Monuments Men - Unusual Heroes

The monuments men were on average 40 years old. Most had families and were successful in their professions. They had no reason to volunteer for this dangerous task. One American and one Briton were killed while trying to protect German artwork. Many of them had studied in Europe or were from there. They wanted to use what they had learned to preserve a cultural world. How many visitors today - especially Germans - know that the monuments men protected and brought back, for example, the collections of the Beethoven House in Bonn or the magnificent Berlin Gemäldegalerie? Who stands in Front of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum in Berlin and knows that it was found by Allied soldiers in a salt dome near Merkers and then brought to Wiesbaden to the Central Collecting Point, where Ken Lindsay looked after it for years?

The fact that U.S. soldiers also took home looted art has been a taboo subject until now.

Many soldiers sent home or brought home war souvenirs, mostly things that were just lying around or whose meaning people didn't know or didn't want to know. Today we know that among them were important cultural goods. If the soldiers or their heirs recognize this significance, they can commission us. We give them credit for that. In the case of things knowingly stolen, the statute of limitations does not apply to theft in the U.S., unlike in many European countries, where you can even acquire ownership of stolen war property after a statute of limitations period. In the U.S., you risk imprisonment if you try to sell it. Hundreds of thousands of objects have still disappeared. 

What is the reaction in Germany?

Extremely warmly. In 2007, one of the so-called Linz albums was returned to the German Historical Museum in Berlin. It is one of 31 photo albums in which Hitler was presented with the acquisitions for the planned large museum in Linz. An American soldier had taken it with him from Hitler's Berghof on Obersalzberg - to prove to his family at home that he really was in Hitler's house. A handover ceremony at the U.S. State Department indicated that eleven albums were still missing. It is believed that they still exist in the US. A way is shown for stolen and lost cultural items to return home.

The real Monuments Man

Harry Ettlinger, born in Karlsruhe, Germany, fled to the U.S. from the Nazis, and was sent back to Germany at the End of the war, to rescue looted artworks as a "Monuments Men." Since Ettlinger no longer speaks German, Sigrid Fischer interviewed him in English; here is the translation:

Sigrid Fischer in conversation with Harry Ettlinger the last living "Monuments Man". 

Harry Ettlinger, now 88 years old, at the Berlinale. 10.02.2014

Sigrid Fischer: Mr. Ettlinger, did you recognize yourself in the Film "The Monuments" Men?

Harry Ettlinger: Yes and no. The actor Dimitri did something different than I did back then. I was busy in the office most of the time, checking documents and interviewing people. The first job I had was to interrogate Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's personal photographer. Captain Rorimer took me to Adelshofen and Neuschwanstein, where they stored many of the art treasures that were later returned to Paris. Finally, I didn't get to the Monuments Men until near the End of the war, I don't remember exactly whether it was April 29 or 30 or May 1 or 2.

Fischer: That means what we see in the film is more exciting than your job was?

Ettlinger: Of course, these are Hollywood actors, that's not me.

Fischer: I mean, how they do their job is more exciting, it's just a movie.

Ettlinger: Yes, you only see the key moments of their work, but not what else was involved. I'm driving a jeep there, but I couldn't even drive a car. I spent most of my time in one or two salt mines, registering the boxes of art treasures that didn't belong to Germany. So I spent an early part of my life in a mine, I wouldn't have thought that before either. That was interesting, because salt mines are not coal mines, there's quite clear air in there, 18 degrees temperature, so very pleasant. Down there they set up factories for the mass production of aircraft engines, which Jewish slaves from Hungary had to make. And if they had been successful, the German Luftwaffe could have shot down all our planes and World War 2 would have lasted one or two years longer.

Fischer: You were very young, did you understand at all then why it could be important to save art?

Ettlinger: Not at all, that was not clear to me. But when you become a soldier, you are no longer a child, you suddenly grow up. But back then, not much was explained to you, it was simply: You stay here now and do this. Why? Forget it. And they had taken me out of combat, three of eight comrades were already dead, five injured, and that would have happened to me too if I had stayed in combat. When you're offered a job - I had volunteered as a German translator - if someone says, "Do this job and that job," you do it. And that's how I came to the Monuments Men.

Fischer: Have you heard of Cornelius Gurlitt, in whose Munich apartment many paintings of undetermined origin are stored?

Ettlinger: Yes.

Fischer: What did you think when you heard about it?

Ettlinger: At the time, the Monuments Men felt that possibly three quarters of a million valuable paintings out there in the world would still turn up at some point. And when I heard about that, I thought: There's the beginning. And you can expect more stories like that, more will turn up in the next generations.

Fischer: You left Germany with your family when you were 12 or 13?

Ettlinger: At 13, the day after my bar mitzvah.

Fischer: Okay, at some point you made your peace with the Germans. Did you forgive what they did to the Jews?

Ettlinger: Let me put it this way: In my job of recovering the Lost works of art from the salt mine, I had to deal with many Germans. And I found out that, like everywhere else in the world, people are different. Our bodies are the same, except that there are big differences between women and men, I don't want to go into that now. But we all behave differently. That is my experience. Because some Germans showed me a lot of respect. I was their superior. There was this "Jewish kid," and some of you performed my instructions. In Kochendorf, I was dealing with a Nazi, I realized that he saw in me the Jewish soldier, not the American soldier. We had a business deal: you have your job, I have mine. Let's leave it at that. I knew very well that he didn't like that at all, that a Jew was telling him what to do, that was perfectly clear to me. But then that's the way it is.

Fischer : Mr. Ettlinger, now you've met George Clooney, explain to me what it is about him. Why does everyone go crazy as soon as he appears?

Ettlinger: You'll have to explain that to me, you being a woman. Because every time I mention his name, to any woman, there's a coo and a big smile appears on their face. He is the most popular man in the world. He has this, which I cannot explain because I am not a woman, but when I mention the name. ...I have never met anyone like him before. What is that?

Fischer: Charisma - some people have it, others don't.

Ettlinger: Yes, you and I don't have it.

Fischer: Well, but because of his Film, everybody is talking about the Monuments Men now. For 50 years, nobody did that, it's strange, isn't it?

Ettlinger: I think it's good that now it's finally becoming known what some people did to preserve their culture, which is part of our life. Today, it's normal for us. We no longer sit rooms with bare walls, but we want to make them pleasant. This is our way of living a peaceful life. Not by fighting and killing each other. That's not a good life. That's what we've learned. And what we still need to learn to live a good life is to treat each other with respect.