings of rail centers at Florence and Siena, and such vital areas as the harbor of Venice, were usually masterpieces of precision, but there were still losses. On March 11 bombs destroyed forever the frescoes by Mantegna in the Church of the Eremitani in Padua and narrowly missed the tiny Arena Chapel, decorated by Giotto, only a few hundred yards away. Each such mistake was trumpeted in the German and Fascist press. The Italian puppet government even put out a set of postage stamps showing “destroyed” monuments and vividly illustrated pamphlets with such titles as The War against Art, Liberators over Bologna—The Stones Speak, and Torino, ferita—mutilata.

  On June 2, 1944, Allied forces finally reached the outskirts of Rome. Kesselring in another of his brilliant retreats now withdrew his badly battered troops out of the city to regroup just to the north. On June 4 the American Fifth Army entered the city without encountering resistance. This time every precaution had been taken to avoid embarrassing incidents. Indeed, one Monuments officer, sent forward to assess damage, had entered the city ahead of the combat troops.

  Cables from General Marshall, sent days before, ordered that Vatican officials be immediately informed of “the efforts that the Allied Armies have made in Italy to save Church property and historic arts monuments from damage,” and be given copies of the marked bombing atlases. He also required that Monuments officers be sent into Rome immediately “for the purpose of compiling an inventory of damage caused to non-military objectives … due to Allied bombing.”34

  On June 5 the Pope spoke to a huge crowd,
made up to a great extent of Allied soldiers, and thanked God that Rome had not been destroyed. The same day, Monuments officer Perry Cott had arrived in the city, where all museums and galleries were closed and placed under guard. By June 7 conferences with Italian fine arts officials were in full swing, and Lieutenant Cott was busy inspecting buildings and writing an article for the Corriere di Roma explaining the functions of the Monuments officers “to dispel German propaganda to the effect that this is a purchasing commission.”

  Cott was immediately told of the purloined Naples pictures and of the dubious art deals done by Philip of Hesse and others, but his early investigations revealed no major cases of looting by German troops within the city which would be of use in the continuing propaganda war. Soon the great treasures of the Italian patrimony held in Rome were brought out and exhibited to the press. Michelangelo’s Moses was freed from its protective wrappings. Mosaics were stripped of the cloth coverings which had been glued to their surfaces, and all over town the bizarre brick structures built around immovable monuments came down. By August, Cott was able to organize another of the never-to-be-seen-again exhibitions which the war would make possible, making his magnificent selection from both the Roman and refugee pictures at hand.35

  During the progress from Naples to Rome and beyond, the field organization of Monuments officers improved greatly. Two men, Deane Keller and Norman Newton, were assigned to the forward echelons of the Fifth and Eighth Armies, respectively, often arriving at a town within hours of its capture. They would immediately seek out local officials, post guards, and report damages and German depredations to colleagues who would take over as they moved on. Theirs was an Odyssey that would be the dream of any peacetime traveller: up the coasts to Gaeta, San Giovanni in Venera, Ostia, and Pescara; past Palestrina and Tivoli, through the wild reaches of the Abruzzi to the fabled cities of Umbria and Tuscany. But they were the first to see the full effects of Churchill’s “red-hot rake,” and the dream trip was more often a nightmare.

  Nor were they always well received by the locals: in one devastated village cold and hungry citizens were outraged that Monuments officers arrived before anyone else and were heard to complain that “they take more interest in old stones than in us.” The shaken officer involved recommended that “no further visits be made … to deal solely with monuments and works of art until it has been made known to the homeless population that plans are afoot to provide them with weatherproof shelters before winter.”36 In other places lack of interest was total. Archives specialist R. H. Ellis reported one town to be “a torpid and unsatisfactory place … much time wasted hunting up sleeping officials…. Archives finally seen with the Prosindaco, the village idiot, and a young lady who was found inside one of the rooms when it was unlocked.”37 No further explanation was given for this interesting situation.

  Visiting village churches on the west coast, Keller found a pattern of pilfering and looting by retreating German troops: vestments strewn around, attempts to carve out inscriptions, scattered and rifled archives, and missing gold and silver church ornaments. Mines and booby traps were everywhere and physical damage was often terrible. In the little town of Itri, nestled in a rocky and strategic pass on the Via Appia, the Monument of San Martino was reduced to a twenty-foot heap of rubble. No church had a roof intact, and shell holes pocked walls and floors. Here and there in the devastation a statue or campanile would stand intact. In Terracina, described in the guidebooks as a “smiling little town,” the bodies of more than two hundred Germans were discovered around the Temple of Jove. More were found in the museum in the Barberini Palace in Pales-trina. At Frascati even the ancient galleys from the reign of the notorious Emperor Caligula, raised at great expense from Lake Nemi by Mussolini—the entire lake had been drained—were found to have been put to the torch by a retreating German artillery battalion.

  North of Rome, where the Allied advance was much more rapid than had been the case in the preceding weeks, damage to the “art towns” between the Tiber and the Arno was far lighter. Orvieto’s striped cathedral, high on its pedestal, was unharmed, and its movable treasures were found safely stored at Boito. Assisi, its irreplaceable frescoes by Giotto, Cimabue, and Simone di Martini joined by the evacuated works of Bergamo, Milan, and Foligno, had been declared a hospital town by the Germans and had been carefully protected by them. Siena, where flag-twirling representatives of the city wards joyously welcomed French troops on July 3, had also been so designated by Kesselring, and remained untouched except for last-minute looting of shops by the Germans, giving the lie to reports in the Nazi press that it had been totally destroyed by Allied artillery.

  Italian officials of the town, German propaganda having taken its toll, were, nevertheless, suspicious of the new arrivals. The Superintendent of Fine Arts was convinced that the Allies would take everything with them when peace came and there was universal fear that French Moroccan and other “black” troops from “a different civilization” would not respect citizens or monuments.

  The towered town of San Gimignano, badly shaken by artillery shells, was intact (contrary to press rumors), and heavily guarded by MPs who had put the entire town off limits to troops. And so the pattern continued: again and again the stores of priceless treasures were miraculously found to be safe and inviolate in the midst of carnage. The German Army and the Kunstschutz seemed to have generally respected the ricoveri. As the Allied Armies approached Florence, Monuments officers began to relax a little. They had been assured from Rome that the Florentine treasures, like those around Rome itself, had been removed from the battle zones, and were safe in the city.

  As elsewhere, the Florentine collections had been sent to refuges in the surrounding countryside. In 1940 the former Medici villa of Poggio a Caiano and two other palazzos were requisitioned and soon filled with top works. The eight-ton bronze equestrian statue of Cosimo I de’ Medici was dismantled and, appropriately, moved from the Piazza della Signoria to the gardens of Poggio on a cart pulled by four oxen. The trip took sixteen hours; at one point the surface of the road had to be dug out so that the ears of the horse could pass under a railroad bridge. Eighteen more refuges were eventually opened, some in private villas owned by well-known Florentines, others in such buildings as the Oratory of San Onofrio at Dicomano, where the major sculptures from the Bargello and the Duomo were stored. In November 1943 Kunstschutz chief Evers appointed Professor Ludwig Heydenreich, the well-known director of the German Art Institute in Florence, as his deputy with responsibility for the Tuscan region. Heydenreich was definitely of the same ilk as his Roman colleagues and deeply anxious to preserve the Florentine collections. The agreed policy of returning the contents of the ricoveri to Florence, negotiated by von Tieschowitz before he returned to France, was implemented, but due to problems of transport, and the ineffectiveness of Evers, progress was slow.

  In February 1944 Evers was replaced by quite a different personality, SS Standartenführer Dr. Alexander Langsdorff, formerly of the Prussian State Museums, an archaeologist who had worked with none other than Sir Leonard Woolley before the war but who had subsequently graduated to the SS, serving at one point as a personal cultural adviser on Himmler’s staff. By June constant bombing of the roads around Florence made further attempts at moving works of art unthinkable, and all agreed that everything must now be left in place.

  On June 19, as the battle lines approached, the Kunstschutz and the rest of the German support staffs were moved back to Verona and other cities. Heydenreich was sent to Venice to work on protection there. Langsdorff left behind a farewell letter in which he commended himself to Sir Leonard Woolley, and pointed out that the Kunstschutz had done its utmost to save the Florentine works.

  In Florence, after the departure of these worthies, confusion reigned. No one seemed quite sure what exactly had been brought back to town and what was still in the refuges around the city. Nor, in the absence of Kunstschutz officers at field headquarters, did German troops know how to handle the dep
osits they encountered in the midst of their retreating lines. Kesselring therefore ordered all units to leave the contents of the deposits where they were, but to report any finds to headquarters and if necessary to hand over works to the Church.

  On July 4 the German commander of Florence called in the Superintendent of Fine Arts, Signor Poggi, and told him that a huge deposit of 291 Uffizi and Pitti pictures in the Villa Bossi-Pucci at Montagnana would have to be moved, as the area was threatened by artillery. What he did not reveal was that they were already en route north. On July 3 General Greiner of the 362d Infantry Division had transported them to Bologna, where he was told to hand them over to the Cardinal Archbishop. For reasons known only to himself the prelate declined to accept this awesome responsibility. The Bishop of Modena also refused, and the pictures were temporarily deposited at the nearby resort town of Marano sul Panaro. A few days later another German unit suddenly appeared in Florence with the contents of another ricovero casually tossed into uncovered trucks. These were handed over to Poggi, minus two works by Cranach, the famous Adam and Eve from the Uffizi.

  Upset at this evidence of paintings whizzing around the battle area with no professional supervision, Superintendent Poggi prevailed upon the German consul, still in the city, to recall Langsdorff to control further shifting about of works. Langsdorff did report to Florence, but it is clear that at Nazi headquarters in Verona his thinking about the duties of the Kunstschutz had changed. When he discovered that the Army was planning to take the “Germanic” Cranachs back to the Fatherland, he promised the reluctant officers that he himself would present them to the Führer. Then he hid them in his room at the Excelsior, without telling Poggi.

  On July 18, after talking to local commanders, he informed Kesselring’s headquarters, and also those of SS General Karl Wolff, who controlled all SS operations in Italy and was directly responsible to Himmler, that he was “taking in hand immediately supervision and direction of evacuation measures by our troops.” He again did not bother to tell Poggi and left town without even saying goodbye, taking the Cranachs with him to the German embassy, now located at Fasano on Lake Garda. There, on July 22, he met with Wolff, who issued a special order authorizing the removal from any ricovero which could still be reached of “whatever could be saved of the endangered works of art belonging to the Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti in Florence,” and gave Langsdorff eight precious trucks for the operation. The convoy left almost immediately for Florence, and arrived there at dawn on July 28 after three straight days and nights on the road.38