The Rape of Europa (47 page)

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 deposits 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.