The Monuments Men (4 page)

“If the war would start today,” the canny veteran said, “all these soldiers would be off the street and in their barracks. The war will not start today.”
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Harry’s father, also a proud veteran of the German army, agreed. The family left not that afternoon, but the next morning on the first train to Switzerland. On October 9, 1938, they arrived in New York harbor. Exactly one month later, on November 9, the Nazis used the assassination of a diplomat to put into full force their crusade against German Jews.
Kristallnacht
, the Night of Broken Glass, saw the destruction of more than seven thousand Jewish businesses and two hundred synagogues. The Jewish men of Karlsruhe, including Opa Oppenheimer, were rounded up and put in the nearby Dachau internment camp. The magnificent hundred-year-old Kronenstrasse Synagogue, where only weeks before Heinz Ludwig Chaim Ettlinger had celebrated his bar mitzvah, was burned to the ground. Harry Ettlinger was the last boy ever to have his bar mitzvah ceremony in the old synagogue of Karlsruhe.

But this story isn’t about the Kronenstrasse Synagogue, the internment camp at Dachau, or even the Holocaust against the Jews. It is about a different act of negation and aggression Hitler perpetrated on the people and nations of Europe: his war on their culture. For when Private Harry Ettlinger, U.S. Army, finally returned to Karlsruhe, it wasn’t to search for his lost relatives or the remains of his community; it was to determine the fate of another aspect of his heritage stripped away by the Nazi regime: his grandfather’s beloved art collection. In the process he would discover, buried six hundred feet underground, something he had always known about but never expected to see: the Rembrandt of Karlsruhe.

CHAPTER 2

Hitler’s Dream

Florence, Italy

May 1938

I
n early May 1938, a few days after Harry Ettlinger’s parents accidentally signed their applications for emigration to America, Adolf Hitler made one of his first trips outside Germany and Austria. The trip was a state visit to Italy, to meet his Fascist ally Benito Mussolini.

Rome, so vast, so monumental, so redolent of empire with its massive, columned ruins, almost certainly humbled him. Its splendor—not its current splendor but the reflection of ancient Rome—made Berlin seem a mere provincial outpost. Rome was what he wanted his German capital to become. He had been moving toward conquest for years, planning his subjugation of Europe, but Rome sparked the idea of
empire.
Since 1936, he had been discussing with his personal architect, Albert Speer, a plan to rebuild Berlin on a massive scale. After Rome, he told Speer to build not just for today, but for the future. He wanted to create monuments that over the centuries would become elegant ruins so that a thousand years into the Reich, humankind would still be looking in awe at the symbols of his power.

Hitler found the smaller-scale Florence, the art capital of Italy, similarly inspiring. Here, in the intimate cluster of buildings that marked the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance, was the cultural heart of Europe. Nazi flags fluttered; the citizens cheered; but the artwork moved him. He spent more than three hours in the Uffizi Gallery, staring in wonder at its famous works of art. His entourage tried to keep him moving. Behind him, Mussolini, who had never willingly stepped foot in an art museum in his life,
1
muttered in exasperation, “
Tutti questi quadri…
”—“All these paintings… ”
2
But Adolf Hitler would not be hurried.

As a young man, he had dreamed of being an artist and an architect. That dream had been crushed when his application to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna was rejected by a panel of so-called art experts he believed to be Jews. He had wandered in the wilderness for a decade, almost destitute and virtually living on the streets. But his true destiny had finally revealed itself. He was not destined to create, but to remake. To purge, and then rebuild. To make an empire out of Germany, the greatest the world had ever seen. The strongest; the most disciplined; the most racially pure. Berlin would be his Rome, but a true artist-emperor needed a Florence. And he knew where to build it.

Less than two months earlier, on Sunday, March 13, 1938, Adolf Hitler had placed a wreath on his parents’ grave in his adopted hometown of Linz, Austria. The afternoon before, March 12, had seen the fulfillment of one of his great ambitions. He, who had once been rejected and ignored, had crossed from Germany, which he now ruled, into his native Austria, which he had just annexed into the Reich. At every town, the crowds cheered his convoy and mobbed his touring car. Mothers cried with joy at the sight of him; children showered him with flowers and adulation. In Linz, he was hailed as a conquering hero, a savior of his country and his race.

The next morning, he had been forced to linger in Linz. So many trucks and tanks in the German convoy had broken down that the road to Vienna was completely blocked. All morning he cursed his commanders for ruining his moment, for embarrassing him before his people and the world. But that afternoon, alone in the cemetery, his soldiers and hangers-on at a respectful distance, the bigger moment descended on him again, like an eagle plunging from the sky to grasp a fish.

He had done it. He wasn’t just a mournful son kneeling before his mother’s iron cross. He was the Führer. He was, as of that day, the emperor of Austria. He didn’t have to cower at the sight of Linz’s haphazard industrial riverfront; he could rebuild it. He could pour money and prestige into this small industrial town until it toppled the dominance of the Jewish-tinged (but at the same time virulently anti-Semitic) Vienna, a city he despised.

Perhaps on that day, he had thought of Aachen. For eleven hundred years the city, burial place of Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the First German Reich in AD 800, had stood as a monument to that man’s glory. Upon its ancient foundations, Charlemagne had built an enduring seat of power, centered on the magnificent Aachen Cathedral. Adolf Hitler would rebuild Berlin on the blueprint of Rome. But he would rebuild Linz, this rural backwater of factories and smoke, in his own image. It wasn’t just a dream; he had the power now to forge an enduring testament to his own fierce leadership and artistic soul. Two months later, in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, he saw clearly what Linz was destined to become: the cultural center of Europe.

In April 1938, Hitler had begun to consider the idea of an art museum in Linz, a place to house the personal collection he had begun amassing in the 1920s. His visit to one of the epicenters of Western art showed that his thinking had been far too small. He would not give Linz a mere museum. He would remodel the city’s riverfront along the Danube into a cultural district like the one in Florence, but with wide avenues, walking paths, and parks, and with every viewing point considered and controlled. He would build an opera house, a symphony hall, a cinema, a library, and of course a giant mausoleum to house his tomb. And nearby, in the center of it all, would stand the Führermuseum,
his
Aachen Cathedral, the largest, most imposing, most spectacular art museum in the world.

The Führermuseum. It would be his artistic legacy. It would vindicate his rejection from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. It would give form and purpose to his purge of “degenerate” works of art by Jews and modern artists; his new museums, like the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich, the first public project financed by his government; his huge yearly art exhibitions for the edification of the German people; his advocacy of art collecting among the Nazi elite; his decade-long pursuit of a world-class personal art collection. He had spent his life searching for artistic purity and perfection. The Führermuseum, the most spectacular art museum in history, culled from the riches of the entire world, gave that pursuit a defining rationale.

The foundation for culling those riches had already been laid. By 1938, he had already purged the German cultural establishment. He had rewritten the laws, stripping German Jews of their citizenship and confiscating their collections of art, their furniture, all their possessions right down to their silverware and their family photos. Even at the moment he knelt before his mother’s grave on his second day as ruler of Austria, Nazi SS troops under the command of Heinrich Himmler were using those laws to arrest the Jewish patriarchy of Vienna and seize their property for the Reich. The SS knew where the artwork was hidden; they had a list of everything. Years earlier, German art scholars had begun visiting the countries of Europe, secretly preparing inventories so that when Hitler conquered each country—oh yes, he had been preparing for conquest even then—his agents would know the name and location of every important object of artistic and cultural value.

In the years to come, as his power and territory grew, these agents would spread like tentacles. They would force their way into every museum, hidden bunker, locked tower, and living room to buy, trade, confiscate, and coerce. The racially motived property seizures of Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg would be turned into an art plundering operation; the insatiable ambition of Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring would be bent into an engine of exploitation. Hitler would use new laws,
his
laws, to gather the great artwork of Europe and sweep it back into the Fatherland. Once there, he would jam it into every available storage facility until the day it could be displayed in the world’s most magnificent museum. Until then it would be chronicled in enormous catalogues so that perhaps in the not-so-distant future, after a long day of ruling the world, he could relax at home, his faithful dog and a steaming pot of tea by his side, and select from the greatest art collection ever assembled,
his
art collection, a few choice pieces to brighten his day. In the coming years, Adolf Hitler would sketch this vision over and over again. He would contemplate it, turn it over in his mind, until with the help of architects Albert Speer, Hermann Giesler, and others, the Führermuseum and the Linz cultural district—the symbols of his artistic soul—would become a set idea, then a twenty-foot-long architectural rendering, and finally a three-dimensional scale model, large enough to fill an entire room, showing every building, bridge, and tree that would ever grow and prosper under his mighty hand.

June 26, 1939

Letter from Hitler directing Dr. Hans Posse to supervise the construction of the Führermuseum in Linz

“I commission Dr. Hans Posse, Director of Dresden Gallery, to build up the new art museum for Linz Donau. All Party and State services are ordered to assist Dr. Posse in fulfillment of his mission.”

—signed: Adolf Hitler

CHAPTER 3

The Call to Arms

New York City

December 1941

T
he Christmas lights sparkled defiantly in New York City in mid-December 1941. The windows of Saks and Macy’s blazed, and the giant tree at Rockefeller Center glared out at the world with a thousand wary eyes. At the Defense Center, soldiers trimmed Christmas trees, while around them citizens made preparations to feed 40,000 enlisted men in the largest feast the city had ever seen. In stores, “as usual” signs hung in the windows, a sure indication this was anything but an ordinary Christmas. On December 7, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, shocking the nation and catapulting it into war. While most Americans shopped and fumed and decided for the first time in years to spend a few days with their families—bus and train travel set a record that year—spotters stared up at the sky on both coasts, looking for signs of enemy bombers.

Much had changed since Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938. By the end of that year, Czechoslovakia had capitulated. On August 24, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact. A week later, on September 1, the Germans invaded Poland. In May 1940, the Nazi blitzkrieg (lightning war) turned west, routed a combined British-French force, and overran Belgium and Holland. By June, the Germans had taken Paris, catching the shocked French in the midst of evacuation. The Battle of Britain began in July, followed in September by a fifty-seven-day aerial bombardment of London that became known as the “Blitz.” By the end of May 1941, the bombs had killed tens of thousands of British civilians and damaged or destroyed more than a million buildings. On June 22, confident that Western Europe had been subdued, Hitler turned on Stalin. By September 9, the German Wehrmacht (Armed Forces) had stormed through western Russia to Leningrad (formerly the capital, St. Petersburg). The Leningrad Blockade, which would last nearly nine hundred days, had begun.