The Ghent Altarpiece, that great masterpiece that had changed the course of painting forever, thus represented two of Hitler’s enduring quests: to right the historic “wrongs” of the Treaty of Versailles, and to add an undisputed world treasure to his Führermuseum in Linz.
By 1942, Hitler was unable to resist the temptation any longer. In July, he sent a secret delegation, led by Dr. Ernst Buchner, general director of the Bavarian Museums, to the repository at Pau. This was not a mission of force—the delegation consisted of only one truck and one car—but of stealth. When the French superintendent at Pau refused to hand over the altarpiece, Buchner called the Reichschancellery. Within hours, a telegram arrived from Pierre Laval, the chief of government in Nazi-controlled Vichy France, ordering the altarpiece turned over to Buchner. By the time the proper French and Belgian art authorities learned of the order, the Ghent Altarpiece had disappeared into Germany. The Belgian government protested vigorously—even accusing the French of treason against its culture—but there was nothing that could be done. The Ghent Altarpiece was gone.
And now, more than two years later, Robert Posey sat on his bunk in the captured German barracks in France, looking at a picture of this irreplaceable treasure. He knew the world was counting on him and his fellow Monuments Men to track it down, find it, force the surrender of those who guarded or coveted or wanted to destroy it, and return it to Belgium unharmed.
CHAPTER 15
James Rorimer Visits the Louvre
Paris, France
Early October 1944
While Posey found himself surprisingly pleased with his experience in U.S. Third Army, Second Lieutenant James Rorimer, the bulldog Metropolitan Museum curator, was having a similar experience in Paris. Over his beer at Mont Saint-Michel, Rorimer had wished fervently to be assigned to the City of Light; after returning to headquarters, he soon learned he had in fact received “the plum of all the jobs in Europe for one with my background.” 1 The French authorities had embraced him with “open arms and hearts” and he was regularly being feted by the rich and powerful of Parisian society. 2 They wanted his help; he wanted their information. It was satisfying to be embraced wholeheartedly as a liberator and a friend.
And Paris, that wonderful sanctuary of a city, was in fantastic shape. It was almost hard to believe, looking at her buildings and monuments, that she had been occupied by the Nazis for four years. Several landmarks—including the Grand Palais, burned by the Nazis in an effort to root out the Resistance—had been destroyed, but a stroll down any of the wide avenues revealed a city virtually unmarked and bursting with life. There was almost no gasoline, but on every corner the bicycles crowded the lockups, especially the tandems with their little carts that during the occupation had been the city’s primary taxis. In the parks, the old men were back to playing cards in their berets and fedoras. At the Luxembourg Gardens, the children floated their boats in the fountain, their innocent sails white against the water. “From the long and wonderfully empty avenues leading into the heart of the city,” wrote Francis Henry Taylor, who visited the city as a representative of the Roberts Commission, “one felt the elation which comes only to those emerging after a deep sleep from illness. The will to live had conquered. Paris as the supreme creation of the mind of man had paralyzed the hand that tried to seize her.” 3
But Taylor was only in Paris a few days. A more detailed look at the city revealed that while there was ebullience on the surface of Parisian society, it was undercut by crosscurrents of fear and mistrust. The sudden retreat of the Germans and the collapse of the French collaboration government had left the city short of civil servants like police officers, and there was no way to control the simmering emotions of an angry population. A wave of revenge had gripped the populace as citizens took the law into their own hands. Women who had slept with Germans were taken into the streets and their heads publicly shaved in front of rowdy mobs; suspected collaborators were brought before tribunals and summarily executed. Anyone reading one of the city’s newspapers, Le Figaro, would easily understand the gravity of the situation. Le Figaro had resumed printing on August 23, 1944, after a two-year hiatus. Inititally the paper was only two pages in length, but it had one recurring feature that appeared every day. The first part of the feature appeared under the heading “Les Arrestations et L’Epuration” (Arrests and Purges) and detailed the previous day’s developments in the pursuit of collaborators. Underneath the article appeared two lists: “les exécutions capitales” (death sentences) and “les exécutions summaires” (summary executions). Even the more civilized death sentences, Rorimer knew, must have been meted out in trials lasting a few hours, or at most a couple of days.
In this void—no working civil institutions, no working safety apparatus, and no trust in one’s fellow citizens—there was plenty of work for a Monuments Man. There were 165 Parisian monuments in the army’s Civil Affairs Handbook, fifty-two of which were officially protected. There were hundreds if not thousands of victims of Nazi looting. Hundreds of public sculptures were missing, especially the city’s famous bronzes, and even the nineteenth-century lights had been stolen from the Senate building. And then there was the general confusion of a city trying once again to find its feet. Finding basic information and supplies was often impossible. Procedural questions could wrap him in knots for hours. Even locating the right official for a particular area or task took an inordinate amount of energy.
Just after his arrival in August, Rorimer had been temporarily assigned to Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton’s detachment, and even in late September Hamilton wouldn’t give him up. “No one officer should be tied up with Monuments duty alone,” Hamilton had told Rorimer when he pleaded for his release, which meant Hamilton needed an aggressive, competent, energetic officer who spoke French, and he wasn’t about to let James Rorimer go. 4
And then, of course, he had to make sure the American military didn’t do anything to damage the city. In August, when he arrived in the convoy of General Rogers, Paris had seemed deserted; now there were American troops everywhere. Not that they weren’t enthusiastic to help. One detachment, assigned by Rorimer to assess damage to the Place de la Concorde, counted every bullet hole in the enormous complex. Rorimer caught them the next day counting war damage holes in the Louvre. “General assessment,” he told them. “Only the big stuff.” The Louvre was so massive that counting each bullet hole would have taken them a year.
The real problem, Rorimer felt, was that the American military didn’t understand the French. The park through which he was walking, the Jardin des Tuileries, was a perfect example. It was the heart of Paris, a great formal garden laid out for Louis XIV and familiar to all who had ever strolled this great city. On his first morning in Paris, Rorimer had seen it as few Parisians ever had: almost empty in the morning light. The abandoned German guns lining the perimeter seemed to have scared people away, but bivouacked under one copse of trees was a single American tank unit with small cooking fires going for breakfast. Otherwise, the gardens had been his alone.
A few weeks later, Rorimer discovered the Jardin des Tuileries was slated for use as a massive Allied encampment. The Germans had dug trenches throughout the park and strung them with barbed wire, but the idea of the Allies digging slit-trench latrines into the heart of Paris was too much. The Tuileries, he argued in a series of interminable meetings, were no place for Allied waste. The gardens were as vital to the health and happiness of Parisians as Hyde Park to Londoners and Central Park to New Yorkers.
The army relented. But what had Rorimer really accomplished? The Tuileries’ famous central boulevard, down which he now turned, was lined with ten-ton trucks, troop carriers, and jeeps. Nobody had declared the gardens off-limits to vehicles, not technically anyway, and they were now the largest parking lot in Paris. Six statues had already been knocked off their pedestals and the terra-cotta pipeworks, laid out in the seventeenth century, were bursting under the weight of vehicles. It had taken ten days of research and plann
ing to find an alternative, but Rorimer was convinced the paved Esplanade des Invalides would accommodate the army’s needs. And the Esplanade, appropriately, was in a district dedicated to military history. Now if he could only convince the army it was worthwhile to move their parking lot across town.
Rorimer passed the fountain known as the Grand Bassin—even in the shadows of the military trucks young boys were out floating their sailboats—crossed the Terrasse des Tuileries, and, after showing his credentials to the armed guards, passed into the courtyard of the Louvre. On one side, the American anti-aircraft installation bristled with guns, and he could still see the fenced yard where the Allies had kept German prisoners during their first week in the city. But inside, as always, the museum was a sanctuary. In here, he couldn’t see a single gun or armed guard, much less the supplicants who came continually to his office to plead for individual care. Beneath the vaulted glass ceiling of the Grande Galerie, the museum was as still and quiet as a grave. A largely empty, hollow grave, for on these walls where millions had once come to view the world’s masterpieces, there were nothing but scribbled words in white chalk, notes to remind the curators where each magnificent painting had hung.
The works weren’t stolen or missing. In fact, the Germans hadn’t touched them. They were even now secure in the repositories to which the French had moved them in 1939 and 1940, just before the German invasion. The evacuation had been an extraordinary operation, overseen by one of the great heroes of the French cause, Jacques Jaujard, director of the French National Museums.
Jaujard may have been a French government official, but he was also one of the most respected museum men in Western Europe. He was only forty-nine, but with his swept-back jet black hair and handsome chiseled face, he had the look of a youthful grandfather, the vibrant partriarch, perhaps, of some French wine-making clan. He was a bureaucrat—but a man not afraid to get his hands dirty with work. During the Spanish civil war, Jaujard had been instrumental in evacuating the contents of Madrid’s world-class museum, the Prado. In 1939, he was promoted to director of the National Museums and immediately began to plan the evacuation of the French museums, at a time when few thought the Nazis would attack, much less conquer, a country like France. Under his watchful eye, thousands of the world’s great masterpieces had been crated, loaded, driven, and stored. Even the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the massive ancient Greek statue that had stood at the head of the Louvre’s main staircase, was removed by means of an ingenious pulley and inclined wooden track system. The almost eleven-foot-tall marble statue of the goddess Nike, her wings outstretched (but her head and arms lost over the centuries), appeared solid, but in fact consisted of thousands of shards of marble that had been painstakingly reassembled. Jaujard must have held his breath, Rorimer thought, as the statue slid down the staircase on its wooden track, her great wings trembling slightly in the air above her. If she crumbled to pieces, Jaujard would be held responsible. But he had always been a man who welcomed such challenges. Like Rorimer, Jaujard believed it was better to assume the burden of leadership than to drift along in the shadows.
Rorimer stopped and, turning, stared up and down the Louvre’s long, empty Grande Galerie. So much irreplaceable art, all gone, he thought. So much danger. He stepped toward a shallow alcove, framed by pillars, where two words had caught his eye. The words La Joconde seemed to float on the wall inside an empty frame. La Joconde, the French name for the Mona Lisa. Most of the works were transported en masse, sometimes over bomb-blasted roads, but the Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous painting, had been loaded by ambulance stretcher into the back of a truck in the dead of night. A curator climbed in the back as well; the truck was sealed to provide a stable climate. Upon arriving at its destination, the painting was fine but the curator nearly unconscious. There hadn’t been enough air for him to breathe. 5
There were other stories. The great Géricault painting The Raft of the Medusa was so large it became tangled in the streetcar wires of Versailles. At least they learned their lesson. In the next city with low-hanging wires, the truck was accompanied by telephone repairmen walking before it and lifting all the wires with long, insulated poles. The image was amusing: the truck creeping along with its pole-wielding escorts, the evacuating citizens racing around it, perhaps staring in wonder at Géricault’s painting of the dying faces of victims stranded on a sinking raft. But the situation wasn’t amusing at all. These were masterworks, not parade floats. And under Jaujard’s careful guidance, there was no major damage.
But even Jaujard had not foreseen the lightning strike of the German blitzkrieg or the humiliating collapse of the French army. The placement of art in temporary repositories, mostly country châteaux and remote castles, was intended to prevent war damage, primarily from aerial bombardment. At the Château de Sourches near Le Mans, the curators had even spelled out on the lawn in huge white letters the words “Musée du Louvre” so that pilots flying overhead would know artistic treasures were housed inside and avoid bombing it. As the French army melted, Jaujard ordered the artwork moved to repositories farther west and south. The advancing Germans found him at the repository at Chambord southwest of Paris, directing the evacuation. “You are, sir,” they told him, “the first top French civil servant we find present on duty.” 6
Nothing was harmed, thank goodness, by bombs and artillery, but there was not much that could be done about the Nazi occupiers. They knew almost every work of art comprising France’s patrimony, and they acted quickly to seize it. Paris was occupied on June 14, 1940. On June 30, Hitler ordered his representatives in Paris to safeguard works of art from the French National collections, and also artwork and historical documents belonging to individuals, in particular Jews. These cultural objects were to be used as collateral for the peace negotiations. France had signed only an armistice; Hitler was planning to use the formal peace treaty to “legally” seize the country’s cultural assets, much as Napoleon had used one-sided treaties to seize the cultural treasures of Prussia almost 150 years before. It was widely acknowledged, and with only slight exaggeration, that without the spoils of the Napoleonic campaigns the Louvre would be a mere shadow of what it had become.
The powerful Nazi ambassador to Paris, Otto Abetz, sprang into action, declaring that the Nazi-controlled occupation government would provide “custody” for the cultural assets. Three days after Hitler’s order, Abetz ordered the confiscation of the holdings of the top fifteen art dealers in Paris, most of whom were Jewish. Within weeks, the embassy was overflowing with “safeguarded” artwork. And that, Jaujard told James Rorimer during one of their frequent chats, was when a true hero emerged: the art official Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich.
“A German?” Rorimer had asked in surprise.
Jaujard had nodded, a twinkle in his patrician eyes. “Not just a German,” he said. “A Nazi.”
In May 1940, Count Wolff-Metternich had been appointed head of the Kunstschutz, the German cultural conservation program. The Kunstschutz had originally been created as an army-based protection unit during World War I—the only true precursor to the Western Allies’ MFAA—but had been reconstituted in 1940 as a branch of the Nazi occupation government, operating primarily in conquered Belgium and France. Wolff-Metternich, an expert on Renaissance architecture, especially that of the Rhineland of northwest Germany where he was born and raised, was plucked from a professorship at the University of Bonn for the top job.
Wolff-Metternich was chosen because he was a respected scholar whose credibility brought a sense of professionalism and legitimacy to the Kunstschutz program. He was not an avid member of the Nazi Party, but in instances such as this the Nazis were often more concerned with selecting qualified professionals than with their political associations. That the Wolff-Metternichs were a prominent German family, with a title dating back hundreds of years to the Prussian empire, was also an appealing factor.
Wolff-Metternich was given no instructions, but he had a clear idea what his Kunstschutz sh
ould do. “At all times,” he would write, “we took as our legal determinant the relevant paragraphs of the Hague Convention.” 7 His definition of cultural responsibility, therefore, was the internationally recognized one, not the Nazi version. “The protection of cultural material,” Wolff-Metternich wrote, “is an undisputed obligation which is equally binding on any European nation at war. I could imagine no better way of serving my own country than by making myself responsible for the proper observance of this principle.” 8
“Count Metternich stood up to the ambassador,” Jaujard had told Rorimer. “He went over his head to the military authorities. It was really a tug-of-war then to see who would control France, the Nazi military or the Nazi occupation government. Within days, the military forbade the embassy to seize any further cultural objects. At my suggestion, transmitted through Wolff-Metternich, most of the objects in their possession were transferred to the Louvre. When they arrived, many were already crated for shipment to Germany.”
Jaujard took little credit for this success. He was a man who believed in discretion; that those who do not speak of their actions are the ones who actually perform them. But Rorimer knew the stories of his bravery; he had heard many times and from many different sources the awed reverence for the director’s opposition to the Nazi threat. Defeating the ambassador merely meant the battle wasn’t lost in the first days; it certainly didn’t win the cultural war. Jaujard had worked closely with Count Wolff-Metternich on the ambassador affair—much closer than he had acknowledged—and he would continue to work with him through a long string of Nazi attempts to seize the patrimony of France. An official charged with confiscating French government documents also tried to confiscate its movable artwork. Other Nazis claimed the artwork was stored improperly at the repositories, and therefore needed to be moved to Germany for its own safety. Wolff-Metternich refuted that claim with personal inspections. Dr. Joseph Goebbels demanded almost one thousand “Germanic” objects held in the French state collections. Wolff-Metternich actually agreed with Goebbels that many of these objects rightly belonged to Germany; he did not agree with the propaganda minister that they should be sent immediately to the Fatherland. “I never hid my idea that this delicate problem,” he wrote, “which touches the sense of honor of all people so deeply, could only be solved at the Peace Conference by a full agreement between peoples with equal rights.”