Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (23 page)

AS GERMAN SOLDIERS
gathered more and more artworks from Tuscan repositories, officials began the search for a new repository where they could be hidden. The initial site approved by General Wolff and Gauleiter Franz Hofer proved unsuitable. As Major Leopold Reidemeister, another of the German art historians serving in the Kunstschutz, explained to Hofer during their August 8 meeting, the dampness of the building wasn’t half as disturbing as the ammunition stored inside. Sensing an opportunity, the Gauleiter suggested taking the works of art out of Italy to Innsbruck, Austria, or into the Bavarian region of Germany. Prepared for a diplomatic chess game, Reidemeister reminded Hofer that General Wolff would have to be consulted for any such move. The two men agreed that a new location in the Alto Adige region would have to be found. Hofer instructed Reidemeister to contact Dr. Josef Ringler, Superintendent of Monuments and Galleries of Trento (thus also responsible for Alto Adige) who would assist with the search.

Within several days, Major Reidemeister and Dr. Ringler identified two ideal storage facilities in remote villages near the Brenner Pass, the principal Alpine link between Italy and Austria. The first delivery of works of art arrived without difficulty on August 11; more continued to arrive throughout the following weeks. But on August 29, five trucks, each filled with recently plucked masterpieces, ran out of gas in the town of Bolzano, capital of Alto Adige. That convoy also included the ambulance carrying the two Cranachs belonging to the Uffizi Gallery. The fuel shortage proved so severe that OKW temporarily pulled Wehrmacht divisions from the front out of concern they might become stranded.

In the interim Dr. Ringler agreed to store the Cranachs at his office in Bolzano. Even that came with complications. The sounding of sirens on August 31 and September 1 forced him to hand-carry the two life-size paintings of
Adam
and
Eve
into the air-raid shelter on three separate occasions. Then came the astonishing suggestion that Ringler load the paintings onto furniture vans and haul them to the two repositories by horse or oxen. Fortunately, Ringler soon received a call from Hofer, who had heard from Wolff’s headquarters that “700 liters [185 gallons] could be obtained from the police’s off-limits petrol.”

The Cranachs finally reached one of the two newly selected repositories on September 6. The following day, Colonel Langsdorff’s assistant, Captain Zobel, stopped in Bolzano to visit with Dr. Ringler. Zobel was accompanying two trucks carrying the Gordon Craig Theatrical Archives—property of an English actor, director, and stage designer, which the Führer purportedly had purchased. After discovering that Ringler had already departed, Zobel resumed his trip north—past the two new repositories containing the Florentine treasures, across the Brenner Pass into Austria, to the salt mines of Altaussee, less than 250 miles away.

WITH THE MISSING
Cranachs and the paintings from Montagnana on their minds, Fred Hartt and the Monuments officers pondered the meaning of the suspect radio message they received in late August concerning the villa at Poggio a Caiano. The Germans appeared to be asking the Allies not to bomb in the area because of the art treasures stored in the villa. But Hartt remained skeptical that it was an act of benevolence. Now that the line of fighting had shifted, Hartt and his driver, Franco Ruggenini, departed Florence on September 5 to investigate. Although the area surrounding the villa had been liberated, the drive posed other hardships. A key bridge had been destroyed, forcing Hartt and Ruggenini to wade across a canal. When they reached the other side, to their great surprise they found themselves “greeted as liberators by a village which had never before seen an Allied officer.”

Upon arriving at the villa, the custodian informed Hartt that German soldiers had made off with fifty-eight cases of sculpture. As Hartt pointed out in several of his reports, “The withdrawal of these works of art corresponds narrowly with the dates of the German radio appeals from Berlin to the Allies not to bombard Poggio a Caiano.” The Germans had used the radio transmission as a feint so they could empty the villa. At the caretaker’s insistence, the Kunstschutz representative, Major Reidemeister, had signed a handwritten receipt for what was taken. He also acknowledged that the works of art were protected by order of Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring and by virtue of Cardinal Dalla Costa’s letter placing the villa and its contents under the protection of the Holy See.

Missing were some of the most important pieces of Renaissance sculpture in existence. Discovering that German troops had taken works by Michelangelo and Donatello belonging to the Bargello Museum in Florence left Hartt in a state of despair. “Donatello’s
Saint George
! What loss could Florence have felt more keenly? The ideal hero, the saintly warrior, represented for the Florentines the very incarnation of the martial vigor of their lost republic.” Although crated, these fragile works had been loaded onto a truck and driven to destinations unknown over some of the worst roads Hartt ever had the misery to traverse.

Overwhelmed with anger, Hartt immediately contacted DeWald:

Dear Ernest:

This is what they stole. I retain the original hand written document which the custode [
sic
] made out. Was going to write a thing for the papers, but no time. Dig out your files on Poggio [a Caiano] & you will notice that they started stealing the stuff two days before they broadcast to us not to bomb it. God knows where it is now. If I were you I would call in the correspondents & make a big story out of this. Maybe that will save other stuff from being stolen.

On September 7, and again on September 18, Hartt attempted to reach the Palazzo Pretorio in Poppi, which contained additional masterpieces from the Uffizi and the Pitti; both efforts failed. For all his enthusiasm, Hartt knew that when he confronted a sign on the road that read,
THIS IS THE FRONT
, he had to turn back and try another day. After the front moved north, Hartt made a third attempt to reach Poppi; this time he was successful. On September 27, he made a follow-up inspection. Unlike other removals by German troops, this one had occurred at gunpoint over the course of almost five days.

On August 18, a German officer had arrived under the pretext of checking for concealed weapons and ammunition. Four days later, three German officers offered the weak excuse that “the village was a nest of spies and rebels.” After forcibly inspecting all the rooms of the palazzo, and breaking down doors when keys weren’t produced quickly enough, these officers, revolvers drawn, forced the municipal police to carry one crate of paintings to their waiting truck. The Germans fired shots in the air to scare away the townspeople, then drove off. Only an hour passed before German soldiers returned, informing the locals that they were about to detonate mines placed under the town gate. Everyone was ordered to remain in their cellars, where they would be safe. Of course, this also kept idle witnesses indoors during the removal of additional paintings from the palazzo.

The following morning, two German second lieutenants arrived to report that the night’s work had been “official and had been ordered by the High Command, that it had been executed only in order to save the works of art from the damage of war and especially from theft by Anglo-American troops, that the German authorities were extremely sorry they had not been able to remove all of the works of art, and that the remainder would have to be protected by the population.” True to their word, at 2 p.m. the Germans detonated the mines, destroying the town’s medieval gate, some of the surrounding houses, and the only road into the village of Poppi.

GERMAN FORCES HADN’T
limited their removals to the Florentine public collections; private collections had also been taken north during the summer. At the Villa Landau-Finaly, property of an heir to a former director and representative of the Jewish-owned Rothschild Bank in Turin, a German parachute division ignored three separate
OFF-LIMITS
signs posted by Kesselring, the Holy See, and Consul Wolf. They then emptied the cellars of the neighboring Villa La Pietra, where most of the Finaly collection had been hidden together with that of its owners, the prominent Acton family. Florentine art dealer and collector Conte Contini Bonacossi, who had sold paintings to Göring, hid his collection in a villa at Podere di Trefiano. Once German Regiment 1060 began using the villa as its headquarters, Kunstschutz officials ordered its commander to evacuate the works of art. The 16th SS Panzer Division also removed the Bourbon-Parma collection from the castle of the Duke of Bourbon-Parma.

By early October, Hartt, working out of the Florence Superintendence, finally completed his inspections of all but one of the thirty-eight Tuscan repositories. According to his October 8 report, German soldiers had removed works of art on specific orders from senior Nazi leaders. Most of the removals involved subterfuge or threat, and at least one took place at gunpoint. In Hartt’s opinion, “Only the fearless conduct of Superintendent Poggi prevented the departure of even more treasures.” “On three separate occasions Poggi was visited in his office by SS officers who had an order on Himmler’s authority to take away all the important works of art in and around Florence, and that these officers enforced this demand with the utmost rudeness and threats, which had little effect on the 64 year old Superintendent.” Hartt had no way of knowing that Himmler had merely granted his approval to decisions made by General Wolff.

Once again the art historian in Hartt found its way into his official report:

The pictures taken were of such importance that it is difficult to know which ones to choose as the principal losses. Suffice it to mention Rembrandt
Portrait of an Old Man
, Ingres
Self Portrait
, Botticelli
Madonna and Child
, Filippo Lippi
Madonna and Child
, Raphael
Self Portrait
, Dürer
Calvary
, Caravaggio
Head of Medusa
, Raphael
Donna Velata
, Rubens
Holy Family
, Titian
Concert
, Velasquez
Portrait of Philip IV
. It should be further emphasized that a very large number of the missing pictures are German, Flemish and Dutch artists.

The list of what had been taken clearly indicated a bias toward northern artists. Cranach’s two paintings of
Adam
and
Eve
would find worthy companions. Remarkably, masterpieces such as Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished
Adoration of the Magi
, Andrea Mantegna’s completed version of the same subject, Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
, and Michelangelo’s panel painting known as the
Doni Madonna
—one of only four known paintings by the great master and certainly his most important—had been left behind.

As he tallied the number of objects missing from the Florence repositories, Hartt felt overwhelmed. “A grand total of 529 paintings, 162 works of sculpture and minor arts, 6 large cartoon drawings, and 38 pieces of medieval and Renaissance textiles had been taken from the public collections of Florence, all in all 735 objects.”
*
He concluded that Florence “had suffered robbery . . . on a scale to dwarf the depredations of Napoleon.”

*
Incunabula
are books and other documents printed in Europe before 1501.

*
Hartt’s calculations did not include objects removed from private collections.

19

RESURRECTION

SEPTEMBER–NOVEMBER 1944

T
he disappearance of its priceless artworks aside, Florence had been far more fortunate than Pisa. The Tuscan capital had lost a great number of medieval structures, but Florence and its citizens were alive. In contrast, the city of Pisa—or what was left of it—was ghastly and quiet. War had emptied the streets and piazzas. While Deane Keller focused on saving Pisa’s Camposanto, his overarching concern was restoring life to the city itself.

U.S. Fifth Army troops battled the Germans for six weeks before liberating the city on September 2. Allied bombers had done their work well; the devastation had rendered the city largely uninhabitable. Even then, German long-range artillery pounded the city for an additional three weeks. As Keller noted in his report, little remained undamaged: “Thirty-eight of her monumental churches exhibited major war damage; eight of her secular buildings of monumental importance suffered severely; numerous houses dating back to the Renaissance times were hurt . . . this in addition to the loss of her bridges, railroad station and other public utilities.”

Keller understood that saving the Camposanto presented the army with a considerable challenge. Damage to the frescoes was extensive. John Bryan Ward-Perkins noted: “The whole fresco was painted against a wicker ground which has partly burned, partly come away from the wall, and only immediate action will save it from disaster.” The Allies didn’t have the resources for such an exhaustive and time-consuming project, but ignoring the problem would draw the scorn of the press and alienate Italians. One rainstorm would wash away the remains of centuries of history. Something had to be done.

From Keller’s perspective, if the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section ever stood for anything, it was this. On September 3, he made a call to a senior Civil Affairs Officer, Major Hamilton T. Walker, and explained the risks—and opportunity—of taking immediate action. Brigadier General Edgar Hume arrived the following morning. After a second tour of the Camposanto with Keller (who served as translator) and the Archbishop of Pisa, Hume contacted Fifth Army Commander Lieutenant General Mark Clark and briefed him on the situation. Clark had learned the cost of adverse publicity following the destruction of the Abbey of Monte Cassino. The attention of the army commander made a big difference; within nine days of Keller’s initial call, a group of army engineers, eighty-four Italian military personnel, and fresco specialists from Florence and Rome were in Pisa and at work on the Camposanto.

Things began badly. On September 10, Keller wrote Kathy: “On my way home we ran over a dog. . . . Stopped the car and went to see. In a minute some 40 people gathered around. When I left, the owner came up to me and said, ‘Americans good. Germans no stop, hurt dog.’”

As soon as he reached Pisa, Keller had to arrange lodging for all the incoming workers and provide food for some one hundred extra people. Then followed a rash of sickness. Initially it was feared to be lead poisoning. The workers had been peeling away the lead rivulets from the tombs and frescoes. As Keller noted, “the dust was terrific.” If this activity was harming them, the operation would become even more complicated. Closer examination, however, found a more benign cause: food poisoning.

The Superintendent of Monuments and Galleries of Pisa, a key figure in the cleanup, had been accused of being a Fascist, “a man with a very doubtful political past,” and removed from his post. Keller believed his involvement was essential, so he arranged to have him temporarily reinstated, much to the benefit of the project. German shells continued to fall; one killed a woman in a nearby building. The encampment was soon moved. Needing additional lumber for the framing and beams, Keller led a surreptitious “midnight requisition” aboard a ship in the nearby harbor of Livorno.

Despite these hardships, Keller, the engineers, and the workers performed heroically. After thirty-four days of work, a twelve-foot-wide tarpaulin with tarpaper covering, designed to protect the existing frescoed walls from rain, was attached at a downward angle to the walls of the Camposanto, supported by wooden beams in the interior space. Keller proudly observed that “the Camposanto of Pisa is now one of the greatest laboratories in Italy for the study of fresco painting.” Every speck of painted plaster had been picked up—most by hand, some gingerly with shovels—and removed from the site, preserved for the day when the tedious work of reassembling the pieces could begin. In an October 12 letter, Keller wrote, “The job is done, works perfectly. The frescoes were dry as a 15th century tibia in the last downpour.” With a sense of relief, Keller wrote Kathy, telling her, “This is the biggest job I have had of its kind and it has been interesting all through, though fraught with unforeseen troubles. I wonder if this whole story will ever come out for people to know about and to realize—I doubt it.”

Keller had other responsibilities in Pisa besides the Camposanto. The nearby Leaning Tower had been closed due to an accumulation of water that some thought might threaten the foundation. The water proved more of a nuisance because of the horrid smell than any structural problem. After arranging for the water to be pumped out, and rerouting traffic away from the building, he reopened the Leaning Tower to the public. It became an instant attraction for soldiers.

Well aware of Pisa’s reputation as a center of learning, Keller put his knowledge of academic life to good use by jump-starting the university. “Without the University the town has no economic future at all let alone its importance as an intellectual center. All its factories and industries are destroyed.” It took two months to locate the faculty, remove mines that the Germans had placed throughout the university’s buildings, and return to its library books that had been stored off-site for safekeeping. On November 25, General Hume returned to Pisa and hosted a ceremony celebrating the reopening and the enrollment of some six hundred students. The city’s key institution was operational. The dead city Keller had encountered when he first arrived started to resuscitate.

With the reopening of the Leaning Tower and other attractions in the Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa, Allied soldiers had a chance to visit these famous attractions. [Deane Keller Papers, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University]

After turning over the ongoing responsibilities in Pisa to Fred Hartt, Keller resumed his inspections of other towns farther north. Until this point, he had been so far in advance of the other Monuments Men that his interaction with them had been very limited. But the sharing of Tuscany’s provinces with Hartt, transitions in both Florence and Pisa from the emergency phase to long-term recovery, and the halt to offensive operations changed that arrangement. Hartt now worked directly with Keller. The physical distance between them shrank to nothing. Not surprisingly, friction ensued, initially the result of two well-intended but overzealous comments by Hartt.

The first, included in his monthly report to the Senior Civil Affairs Officer to whom both Keller and Hartt reported insinuated that certain uninspected towns in Keller’s territory had been neglected. The other comment surfaced in a letter from Hartt to Keller, telling him that the temporary roof Keller had designed at the Camposanto should be extended in several areas: “It is really necessary, as these frescoes, while not as well known as the Traini and Gozzoli ones, are of great importance. . . . Personally I consider this urgent, far more so than much of the other stuff we are now doing.”

Keller found Hartt’s message patronizing. How could Hartt say that towns had gone uninspected while at the same time suggesting further work on the Camposanto was a priority? On October 18, his frustration boiled over in a letter to his wife: “[Hartt] bores me to death—lectures to me all the time if I happen to walk down a street with him. . . . Frankly, I don’t take the interest the historians do.” Keller figured that Hartt, twelve years his junior, at times had “the young intellectual’s habit of underrating experience and overrating knowledge.” Still, he never let his personal feelings affect his assessment of Hartt’s performance. A day later, he wrote a letter to DeWald telling him what an outstanding job Hartt had done in Florence, especially dealing with a complex situation. However, the sting of Hartt’s comments lingered.

AS THE RECOVERY
of Florence progressed through the fall, Hartt allocated more time to hunting down the missing Florentine treasures. Two months had passed since he and Poggi had met with Cardinal Dalla Costa to seek the Vatican’s assistance in finding the works taken from the repositories. Hartt had been consumed with work in Florence and the neighboring provinces, but after hearing from Poggi that the archbishop had finally received a reply from Rome, he immediately shifted all focus to the investigation.

According to Poggi, the November 15 letter from Vatican Secretariat of State Montini stated: “The works of art were stored in the [Alto] Adige, in a place called ‘Neumelans in Sand.’” Hartt was confused, Poggi likewise. “I could find no such place in any Italian guide, nor did even Poggi know where it might be.” There wasn’t much Hartt or the Monuments Men could do about it anyway. The Allied armies were digging in for winter, hundreds of miles from northern Italy, where the works of art were most likely located—if they hadn’t already been taken across the border into Austria or Germany. Much to Hartt’s frustration, the hunt would have to wait until spring, when offensive operations resumed.