Oct 7, 2014 4 min read

Robert Edsel, founder and president of The Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, began his speech during a Town Hall South lecture Oct. 7 by asking all those in the audience who served in the military, including World War II, to stand for recognition. For Edsel, honoring the past is important.

At 57, he was not alive during World War II, but his passion for the past two decades has been to document the heroics of those who worked diligently to recover and to preserve artifacts stolen from museums and collections across Europe.

One of Edsel’s three books, “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” was made into a movie starring George Clooney that was released in February 2014, and was the impetus for the Tuesday talk.

Edsel said that Adolf Hitler has been described as a frustrated artist, and one of his passions was to collect the great works of art for eventual display in a museum he planned for his hometown in Austria. Edsel said that even as the war was ending, Hitler was obsessed with the concept of a museum that was never to be built.

The Monuments Men was a group made up of about 70 percent Americans and 30 percent from Great Britain who were tasked with saving, not destroying, art and cultural treasures. A hodge-podge group of men and a very few women, most without any military experience, donned uniforms and set off to recover and document artifacts. The group began in 1939 and remained in Europe until 1951. Two were killed – American Capt. Walter Huchthausen and Brit Maj. Ronald Balfour. And while the group uncovered more than five million artifacts before leaving Europe, millions more remain lost, Edsel said.

Across Europe, works of art were moved, many to underground salt mines. In Florence, Italy, Michelangelo’s “David” was surrounded by brick columns to protect the sculpture from the Allied bombs. Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” was moved five times in France, Edsel said. And, da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” in Italy survived even though its three surrounding walls were destroyed by bombs, the roof collapsed and the painting was exposed to the elements for two years.

“Hitler used art as his propaganda of power,” Edsel said.

In addition to works of art, millions of books were stolen, along with church bells that were to be melted for use as munitions.

The Monuments Men found thousands of Torahs, the books of Jewish scriptures, that Hitler planned to use after he won the war for use in racial institutions, Edsel told the audience.

“That’s the great paradox of the story, they survived,” he said.

One relatively unknown hero was Rose Valland, a French art historian who was the curator of a museum in Paris. She kept meticulous records of when German dignitaries visited 21 times, and which art pieces were confiscated and shipped. Unknown to the Germans, she was fluent in their language. At first not trusting the American soldiers, she kept her records secret until finally turning over the information to one of the Monuments Men, Capt. James Rorimer, a museum curator who worked at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

“She was a woman in a man’s world with no authority, so she worked with Rorimer,” Edsel said. Because she gave the information to the American soldiers, Valland was not recognized by her native France.

“Her loyalty was to art,” Edsel said.

In addition to finding artifacts in various salt mines, the Monuments Men uncovered gold teeth and wedding bands near a concentration camp.

Throughout Europe, fine works of art were found in castles and cathedrals, often surrounded by bombs. Fortunately, one member was a bomb disposal expert.

The youngest Monuments Men member, Harry Ettlinger, joined at the age of 18, but because he was a German Jew, he was given the rank of private first class. The remainder were officers.

While the Monuments Men is best known for its work during World War II, Edsel said there is a dire need for similar preservation during the current conflicts in the Middle East. In April, a 10th century minaret in Aleppo, Syria, was destroyed during the fighting.

Edsel said much of the current destruction is deliberate as “(art) defines who we are, and that’s the reason so many are targeted.”