The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History in 100+ Books in 2025

Apr 02, 2014 Dolly rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2014, canada, czech-republic, new-england, the-netherlands, education-school, virginia, washington-dc, england-english, gardens-flowers

This book offers an enlightening account of the efforts taken to preserve cultural and historical works of art, highlighting the efforts in northern Europe - mainly France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

Of particular interest, scattered throughout the text include numerous memos and reports from the Nazis in their attempts to plunder and loot artwork for their own purposes, even going so far as directing the destruction of the artwork rather than returning it to the original owners.

Thes This book offers an enlightening account of the efforts taken to preserve cultural and historical works of art, highlighting the efforts in northern Europe - mainly France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

Of particular interest, scattered throughout the text include numerous memos and reports from the Nazis in their attempts to plunder and loot artwork for their own purposes, even going so far as directing the destruction of the artwork rather than returning it to the original owners.

These extraordinary stories are, at times, exciting, heartbreaking, inspiring and sometimes very dramatic and the brave men and women who embarked on this mission often faced grave danger along the way. The narrative is very readable and understandable, even for people (like me) who aren't very knowledgable about art terminology.

I loved how the story was very personalized, including letters home from the men who were conducting the search and recovery of the artwork. And the author seems to have compiled an incredible amount of research, admitting that he had to put the vast amount of information he unearthed about similar efforts in Italy in a subsequent book. That book, Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis, is now on my vast to-read list.

Overall, I found this book to be an informative and compelling read. I have not seen the movie and I am not in a hurry to do so, but I am very glad that the story is being brought forth to greater public awareness. It's a story that needs to be told.

interesting quotes:

[John Gettens, Fogg Museum Conservation Department] "I think we got some work done, back at the start, because nobody knew us, nobody bothered us - and we had no money." (p. 1)

"The creation of the MFAA [Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives] section was a remarkable experiment. It marked the first time an army fought a war while comprehensively attempting to mitigate cultural damage, and it was performed without adequate transportation, supplies, personnel, or historical precedent." (p. 2)

"He [Hitler] 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." (p. 10)

"How influential was Paul Sachs? Because he was short, about five foot two, he hung paintings low on the wall. When American museums rose to prominence after the war, many of the directors hung their paintings lower than their counterparts in Europe." (p. 19)

"Was the whole war an exercise in understanding mistakes only after they had been made?" (p. 34)

"There's one good thing about being in the bomb disposal unit: No superior officer is ever looking over your shoulder." (p. 107)

"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." (p. 126)

"He was an expert; it was his job to preserve this city. And he was a soldier. He had met with General George S. Patton Jr., the greatest fighting man in the U.S. Army. A man who when you called him a bastard - and every man in Third Army sometimes did - you did so with admiration." (p. 169)

"To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won...it was unheard of, but that is exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do." (pp. 254-255)

[regarding Walter 'Hutch' Huchthausen] "The buildings that he hoped, as a young architect, to build will never exist...but the few people who saw him at his job - friend and enemy - must think more of the human race because of him." (p. 286)

[regarding Adolf Hitler] "He was capable of terrific fits of temper, when he would become livid at those who had abandoned him, insist victory was achievable, and vow to fight on, but he had also become increasingly brooding and consumed with hatred and a will to destroy: to kill as many Jews as possible; to throw his armies, including old men and young boys, into the enemy lines as cannon fodder; to smash every brick and gut every element of infrastructure in Germany until the country that had betrayed him, that in its cowardice had proven the weaker race, not the master race, was sent back to the Stone Age. Their failure stripped everything from him until, in those final days, in his bunker deep beneath the Reichschancellery in Berlin, with the sound of Soviet artillery shells exploding overhead, one of the few things that remained in his twisted heart - perhaps the one thing that made him human and therefore truly terrifying - was his love of art." (p. 332)

"...he had sold his soul, and that is something you can never repurchase at any price. Hermann Bunjes had craved Nazi power, wealth, and prestige, but they had been nothing but a cruel illusion for a foolish man." (p. 345)

"'My knowledge of the Holocaust,' Harry [Ettlinger] would later say, 'started really with the realization that it was not only the taking of lives - that I learned much later in my experience - but the taking of all of their belongings...[For me] Neuschwanstein was the start of really opening up that part of history that should never be forgotten." (pp.393-394)

"In the end, the Western Allies discovered more than one thousand repositories in southern Germany alone, containing millions of works of art and other cultural treasures, including church bells, stained glass, religious items, municipal records, manuscripts, books, libraries, wine, gold, diamonds, and even insect collections. The job of packing, transporting, cataloguing, photographing, archiving, and returning this plunder to its country of origin - the respective countries were then responsible for returning it to the individual owners - fell almost exclusively to the MFAA section. The job would take six long years." (p. 400)

[Jacques Jaujard] "There are fights that you may lose without losing your honor; what makes you lose your honor is not to fight them." (p. 411)

new words: agglomeration, redound
...more

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Apr 16, 2015 Jgrace rated it liked it

Shelves: 20th-century, jgrace, judithg, kindle, europe, france, ww2, read-in-2015, non-fiction, history-usa

The Monuments Men - Edsel
3 stars

The preservation and recovery of great works of art is definitely a 5 star subject. World War Two is a fascinating historical setting. The Monuments Men and one particularly heroic French woman were all amazing personalities. This book should have been a gripping page turner. It wasn’t. Interesting enough to finish, but not exciting.

Despite his use of personal correspondence, Edsel never brought these men to life for me. I was able to occasionally feel the stres ...more

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Jan 08, 2014 Bookboy rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, biography-and-memoir, history, read-2014

An unknown chapter in World War II history, The Monuments Men unveils a race against time as a disparate group of historians, art experts and scholars scour Nazi-held Europe in the aftermath of the Normandy invasions to find and recover the stolen art works seized by the Nazis. Taking us from Washington to Berlin, the book manages to convey the difficulty of the task, as the Monuments Men struggled with lack of resources, sometimes reluctant Allied leadership and the dangers of the war itself. C ...more

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Jun 05, 2014 Mary Catherine rated it liked it

3.5 stars...fascinating history but I could never totally get into the book. But it's worth reading to find out more about this rarely-talked-about part of the war. ...more

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