Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (17 page)

At first, Keller’s fellow officers and some troops wondered why, with wounded men to care for and the dead to be buried, he would show so much concern for buildings and works of art. Yet Italians never questioned his presence or his mission. They cheered as he plucked the local superintendent from a crowd, or sought help from a prominent citizen if the superintendent had been a Fascist. There was always someone knowledgeable and passionate about the town’s history and artistic heritage. As he examined the remains of each building on his list, Keller would listen as the local man recounted the familiar sequence of destruction. When he reached into the back of his jeep and grabbed an
OFF-LIMITS
sign, a group of townspeople always gathered round nodding and smiling as he nailed it on the wall of a building.

Citizens of the liberated cities and towns appreciated his effort. The Italian government had bombarded its citizens with misinformation, saying that the Allies “have but one aim, to destroy everything, with no discrimination. . . . the enemy—proving it for the 1000th time—wants to hit our people, wants to humiliate and destroy our history and our civilization.” Keller’s presence and interest in their villages resoundingly undermined such propaganda.

Most villagers were helpful. A few—the holdovers from the Mussolini era, the
impiegatucci
(little bureaucrats), focused more on making a good impression—
fare una bella figura
—and exercising their
autorità
than doing any meaningful work. As Keller explained to Kathy, “Maybe I am getting a little pooped, for the Italians irritate me a lot. Too much talk and too little accomplished . . . at least with the little bureaucrats. I know their sufferings, but it’s exasperating.”

Gaeta was just the first town on Keller’s list, not the worst hit. Each day he visited others. The town of Itri, an ancient jewel perched on a mountainside seven miles north of Gaeta, had tumbled down the cliff and splintered into a slag heap. He couldn’t even identify the remains of its most famous monument, the Monastery of San Martino. It had simply disappeared.

In the ancient town of Terracina, Keller discovered a message left by German troops on a blackboard in front of the Civic Museum.
“Chi entra dopo di noi non troverà nulla”
(“Whoever comes after us will find nothing”). The Roman sculptures, the pride of the museum, had been left in the unlocked building for anyone to steal. But something quite different had been left behind near the Temple of Jove Uxor: telephones, guns, beds, food, and two hundred dead bodies stretched out in rows. Keller remembered the thick, sweetish smell of death. The fact that the dead were German soldiers didn’t really matter; every man had a face.

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS
on the road living out of his jeep, Keller would circle back to his new “home,” the Allied Military Government (AMG) advance camp at Formia, a coastal town about halfway between Naples and Rome, to restock supplies and have access to a typewriter to prepare his official reports. On such evenings, letters to Kathy and drawings for Dino had to wait, as would a stop for a beer or a shot of whiskey at the small bar run by the nice Italian boy. He preferred to write his report while the details were fresh. After arranging his field notepads and the list of monuments he had examined, Keller began typing, “doing it by the numbers,” as he always had.

In the two weeks since joining Fifth Army AMG, so much had happened, so quickly, that Keller had a difficult time recording it all in his reports. He thought about Valmontone, a mountain city just thirty miles southeast of Rome that had been shelled without mercy. The dome of its cathedral had been cracked, the doors smashed, the walls pitted and flaking like the skin of a man in the dying stages of leprosy. Behind the church, Keller found hundreds of civilians huddled in a cave, their meager belongings at their feet.

The memory of the first dead American infantryman Keller saw, lying in the street of the nearby town of Palestrina, haunted him. As he looked down at the body, he noticed the lining half pulled away from the steel plate of the soldier’s helmet. Inside Keller found a letter addressed to the boy’s mother. For a man who believed that “the life of one American boy is worth infinitely more to me than any monument I know,” it was a sorrowful experience.

But the experiences hadn’t all been tragic. One happy memory that lingered occurred at the great Abbey of Fossanova, “an admirable example of French Gothic architecture and among the most beautiful churches in all of Italy”—and the place where Thomas Aquinas had died in 1274. Reports that the Germans had occupied the abbey for the duration of their stay in that area, even holding an elaborate party in the refectory on Christmas Eve in 1943, left him worried about its condition.

As he drove to Fossanova, along the edge of the Pontine Marshes, the beauty of the afternoon was marred by thoughts of the victors at Anzio, whose reward was to slog through the low-lying malarial plain. From a distance he caught his first sight of the abbey, its white walls gleaming. Ten-ton trucks rumbled by on the main road, artillery boomed in the distance, but the old stone walls stood apart, seeming to rise to meet him as he approached.

Keller entered the undamaged sanctuary and saw the priest of the abbey, Don Pietro—“a very capable fellow”—who had been providing accommodations for Allied servicemen and refugees. Noticing an organ behind the High Altar, Keller asked him to play Schubert’s
Ave Maria
. Some fifty or so Allied soldiers listened raptly. As the last note resonated, the servicemen stomped and cheered for more. War had introduced many new sounds to a soldier. After months of artillery fire, gunshots, trucks, planes, engines, and radios, music offered otherworldly grace. That sublime moment would sustain Keller in the months ahead.

*
A slang term for a homosexual.

^†
His wife’s uncle, fighting with the British Eighth Army, died at Monte Cassino.

*
“V-Mail” stood for “Victory Mail.” According to the National Postal Museum, the creation of V-Mail involved microfilming the original letter sheets and then transporting the microfilm overseas, where it was printed for the recipient. V-Mail saved valuable cargo space and was usually transmitted more quickly than regular mail.

13

TREASURE HUNT

JUNE–JULY 1944

T
he advance of Allied troops forced Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring to finalize his plans for the withdrawal of Rome. He first submitted recommendations to OKW on February 4, 1944. Although Kesselring had no desire to damage monuments or other important structures, slowing down the enemy advance took priority. For that reason he advocated demolition of the city’s bridges crossing the Tiber River. That plan had received approval but for one glitch: owing to the Führer’s view that Rome’s bridges had “considerable historical and artistic merit,” they were to be spared. On June 3, OKW directed Kesselring: “Führer decision. There must not be a battle of Rome.”

Hitler had relished the experience of visiting Rome in 1938 and again in 1940. After viewing the paintings and sculpture in the Borghese Gallery during his first trip, he “continued imagining the possibility of returning to Italy, perhaps one day, ‘when everything would be in order in Germany’ and to move into a small house in the outskirts of Rome and visit the museums incognito.” Hitler understood that the destruction of Rome’s historic and artistic monuments would be disastrous propaganda, but, more than that, he loved the city itself.

On Sunday, June 4, two days before Allied forces stormed the beaches at Normandy, U.S. Fifth Army became “the first army in fifteen centuries to seize Rome from the south.” In the weeks that followed, a steady stream of dignitaries—diplomats, intelligence officials, and military officers—headed to the Vatican for audiences with the Holy Father. Among them was the tall, silver-haired Major Ernest DeWald, Director of the MFAA in Italy. At fifty-two, the World War I veteran and Princeton professor was one of the world’s leading authorities on medieval illuminated manuscripts and early Italian paintings. Fluent in German, Italian, and French, he had a great love of opera and even briefly pursued a career as a singer. One Monuments officer noted that, on occasion, he could be seen, “walking stick in hand, singing Mozart arias.”

DeWald’s Deputy Director, Major John Bryan Ward-Perkins, a British archaeologist, had stayed in Naples to make arrangements for the transfer of MFAA operations to Rome. DeWald had no prior experience in Monuments work, but Ward-Perkins had served with distinction in the North Africa campaign, where his efforts to protect ancient ruins from curious troops made him, in the words of Mason Hammond, “the first officer, British or American, actually to undertake Monuments work.”

Ward-Perkins had previously worked at the London Museum, and the University of Malta, before joining the British Army in 1939. Colleagues found him charming and enjoyed working with him. During the North African campaign, he crashed his motorcycle and landed in an Egyptian hospital. While recuperating, he fell in love with Margaret Long, a British nurse serving in the Voluntary Aid Detachment. They married shortly afterward and honeymooned in Luxor. After returning to duty in January 1943, Ward-Perkins and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Mortimer Wheeler, acting on their own initiative, saved the ancient Roman sites of Leptis Magna and Sabratha (in Libya) from damage by convincing commanding officers that the ruins should be placed off-limits to troops. They also posted guards and set about educating soldiers about the importance of the sites as a way of winning over their cooperation. In time, Monuments officers in Italy and Western Europe would repeat the strategies Ward-Perkins pioneered.

Seeking to avoid the billeting problems and looting that had plagued their efforts in Naples, DeWald arranged for three Monuments officers—Lieutenant Perry Cott, British Captain Humphrey Brooke, and Lieutenant Fred Hartt—to enter Rome with the troops. Within days, Hartt had completed a damage assessment of the city and its most prominent monuments. The Basilica of San Lorenzo, which received one direct hit in the July 19, 1943, Allied bombing raid, was severely damaged—but repairable. In fact, Hartt reported that local art officials had already erected scaffolding to repair the roof. “Despite widespread damage to civilian buildings in the Ostiense, Tiburtina, and S. Lorenzo suburbs,” the areas surrounding the marshaling yards and airfields bombed by the Allies during their July and August 1943 raids, “no further damage to cultural monuments in Rome could be ascertained from inspection or from reports.”

Credit for the extensive protective measures taken in Rome, like those in other Italian cities, belonged to the nation’s cultural officials. After evacuating movable works of art, authorities went to work protecting permanent works. Officials wrapped Michelangelo’s eight-foot-tall sculpture of
Moses,
located in the vestibule of Rome’s Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in protective cloth, then entombed it in brick. The Arch of Constantine—a triple arch measuring almost seventy feet in height and eighty-four feet in width—was encased using sandbags and scaffolding. Roman authorities even wrapped Trajan’s Column in brick, a project so beautifully conceived and executed by local craftsmen that the protective measures weren’t noticeable at first glance.

Beyond the mammoth labors of the Italians, undertaken and executed with foresight and dedication to their culture, the most difficult assignment fell to Perry Cott, a man well known to DeWald. After receiving his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Princeton, he became Associate Director and Curator of the small but important Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts before beginning his career as a Naval Reserve officer. His knowledge of art and gift for languages made him an easy choice for Monuments service.

Cott had orders to verify that the city’s museums were secure and then to post
OFF-LIMITS
signs on all buildings on the MFAA’s “protected” list to prevent troops from entering. He hitched a ride up the Janiculum Hill to the American Academy, alma mater to four of the Monuments Men on duty in Italy.
*
There he met with Professor Albert van Buren, who had insisted on remaining in Rome to oversee the academy after it suspended regular operations in 1941. Van Buren briefed Cott on the general situation in the city and the German occupation. He spent his first night in Rome bivouacked in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. The following day, Cott met with Professor Aldo de Rinaldis, Superintendent of Galleries in Rome, to discuss the security of the city’s museums, all but one of which had long since been closed. De Rinaldis informed Cott that most of the works of art in Rome had been safely stored in the Vatican, but only after the incredible adventure orchestrated by Rotondi and Lavagnino, in which the art went out to the countryside and back again under harrowing conditions.

Even before the arrival of Rotondi and Lavagnino’s shipments, the Vatican possessed one of the greatest collections of art in the world. With the temporary addition of works from the Brera Picture Gallery in Milan, Accademia in Venice, Borghese Gallery in Rome, Museo Nazionale in Naples, the holdings of dozens of less prominent museums, and many priceless riches from the nation’s churches, it now had few, if any, rivals anywhere on earth. Joining its remarkable collection were—to name just a few—the Caravaggios from Santa Maria del Popolo and San Luigi dei Francesi, and oversize canvases by Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Tiepolo from Venice. Never before or again would the results of such creative genius be gathered in one place.

After presenting his credentials to the Holy Father, DeWald explained the purpose of the Monuments operation, offering his services to the papal collections and the Vatican. This marked the beginning of a close relationship between the Monuments operation and the Vatican, as evidenced by DeWald’s subsequent audiences with the Holy Father. DeWald and his team then set to work inventorying the crates that the Hermann Göring Division had delivered to Rome the previous winter.

On June 26, DeWald, Cott, and Lavagnino began the first of six separate inspections. The team relied upon an inventory list DeWald had received from the Naples Superintendent. During the course of their work, Lavagnino recounted for the others the events of that cold January day six months earlier, when trucks of the Hermann Göring Division pulled up to the Palazzo Venezia and began unloading the 172 Naples crates. Lavagnino then let it slip that he suspected the Germans had taken paintings out of the crates before delivering them to Rome. He told DeWald that although a German officer initially told him the convoy was “delayed,” the missing crates never arrived. In late January, eager to identify the contents himself, Lavagnino began inspecting crates and noticed that “almost all the boxes have been opened previously, because the paper that wrapped the pictures has been torn apart, probably to identify the paintings.” The sudden news of the Allied landings at Anzio, thirty-five miles south of Rome, forced Lavagnino to suspend his investigation into the mystery of what appeared to be tampering of the shipment by the Hermann Göring Division.

Within a few minutes of DeWald and Cott’s examination, the group came to the same conclusion as German officer Dr. Becker had eight months earlier when he interrupted the looters engaged in their “unbelievably shitty business” in Spoleto. Crate no. 1, which, according to the Naples superintendent’s list, should have contained the world-famous painting of
The Blind Leading the Blind
by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and two paintings by Anthony van Dyck and Thomas de Keyser, was missing. When DeWald later opened crate no. 29, he discovered that someone had shoved into it the de Keyser painting from crate no. 1. He then found the Van Dyck belonging to crate no. 1 inside crate no. 58. But the Bruegel, by far the most important painting of the three, could not be found in any of the crates. Obviously someone had taken it. The thieves not only knew its importance, they also knew enough to leave behind the lesser paintings by Van Dyck and de Keyser, placing them in crates with extra space.

And so it went. Case no. 3: “completely missing.” Gone were paintings by Pannini, Battistello, and Titian’s
Danaë,
one of the world’s best-known and priceless works of art. “Case No. 8: Two of three pictures are missing. They are: Filippino Lippi, ‘
Annunciation.
’ Joos van Cleeve, a Triptych. The third picture, ‘
Cain
’ by B. Cavallino, was found packed in with the pictures of case No. 29.” DeWald summarized their work in his report: “The evidence therefore of the foregoing is fairly complete that the cases were tampered with prior to their reaching Rome. The particular evidence of cases No. 1, 8, and 38 show that these pictures were intentionally taken.”

DeWald and his team, including Lavagnino, had no doubt that the missing Naples pictures had been taken by the Hermann Göring Division. The brazenness of their theft appalled the Americans. To steal some obscure work of art was one thing. But the works taken from the Abbey of Monte Cassino were among the most recognizable works of art in the world. For all practical purposes, the Hermann Göring Division might as well have driven to Naples, backed up to the doors of the Museo Nazionale, and lifted the masterworks off their hooks.

Reports of Nazi looting throughout Eastern and Western Europe proliferated. By now, the missing artworks were likely in Germany, perhaps even hanging on the walls of one of Reichsmarschall Göring’s homes. Naples had introduced the Monuments Men to wanton destruction caused by German forces, but the inventorying of crates at the Vatican provided them with the first evidence of theft by the Nazis in Italy. With the Germans now retreating northward, through art-rich Siena, Florence, and Pisa, it seemed certain there would be more.

*
Monuments Men Deane Keller, Norman Newton, Sidney Waugh, and Bernard Peebles each received the Rome Prize. So, too, did Keller’s friend Walker Hancock, a Monuments officer serving in northern Europe. Monuments Men Patrick Kelleher, Mason Hammond, and Craig Hugh Smyth became postwar fellows, bringing to eight the number of Monuments Men affiliated with the American Academy in Rome.