The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  Although Allied troops arrived in the southern section of Florence on August 4, they could not move into the center until after the eleventh, when the Germans withdrew from the river. The northern parts of town remained in German control until the third week of August. In the meantime, life on both sides of the river was miserable. The Pitti and the Boboli Gardens had become a great refugee center where six thousand citizens evacuated before the bridge demolition were living in terrible squalor.

  When Hartt first entered the courtyard of the Pitti on August 13 he was greeted with jubilation and relief by the two top Florentine art officials, Drs. Poggi and Procacci, who related the recent events with great emotion. They went immediately to the river. Huge piles of rubble lay along the banks, but it was still possible to cross the Ponte Vecchio. The ruins were filled with mines, and raw sewage spewed out over the devastation. Herbert Matthews of The New York Times reported that “Florence as the world knew it is no more,” and although the great monuments remained intact, “it will not be the Florence of the Medici, it will not be that perfection, that utterly harmonious atmosphere that made it unique in the world.”47 At the Uffizi all the windows and skylights were gone and decorative frescoes hung down from the walls. Someone had written in chalk below the statue of Dante in the colonnade of the empty Uffizi:

  In sul passo dell’ Arno

  I tedeschi hanno lasciato

  Il ricordo della loro civiltà48

  (In the crossing of the Arno/The Germans have left/A souvenir of their good manners).

  Allied control was not total until late August. This was sometimes a mixed blessing, as the problems of Military Government already encountered in Sicily and Naples began to recur. Lieutenant Hartt was relentlessly pursued by villa owners trying to have their houses declared “monumenti nazionali” and thereby avoid billeting of troops, and by homeless refugees who confused him with the displaced persons officer Lieutenant Dart. Army units schemed to be allowed to set up in the Pitti Palace, and repair estimates and proposals by the hundreds arrived to be pushed through the various bureaucracies.

  There were more frivolous requests: one Florentine count, immaculately attired in “a white linen suit, a blue shirt and a boutonnière,”49 came to discuss the reopening of the race track in the Cascine. Despite these irritations the Monuments officers found plenty of volunteers who patrolled the city each morning and picked up fragments of sculpture and architecture knocked off by the night’s shelling, and others who spent their days diving into the now filthy Arno to retrieve what remained of the adornments of the Ponte Santa Trinità. (All but the head of the statue of Spring were recovered, and that suddenly appeared on a sandbank three hundred yards downstream in 1961.)

  Hardest of all was the need to deal with officers totally oblivious to historic preservation. Hartt could not persuade Army engineers to stop bulldozing away salvageable fragments of the ancient buildings blown up by the Nazis, along with the books, manuscripts, and works of art which had been inside. Happier was quite another engineering feat undertaken to return the statue of Cosimo I to the city. The oxcart in which he had departed was replaced by a ten-ton wrecker from the 477th Ordinance Evacuation Company, and the separated horse and rider were loaded in short order by an Italo-American team directed by Deane Keller. A soldier rode on the horse to lift or cut power lines. As the truck approached Florence, people in small villages cheered and rushed out from their houses. Just outside the city, a snappy escort of MPs on motorcycles joined the convoy, which now progressed with sirens sounding to the Piazza della Signoria. A carriage driver on the route raised his hat and shouted “Cosimo, bentornato!” Keller’s report on the event tells every detail. “This is a long report on a relatively simple operation,” he admitted. But for him it was “a large and important undertaking in terms of giving pleasure to a people who have suffered and in establishing happy relations between these people and their present military governors.”50

  Despite the lion’s share of attention showered upon it, Florence was not the most devastated city in northern Italy. Through the fall of 1944 great efforts were made to salvage other victims of the “red-hot rake.” In the small town of Impruneta the beams of the basilica of Santa Maria lay like a giant game of pick-up sticks, covering blasted open, bone-filled tombs, shattered della Robbia plaques, and twisted paintings. Lucca, Pistoia, and Arezzo had much damage. Pieve had been systematically blown up, house by house, by the retreating Nazis; the only thing still standing was an enormous terra-cotta Assumption of the Virgin by della Robbia in a little chapel, itself on the verge of collapse. The townspeople refused to let Monuments officers remove the relief to safety, crying, “E tutto quello che ci rimane! [It’s all we have left!]” When they returned some months later they found the relief secured, the streets cleared, and even a suspension bridge, built by the villagers themselves, spanning the river.51

  The full effects of battle had fallen on Pisa and its port city of Livorno, where intense fighting had gone on for nearly forty days. Picking his way through the deserted and mined ruins on September 3, Deane Keller made his way with trepidation to the famed group of monuments known to the most untutored tourist. The Leaning Tower stood intact, if somewhat pockmarked. The Cathedral’s roof was full of holes, the Baptistry unharmed. But the Campo Santo, the ancient cemetery of the city which forms one side of the famous square—built according to tradition on earth brought back by the Crusaders in the thirteenth century and surrounded by delicate Gothic galleries which enclosed some forty thousand square feet of frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli and a host of other artists—lay in a twisted, fire-blackened mass before him. So intense had been the heat that the lead of the roof had melted and run down across the frescoes and tombs. Hanging fragments of painted plaster lay open to the rain. It had been this way since a July 27 artillery bombardment, probably Allied and probably aimed at the Leaning Tower, which was thought to be a German observation post.

  Keller realized immediately that only fast action could save the Campo Santo. General Hume, the highest-ranking Civil Affairs officer, inspected the ruins within days. Fresco specialists were sent from Florence and Italian soldiers attached to Fifth Army, directed by American engineers, worked to lift the sheets of lead from the floors. Everyone pulled together, including the Fascist former Superintendent of Pisa, who otherwise would have been in jail. Conditions were not easy. For three more weeks the Germans bombarded Pisa from the other direction. Water and light were not reconnected for nearly six months; there was little food other than Army rations. The few restaurants still standing could offer only “unidentified boiled vegetation” to the group working to get a temporary roof up before the autumn rains. The effort succeeded: by mid-October a canvas shelter was in place, thousands of fragments had been collected, and the frescoes had been secured with various ingenious forms of netting and supports.52

  Pisa: Under the Army’s protective roof, restorers work on the frescoes of the Campo Santo.

  As if everyone had not had enough, the rains certainly came in October, swelling the Arno, which flooded the Florentine ruins, and making the Army’s life miserable for what would be a second winter holed up before another of Kesselring’s seemingly unending series of defensive lines. And still, as winter approached, Allied Monuments officers remained ignorant of the fate of nearly half of Florence’s greatest treasures.

  Churches and villas full of museum collections were not the only things in the Tuscan hills. In the midst of this gigantic battlefield daily life of a sort went on for private citizens both native- and foreign-born. Tuscany had always attracted a large and cultured expatriate community. In and around Florence, installed in houses overflowing with precious books, paintings, and objets, lived professors of the German Art Institute, intellectual British spinsters, consuls of many nations, odds and ends of various Royal families, and art-world celebrities such as Bernard Berenson and Sir Harold Acton.

  At the outbreak of war many of Allied origins found themselves technicall
y enemies of Italy, but Mussolini’s Fascist government, already so long in power, was not intolerant of these longtime residents and in general they were left in peace. The fall of Mussolini brought confusion, which soon changed to dread as inhabitants noted the arrival of great numbers of Germans. The Badoglio surrender changed everything. Communications were controlled by censors. Private cars were confiscated. A whole secret life developed as Italian families hid sons and husbands who had abandoned their army and now sought to avoid German manpower roundups. Others hid Allied prisoners of war released by the Italians. Anti-Jewish measures, enacted by Mussolini at Hitler’s urging, but far less stringently enforced, were soon brought into line with the rest of the Reich. Transports to concentration camps began in October 1943, and on November 30 a law was passed authorizing the seizure of Jewish property; in Italy too the confiscations could now begin.

  More frightening to everyone than the Germans was the new Republican Fascist government, which consisted of the worst remaining elements of the old regime, thirsting for vengeance. Anyone even remotely related to the Italian Royal Family or the court was regarded by Fascists and Nazis alike as a traitor and was in grave danger. The Florentine SS/Gestapo—made up of Italians—was under the leadership of a certain Carita, who belied his name by arresting retired ladies-in-waiting and torturing members of distinguished Florentine families. This was often too much even for the Germans, and especially their consul Gerhard Wolf, who frequently negotiated the releases of Carità’s victims.53

  Hostages, reprisals, and confiscations became the order of the day. The Italian King’s coin collection was sent to SS headquarters in Verona and the collections of the Duke of Bourbon Parma were removed to Castle Dornsberg, near Merano.54 By October 1943 reports of confiscations of furs, jewelry, and silver began to be heard. On the fourth, Marchesa Iris Origo, an Anglo-American married to an Italian, wrote: “Spend the day in packing linen, blankets, silver etc. to be concealed in an attic which we will wall up in preparation for the German retreat.”55 By November her family’s house in Fiesole, the famous Villa Medici, had been requisitioned. The Germans did allow her to remove the most valuable furniture and the linen, glass, and china, an uncommonly kind gesture, the occupying unit’s commanding officer being mainly interested in the piano, as he was a composer who had written an opera about Napoleon.56

  The retreating paratroops did not come until the following summer. In June 1944 units of Germans, some civilized, some not, followed one another in rapid succession at another Origo villa in the Val d’Orcia south of Siena, sleeping everywhere, bathing in the laundry rooms, setting up and removing artillery in the gardens. Just beyond these, bands of trigger-happy Partisans, sometimes of unclear politics, roamed the woods and were apt to appear with demands for food and other necessities which more and more they simply “liberated.” Meanwhile, Allied bombs fell on villages for no apparent reason, and leaflets rained down from the sky with dramatically opposed instructions from each side. It was hard to know what was going on. In the middle of June, when the Marchesa asked a German officer if he was going to the front, he laughed and replied, “‘And where do you think you are?’” Surprised, she wrote, “This is a new idea to me, who, like most civilians, think that the front is somewhere we are not.”57

  Feeling that their presence was a restraint on looters, villa owners stayed in their houses as long as they could. But on the twenty-second of June a German artillery officer warned the Origos that they should leave immediately. The troops now arriving were the filthy and exhausted echelons of the First and Fourth Paratroop Divisions, who after years of fighting no longer cared about anything but the most basic necessities of survival. Eight days later, the front lines having passed on, the Origos returned to find the villa a shambles, a scene to be repeated randomly all across Italy and France. The Marchesa’s description of this violation of personal life serves for them all:

  As we drive up to La Foce, chaos meets our eyes. The house is still standing, with only one shell-hole in the garden facade … and several in the roof. … In the garden, which has also got several shell-holes and trenches for machine-guns, they have stripped the pots off the lemons and azaleas, leaving the plants to die. The ground is strewn with my private letters and photographs, mattresses and furniture stuffing. The inside of the house, however, is far worse. The Germans have stolen everything that took their fancy, blankets, clothes, shoes and toys, as well, of course, as anything valuable or eatable, and have deliberately destroyed much of sentimental or personal value…. In the dining room the table is still laid, and there are traces of a drunken repast; empty wine-bottles and smashed glasses lie beside a number of my summer hats (which presumably have been tried on), together with boot-trees, toys, overturned furniture and W.C. paper…. The lavatory is filled to the brim with filth, and decaying meat, lying on every table, adds to the foul smell. There are innumerable flies. In our bedroom, too, it is the same.58

  The exact location of the missing Florentine masterpieces remained a lingering mystery to Allied Monuments officers and ostensibly to Italians of both sides throughout the fall and winter of 1944–1945.59 From their side the Allies kept up propaganda pressure, accusing the Germans of looting and theft. This was rebutted by Langsdorff, who was also being badgered by the Fascist Italian government, and who as early as September 18 had asked von Weizsäcker at the Vatican to inform authorities there of the location and safety of the articles.

  As the propaganda continued, the Germans began to prepare a careful inventory and damage assessment of the holdings which despite all were generally in good condition. Fascist Minister of Education Biggini was persuaded to broadcast a comment on the “loyal co-operation of the German Fine Arts authorities in the protection of Italian works of art,” and on October 17 Langsdorff held a press conference in Milan on the same lines. But privately the Fascists now challenged him to prove the truth of his claims, and the presence of the objects in Italy, by allowing them to inspect the ricoveri.

  This was also promoted by certain of his own colleagues, led by former Florentine Kunstschutz chief Heydenreich, who suggested that the Führer should announce that the Florentine works were “being held in trust for the Italian nation” under the direct care of the Kunstschutz, and that a committee of German experts, which he cleverly urged should include Dr. Voss, director of the Linz collection, should be formed to inspect the pictures at regular intervals.

  Soon pressure for information on the fate of the Florentine treasure became so intense that Hitler, on the recommendation of Ambassador Rahn, gave permission for Carlo Anti, Fascist Director General of Fine Arts, to inspect the deposits on November 28. A few days later Anti announced the safety, but again not the location, of the treasures to the outside world. In the meantime, Allied Monuments officers in Florence had heard from the Vatican, which informed them only that the cache was at “Neumelans in Sand,” a mysterious name not to be found in their reference books. If Florentine Superintendent Poggi realized where this was, he did not inform his Allied colleagues.

  A visit to the refuges by quite a different delegation on December 10, 1944, seemed to the few who knew of it to make clear the true destination of the magnificent collections. Bormann’s assistant von Hummel from the Reichschancellery and Professor Rupprecht from the Linz organization arrived with a Munich dealer named Bruschwiller. The Führer Reserve was being updated. As usual, none of the Kunstschutz officers was privy to the consultations of these gentlemen. Immediately following their tour, General Wolff was ordered by Himmler to take the contents of the ricoveri to Austria. This he refused to do on the always plausible grounds of lack of transport. But perhaps to show that his loyalty was unwavering and his belief in the ultimate triumph of the Fatherland unfailing, he ordered photographers to prepare an album of the contents of the ricoveri, carefully designed to match previous such volumes from Poland and France, for the Führer’s birthday on April 20, 1945.60

  By January everyone, Allied, Kunstschutz, Fascist,
or otherwise, believed for their various reasons that the treasures, now completely in the control of the SS, were intended for the Führer’s collections. They could not know that the objects had become pawns in the elaborate end game of the war in Italy. The central figure in this shadowy web of events was SS General Wolff himself, whose rank put him second only to Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy.

  Wolff had for years been Himmler’s personal assistant and liaison with Hitler and von Ribbentrop, and as such had their trust and total access to the highest circles. The Führer, aware of Wolff’s talents, had sent him to Italy as a quasi governor general who would keep an eye on Mussolini.

  As the ultimate defeat of Germany became more and more apparent, Wolff began to think it imperative to open negotiations with the Allies. His first initiatives were conveyed to an American OSS office in Switzerland, headed by Allen Dulles, where they were regarded skeptically, it being well known that Hitler wanted to divide the Allies and try to get the United States and Britain to join him against the Russians. The SS General now had to wait for further opportunities while maintaining his apparent loyalty to the Reich. The works of art were extremely useful in his double game. By refusing to give them to the Italians, and having the album made for Hitler, he made clear that he was saving them for the Führer Reserve. By refusing to allow them to be removed from within the boundaries of what the Allies considered Italian territory, he demonstrated his good faith in that quarter.