The Monuments Men (32 page)

If ever there was an odd couple, it was Posey and Kirstein: a quiet, blue-collar Alabama architect and a manic-depressive, married yet homosexual, Jewish New York bon vivant. Posey was steady, while Kirstein was emotional. Posey was a planner, Kirstein impulsive. Posey was disciplined, his partner outspoken. Posey was thoughtful, but Kirstein was insightful, often brilliantly so. While Posey only requested Hershey’s bars from home, Kirstein’s care packages included smoked cheeses, artichokes, salmon, and copies of the
New Yorker.
But perhaps most importantly, Posey was a soldier. Kirstein chafed at the rigidity and bureaucracy of the army, and found most officers a frustrating bore. Posey understood and respected the military and its rules. He loved them, in fact. He had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, and he had gone immediately back to his duties out of loyalty not just to the mission, but to his fellow soldiers in Third Army. Together, the two men could go a lot further in the army than either could go alone.

There were also more practical reasons to put them together. Posey was one of the most experienced MFAA officers. He understood how the job needed to be done, and he was also an expert on buildings and building materials. But he was not highly cultured or well-read, and he didn’t speak any foreign languages. Kirstein’s familiarity with the cultures of France and Germany and his extensive knowledge of the fine arts were a perfect compliment, and his fluency in French was invaluable. Unfortunately, there was one hole in their armor: Neither of them spoke fluent German, although Kirstein knew enough to get by.

Even though there was no doubt Kirstein was highly qualified for the Monuments job, arguably more qualified than his superior officer Captain Posey, he was still an enlisted man and his tasks included those typical of a newly arrived private: pumping water from a flooded basement; finding a muzzle for a colonel’s dog; tracking down and delivering a load of plywood; serving meals; digging latrines; and, of course, writing reports and filing paperwork. The paperwork was the worst. Each sheet had to be typed in eight copies, and if anyone along the line discovered a typo, he had to start all over again. But even that didn’t get Lincoln Kirstein down. After seven months of limbo, he was interested, active, and happy to be near the front.

Kirstein received his education in Monuments work at Metz, France. Posey and Kirstein spent the last weeks of January traveling the icy road between Third Army headquarters at Nancy and the citadel town of Metz, which had been captured by Third Army in the fall after a vicious struggle. During the Bulge, Posey told him, the Germans had parachuted troops behind Allied lines dressed in American uniforms. The only way to find them out was to ask questions on strictly American topics, like baseball. The Germans were always clueless.

Not long after, on an excursion down a side road to some out-of-the-way villa or town, Kirstein heard gunfire from the trees. Since they had not quite reached the front lines, he thought it was Allied target practice. He didn’t find out until the next day that Germans had been shooting at them. Posey seemed unconcerned; just part of the job. Kirstein wasn’t so sure. His only comfort was his realization the old saw must be true: the “Jerries,” army slang for Germans, couldn’t shoot straight. Still, he never cared much for the back roads after that.

For much of January, at least, they stuck to the main road. Since the end of the Bulge, Robert Posey had been trying to figure out where the treasures of Metz had been taken. This involved primarily interviewing clerks and lesser art officials in the city and the nearby overcrowded Allied prison camp, the true Nazi gangsters having fled east into the Fatherland. It was a tiring exercise given how little these minor functionaries really knew. When pressed, they could usually give only another name, another address of someone that might, just possibly, know something.

This, Lincoln Kirstein learned, was the MFAA grind: finding and interviewing reluctant officials until the right person was found. It was a little like a game of ping-pong: Posey would get a name, find that person, gain a little information and a few more names, find the new people and ask more questions until, through hard work and repetition, he began to figure the situation out. Rarely would the answer come from one source. More often, through a series of mostly unhelpful interviews, a complete picture would slowly, ever so slowly, emerge.

For the most important sources, like Dr. Edward Ewing, an archivist whose name came up repeatedly in interviews, Posey called Twelfth Army Group Monuments Man George Stout. Kirstein would soon realize that Stout, an instigator of the conservation effort as far back as the meeting at the Met in 1941, was the resident expert upon whom all the other Monuments Men relied. If something had to be done, Stout would know the way.

Stout was called on January 15. Two days later he questioned Dr. Ewing, while Kirstein took notes. At first there wasn’t much to record. Dr. Ewing sat quietly and answered quickly. German propaganda had long claimed the Allies, and specifically the Americans, planned to confiscate European art and, being too boorish to appreciate it themselves, sell it to the highest bidder. One of the MFAA’s most insightful early decisions had been to exclude art dealers from Monuments work, focusing instead on cultural officials in the public and academic sphere. It was a trust of their fellow civil servants that usually won over European art officials, even those who were Nazis. And no one was more trustworthy than George Stout. He exuded knowledge, professionalism, and the pure love of and respect for cultural objects.

Eventually, Ewing began to talk. In the eyes of the Nazis, he told them, Metz was a German town. Germany had lost it to the French at the end of World War I, so that must be its true lineage, yes? Its history was far more complicated than that, of course, but the Nazis liked to keep things simple. He quoted Hitler: “The crowd will succeed in remembering only the simplest concepts repeated a thousand times.”
6

In a course of twenty minutes or so, Ewing opened Kirstein’s eyes to the challenges ahead. It was punishable by death, or at least assignment to the Eastern front, which was worse than death, to suggest the Allies could ever breach the Fatherland. Even to prepare for such a possibility was treason. So the art experts in Metz catalogued the treasures but made no provisions to move them. Only when the danger of the Allied advance became undeniable had they begun the evacuation. Ewing didn’t call it an evacuation, of course. He called it temporary custody for the safety of the objects, all of which would be returned when Germany won the war.

“The denial is standard,” Stout told Kirstein afterward. “The use of the word ‘they,’ not us. The insistence that someone else committed the crimes. It doesn’t matter. Our job isn’t to judge; our job is to save the art.”

The treasures of Metz had ended up in various locations: a hotel, a cathedral crypt, a mine. Ewing pointed out the towns on a map Stout gave him. Kirstein saw Stout stiffen with interest at only one location: Siegen.

What about the Ghent Altarpiece?

Ewing knew of its appropriation and was sure the altarpiece was still in Germany, possibly in an underground bunker near Koblenz. Or at Göring’s residence, Carinhall. Or Hitler’s Berghof, in Berchtesgaden. “Or perhaps,” he said, “the
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
was taken to Switzerland, Sweden, or Spain. Honestly, I cannot say.”

Kirstein’s realization came sometime later, although he could never say exactly where or when.
There is not one type of German
, went the thought.
There are many who were never Nazis, but remained silent out of fear. Nor is there one type of Nazi. There are those who went along to survive, or for career advancement, or out of a sheepish devotion to the status quo. Then there are the hardcases, the true believers. It is possible we will find what we are looking for only when the last true believer is dead.

CHAPTER 27

George Stout with His Maps

Verdun, France

March 6, 1945

M
onuments Man George Stout looked at the battered packages, one stamped “Received in Defective Condition” by the army postmaster. He picked up the first one and turned it over. There was an ominous rattle, as if something had broken in transit. The writing on the shipping label was definitely his wife Margie’s, but otherwise the package carried no hint of home. The postmark read early December 1944; it was now March 6, 1945. George Stout was pretty sure he had finally received his Christmas presents. They made him think again how much had changed in three months.

The Bulge, for one thing. And the Western Allied advance. And the bitterly cold winter. And of course his transfer to U.S. Twelfth Army Group, the command group for the bulk of the American army. The transfer had necessitated his leaving the combat zone for France, but at least it provided a warm bed. Not that warm, actually—he cursed his “stiff conscience” all winter because he had balked at picking up a quilted bedroll abandoned by the Germans last fall
1
—but it was far better than the procession of trenches and foxholes the army had used to hopscotch its way to Germany. Back in France, he had even been getting real eggs for breakfast and a little captured wine with dinner. The Twelfth Army Group assignment also offered a desk, a small office, and authority over four armies numbering 1.3 million men—of which exactly nine were frontline MFAA personnel.

It might have been a promotion, but to George Stout the posting felt like his worst nightmare: middle management. France had been all paperwork, meetings, passing messages back and forth from SHAEF to the men at the front. “MFAA administration posts,” read a typical diary entry, “vetting, selection, qualifications, pay, tenure, accountability to authority; problem of centralization of museum administration; procedure in microfilming any MFA&A documents in field; information required on MFA&A and other civilian personnel; information on repositories in Germany.”
2

He felt much better since being back at the advanced headquarters at Verdun, France, near the German border and the combat zone. With his move east, the advantages of his position had become clear to him, and he was becoming more and more comfortable with his new role. As the lead MFAA officer, he was no longer limited to the area in front of him. He could travel anywhere in Twelfth Army Group territory—with the proper pass, which could take several days to receive—and as a consequence his officers had begun to call him to important finds. He had recently been in the Amblève Valley of Belgium with Walker Hancock, surveying damage done to the small villages there during the Bulge. At Metz with U.S. Third Army to interrogate prisoners. In Aachen, Germany, to review the state of the damage caused by U.S. First Army’s assault on the city in October 1944. He was drawing the effort together, solidifying it. For the first time, the men in the field could understand that, at least through one officer, they were part of a larger organization, and that they weren’t out fighting for Europe’s cultural heritage alone. With his unwanted promotion to Twelfth Army Group, George Stout had become quite by accident the indispensable man, the rock upon which the northern European monuments conservation effort was built.

Or perhaps it wasn’t an accident at all. Perhaps it was inevitable. For from the initial meeting in New York City in December 1941, through Shrivenham, England, and the hedgerows of Normandy and the race to the German border, George Stout had always been the indispensable man. The only difference now was that he had an official position.

And none too soon, because on March 6, 1945, the toughest work lay ahead. Stout put aside his packages from home—he would open them later, when he could truly savor them—and unrolled his map.

British Second Army was on the northern edge of the advance in the Netherlands. His old roommate, the British scholar Ronald Balfour, no doubt had the situation well in hand, even though he had yet to locate his primary objective: Michelangelo’s
Bruges Madonna
.

On the southern edge of the advance, U.S. Seventh Army had not yet been assigned a Monuments Man. The only consolation Stout could take from that was that the Seventh was headed for the heavy industrial region of southwestern Germany, an area with relatively few monuments. They would need a Monuments Man soon, though, and Stout hoped fervently that the officers back at SHAEF had someone exceptional in mind.

Between those two armies lay Stout’s command: First, Third, Ninth, and Fifteenth Armies.

The conservation effort in Fifteenth Army was being run by Monuments Man Everett “Bill” Lesley, who had been transferred from First Army.

To the south, in the Moselle River valley, was General Patton’s Third Army. On January 29, 1945, Third Army had finally broken through the Siegfried Line outside Metz and was advancing toward the heart of Germany. From what he had seen during the last few weeks, Stout felt confident Posey and Kirstein were the right pair for the job.

Ninth Army, meanwhile, was now responsible, among other things, for holding the important German city of Aachen. Their Monuments Man was Captain Walter Huchthausen, an architecture professor at the University of Minnesota. Stout had never met “Hutch” before his arrival at the front, and he wasn’t sure how or when the young man had joined the MFAA. All he knew was that Hutch had been wounded in a Luftwaffe bombing run on London in 1944, which might explain why he hadn’t spent time in Shrivenham before D-Day. For all Stout knew, Hutch had been intended for the first wave of Monuments Men.

He certainly had the credentials: knowledgeable, worldly, professional, driven. He had studied architecture as well as design, and he was familiar with European culture. He had recently turned forty, a typical age for a Monuments officer, but Stout couldn’t help but think of him as a young man. And it wasn’t just the paternal feelings of a superior officer. Hutch had the sandy blond, boyish good looks of an all-American kid, acquired no doubt during his upbringing in the small town of Perry, Oklahoma.