All right. Well, welcome everyone.
My name is Kate Fitzgerald and I am a distance-learning specialist at
the National World War II Museum here in New Orleans, Louisiana.
We are here to talk today about Robert Edsel's new book,
The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History.
I'm going to quickly do a couple
of webinar housekeeping things
and talk about some questions and answers before we get started.
On your screen
you should see something that says, "Participation Technology Review."
At the bottom of your screen you see a button that says Q&A.
This is for if you have questions
while the presentation is going on for myself,
for Robert.
We also have a special guest,
one of our museum curators is here with us.
Also, if you're having any technological problems,
we might be able to help you out.
You might be able to write that in there
and we have somebody watching the Q&A.
Again,
please type your questions in there
and at the end we will get to you as many as possible.
Without further ado,
because we're not here to talk about technology, we are here to talk about
the new book, The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History.
It is a true story
of how American and British volunteers found themselves
in a desperate race against time to locate
and save many priceless treasures.
When we learn about history,
sometimes we don't think about all the other parts about history
and how art
plays such a big role in history,
especially World War II.
Robert is here with us today to talk about his new book.
I also wanted to remind everyone,
if you do not have the book with you or you haven't read it yet,
we are offering a 20% discount in our museum store online.
At checkout, just use the code ''webinar''.
I'll put this information in our follow-up email as well.
If you have the book with you today,
I'm actually going to read a couple of passages,
so make sure you have it with you.
I'm going to let Robert take over now.
He is going to tell us about the book.
Robert,
feel free to share your screen and go ahead and get started.
Good morning everybody.
I'm really excited that everybody can be here.
It's a remarkable story and I look forward to
having a chance to tell you more about who these remarkable heroes were,
the Monuments Men and Women.
This is the front cover of the book.
It's the fourth book I've written but it's the first one I've written
specifically for you, for this audience,
to be able to tell the entire story in one book.
It really begins with this aspiring
student, Adolf Hitler,
as a teenager wanting to be recognized as a great artist
and architect,
but he's rejected from the Vienna Academy of Arts
as a student.
He believes that he has been discriminated against by
jurors who he accused of being Jews.
This fueled this
hatred that he had as he rose to power in Nazi Germany.
Art became a weapon of propaganda.
On his first state visit to Florence, Italy,
in 1938, you can see the bridges and Florence in the background,
Hitler only had
ten hours in Florence, but he spent two hours
walking through the museums in Florence,
through the Pitti Palace in Uffizi
feeling this sense of being an artist among artists.
His failed ambitions not recognized, but he felt
he had these great skills that had been overlooked.
As he walked through the halls of these great collections,
the idea for creating a museum in his own hometown of Linz, Austria,
a museum that would be called
the Führermuseum, [?] Art Gallery in Linz
originated. He returned to Berlin
and started making drawings of how the city was going to be rebuilt.
At the center of the city was going to be this new
cultural complex
centered and anchored by this great museum.
As Hitler consolidated power,
paintings were one of the prefered gifts among Nazi leaders.
You see in this photo
Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS,
the police squad that was so instrumental
in the creation of the Holocaust and the death camps,
being handed to Hitler
to recognize his birthday. This was just one
of thousands of events where works of art were
traded among the Nazi leaders.
In 1939 in September,
the Nazi invasion of Polland
set off alarm bells throughout the museums in Europe.
These photographs are from the Louvre Museum in Paris, France.
Some 400,000 objects were evacuated in a period of 10 days,
leaving the Grand Gallery of the Louvre completely empty.
The great concern wasn't theft originally.
It was what would happen to these works of art
if the cities were bombed and fire started.
Works like Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa
were moved on six separate ocassions trying to keep them out of harm's way.
The great sculpture Wings of Samothrace,
which sits at the top of the stairwell in the Louvre,
was lowered down on these wooded skids, and crated and moved to
a countryside château outside the city of Paris.
This situation was repeated in cities throughout Europe. In FLorence,
Michelangelo's great sculpture of The David was entombed in brick
by craftsmen along with other sculptures
of his in the foreground known as The Slaves
because of the concern that Allied bombing might damage the roof
of the academia and cause the roof to collapse
and destroy Michelangelo's great achievement.
In Milan,
local art officials were concerned about Leonardo Da Vinci's great painting,
The Last Supper, painted on this dining hall, the north wall.
They placed sandbags and
wooden scaffolding held in place by these metal bars
on both sides of the wall
under the what-if chance
that bombing might somehow
cause vibration
and place the painting at risk. It was fortuitous because
a British bomb landed in the center of the courtyard
and obliterated the courtyard
of the cloister of the dead where the friars would walk each morning.
It destroyed the east wall of the refectory, leaving the painting
in the upper-left hand side behind this wooden scaffolding.
You can see how precarious it was exposed to the elements,
the sandbags protruding out the side.
This is how it would be for two years before local art officials could rebuild
the roof and the wall of the refectory.
The Monuments Men
were a group of museum curators, architects, artists,
many of them were professors and teachers, some were librarians,
who volunteered for service during World War II
to try and protect
some of the great cultural treasures of Western Europe
from damage by Allied bombing.
Then, in the course of their work there, as
the revelations about the Nazi's theft
became known, they became art detectives
engaged in what was the greatest treasure hunt in history,
trying to track down millions of stolen works of art.
A couple of the Monuments officers who I profiled
in my new book, one is Deane Keller. Keller was a professor of
art and also an artist, a 42 year-old man
with a three year-old son,
Dino,
who left school, volunteered for military service,
put on a uniform and went in the harm's way into Italy.
He had a lot of knowledge about Italy and spoke Italian.
He was also
a very
committed father trying to figure out how to be a parent
to a three year-old boy you've left behind,
who's some 5,000 miles away.
After writing letters and realizing his son couldn't read,
he started sending him these drawings or cartoons,
v-mails they were called. Long before email, there was v-mail.
This is a sketch he did of himself sewing on his
Fifth Army patch onto his jacket
the night that he discovered
that he was going to be the sole monuments officer for US Fifth Army.
He walked through or arrived in Pisa
shortly after combat operations ended
and performed some extraordinarily important work there,
but like so many visitors to Pisa
who take photographs, Deane Keller drew this photograph of him
standing where it looks like he's holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa
to send to his son and stay in touch with him. These were just a couple
of the dozens of drawings that
we make reference to in the book,
and hundreds of drawings that he sent to his son.
Another key Monuments officer was Fred Hartt, who was
a great and developing art historian
who had a great passion for Italy.
Keller, Hartt and a handful of other Monuments officers
arrived in Italy in
the fall of 1943.
They started in Naples and worked their way up through Rome,
through Siena and arrived in Florence
fearful of the damage
that may have taken place in this jewel-like city.
They're stunned
when they reach the outskirts of Florence and discovered that
hundreds of works of art
from the most important museums in Florence
are lying in these villas outside the city
unprotected without any crates or wrapping
and you can see them leaning up against the walls of this villa.
They have been moved there by the local art officials
to try and get them out of the cities
and when the oncoming ground warfare placed them in jeopardy,
the local art officials had no trucks to move them back
into the cities so they were stuck
in the battle fields
as the artillery and explosions
took place all around these buildings.
We speak not of minor works of art;
this is Dean Keller standing next to
Sandro Botticelli's extraordinary painting by Primavera.
Just one of
the works that was left behind because of its size,
they wouldn't fit into the truck
but hundreds of other works were taken
by the Nazi soldiers up to northern part of Italy
on their way into Germany.
It was a theft of epic proportions that
set the Monuments officers in Italy on this journey
trying to find clues
to where the works of art had been taken.
When they arrived in Florence,
these scenes of destruction greeted them,
all of the bridges with the exception of one, destroyed
by Nazi forces as they fled the city
trying to slow down the allied advance.
All the images in black are areas that were just obliterated,
some of the rubble piles reached 30 feet high,
the both sides of the river were impassable
and it destroyed so much of the ancient city,
the medieval portions of the city with its great towers and history.
This is a photograph taken
a top one of the buildings, and you get a sense of
the degree of destruction, none of the buildings
had even a glass left in them.
Just extraordinary devastation to this
great renaissance city.
In northern Europe as general Eisenhower and his forces
moved from Italy to England to prepare for the Normandy landings
in June 1944. They took with them
all the experiences of Italy,
and some of course were mistakes that were made.
General Eisenhower had issued in a historic court order,
in December 1943 in Italy, shortly before leaving,
saying that it was a responsibility not just of his commanders,
but all troops to respect cultural treasures as much as were allowed.
He went on to saying if it came down to the lives
of his man or an object, obviously the lives of his men counted more,
but he noticed that two often times
that was used as an excuse of convenience
and he pointed out to the troops that
it was important to not only win the war
but to try and avoid devastation
to what is our shared cultural heritage.
This order was only issued about six months after
the troops had arrived in Italy,
but in northern Europe
in preparation for the Normandy landings,
general Eisenhower issued it two weeks before
the embarkment of this extraordinary crusade into Europe.
They key Monuments officers in northern Europe were George Stout,
and Stout was one of the older Monuments Man, he was 46,
he actually fought in World War I,
and he was a conserver of works of art at the Faught Museum in Harvard.
Stout was the one who had the idea to create Monuments Man,
he was convinced there was going to be a Second World War,
he studied the impact of the new technologies in warfare
on works of art and he developed pamphlets about
how to go about protecting these works of art
during combat.
He was desisted by Jim Rorimer
who was the curator at the Metropolitan Museums Cloister Museum
just outside of New York City.
Rorimer was a fluid in French and he loved all things French and was
an enormous asset to the Monuments Man
and Walker Hancock
who was one of the United States great sculptors,
who also volunteered for service.
None of these men were likely drafted because of their age,
but they all felt they had a contribution to make,
many of them had been educated in Europe between the two wars,
and they knew of these important works of art
and wanted to do something
to try and contribute to the war effort.
As they landed in France
and worked their way to Paris,
they arrived at this important small musem,
near the Louvre Museum, called [?]
and inside this museum
the Nazis had comandeerted
in particular the number two man in the Nazi party,
rights Marshall Hammond Garing,
and Garing had made
22 separate visits to this museum
during the war. You see him sitting there on the lower left side
holding a painting in his hand, he's got a cigar in his right hand.
There's a bottle of champagne on the table,
and this was the headquarters for the Nazi looting operation in France.
Tens of thousands of works of arts stolen from collectors
and important dealers, many of whom were Jews.
Were brought to the museum,
and we speak not just of paintings but also
sculpture, drawings, tapestries,
furniture, art objects.
Including these two great paintings by Henri Matisse,
and they were presented to Garing
for him to decide which works of art he wanted to have for his own collection.
Which works of art were going to go to Adolf Hitler’s collection,
and then the others that were loaded onto trains
and taken back to Germany.
This was a premeditated theft,
they knew were these great works of art were,
many of them were traded for other works of art,
but it was an extensive looting operation unlike anything
we’ve ever seen.
One of the great heroines of the story and a woman that I love,
sharing her story about it in my book
is a woman named Rose Valland. Rose was
a custodian of the museum, in the United States
we would call her a curator, responsible for the [?] Museum,
and for four years she worked in this museum
and without the Germans knowledge
understood German and listened to their conversations
and made secret notes about what she heard.
She had practically a photographic memory,
and she recognized so many of these works of arts
that came to the museum and she was a spy
for the museum director in France.
Reporting which works had been stolen,
were they had been taken in Germany
and this information where she gathered,
was essential to the work of the Monuments Man
as they spread further and further into France and on their way into Germany
looking for were these works of art had been taken.
As the combat operations
took them through France, into Belgium, into Holland
and finally crossing the border into Germany.
They started making extraordinary discoveries
including this discovery at a salt mine in the German town of Merkers.
Two of the Monuments officers
were killed in combat, Ronald Balfour,
a British Monuments officer
and Walter Huchthausen, an American from Perry, Oklahoma.
Both were killed in March and April respectively in 1945
as they pursued leads about works of arts that were missing.
In centrical Germany,
troops of a third army uncovered Germanys gold reserve
hidden in a salt mine.
Gold and foreign currencies worth millions
and odd treasures from German museums,
[?] for safe keeping.
[?] Raphael's, Leonardo's
and [?].
It is not yet decided what shall be done with them.
Inside this salt mine, the Monuments Man
and American soldiers had found
in today's equivalence, some $10 billion dollars of gold,
gold coins, gold bars
and it was an extraordinary discovery.
Essentially like tripping over our Fort Knox in the United States,
also they found
thousands and thousands of works of art
that had in fact not been stolen.
They were from the great museums in Berlin
that it had been evacuated to get them out of the destruction in the city
and try and save them.
You can see in this photograph, generals Eisenhower, Patting
and Bradley standing there flipping through these paintings,
amazed to see them in this salt mine,
some almost three thousand feet below the surface of the earth.
They also made horrific discoveries,
there were some two hundred suitcases
stuffed filled of gold fillings
taken from concentration camp victims,
jewelry,
silver objects, watches
and general Eisenhower can be seen standing here
looking at one of these open suitcases
disgusted knowing that
the people that once owned these important personal Rolex
had perished in concentration camps.
The next discovery occurred in a castle in Neuschwanstein.
That was a great part of the art treasures stolen by the Nazis.
Taken from [?] families, the Rothchilds and private French collectors.
Many of the 23 thousand pieces were never unpacked.
Not contained with robbing people of their freedom and their lives.
The Nazis tried to make off with their symbols of culture.
At this castle known for being the model for Disneyland,
this fairy tale castle, the Germans had hidden
some 23,000 works of art stolen from France.
Rose Valland, you see her now in a military uniform,
left her position
as a custodian once Paris was liberated
and joined up in the French army.
She was made a captain
and she went to Germany at her first opportunity
with these extraordinary collections of lists of the works of art
and she provided them
to a man who'd become her friend, Jim Rorimer.
Rorimer, seen there on the left
holding one of these Renaissance pieces of jewelry
that had belonged to a French collecting family
known as the Rothschilds, an important Jewish family.
These were sent under 23,000 objects
that Rorimer was able to successfully find and protect
that had been stolen from France
and he knew to go to this castle because of Rose Valland's heroism
in gathering this information at the risk of her life over four years.
You see this photograph of Rorimer standing on the steps
with soldiers walking out of the castle with three paintings,
just some of the 23,000 objects that were found there.
In northern Italy, Deane Keller and Frederick Hartt finally received
clues about where the works of art stolen from
Florence in its museums have been taken.
Inside this jail cell,
packed inside this very small space
were paintings by Rubens,
Leonardo, Michelangelo
and Botticelli,
Caravaggio, some of the great, great artists
of history that had been stolen by the Nazis.
You see this photograph that was taken of the German soldiers
when they had arrived with the stolen works of art on the back of the trucks
with no more protection than this straw
and in open-top trucks.
In fact, it was misting on the day that these paintings arrived
in the fall of 1944.
The works of art that they found were extraordinary,
this painting by Botticelli, this Annunciation,
the sculpture by Michelangelo, Bacchus,
Donatello one of the great sculptors, the sculpture of Saint George.
By the early part of May 1945,
Aldof Hitler now has committed suicide
but the Monuments officers are frustrated because,
despite all of the success of discoveries they've made
and hundreds of salt mines and caves and castles,
the works of art that were destined for Adolf Hitler's private collection
and the museum in Linz continued to elude their grasp.
It was the focus of two Monuments officers, Robert Posey,
an architect from Alabama,
and Lincoln Kirstein,
a cultural impresario and co-founder of the New York City Ballet from New York
who finally received a critical tip
from a German dentist
that led them to a salt mine
outside of Salzburg, Austria
in a small lake town called Altaussee.
This was a photograph Robert Posey took himself.
You see the immediacy of it with these
shovels and picks in the foreground.
They've literally burrowed their way up over the top of this rubble
fearful that
their worst nightmares have been realized,
that the Germans have destroyed the works of art
trying to keep them from the Allied victors.
What they would later learn is that the miners,
and you'd see one of the miners up there on the left with the flashlight,
in an effort to try and protect their
way of living
destroyed the passageways
of the mine to try and keep the Germans from getting into the mines
to detonate the explosives that they placed there.
Posey and Kirstein
scurry over the top of this on their bellies
and are stunned to see
areas that have been hollowed out in this mine,
some two stories in high.
You see that ladder there in the center of the photograph,
that's about 10 feet tall
so you get a sense of how big the spaces are.
They've placed boards on the floor of the stone mine.
These mines I've been in they're very cold,
the average temperature year-round is about 42 or 43 degrees.
You see thousands of paintings that have been placed in these
wooden racks that they constructed.
There are some of the most important paintings in the world,
the Ghent Altarpiece by Yann Van Eyck painted in 1432,
that is today in Ghent, Belgium.
This is a painting that's about
20 feet in width and about 15 feet in height,
that the Monuments Man, George Stout standing there in the center
with the N on his jersey,
is dealing with just the central panel
of the Ghent Altarpiece and you see other portions of the works of art
sitting on milk cartons over his shoulder leaning up against the wall
the salt mine behind him.
There are about 35 recognized paintings by Johannes Vermeer in the world,
Adolf Hitler stole two of them, one The Artist's Studio
which the Monuments officers are holding here
and the other which is on the back cover of my new book,
The Astronomer which was the very first work
Adolf Hitler targeted for theft
in Paris owned by the Rothschilds.
The Monuments officers also found the only sculpture by Michelangelo
that left Italy during his lifetime,
the Bruges Madonna which is
a sculpture of extraordinary beauty
found by George Stout lying on its side inside the salt mine
still wrapped in the burlap mattress that the Nazis brought
when they stole it in the dead of [?] in September 1944.
The thefts of the Nazis though it vastly exceeded just paintings,
it included millions
of important books from thousands of Europe's most important libraries.
This is a warehouse
containing some of
the millions of books that the Monuments officers would spend years
sorting through
trying to determine what libraries
had been stolen from so they could be returned.
These are thousands of church bells stolen from churches throughout
France and Belgium
that the Monuments officers found on a shipyard in Bremen
that they were preparing to be smelted
and converted into war materials by the German war machine.
These were lucky survivors, there were thousands of church bells
that had already been melted down and converted to military use.
The Monuments officers again spend years
looking at the foundry marks on each of these bells
trying to determine which church they belong to as they began this
laborious process of returns that
went on for years after the war.
In this photograph of an American rabbi chaplain,
standing on a pile of Torah scrolls,
some 10 feet high,
that had been protected
ironically by the Nazis.
They intended to create museums to show how in their view jews,
gays, Slavs,
and others were subhuman.
While they destroyed and murdered millions of people
and destroyed so much of their cities and cultures,
they preserved these important religious objects
as a way of putting them on display and ironically,
paradoxically they survived the war.
You see
a rabbi chaplain, Sam Bender going through, holding these
precious objects trying to determine
what synagogue or what country they might have come from.
The Monuments officers stayed in Europe until 1951
and by the time they returned,
they had returned some five million objects
to the countries from which they've been stolen
including a million objects that belong to German museums
that they were the custodians of during the time
that the German museums had to be rebuilt.
One of the most famous works of art that they returned was this
great portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine,
that was stolen
from Krakow, Poland
and it is now back in Poland today.
You see Monuments officers
standing there around this painting
outside of a train, just a photo op that they decided,
"Let's take a photograph
and see what we've got." You see that they've
gotten a hammer on the right side of the photograph and
a screwdriver down the bottom
and have quickly taken off the lid and the paper on top of it to pull this
wooden panel out and take a photograph of what it looked like.
This is a quick overview of
an extraordinary story,
the greatest theft in history
which led to the greatest treasure hunt in history.
It's been a remarkable privilege of mine
to be able to tell this story and to be able to share with you today.
I look forward to answering any question.
All right. Thank you so much, Robert.
We are going to get to questions in just a minute
but I'm going to go ahead and dive a little bit deeper
and talk about some themes
that I found in the book when reading it.
I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.
The first theme I'm going to talk about
are letters during wartime.
If you have the book in front of you,
you'll turn to chapter 10, page 141.
It said, "Today is Christmas
and my first thoughts are with you and Deane.
As I write the roar of tanks and heavy vehicles is in the air.
Some boys will eat a turkey leg in a pup tent
or in a foxhole.
Some will die this day.
Downstairs the radio has come on and someone is singing a Carol.
This is my Christmas,
a big one filled with the highest ideals a man is capable of.''
This was a letter written by Captain Deane Keller
from New Haven, Connecticut as you just learned,
to his wife and his young son
and he wrote it on something that is super interesting
and I didn't actually know about him until pretty recently. That was
Victory mail or V-mail
and basically during World War II,
the Allies, to save valuable room on cargo ships
would use
V-mail and it basically started in England
and it was a process that involved microfilming special letter sheets.
Instead of taking up cargo space full of letters,
you would put them on microfilm and when they got overseas,
then they would put it on the letter. You saw basically a template;
you could write to someone overseas
or someone overseas could write at home
and the Monuments Man used these a lot.
We can see here these two were not from the Monuments Man,
but these are two examples,
one from a guy named Frank actually,
and some of them think of postcards, they were templates.
He sent this
from his overseas position during World War II
and it basically said,
''Happy Birthday,'' to his wife.
It was on a microfilm and when it got back to the States
it was blown up and sent home to her.
Letters play a really big role,
not only in World War II in terms of keeping up the mural both
at home and overseas,
but also in studying World War II.
Think about how much we have been able to learn about
the Monuments Man and what they did,
from their letters.
If you don't have this book yet, you'll see once you read it,
a lot of the letters and the pictures of letters are in here
and they really help you understand
what they were going through and what they were trying to achieve.
The other I found really interesting theme,
is of course, woman in service to country.
We are going to jump to chapter 12 now, on page 165.
''There had been several close calls,
but only one, in February 1944,
did the Nazi lackeys catch her
rand-handed trying to read addresses on shipping documents.
Bruno Lohse, Goring's art buyer,
confronted Valland,
warning that she could be shot for such indiscretions.
But she sloughed it off, telling him,
''No one here is stupid enough to ignore the risk,''
before walking away.
Luck had favored her that day,
but with the Allied landing at Normandy,
threats became more frequent and menacing.''
Rose Valland is the only really female of the Monuments Man
and she was a French heroine,
she worked, as you heard, in that [?] Museum,
wasn't allowed to have the term, curator,
yet she doesn't get that until later on in life.
She secretly maintained,
and if she had been caught her life was in danger,
records of countless looted artworks
so that they could be recovered after the war.
It's really due to her bravery and these recordings,
she spoke German although the Germans did not know that,
that we recovered a lot of art work.
That brings me to American woman in World War II,
they were called upon in many previous ways
that were only reserved for man.
Over 6 million
war time jobs in factories were held by woman.
Right here in New Orleans, Louisiana,
we had the Higgins Industries that made the Higgins boats.
The boats used on D-day, were 92 percent of them
built right here in New Orleans.
Many of those boats were built by woman,
women exhilarate branches of everything from the marine court
to the navary were created and it really opened
many doors for woman. Not only in
jobs but also in the military.
Woman all over the world,
here in America, but also as you can see, from Rose Valland in France,
played a huge role in World War II.
Those, when I was reading the book, were the two things
that really stuck out to me.
I'm going to go ahead and bring,
and I'm going to introduce her first,
our assistant director for curatorial services on,
her name is Kim, and she is going to talk to us a little bit about our
Monuments collection. Kind of what it's like to be
a museum curator
and kind of how we care for these things
and what we are going to do with our Monuments collection.
The first picture that you are going to see on your screen,
I'm going to let Kim take it over, tell us about what you are looking at.
Sure, that's not me, I'll just say to start.
That's my colleague, Tony Keiser, who is assistant director
for collection management.
In her role, she is standing in our newly renovated vault space.
Similar to the salt mine,
it is a space that's designed to house and preserve artefacts.
In this photograph you can see
part of our collection of uniforms, that's just a small part,
a small portion
of the number of objects
that the museum houses.
We have roughly 250 thousand objects in the collection,
as well as around 150 thousand documents.
We have a vast collection, we’ve expanded space recently,
were we can care for and preserve the artefacts,
so in that photo you see Tony,
she is wearing purple gloves, that's to protect
the artefacts from handling.
I have those on as well right now, but
Tony is looking at all of the jackets,
that you'll notice they all have tags on them.
Those tags contain their identifiers,
so we call them excision numbers.
Each object that comes into our collection
it receives a number,
that way it can be identified and tracked within our system.
Kim actually has purple gloves on right now,
because she brought with her a few of our artefacts
from the Monuments collection.
We are just going to have Kim grab her favorite one,
whichever one she wants to talk about
and I'm going to actually stop sharing my screen so we can zoom in
and see it.
-Whichever one. -I got a few.
Let's just sit, don't put me on the spot, my favorite.
No favorites here.
We will start with the dog tags;
I have an assistant here.
All right, I'm going to zoom in so you can see it.
Robert if you want to jump in at all
and talk about this as well.
This is a dog tag here, from Dale Forth, Monuments Man.
All soldiers, and those in service, received these dog tags
so they could be identified. It contains their names,
its stamped with their names,
it's an identification tag.
Robert do you want to share
-anything? -Well, Dale Forth,
was one of the Monuments Man at the end of the war.
Went into these salt mines and was responsible for identifying
works of art that had been placed there
for safe keeping from German museums. He stayed in Europe,
stayed in Germany for almost two years helping evacuate
these museum works out of the mines,
to get them back into the German museums as they were rebuilt.
He was just one of
probably three dozen Monuments Man and Woman that
we have known in the courses of our work over the last 20 years
whose family has donated to the Monuments Man foundation
their collection and personal artefacts.
Sometimes they were
original drawings, like those you've seen of Deane Keller,
sometimes they were dog tags,
personal journals and you'll see some other examples of those things,
some of their medals.
That collection now resides at the National World War II Museum
alongside so many of their other
compatriots' collections.
It's the greatest collection in the world,
not only on World War II but certainly on
the Monuments Man and their greatest achievements during the war.
Speaking of one of those journals, Kim has in her hand,
I'm going to zoom back in again, one of them.
Robert I know you have a story that you shared about this particular piece.
-This is a journal. -Turn that thing sideways,
were we can see the spine of it,
everyone can probably see that there's a little bit of a curve there.
This is a mole skin notebook;
you can go out to the store and buy them today
just like you could 70 years ago.
Walker Hancock who was, as I mentioned earlier,
one of the great sculptors in our country,
carried that with him and made notes everyday about
thing that he saw.
He carried it
in the pocket, in one of his light pockets, and you can see
where the mole skins bent
where shapes over the cuadricep of his leg.
These are the fascinating elements of
having these documents,
you can actually see how they lived with them every day.
The page which she's got open, is showing you a diagram
which he made of one of the salt mines that he entered
that contained
about 200 hugely important paintings and other works of art.
The great shock was, there were also
four coffins
inside this mine and when they first discovered it,
they were convinced that one of the coffins belonged to Adolf Hitler.
It turned out to be wrong,
they were the past German leaders whose bodies had been exhumed
from where theyve been buried
and placed inside this mine like a shrine
and they were convinced that
this was an effort on the part of the Nazi regime to
preserve these figures
and have a day that perhaps
they survived the war they would retreat them.
The last two artefacts that we are going to look at today
are actually medals from one of the Monuments Men
that we talked about. Of the Monuments Men there were two killed
and one of them had the nick name Hutch, I believe.
Kim, I'll zoom in again,
we have a Purple Heart
and a Bronze Star with us, we'll start with the Purple Heart.
Sure. These objects here,
they're examples of
the risk that the Monuments Men
undertook. They were serving in Europe
when victory wasn't yet secure.
It was still quite dangerous to
be in some of the areas.
These are the medals
of Hutch, Walter Hutchausen.
This is a Purple Heart, Purple Hearts were
awarded to those who were wounded in action.
Sometimes
Purple Hearts were also given to those who were killed in action,
the families of those who were killed in action.
We have two medals,
the Monuments Men collection contains two medals from Hutch,
who you met earlier,
and this is the Bronze Star.
That's for heroic action
during the war,
-we can see-- -Hutchausen actually received
two Purple Hearts because when he arrived in England,
in May - June of 1944,
shortly before the landings in France,
he was severely injured
by German bombs of the German bombing of London
he had to go to a hospital and that's one of the reasons
which I describe in my book that he didn't end up in service
as a Monuments Officer until December 1944,
because he was recovering from
his serious of wounds from the bombing
in London, he received a Purple Heart then.
In April 1945,
just a month before the war was over,
none of the soldiers wanted to be killed,
everybody was trying to avoid being that last casualty,
they knew the war was going to end soon,
everyone was looking forward just to getting back to their families.
There was a report of Lieutenant Arthur Hutchhausen and another of
the Monuments Officer Sheldon Keck
went to check on and they found themselves behind enemy lines
in the German machine gunner
and the Nazis fired at their vehicle,
Keck survived and Hutchausen was killed,
it was one of the great losses to the Monuments Men to have
two of their small group killed within a 30-day period.
It's really a miracle, more were killed,
Dean Keller in Italy was constantly going through booby trapped buildings,
that the Nazis had not only destroyed
cultural objects and destroyed buildings, but had left behind
piano wires with bombs attached to them, they knew
citizens would come and open doors,
sometimes it happened with the kids, they would
have musical instruments
and they knew it would be an attraction to the soldier
walking by and they would put a hand grenade underneath.
There are difficult stories to read about but they're part of the war.
To make sure that the Monuments Men are never forgotten
and that their story is not forgotten,
the National World War II Museum
in our Liberation Pavilion will be housing this entire
collection and showing it. Before we move to questions,
are going to let Kim quickly talk about what
that collection is going to look like in our Liberation Pavilion.
Sure, and Robert, Jonathan here if you would like as well.
In our Liberation Pavilion which is slated to open in 2021,
we have a couple years still to work on it, we are already beginning
to design this building and the exhibits inside the building.
Also to talk about
the objects that will be placed in the building and the stories.
The Monuments Men story will be told in the Liberation Pavilion, which
Liberation Pavilion mainly tells the story of the end of the war and
the after effects of World War II. The Monuments Men story,
certainly Robert talked about how
some of the Monuments Men--
It's still and ongoing story,
it's going on today but certainly in the years after the war,
there were a lot of mysteries and a lot of puzzles
still to be figured out.
Those stories will all be told in this gallery.
It's very environmental,
you can see the slide that you're seeing now
replicates a salt mine,
you will see some of the artworks,
it looks like you're coming on to the scene,
similar to what some of the Monuments Men discovered,
the treasures in place as they were
hidden by the Nazis.
-Thank you, Kim-- -This is--
The whole idea is, we recreate in a salt mine and
try to have the visitors, you come to the museum,
walk through and get a sense of the excitement, acceleration
and care that the Monuments officers felt
going to these dark spaces
not knowing whether they were booby trapped,
whether the works of art they would find
were just fragments because they had been destroyed by the Nazis
or whether they were in fact intact.
It's an exciting way to secure the story, it's going to have a lot of
the personal interviews that I've conducted with Monuments Men
over the course of time and Monuments Women
and we are really excited about it.
Agreed. Stay tuned for that
coming soon in the next couple of years here at the museum.
Thank you Kim for joining us, it's always nice to have a curator to give
their take on things. We are now going to turn it over to questions
so teachers, if your students have questions
or anyone watching,
if you look to that Q and A,
we already have a couple here that have come in,
go ahead and type them in.
Also, if you would like to put your name or the student's name,
feel free to do that as well.
Robert, we are going to start with our first question
and it's from Anne. She's wondering,
how much missing artwork still exists today?
Hundreds of thousands of works of art that are missing from World War II,
practically every week
something surfaces somewhere in the world,
the Monuments Men Foundation
has found in return more than 30 objects
over the last 15 years.
The Foundation which I created in 2007
works with a lot of soldiers' families that brought things back
without understanding their cultural importance,
they weren't supposed to be brought back
but we identified who the rightful owners are and returned them.
There are works of art all over the world,
wherever soldiers or displaced persons from these countries lived,
sometimes they were looted,
sometimes they were taken as souvenirs,
but it's kind of an unwritten chapter of this remarkable portion of
World War II, the final chapter
to track down these missing works of art and getting them back where they belong.
If you go right to the Monuments Men website,
can you see any of those
works of art that they were still looking for?
If you visit the Monuments Men Foundation website,
www.monumentsmenfoundation.org,
we have photographs of works of art that we found and returned,
some of the return ceremonies which have been quite celebratory,
we have works of art that are on our most wanted list
that we continue to look for and they're hugely important artists,
Vincent Van Gogh, Rembrandt and others.
We have announcements from time to time about
the works of art that we found
and that are on their way back home.
Awesome.
I'm going to move away from World War II history for a second.
I have a question from Michael from Caribum Middle School.
This was, at what age did you start writing, and what inspired you?
My writing--
The first book was published in 2006,
Rescuing Da Vinci, which is a more photographic telling of the story.
At the time, I was
40 years old, I had been writing since I was young
but not with ambitions of writing a book.
I will tell you a funny story, when I was
nine or ten, my younger brother and I went into
the dining room of our house and we had this big
box of pencils and my mother and father came in and said,
''What are you all doing?'' And we said, ''We are going to write a book,''
and they said, ''What are you going to write about?''
We looked at each other and sat there for about 15 minutes
and realized we didn't have a clue
what we were going to write about.
But I guess my interest about writing
did have some origins back to those early days
in the 1990s I was living in Florence,
and I wondered,
purely out of curiosity, how so many works of art
survived the most destructive war in history
and who were the people that saved them.
It was a question that seemed like it would have an easy answer
but there wasn't an easy answer and the more I dug into it,
the more fascinated
I was and that curiosity
took me on this journey that's now been under way for 20 years
and has led me to meet
20 different Monuments Man and Woman, three woman,
17 man.
Interviewed them, their family members, traveled to these museums
and salt mines and
write these four books,
motivated by sharing what I think is one of the most exciting stories
you'll ever hear and one of the most uplifting
and noble stories about what difference
one person can make.
Awesome, and seeing Anthony's school.
Going back to World War II and the pieces of art,
want to know
what is the most expensive piece of art that was recovered?
Well,
you saw the photograph, of the [?] altarpiece which George Stout was
struggling to figure out how to put it back into a crate.
While George Stout had the idea of
creating these cultural preservation officers
and envisioned that there was going to be some amount of looting.
No one, even him, imagined that there would be looting
to this extent and that such usually important paintings.
I'm sure he was sitting there thinking,
this very experienced
conservator of works of art, inside this
freezing cold salt mine,
what the heck do you do when you have a painting
that was painted in 1432 by
a painter that was as important has Leonardo,
Jan Van Eyck,
how do you began to crate that thing up and get it out safely?
What do you do in those kinds of conditions?
The text book was being written as they were doing the work
and that painting,
if it could ever come onto the market,
it would be a billion-dollar painting, perhaps more.
I mean, these works of art we are talking about are so
rare and so important
that with the number of billionaires there are in the world today,
there would be a conquest to trophy for anyone to have them.
Because no one else in the world could have it.
Awesome,
we actually have two people ask this question. Molly asks,
did Japan loot art and were there Monuments Man
in the Pacific theater?
Molly, great question.
There were Monuments officers in the Pacific theater,
the Japanese did
loot along with all the other horrible things they did.
The monuments officer's
success in Europe was that they were on the ground
doing work while the battle was ongoing and
as territory was being lootherated, they were into these areas
to affect temporary repairs and then began
the treasure hunt to try to find what was stolen.
As you probably know, in Japan, we did not have
soldiers on the ground
on the main island of Japan until
after the second atomic bomb was dropped.
The war had come to an end then, the effort to try
and protect cultural treasures from damage of war was
a moot point.
There were only about a dozen or so of them,
more than half were British because
of these areas of Malaysia and South East Asia that had been
British territorial posetions.
Many of the British had more familiarity with the areas,
but there were a number of important Monuments Man
in Japan, in Tokyo.
None more important than George Stout,
Stout not only came with the idea
and went to war in Europe, but after
the main discoveries were made, he was pretty fed up and tired,
he had taken one day of vacation in two years,
one day of vacation in two years.
He wanted to go back to Stanley,
but he wasn't home more than a month before he decided,
''We need to have an operation like this in Japan,'' and
he knew the most about it so off to Japan
he went and he helped to get the office set up in Tokyo.
Awesome.
We have time for about one more question.
Artie wanted to know, we talked a lot about
the works that had been recovered or still missing,
but what are some of the famous pieces
that were destroyed or damashed that we know of?
Another great question.
There probably, the greatest loss in the history of art,
took place in Berlin,
in the days after the war was over, sadly,
that makes it even more of a tragedy,
the Soviet Red Army was in control of Berlin.
There was
a hugely
significant flat tower,
this concrete bunker that was about 12 stories high with walls
that were about nine-foot-thick of concrete.
You could park a tank in front of the wall and fire at it
and the tank round would bounce off the wall.
Inside these
buildings which could house 30 thousand people,
the German museum directors had placed
some of the most important works of art from the museums in Berlin
that were too large to put on trucks
and take to hide in the salt mines.
In the days after the war ended,
there were people wondering the streets
trying to avoid being killed, looking for food, trying to stay warm
and the Soviet Red Army forces
were aware that these works of art were inside
one of these flat towers and they were supposed to be safe guarding it,
but they really weren't paying attention and a fire started.
No one knows for certain whether it was a deliberate fire
to cover up the theft,
whether it was an accident, someone just trying to stay warm and
dropped a match on the ground,
but some 450 paintings by painters like Caravallio, Rubens, [?]
Botticelli.
The most important painters in the world
went up in flames,
we know that contrary to the thoughts for some 60 years,
a few of the paintings survived, but they were the smaller pictures
that someone could carry or hide under their jacket
and walk out with. But these pictures I'm speaking of,
were paintings that were large format pictures
about the size of that painting you saw Deane Keller standing next to.
They were just incinerated in this extremely devastating fire.
Thank you so much Robert
for sharing your book and sharing your knowledge of the Monuments Man.
Again, I'm going to share my screen,
if you don't have the book already,
you can go to our museum store.
You just go to our website and click the store button
and you type in, ''The greatest treasure hunt in history,''
or ''Robert Edsel.'' You will see his book pop up
and at check out if you use the code, ''Webinar''
then you will receive a 20 percent discount.
We just want to thank you all for taking your time on a Tuesday
to spend with
the National World War II Museum and Distance Learning Studio
and Robert, I'll leave the last word to you,
thank you again.
Thanks to everybody for being with us,
it's a great story, I hope you enjoy it and realize that
all of these works of art belong to everybody
and they haven't survived by accident.
People that came before us wanted to make sure
that we had a chance to see them
and the responsibility for protecting them
for your generation and future generations
will someday soon rest in your hands.
I hope you enjoy this story and I hope you'll be inspired
by the actions of these remarkable brave man and woman
who did this great thing that benefits all of us today.
All right.
Thanks guys and have a great day. We hope you read the book.