Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (13 page)

In early December, Wolff returned to Hitler’s headquarters to submit his recommendation to the Führer. During his time as the SS liaison officer, Wolff had studied the many approaches taken by others in their meetings with Hitler. He knew from experience that a successful meeting with the Führer depended on seeing him privately, and that anything said had to be supported by facts presented in an uncomplaining manner. Shifting blame to others would only enrage him. “The Führer and I spoke the same language,” Wolff once commented. “We were both front[line] soldiers of World War I.”

Wolff began the meeting by explaining the war weariness of the Italian people. “The mood of the Italian population towards the Germans is not directly hostile yet, but they consider us, due to the continuous destructions on Italian soil and the losses among the civilian population, to be unpopular prolongers of the war.” He then discussed the “undisputed authority” of the Catholic Church, noting its far superior influence on Italians than Mussolini’s reconstituted Social Republic:

After I recognized this, I immediately and at any given opportunity—mostly petitions for mercy from the high Clergy for condemned and arrested Italians—tried to reestablish a good contact to high ranking dignitaries of the Church and the Vatican, which eventually led to my proposal [to church authorities]: “I protect your ecclesiastical institutions, your authority among the Italians and the German occupying forces, your property and your life; and you in your areas keep the population quiet and discourage them from actions against the German authority.”

With Wolff’s SS forces already stretched thin supplying Kesselring’s front-line troops, and Himmler unable to send reinforcements to Italy, Wolff urged the Führer to “give up your Vatican Plan and allow me to act with determination when necessary and continue my policy of the ‘easy hand’ with Italy. . . . As I see the situation, the occupation of the Vatican and the kidnapping of the Pope would have so many negative repercussions for us as well among the German Catholics at home and at the front.”

Hitler seemed resigned to accept Wolff’s recommendation, thanking him for his presentation and the details of his research, but not before admonishing him to remember: “I have to hold you responsible in case you cannot uphold your optimistic ‘guarantee.’”

BY EARLY DECEMBER,
some combination of efforts by Becker, Tieschowitz, Italian art officials, appeals to the Vatican by the congregation of Monte Cassino and others, and a steady stream of newspaper stories from abroad, compelled the Hermann Göring Division to relinquish the works of art and other objects under its control. With the full support of Italian authorities, an arrangement had been reached for the Vatican to receive the state-owned items and archives in two parts. On December 8, with German cameras rolling, fourteen large trucks bearing the division’s insignia arrived in Rome, slowly crossed the Tiber River, and pulled up to the entrance of Castel Sant’Angelo, formerly the mausoleum of the Roman emperor Hadrian. This first delivery was a staged production designed to portray the division, and the German Army, as defenders—not destroyers—of Europe’s heritage.

Officials watched as each truck backed through the entrance doors and down the loading ramp, where local workers and uniformed soldiers waited to offload the contents, 387 cases in all. Out of the trucks came drawers (removed from their cabinets) filled with scrolls and archival documents bound by silk ribbons, the abbey’s ancient globe, and crates containing works of art that had once adorned the walls of the monastery. Schlegel and others spoke at the short ceremony, although Kesselring had ordered the Kunstschutz representative to “say no more than three sentences. . . . the less said about this matter the better.” Handshakes followed. The Hermann Göring Division, the German Army, and Kunstschutz officials had their propaganda coup.

Several weeks passed before the Hermann Göring Division returned the remaining—and most magnificent—objects from Monte Cassino to Italian officials. On January 4, the German propaganda machine prepared for the second and final delivery, this time to officials at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Cameras began recording the arrival of thirty-one trucks containing six hundred crates of books from the National Library evacuated from another storage facility by Becker and, finally, the Naples collections. With the safe arrival of the remaining Monte Cassino treasures, the long-drawn-out affair appeared over.

After the ceremony, Italian officials, including Emilio Lavagnino, Central Inspector of the General Direction of the Arts, and former Superintendent of Galleries in Rome and Naples, supervised the unloading. Of the 772 crates delivered that day, 172 contained the Naples treasures. Everything proceeded smoothly until the German officer in charge of transport mentioned that enemy machine-gun fire en route had delayed the arrival of two trucks.

The two trucks containing fifteen additional crates did indeed reach their destination, much to the relief of the leaders of the Hermann Göring Division and Göring’s adviser, Brauchitsch. But their destination had been Berlin, not Rome. Their timing was perfect. Birthday festivities for Göring were just around the corner. There were many new gifts to wrap.

*
In November 1943, allegedly at the urging of SS General Karl Wolff, Hitler removed Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel as commander of forces in northern Italy and appointed Kesselring Commander-in-Chief OB South-West and Commander-in-Chief Army Group C. “Overnight, [Kesselring] had become the most powerful man in the Mediterranean region.”

SECTION II

STRUGGLE

What happens when this dense fabric of human achievement, so infinitely precious, so incalculably old, so carefully guarded, is struck by the full force of modern warfare?

—
MONUMENTS OFFICER FRED HARTT

9

THE FIRST TEST

FEBRUARY 1944

M
ajor Ernest DeWald considered the December 29, 1943, directive from General Eisenhower “the first official ground under our feet on which we can build.” But there was still much to do. The Western Allies had no tradition of working with a formalized group of Monuments officers. Even with Ike’s new order, they numbered just fifteen men in an army of hundreds of thousands.

The transfer of MFAA headquarters from Sicily to Naples in February 1944 created an immediate need for additional officers. Deane Keller, still stuck in North Africa, finally received orders to report for his new assignment. No one bothered to tell him what that new assignment was, but his Priority status enabled him to escape the doldrums of Tizi Ouzou and board a ship for the mainland. He arrived on the evening of February 6 and reported for duty the following morning to the original Monuments Man, Mason Hammond. Keller “brought with him no copies of his travel orders or of any orders assigning him to the Subcommission [as] his assignment . . . was made verbally.” After eight months in his new assignment, very little about the ways of the United States Army surprised Hammond.

The very evening of his arrival, Keller wrote Kathy a letter to let her know he had arrived in Italy: “I could write you fifty pages of what has happened to me. . . . I am quartered in a hotel, expecting blankets tonight; my bedding roll was dropped off the boat in unloading into the water. . . . I carried my 100 pound bedding roll seven flights to my billet and then my barracks bag, soaked in water and very heavy.” Despite the initial hardships, Keller remained undaunted in his sense of purpose, telling Kathy, “I feel I am on a personal crusade, and if I can save a bit no matter how little, for America and for Italy, I’ll be satisfied.”

As a security precaution, censorship rules prohibited soldiers from disclosing key information in letters, especially references to their unit or location. Letting Kathy know that he’d reached Italy was the limit to what he could say. “I have been here before and am in the 7th Heaven as far as that goes.” She would have to guess the location of “here.” These rules created considerable frustration for loved ones and often required writerly acrobatics. One of Keller’s letters sent a day later included the absurd line: “We had a trip without incident to here where I have been before.”

“Here” turned out to be the former Greek colony of Naples, among Europe’s oldest settlements, dating back almost three thousand years. But the Naples that greeted Keller in February 1944 appeared unfamiliar. The “light-hearted” Neapolitans that Keller had described to his classes at Yale seven months earlier were now hungry, homeless, and out of work. By September 1943, twenty thousand civilians already had been killed during the 105 Allied bombing raids on their city. Many survivors had been living in underground air-raid shelters (
ricoveri
),
*
“great cavernous excavations with cathedral-like chambers accommodating thousands of people”—places dominated by “terror, dirt, [and a] sense of impotence.” Monuments Man and fellow artist Salvatore Scarpitta observed that the city’s “churches are the war’s innocent victims whose price is paid bitterly by all in this unprecedented conflagration.” On the bright side, a typhus epidemic finally seemed to be under control after special “dusting” squads began disinfecting more than eighty
ricoveri
per week in late December.

Keller’s first weeks saw him working out of the damaged but functional Post Office building, where a room large enough for one senior executive had been jammed full of small desks and typewriters. Frequent air-raid sirens interrupted the tedium of preparing reports and sent Keller and the others to the nearby bomb shelter, often overnight. His daily exercise came from walking up and down the seven flights of stairs to reach his room at the Hotel Volturno, on Via Roma.

He derived satisfaction from being out of the office on inspection trips. Keller and his colleagues traveled around southern Italy, meeting officials and inspecting monuments, but these trips also thrust them close to the agony and hardships being endured by the Italian people. Each wounded child, destroyed home, and damaged town made Keller realize how sheltered and privileged his life had been. One letter to Kathy conveyed scenes he would see again and again during the months to follow:

At the hospital today a tall man, one leg shriveled, a man without any nose—two holes in his face and great sores on his cheeks asked me for a cigarette and bread. . . . Another man, a custodian, lost his house and holdings, in the American raid. . . . Then the flood came and ruined what little he had left. . . . He says, “Thank God the Americans came, killed and destroyed, for then the Fascists and Germans left for good, and I can stretch and [breathe] and speak again.”

Keller could barely contain his fury when soldiers turned cold shoulders to the sufferings of the local people. “I’ll do what I can and try to make some of them feel that we all don’t consider them all the scourge of the earth,” he wrote Kathy. “I wonder sometimes how much heart there is in the world.” He understood why some thought the Italians’ plight was earned punishment for their alliance with Nazi Germany. But during his three years as a student in Rome, Keller had developed a fondness and admiration for them. It became one of his motivations for entering military service. “You must understand that the Italians are good people by and large. . . . As they say themselves, ‘Buona gente, buonissima gente, ma bisogna saperla prendere.’ Good people, very good people, but you have to know how to take them.”

Keller’s paternal feelings also extended to “the boys,” the young American soldiers, many the age of the students he once instructed. At forty-two, Keller was old enough to be their father. He admired them greatly, always taking time to study them as they passed. “There is a quiet seriousness about the foot soldier. He is proud, he knows what he’s done & what it means to the individual.
He does not complain
. . . . it is near the top experience of my life to know some of our men who are risking everything.”

Kathy responded to these letters with letters and packages. She and other family members sent boxes filled with chocolate, notebooks, soap, toilet paper, shaving soap, pencils, toothpaste, and stationery—staples her husband had requested but that nevertheless provided cause for celebration upon arrival. She also included pictures of her holding little Dino that offered a glimpse of home, which meant everything to him.

Making friends with the other Monuments officers came slowly to Keller. His taciturn demeanor hid a shyness known only to his closest friends. Few of his colleagues were married or had children; several were gay. He avoided after-work get-togethers and socializing, instead preferring to visit a church, stop by the Red Cross, or return to his room and write letters. Tubby Sizer, the man responsible for encouraging Keller to pursue becoming a Monuments officer, had departed Italy by the time of Keller’s arrival. He had been transferred to the Civil Affairs Training School in Shrivenham, England, to begin work with newly arriving Monuments officers. Mason Hammond would soon follow. The Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, intended to capitalize on their experience in Sicily and southern Italy as he assembled his invasion forces for Western Europe. Many churches, museums, and other monuments lay in the path to Berlin. Their knowledge would prove invaluable to incoming art scholars and museum men.

Hammond’s successor, Major Ernest DeWald, formerly a professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton, had been designated the Director of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Subcommission in Italy. A change in directors brought new leadership and ideas, a development Keller hoped would free him and the others from their cramped Naples office. But without a breakthrough at Cassino, there would be few new towns or villages to inspect. For the time being, they were stuck. Keller wrote, “The big work lies ahead and I’m getting myself in the proper frame of mind. . . . We are truly in the hands of Destiny, and I wouldn’t have it different.”

THE BATTLE FOR
Cassino began on January 17, 1944. It would prove to be one of the most gruesome campaigns of the war. U.S. Fifth Army spent six weeks—and suffered sixteen thousand casualties—advancing the last seven miles to Monte Trocchio. The town of Cassino, on the edge of the Germans’ Gustav Line, was still three miles away. Kesselring’s commanders capitalized on what Allied General Harold Alexander called “one of the strongest natural defensive positions in the whole of Europe” to entrench their troops. By February 11, after three weeks of demoralizing struggle—against the Germans, the high ground, and poor weather—Allied Forces had incurred some ten thousand additional casualties. Memories of World War I stalemates such as Verdun began to creep into the minds of some commanders old enough to have witnessed the vast, muddy trench fields of eastern France and Belgium.

Casualty numbers alone do not convey the brutality of the fight. Colonel Young Oak Kim, a second-generation Korean American in the U.S. 100th Infantry Battalion—later known as the “Purple Heart Battalion”—condensed the misery and gallantry of the battle at Monte Cassino into a single story about a young infantry soldier:

All the way up this mountain ridge we had Germans at different levels all dug in and all shooting at us. They could put machine guns up there and fire at us and be totally immune to anything we could shoot at them. . . . I had one person next to me just two days before we withdrew. He was from Mississippi and had joined us a few months before. And he was sitting next to me, and we were both pinned down on this rocky ledge by a German sniper, and every time we tried to move our heads even a couple of inches he would fire. And so we were pinned there for something like three and a half hours. . . . it’s raining miserably and we’re stuck there, flat against this sort of rock. Some of our people are trying to shoot this sniper . . . trying to get us out of this predicament. All of a sudden he quits firing for almost twenty minutes . . . before, a rifle round was coming every two or three minutes. So we feel it’s relatively safe. We figure, “well maybe one of our guys hit him.” So we both sit up, and we no sooner sit up then Claudy—that was his nickname—was pulling out a cigarette and says, “You got a light?” I said, “Yeah.” So I have to lean back to try to get in my trouser pocket to get the lighter out. The moment my head gets out of the way the sniper fires and put a bullet right through his head. And if he hadn’t asked me for that light I would have been dead too. I was pinned there again for another two hours with Claudy dying on my side.

Day after day, through the injury and death of their buddies, soldiers fixed their attention on the imposing five-story structure of the abbey atop the hill. Without controlling the mountaintop, there could be no breaking through the Gustav Line. Incoming reports repeated the refrain, “The centre of resistance is Monte Cassino.” At a certain point the distinction vanished. “The fortified mountain and the building at its summit were in military terms a single piece of ground.” Allied generals now grappled with the question of how to approach that “single piece of ground” when the building was one of considerable historical and religious importance.

In accordance with Eisenhower’s directive “to respect those monuments so far as war allows,” Fifth Army commander Lieutenant General Mark Clark had received a request from his superior General Alexander, commander of Fifteenth Army Group, that the Abbey of Monte Cassino be spared. However, Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand Corps, whose men were fixated on the abbey while fighting to break through the Gustav Line, was convinced the abbey had to be destroyed. In a memo to Clark and Alexander, Freyberg insisted that “no practicable means available within the capacity of field engineers can possibly cope with this place. It can be directly dealt with by applying blockbuster bombs from the air.”

But Eisenhower’s order also stated that “if we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the building must go.” Which part of the order applied to the abbey? With Ike now in England preparing for the invasion of Western Europe, Clark and Alexander sought the right answer. It would be the first significant test of Eisenhower’s directive.

In an effort to evaluate Freyberg’s request, many became convinced—and some convinced themselves—that German artillery spotters were actually in the abbey. Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, who had been reassigned from Eighth Air Force in northern Europe to command the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, which included Italy, flew over the abbey on February 14 and reported seeing “Germans in the courtyard and also their antennas.” That same day, Major General Geoffrey Keyes flew a similar mission and reported seeing “no signs of activity.” He claimed that those who believed there were Germans in the abbey had “been looking so long they’re seeing things.” But to the battle-weary soldiers like Colonel Kim, dug into the hills and taking fire, the abbey had become a symbol of mocking invincibility.

The interpretation of Eisenhower’s order, like the decision on whether or not to bomb the abbey, involved the entire chain of command. In the end, the order was given: dislodge the Germans by bombing the abbey. On the morning of February 15, waves of Allied bombers—229 in all—dropped 493.5 tons of high explosives and incendiaries. Portions of the monastery walls collapsed into rubble even as more bombs fell. Hundreds of displaced persons had taken refuge inside; 230 were dead, including some who had assisted Dr. Becker of the Hermann Göring Division with crating and removing the abbey’s cultural treasures just four months earlier. No Germans died because none were inside the abbey. Abbot Diamare and six fellow monks who sought shelter in the deepest vaults of the abbey survived. They and some thirty refugees—many severely wounded—emerged to discover a rubble pile where their medieval building had once stood.