The Rape of Europa (56 page)

From the earliest days of the occupation he had been most careful to provide exemplary shelter for the delicate Michelangelo
Madonna and Child
, which is the glory of the Church of Notre Dame at Bruges. It was noticed that both he and his assistant kept photographs of the sculpture on their desks. At first, because of its popularity with the occupiers, it was not hidden away, as were so many things, but was taken down from the side altar where it normally stood, and placed in a specially constructed shelter on the north side of the church.

In the first week of September 1944 German officials began leaving Belgium. Dr. Rosemann, having packed up his photographs, stopped by for a last visit to the Michelangelo, lamenting to the sacristan that “he could not leave Belgium without a final look.” Before departing he casually ordered a number of mattresses to be placed in the little shelter. The Bishop of Bruges arrived the next morning to inspect the church and order the shelter walled up. He was just too late. In the night two German officers with a contingent of guards had appeared, claiming to have orders to remove the statue “to protect it from the Americans.” The tall windows of the church were covered. Working only with flashlights, they had wrapped the marble sculpture in the mattresses and loaded it into a Red Cross truck. As an afterthought they took ten paintings. There was so little room in the truck that two wings of a large triptych by Pourbus had to be left behind.
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The next day the Bishop received a pious letter from a Lieutenant Dr. Figlhuber, who identified himself only as “Special Representative of the High Command.” The Lieutenant Doctor stated that experience in Italy and France had proven that the Anglo-Americans were removing masterpieces of the European Spirit and Genius in order to put them in their museums or sell them to private collectors. It was therefore the duty of the German Reich to preserve these treasures for Europe and for the Catholic Church. In closing he assured the Bishop that “during the safeguarding the dignity and sanctity of the House of God were carefully respected.” While this edifying document was being perused, the
Madonna
languished on a nearby dock waiting to be loaded onto a small German naval vessel, the sea being the only way out for the beleaguered Nazi forces. The officer in charge of this operation later reported in terms which might have described many a Netherlandish seascape that “in the late afternoon of September 7, as a result of a storm which suddenly arose, the sea was so disturbed that safe transfer from the lighter could not be guaranteed.” The transfer was eventually accomplished. It was just as well for the Belgian authorities not to have too precise an image of how their treasure had left them.
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In their newly expanded territory the “flotation” system devised for the Allied Monuments officers was a very mixed blessing. They had attained freedom and mobility, but without means to make use of it. The fact that they sometimes belonged to no specific unit and still were of very low rank made the problems of transportation more difficult than ever. George Stout managed to procure a decrepit German Army Volkswagen for himself. This miserable machine, which broke down in every conceivable manner, and by November even lacked a roof, nevertheless proved invaluable.

On September 17 an urgent, secret message sent Stout rushing to Maastricht. The Dutch government desired protection for the masterpieces stored in one section of the endless limestone tunnels near the town, which stretched into Germany, and through which many people had escaped from the Reich. Unfortunately the news also reached the BBC. Stout heard their broadcast on the radio of his Volkswagen. Soon the repository, perilously close to the German lines, was receiving unwelcome visitors and publicity. But the news, conveyed to the outer world by
New York Times
war correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick in a vivid report, was full of wonder. Turning away from the “mud and blood of the world of war,” where the atmosphere was “dark with danger,” she was escorted into the caves, mined since Roman times, where some eight hundred paintings hung on endless steel racks, and was overwhelmed by the “sense of life flowing out of the glowing color and exuberant vigor of these immortal works of art…. Seeing the buried treasure under embattled Maastricht is to glimpse again the meaning of the struggle for a civilized peace.”
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George Stout, equally pleased that the pictures were in good shape, but less flowery, helped the Dutch set up a vital phone link to the repository and recommended that they leave everything right where it was.

It was not until Aachen, where Stout was joined by MFAA colleague Walker Hancock, a well-known sculptor in civilian life, that he came face to face with the ghastly conditions which now prevailed in Germany’s cities. Nothing they had seen in Normandy could compare to the devastation wrought by months of bombing. For two weeks they had watched from afar as the city burned. Now, given a lift by a group of photographers and reporters, the men responsible for preserving what might be left of Charlemagne’s capital slowly made their way into town.

Aachen was totally deserted. The new military government had ordered everyone out. Gutted houses spewed their contents into the streets. Allied troops had not restrained their desire to pick up items so exposed, some of which were not what one would expect. As Hancock watched, amazed, “on a lean horse, a G.I. galloped by, bedecked with the complete feathered regalia of an Indian chief.” The city was a skeleton, and, as he would later
observe, “a skeleton city is more terrible than one that the bombs have completely flattened.” Hancock, wary of shells which still whistled down, continued on to the cathedral:

All the doors were standing open in that strange cluster of churches that is the cathedral of Aachen. Once inside the dark octagon that forms its nucleus I felt suddenly secure. For more than eleven centuries these massive walls had stood intact. That I should have arrived just in time to be the sole witness of their destruction was reassuringly inconceivable.
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A bomb had gone through the roof and into the high altar without exploding, but in general the wonderful octagonal church and its delicate tracery were intact. To his surprise Hancock found the vicar, shaken but still at his post. He told the American that his most important need was to reconstitute the fireguard of six Hitler Youth teenagers, whose job it had been to patrol the roof of the cathedral. Stout and Hancock found the boys in a suburb, on a street being used as an Allied artillery emplacement. Their terror of the American officers soon vanished when they found they were being recalled to duty. After a quick investigation by Counter Intelligence Corps officers, passes were arranged for the boys, and for one of their mothers, who would cook for them and the vicar at the cathedral. Hancock noted that “their faces were alight with a radiant joy. It was as if no further cares existed for them.” The Americans told them to brush their hair and not wear their uniforms. As they left “we saw them starting on the long walk down into the hell-hole. We saw too, faces in every window, watching them.” The relationship of the Allied conquerors to the German people was not going to be a simple problem.

Before they left Aachen the officers checked the empty museums and refugee camps, hoping to find, as they had in France, some museum employee who would help them locate and protect the city’s collections. They did not succeed, but in the wreckage of the Suermondt Museum’s offices they did find a marked copy of its catalogue with the notation that certain objects had recently been moved from Meissen to Siegen. Hancock reflected that only the most precious objects would have been moved all the way across Germany in the present conditions. But Siegen lay across the Rhine, between Cologne and Marburg, and they would not get there for a very long time.

After Aachen, Stout was called back to SHAEF and appointed “Special Emergency Inspector.” This was in response to the hundreds of dutiful reports of “Michelangelos,” (the generic term for paintings), now coming in from combat units who were encountering works of art hidden in the German
border areas. They all knew by now that it was their duty to protect these things, but there were still no directives to tell them where the works should be taken or exactly who was responsible. Walker Hancock had brought one collection to the nearest headquarters in a weapons carrier following a tank column “laboring through the dark December forest. The gilded rococo frames glistened indecently in that moving mass of brown, green and olive drab. We looked at each other, laughed, and said together, ‘God! What a war!’” This picturesque method of evacuation was clearly not ideal, but the Army still adamantly refused transportation to the floating Monuments men.

The high altar at Aachen, fall 1944

Adherence to regulations was so total that Stout, a Naval officer, was even refused foul-weather gear by Army supply officers and was forced to buy his own field coat. For the same reason he also had the greatest
difficulty finding a place where he was allowed to eat or sleep. The eventual arrival on the scene of Colonel Newton, ineffectual though he might have been at higher levels, provided some relief. Newton, being a regular Army colonel, was given a staff car and for a few weeks in November took Stout on a “tour of inspection” of the territory for which he was responsible, which ranged from Beauvais to Brussels to Paris. They discovered a number of threatened collections, but for the moment the only solution seemed to be to leave them where they were under the protection of local Military Government, “until they can lodge objects in custody with responsible civilian administrative officials.” By the end of one month of roving, Stout gave up this system, and got himself attached to Twelfth Army. This required him to arrange for written orders to justify each inspection trip, but now at least he would be given room and board after his sixteen- or eighteen-hour days of scrounging his way around the icy roads of Belgium and France.
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Things were much more civilized for another Monuments man who had arrived in Normandy in late August complete with truck and driver. This was Major Lord Methuen, attached to the British Twenty-first Army Group. His luxurious equipment allowed Methuen to take over inspection of the monuments listed by the Allies in virtually the entire liberated area west of Paris and on up to Brussels and Antwerp. It was no small job: there were nearly eight hundred sites in Calvados alone. Methuen was very thorough. For the next eight months he toured about his area, his inspection stops greatly enhanced by the fact that he had numerous relations in the countryside and had previously done much work with the Demeures Historiques.

Damage was completely random and caused by both sides. Next to one trashed house would be another still bearing Kunstschutz Off Limits notices, its contents secured and completely intact. On the way Methuen did nice sketches and watercolors of the visited sites, and discovered a number of little-known ones. All this he recorded in a gracefully written diary full of historical notes, observations of nature, and occupation stories, which would be elegantly published in 1952. At the time it was the only source of information anyone had, he being the only truly mobile informant.

As he travelled Methuen took French officials around with him so that they too could evaluate damage. Together they made plaster casts of burned sculpture about to turn to dust, propped up roofs, and saved precious fragments. On his routes were all the shrines of Impressionism. Honfleur was intact. Giverny, its various studios filled with over a hundred of Monet’s paintings, had suffered from shelling which had destroyed three pictures and damaged others. But the garden was just as it should be:
“a blaze of dahlias and michaelmas daisies.” Methuen arranged for assistance for Monet’s daughter-in-law, who was in residence, so that she could repair broken skylights and windows. This done, he and his French colleague “had our sandwich lunch here supplemented by some excellent wine and fruit kindly provided by Madame Monet in the yellow dining-room hung with Japanese prints.”
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