Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (15 page)

The fact that the Arena Chapel had avoided damage was, in Hartt’s opinion, pure luck. Hartt closed his letter to DeWald on a cautionary note: “With Florence, Rome & Venice great care is being taken, but not with the other centers, and if you do not wish to see the great works of architects & fresco painting ground off one by one, prompt action will be necessary. . . . Right now I should characterize the situation as desperate.” Two weeks later, his orders came through.

On April 15, Hartt filed a summary report of bomb damage in sixteen Italian cities. It was an extraordinary piece of work. An academic career scrutinizing images of works of art, seeking clues to identify an artist or understand his working methods, had prepared him well to parse postdamage photos. One entry on Milan stood out from all others. Working with an aerial photograph dated September 5, 1943, Hartt evaluated the damage to Santa Maria delle Grazie and its adjoining Refectory and commented: “Neighboring Dominican convent [the Refectory] almost demolished by HE [high explosive], save for small section at NW corner, containing Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci.”

*
Florence had been bombed on September 25, 1943, as a secondary “target of opportunity” selected on short notice after the original mission on Bologna was abandoned due to cloud cover. Eleven of the thirty-nine B-17 Flying Fortresses changed course and headed for Florence to bomb the Campo di Marte marshaling yards. The bombs largely missed their target but killed 218 people, including Friedrich Kriegbaum. The Allies later bombed the outskirts of Florence on January 18 and February 8, 1944.

^†
Many sources cite March 23, 1944, as the first bombing of Florence. This is a popular misconception, probably due to an article published in
National Geographic
in March 1945. The author, 1st Lt. Benjamin C. McCartney, participated in the March 23 raid and stated his belief, although in error, that it was the first raid on Florence.

*
Just twenty-three days had passed since Lieutenant Seymour’s first bombing mission. The target that day had been the Abbey of Monte Cassino. On the tag from that mission he wrote, “Excellent job—Demos.”

11

REFUGE

MAY 1944

I
n May 1944, the last of the shipments of art from museums and churches across Italy arrived at the Vatican for storage. This marked the end of an effort that had begun almost four years earlier, largely at the direction of Professor Pasquale Rotondi, Superintendent of Fine Art for the Marche region, and Emilio Lavagnino, Central Inspector for the General Direction of the Arts.

The commencement of Allied bombing of Italy resulted in orders being issued by the General Director of Fine Arts to all Italian cultural officials: “The provisions arranged for the protection of cultural heritage shall be implemented immediately.” Museums in Italy followed the lead of other great institutions in Europe, including the Louvre Museum in Paris, the National Gallery in London, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and transported their contents to remote storage facilities. Officials began removing works of art from Italian cities, transferring them to various countryside villas and castles. Custom-made shelters protected those objects that couldn’t be moved.

One place offered unparalleled protection: the 468-year-old stone Fortress of Sassocorvaro, about sixteen miles northwest of Urbino, more than two hundred miles southeast of Milan, near the Adriatic Sea. Within its thick walls, massive rooms provided secure space for storing works of art. First to arrive were the collections of the Marche region—Bellini’s altarpiece from the Pesaro Museum; paintings by Titian, Rubens, and Signorelli; ceramics and tapestries, nearly 350 pieces in all. In October 1940, seventy crates from Venice followed, including Giorgione’s
The Tempest
. Shipments would continue to arrive over the next two years.

By early 1943, Sassocorvaro had reached capacity, forcing Rotondi to identify a second storage facility to stay ahead of the huge volume of paintings still arriving from museums and churches throughout Italy. In April, works of art from the Lombardy region arrived at the Marche region’s new repository, Palazzo Carpegna. Included were archaeological items from the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. A second shipment brought the sumptuous high altar and retable—the
Pala d’Oro
(Golden Pall)—from St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Even precious objects in Rome, some 190 miles to the south, were no longer considered safe from war. Masterpieces from the Borghese Gallery, along with the Caravaggio paintings from the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, soon departed the Eternal City to join thousands of others under Rotondi’s watchful eye. Paintings belonging to the Brera and Poldi Pezzoli Galleries in Milan followed. By summer’s end, Rotondi found himself safeguarding some thirty-eight hundred works of art and four thousand priceless archival documents. Conspicuously absent were any objects from the art-rich cities of Tuscany.

The sudden influx of German troops into Italy following the September 1943 armistice spurred Rotondi to take additional precautionary measures. He concealed the most important paintings behind fake walls and removed labels from crates to dissuade curious German troops from inspecting their contents. The inventory list remained with him at all times. At one point, the increasing presence of German troops in Sassocorvaro compelled Rotondi to hide paintings by Mantegna and Bellini in his bedroom at Villa Tortorina in the Urbino countryside. He placed Giorgione’s
The
Tempest
under his bed. “That was a moment when I was really scared,” he later said. “I feared these works of art would be stolen from me, or even worse, destroyed.”

For all the precautions taken by Rotondi and other Italian art officials, too little consideration had been given to the possibility of a ground war. The Allied invasion of Sicily, followed by the landings at Salerno, changed that. Hundreds of thousands of troops would soon be fighting for every inch of Italian soil. No existing repository seemed safe.

With the Allied beachheads established, many of these same officials now wanted to relocate the great collections. But to where? In late 1943, Pope Pius XII had offered sanctuary by allowing the refugee artwork to temporarily join the massive collection of the Vatican. With German troops in control of Cassino, Rome, and areas north, and continued Allied air attacks, the neutral Vatican City emerged as the only place in Italy that offered any lasting hope of safety.

In December 1943, Rotondi and Lavagnino set their plan in motion. After scrounging for trucks, tires, and the increasingly rare commodity of gasoline, Lavagnino and a handful of dedicated men made a series of harrowing trips on bomb-cratered roads, pelted by rain and snow, usually during the dead of night, ferrying treasures to the Vatican. Kunstschutz officials, including its director in Rome, provided important assistance. At one point, Rotondi’s wife tried to distract a local SS officer by getting him drunk, while her husband and others loaded paintings onto arriving trucks. The following day, the SS officer took both of them aside and said, “For what you did to me yesterday, I could have you shot right away, but I will not do it, I’ll pretend nothing happened.”

Lavagnino and other art officials were forced into retirement on January 1, 1944, for refusing to join Mussolini’s Nazi-supported puppet government, but they continued their work anyway, without pay. By January 17, 1944, the works from Sassocorvaro had found safety in the Vatican. The effort to relocate items from museums and churches around Rome continued. On eighteen occasions, between January and May 1944, Lavagnino traveled back and forth from Rome, “by car, truck, and pickup truck, carrying sculptures, paintings, sacred vestments. . . . Of course I had moments of great fear and sometimes I even had to run through the fields when we saw Allied aircrafts but, all in all, nothing serious ever happened.”

ITALIAN ART OFFICIALS
were not the only ones worried about protecting their collections. Six hundred miles away, a caravan of trucks continued arriving at the working salt mines of Altaussee, Austria, about fifty miles southeast of Salzburg—and less than a two-hundred-mile drive northeast of the Brenner Pass on the Italian border. The trucks wound their way through the mountains along a narrow road. Heavy snow accumulations, in some places measuring sixteen feet, required the use of tractors to complete the journey. Workers had been converting the mines for a new use since August 1943. Elaborate shelving, in some places more than two stories high, had been built into areas hollowed out by hundreds of years of excavation. Workers from neighboring mines had been reassigned to the task of handling the fragile cargo that was now arriving—thousands of works of art, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Rubens, many selected by Adolf Hitler for the Führermuseum in Linz.

Hitler’s concern for the safety of his own art collection bordered on paranoia. Some of these objects initially had been stored above ground at monasteries in Austria; others had been hidden in underground air-raid shelters. In December 1942, the German leader had directed his private secretary, Martin Bormann, to write to an assistant, asking “whether everything humanly possible has been done to protect our art against fire.” Bormann then added that a worried Führer “had asked again whether the monasteries were really air raid safe and whether camouflaging the buildings was not an idea as well.”

By the fall of 1943, Allied bombings of German cities had become increasingly frequent and punitive. The violence Hitler had rained upon Europe had produced the greatest upheaval of art in history. Now it threatened to claim his own collection. On Christmas Day in 1943, Hitler authorized the consolidation and transfer of his collection to the impregnable salt mines in Altaussee.

Those mines, as well as the city of Linz, fell within the territory of the Upper Danube, ruled by
Gauleiter
(district leader) August Eigruber, a founding member of the Upper Austrian Hitler Youth. Eigruber had declared his belief in fellow Austrian Adolf Hitler years earlier. During the early rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, while it was outlawed in Austria, Eigruber spent eighteen months in jail for spreading Nazi propaganda. Known for his fiery temper and ruthlessness, Eigruber quickly became “one of the most powerful Gauleiters of the Reich.” In his eyes, everything was expendable in service to the Führer.

SS COLONEL DR.
Alexander Langsdorff, recently appointed head of the Kunstschutz operation in Italy, arrived in Florence around May 9, 1944, with orders to oversee a very important operation. Langsdorff had served as a lieutenant in the Imperial German Army during World War I. He spent his eighteenth birthday, and the two that followed, in France as a prisoner of war. After his release, he studied German prehistory, ancient history, and archaeology in Berlin and at the Universities of Marburg and Munich. An ongoing interest in archaeology took him to Egypt, Iran, and Iraq from 1929 to 1933, where he became acquainted with Sir Leonard Woolley—now the senior British Monuments Adviser—during his historic excavations in Ur (in modern-day Iraq).

A supporter of Hitler as early as 1923, Langsdorff was present that November at the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s first attempt to seize power. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1933, a “Septemberling” like General Wolff. The following year, he became the “personal artistic and cultural consultant” to SS leader Heinrich Himmler, serving as a member of his staff through 1944. During that time, he worked extensively with Himmler’s cultural-heritage project, the Ahnenerbe, while continuing his affiliation as a curator with the Berlin State History Museum. In February 1944, at Himmler’s instigation and without consulting OKW, the Armed Forces High Command, Langsdorff became responsible for the Kunstschutz in Italy.

Langsdorff had fallen in love with Italy during his travels there as a student. Now, with so many of Germany’s cities in ruins, he felt fortunate to return to his apartment in Florence, not far from Piazzale Michelangelo, with its enchanting view of San Miniato. “I experience Italy as never before, I breathe in the still existing, though everywhere so much threatened beauty, and am grateful and devout,” he noted in his diary.

Kesselring’s headquarters had ordered Langsdorff to assist Giovanni Poggi, the Superintendent of Galleries for Florence, Arezzo, and Pistoia, in moving three sets of bronze doors and some fifty sculptures out of an old rail tunnel near the town of Incisa. German troops had previously assisted Poggi’s team in placing the doors in the tunnel as a protective measure. Now Kesselring needed the tracks for his supply trains. The art would have to go.

Andrea Pisano, and later Lorenzo Ghiberti, had created these remarkable doors for the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, with their relief sculptures depicting scenes from the Bible, in the early fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, respectively. The last set of doors created by Ghiberti consumed twenty-seven years of work. Vasari described them as “undeniably perfect in every way,” adding that they “must rank as the finest masterpiece ever created.” Michelangelo paid homage to the work of Ghiberti with such lofty praise that it led to the name by which the doors became known:
Porta del Paradiso
(
The Gates of Paradise
).

As head of the Kunstschutz, Langsdorff’s responsibilities included working with Florentine officials to relocate their works of art. Moving such historic and beautiful pieces conferred honor not only on the Kunstschutz operation but also on the German Army. Langsdorff considered the assignment a privilege. Transporting the doors back into the city, however, proved harrowing. The move, which required the use of cranes, fifteen train cars, and several trucks, occurred overnight, “in very scary conditions due to continuous bombing.” After delivering the last of them to the Pitti Palace, he celebrated at a beer garden in Fiesole with the others who had assisted him.

FOLLOWING EIGHT MONTHS
of occupation, Kesselring and his troops prepared to evacuate Rome, and not a moment too soon. In the preceding months, partisan resistance fighters had conducted increasingly bold raids against the German occupiers. Communists, monarchists, socialists, Catholics, liberals, and anarchists throughout occupied Italy had joined forces in the fall of 1943 to create the Committee of National Liberation. This group of “clandestine origin” took up the fight against Nazi-Fascism as armed combatants. One attack in late March resulted in the deaths of thirty-three German policemen from the Alto Adige region assigned to Rome. German forces retaliated with swiftness and brutality. Acting on Hitler’s orders, SS troops implemented a ten-for-one disincentive ratio for those considering such future attacks and rounded up and murdered 335 Italian citizens, seventy-five of whom were Jews.
*
The victims were led into the Ardeatine Caves, about three miles outside Rome, then executed in groups of five by a gunshot to the neck. The bodies, piled upon each other, filled the cave, which SS troops attempted to seal using explosives.

The brazen attack in the heart of Rome indicated that Germany was losing control of southern Italy. Sicily and Naples had fallen to the Allies. The Wehrmacht’s grip on Monte Cassino and Anzio was tenuous at best. Soon the Allies would be driving on Rome. While General Wolff’s “easy hand” approach to quelling unrest had failed as a policy, maintaining good relations with the Catholic Church had earned him favors with several influential members of the clergy. Now was the time to use them.

Upon returning to Rome on May 9, Wolff learned from his assistant, SS Colonel Eugen Dollmann, that he had been granted a special audience with the pope. It would be the only meeting between the Holy Father and a senior SS official during the war, and Wolff’s only chance to win the favor of the still-influential leader for the uncertain days ahead. The meeting would also provide Wolff with an opportunity to capitalize on his assurance to the Holy Father, made the previous December, that as long as Wolff held his position in Italy the Vatican and its occupants were safe from abduction. Scheduling, however, presented a problem for the tall general, who arrived carrying a suitcase containing nothing but uniforms. The image of Wolff, the second-highest-ranking SS leader in the Nazi Party, wearing his black Nazi livery with its SS-bolts badge, and cap with its death’s-head insignia, being greeted by Pope Pius XII, in his white robe, jewel-encrusted silver cross, and Piscatory Ring—the Ring of the Fisherman—would draw attention to a meeting neither party had any interest in advertising. Wolff scrambled to find more appropriate attire.