The Rape of Europa

  Alexander Langsdorff (second from right) showing British MFAA officer J. B. Ward-Perkins the Kunstschutz repositories

  Wolff did not hide his negotiations. In an early February meeting he convinced his Commander in Chief that he was indeed promoting Allied dissension. Shaken by Hitler’s physical condition and his adamant refusal to consider an end to the fighting, even after the failure of the Battle of the Bulge, Wolff returned to Italy determined to redouble his efforts. Dulles finally agreed to see him on March 8. To prepare for the meeting, the General had sent ahead a sort of résumé of his career and good deeds in Italy which included, to the amazement of the OSS men, a list of almost all the Florentine works of art they had ever heard of, which Wolff claimed to be able to deliver to them.61 By April 13 the negotiations had progressed so well that Wolff had even agreed to have an OSS radio operator installed in his headquarters in order to facilitate communications.

  But the Allied High Command, determined to pursue an unconditional surrender to the bitter end, obsessed with the idea of a Bavarian Redoubt, and accused by Stalin of bad faith for these separate negotiations, on April 20 ordered the OSS to break off all contact. This was extremely awkward. Before Dulles could inform Wolff he discovered that the SS General and representatives of the Wehrmacht, whom he had persuaded with great effort to join him, had already arrived in Switzerland prepared to sign a surrender. While Dulles radioed Supreme Headquarters in Caserta hoping for a change in policy, Wolff received yet another exhortation from Hitler, ordering his armies to hold out at all costs. Wolff realized that he must return to his headquarters in order to prevent chaos, but the other members of his party stayed behind. Before he left, he handed Dulles a handwritten note indicating the locations of the Florentine treasures and advised him to send Army units to protect them from plunder. Four days later the Allies reversed their policy, and the German officers were flown to Caserta, where in absolute secrecy they signed the surrender of Italy, which was announced to the world on May 2.62

  Within days Monuments officers and Italian Fine Arts personnel were on their way to the Brenner Pass. Here on the borders of the Reich the world seemed upside down: in Bolzano, Germans of “colossal arrogance,” not yet confined to POW camps, outnumbered the victors ten to one and were living and feasting happily in the best hotels while the Americans camped miserably in tents and “the Military Government Provincial Commissioner had to plod about the town on foot, hot, red faced and dusty, while haughty and glittering SS Generals sped past in motor cars loaded with blondes.”63 Dulles’s assistant, Gero von Gaevernitz, invited to see Wolff a week later, found much the same scene: the German Army “enjoying springtime in the Alps … consuming their remaining supplies of food and drink. … It was a peaceful scene, rather like lunchtime at the M-G-M studios.” He too had trouble getting a hotel room away from the conquered, and was received in great style at Wolff’s headquarters in the Palace of the Dukes of Pistoia. Farther up the road to the Brenner the Monuments men found no Americans at all. The countryside seemed entirely in the power of heavily armed Germans.64 But it was worth the trip: in the narrow jail cells at San Leonardo there they all were, without cases and squeezed dangerously together: Titian’s Philip II, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, the great Bellini Pietà, and, modestly hidden under an old bedspread, Cranach’s Adam and Eve.

  At Campo Tures, or “Neumelans,” Langsdorff impatiently awaited them. Here a number of pictures were packed in cases newly labelled “Kunstwerke aus Italienischen Staatsbesitz.” Reidemeister and Langsdorff, brought down to earth during frequent interrogations administered by British Wing Commander Douglas Cooper, collector and art historian turned specialist Intelligence officer, and by the unglamorous life in the POW enclosures, cooperated fully. After the inventories and lists were checked, all but ten works, which included a pair of tiny and extraordinarily valuable paintings by Pollaiuolo depicting the Labors of Hercules, were accounted for.

  Fifth Army brings the Florentine treasures home.

  The public relations importance of this recovery was enormous, and Fifth Army—and anyone else who could get into the act—threw themselves into the arrangements for the return of the treasures with gusto. A heavy guard was posted around the buildings. The Italian Resistance found packers. Fifth Army Commander Lucien Truscott’s personal plane was sent for fire extinguishers. It was a big operation, and there was no little pride involved:

  The day the Germans took stuff to the jail at San Leonardo it was raining. The trucks were open and old, the pictures were covered with a few blankets and resting on loose straw. U.S. Army, it is hoped, will do a bang up job just the opposite of this.65

  A train was made up of thirteen freight cars, some with special doors, interspersed with guards’ vans. Special cranes lifted the sculptures. On went Michelangelo’s Bacchus and Donatello’s St. George. Everyone was very nervous: the priceless shipment, listed simply on the waybill as “Art Treasures,” was valued even then at $500 million.

  In Florence a batch of crates were unloaded onto beflagged trucks and, escorted by two jeeploads of curators and Monuments officers, paraded through the hot streets with a sign reading simply, “Le opere d’arte fiorentine tornano dall’ Alto Adige alla loro sede [The art works of Florence return from the Alto Adige to their home].” In the shade of the packed Piazza della Signoria, Fifth Army General Edgar E. Hume officially gave the cases to the mayor of Florence. “A spontaneous ovation was given the General by weeping and emotionally touched citizens,” Keller later reported. Hartt was overcome by the “sincerity and spontaneity of the population,” who crowded around General Hume, “embracing him, weeping with joy, striving to touch his uniform.” The war seemed really over. Later, the ever-practical Keller noted, “a good banquet followed.”66

  Within weeks of these festive events the Monuments officers in Italy found their jobs had come to an end. Disappointed and frustrated at having to leave many of their projects unfinished, they were moved on. It would be up to the Italians themselves to complete the job. To one man in particular it seemed far from finished: Rodolfo Siviero, mysterious member of the Italian Resistance, who had been collecting tidbits of art-related intelligence for years, was not satisfied with the return of the national collections alone. Much from Italy had been confiscated and been sold or given to the Nazi hierarchy. Siviero felt that all these objects should return to Italy. He would find that many did not agree.

  X

  TOUCH AND GO

  The Allies Take Over:

  Northern Europe, 1944–1945

  I cannot resist the temptation to recount the efforts made to save my treasures. It illustrates how little planning and plotting mattered; how much it was touch and go.

  —Bernard Berenson, Rumor and Reflection

  October 1944

  Immediately after Roosevelt and Churchill had decided on the invasion of Northern Europe in August 1943, the Joint Military Staffs had begun to discuss strategy for the event. The shadows of World War I affected both camps. To the Americans the proper place for fighting Germany was not Italy or Africa, but the north of France. The British, remembering the terrible attrition of trench warfare in Flanders, were reluctant to enter this territory again. But at the Teheran Conference in early December, with pressure from Stalin, who had long wanted a second front, the invasion policy was reaffirmed. Roosevelt informed Eisenhower of his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander on the way back from the Conference.

  Now Eisenhower was where he had always wanted to be. The excitement of the coming campaign in France was all-encompassing. The American leaders envisioned a swift withdrawal of forces from the European theater for possible redeployment in the Far East after the inevitable Allied victory, which, they felt sure, would take place in 1944. The occupied nations would revert to the control of their duly elected governments and Germany would be punished so that it could never burst forth again. Just exactly how all this was to be effected remained to be determined, although plenty of people had very stron
g ideas on the subject.

  To Lieutenant Colonel Sir Leonard Woolley in London it was quite clear from events in Italy that there was no time to waste on preparations for the European invasion, even though no one yet knew exactly when that would take place. He appointed the Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge, Geoffrey Webb, to direct Monuments operations for SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force), as Eisenhower’s headquarters were known, and brought in an American officer, Calvin Hathaway of the Cooper Union Museum, to assist. Together, in December, they drew up the first draft of the directives which would be given to Monuments officers in the European theater.1 They proposed that a lieutenant colonel and two majors head the operation and particularly insisted that officers in the field not only be concerned with the protection of buildings and the prevention of looting but with “evidence … of theft by the Germans … with a view to subsequent compensation or restitution under the terms of the peace settlement.” They included a clause requiring that reports be sent directly to the Roberts Commission once a month as well as to Civil Affairs headquarters in London.

  By March, Mason Hammond and a number of other officers had been sent north from Italy to join in this effort, and by April the Monuments men, divided into groups responsible for planning for different countries, plus a pool of eight men who would be assigned to forward elements of each Army, were all organized. They were determined to avoid the rigid system which had been so disastrous in Italy. The “pool” officers were to be sent to whatever region or Army, British or American, needed them most. Lists and handbooks were prepared, and maps supplied to the Air Force. The long technical instructions written by Stout and Constable were boiled down into a two-sided instruction sheet.

  It all seemed marvelous on paper, but in the last weeks before D-Day, reality hit. SHAEF took one look at the list of 210 protected monuments in Normandy and rejected it because there would be no place left for the billeting of troops. The Monuments men gently pointed out that many of the monuments were prehistoric stone circles and dolmens, unsuitable for residence, and at least 84 were churches. Mollified, the strategists accepted the list.2 Much worse was the fact that the final “table of organization” for the invasion left the MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives) section, as they were now called, out entirely, with the result that within days other parts of the Army began refusing to send them supplies or mail as they had no exact “status.”3 This was not rectified (with many apologies, it must be said) until May 29, three days after Eisenhower had sent out an eloquent order, similar to the one issued for Italy, exhorting all commanders to “protect and respect” historical sites,4 and a supporting directive stating that Monuments officers should be “utilized to the best advantage in the areas for which they are responsible”—thus proving that they really did exist.

  London Daily Mail cartoon, March 1944, responding to German art destruction propaganda (Cartoon by Illingsworth © London Daily Mail)

  The efforts of the Roberts Commission had by now also persuaded the Navy to release George Stout from a job dealing with airplane paint and had secured the services of First Lieutenant James Rorimer, former curator at the Cloisters in New York, so that the Monuments contingent now numbered seventeen. But Stout’s proposal for a mobile group of ten or so conservators had not been accepted. As it turned out, he would, for most of the campaign across France and Germany, be a group of one.

  News of London developments still did not reach the Roberts Commission through official channels, but only through private letters from Woolley and his protégés in England. These friendly missives did nothing to cheer up the news-starved Commission, which was already worried by Wool-ley’s domination of the MFAA organization. They had, in fact, already begun a campaign to have an American officer of flag rank, loyal to them, assigned to England to replace Woolley in the councils of SHAEF. For this job they found a reserve brigadier general with architectural training named Henry Newton. So anxious were they to get someone overseas to compete with Woolley that they chose to keep Newton on even after his rank was reduced to colonel for the incompetence he had demonstrated while commanding an Engineer battalion in maneuvers earlier that year. (The problem had been that Newton “did not have an Engineer company in the right place at the right time,” which had led to enormous traffic jams of tanks at a river crossing. This was to be all too characteristic of his future performance.) In a long apologia addressed to Paul Sachs, Newton dismissed his error as a “picayune” matter.5 Sachs was still impressed by the former general and felt that “only he can speak for the General Staff and the Armed Forces as well as for us” and therefore coordinate the work of “our good fellows.”

  Fortunately, one RC member, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, had already been given a London mission on a State Department delegation led by then Congressman J. William Fulbright, and had gone over by air armed with a list of questions related to the status of works of art owned by private collectors. MacLeish’s mission brought him into contact with the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education, which had still not taken any very concrete steps to decide how to control movable works of art at the end of hostilities. He was now able to brief them on actions taken in the United States by the Roberts Commission.

  The RC had also begun to receive copies of the Treasury reports on the intercontinental machinations of the art trade. It seemed to them that at the liberation of Europe there might be an explosion in sales of the illegally acquired objects bottled up on the Continent since the establishment of the British blockade. Such a dispersal would make recovery almost impossible. According to the 1943 declaration of the exiled governments in England, “illegally acquired objects” meant anything at all transferred in territory occupied by the Axis, even if the transaction appeared to be legal. An immediate freeze on the movement of works of art from the Continent at the moment of an Armistice was recommended by many, including Georges Wildenstein, who piously warned that a barrier should be set up against the “functioning of the diabolic plan prepared by the enemy for his profit for the post war period.”6

  In response to these fears the RC had recommended to the Treasury in February that Customs agents be instructed to hold any art objects entering the United States worth $5,000 or more, or any object of historic, scholarly, or artistic interest which was suspect, until satisfactory proof of origin was submitted. The Commission would assist in these investigations.7 This came into force on June 8, 1944, as Treasury Decision 51072.

  Shortly thereafter, the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference (known as the Bretton Woods Conference) issued an international resolution reasserting the January 1943 declaration. Furthermore, since “in anticipation of their defeat” enemy leaders were transferring assets, which included works of art, “to and through neutral countries in order to conceal them and perpetuate their influence, power and ability to plan future aggrandizement and world domination,” the United Nations recommended that the neutral countries prevent the exploitation of these assets within their borders.

  All American embassies were now ordered to gather information on the assets and activities of Axis nationals in their jurisdictions and relay it to the State Department under the code name “Safehaven.” This would be added to the data already being gathered by the economic warfare agencies of the various nations. The art market was considered an especially likely place for the concealment and international movement of assets, the theory being that Nazis could hold their ill-gotten works for some years, until public interest had subsided, and then sell them. Nobody mentioned it, but non-Nazis could, of course, do likewise.8

  All of these initiatives were now conveyed to the nine Allied Ministers of Education, who had created their own Commission for the Protection and Restitution of Cultural Material, known as the Vaucher Commission. This group envisioned nothing less than a vast pool of information listing every work thought to have been taken or illegally sold; every dealer, curator, artist, or official who might have rela
ted information; every reported victim and his location; as well as an index of places to be protected. All this would be gleaned from reports and rumors brought by refugees, spies, and Resistance groups, German press clippings, secret messages, and personal letters, and be put in useful form for a supposed postwar restitution agency—a compilation that would be an incredible task even in the computer age. In London they planned to make cross-referenced card files which would be microfilmed for distribution. Only one country was already prepared: the indefatigable Karol Estreicher of Poland had made such a list, not always accurate, based as it was on the rawest intelligence, but certainly impressive in its revelation of the massive dislocations of his nation’s patrimony.

  Now more than ever, the RC felt the need for someone who would serve as liaison between the civilian committees and the Army. By late April 1944 Newton, embroiled in his rank problems and Civil Affairs Division orientation, still had not appeared. MacLeish wired back that “the British have taken over organization of the Monuments officers in this theater in consequence of the non-arrival of Newton.”9 Newton was, in fact, about to leave. To make quite clear to the Army his duties as the RC saw them, chairman and proper lawyer David Finley wrote a long letter to General Hilldring of Civil Affairs which ended as follows:

  If it is consistent with War Department policy, the Commission hopes that Colonel Newton will be in a position to carry out certain vitally important tasks which may not be strictly within the jurisdiction of the War Department and the Theater Commanders, such as liaison work with the British and other European commissions and essential conference work with British officials and art advisors to the British Government.10