Robert M. Edsel -- The Monuments Men: allied heroes, Nazi thieves, and the greatest treasure hunt in history
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An exciting but complex story.

These are exciting tales.  But, it's not a single story.  This book
tells of the struggles of several members of this team as each
separately follow Allied forces into and across Europe during the
final campaigns and the collapse of the German forces.  They are
trying to find treasured works of art before those works are
damaged, looted, or destroyed.

The members of the Monuments team, each assigned to a separate
segment of the U.S. Army and the Allied forces are each interesting
and you come to care about each of them personally as well as
hoping for their success in finding the repositories of works of
art in the regions to which they have been assigned.

It's a small group and, often, each is acting on his own, so
there's plenty of personal initiative one the part of each of them
to make their work exciting.

What provides the background for this story is the looting or
confiscation, call it what you want, of huge amounts of works of
art, notably by Adolph Hitler and Herman Goring.  There were whole
train cars full of art works.  There were castles and towers full. 
There were entire mine shafts, hundreds of feet under ground, full
of art.  Mines were used both to hide the works of art and to
protect them from bombs and explosives.

One thing that seems amazing to me is that the Monuments Men group
was so small, given the size of Europe and given the number of
locations in which art works had been hidden.  It seems impossible
to me that they could hope to recover all of it and that they were
able to recover as much as they did is amazing.  I was left
wondering how much art was never recovered or was looted and
disappeared, especially since there were believed to have been more
than a thousand repositories within Germany.

These were very special "men".  I put "men" in quasi-quotes because
one of the important and bravest characters in the book is Rose
Valland, a woman.  Some had serious backgrounds in art, working at
well known art museums, or as artists themselves.  Perhaps just as
important as their background and the knowledge that this
presupposes is their fierce caring about art, cultural items, and
their value.  How else can we explain the extreme efforts and time
that they put into their efforts to track down and to secure
confiscated art objects, not to mention the amount of initiative
they showed, and the dangers they went through.  These were people
on a mission.  These were people who sincerely believed that they
were attempting to save civilization.

It's very moving to read about someone who truly values and
appreciates art finding a work that he had only read about, the
holding and saving that piece of art.

One especially exciting story is the struggle to save a mine
containing immense store of art from destruction by German officers
who believed that Hitler had ordered those art works and cultural
items destroyed.  The story of the men who worked to block that is
a thrilling one about brave men risking their lives for what felt
was so valuable.

The landscape is also so impressive.  There are castles and
churches and towers and mines, and all in the middle of military
battles and destroyed cities and country-side the control of which
is changing even as the Monuments Men are passing through it.

One subject I'd like to have been given a bit more attention is
a discussion of ownership, and from two aspects.  One, given that
they were tracking huge numbers of works of art, thousands
literally, how could they ever hope to identify the owners,
especially in the case of art confiscated from Jews and others who
died during the war?  Two, although many pieces did indeed have
rightful owners, some were pieces stolen in previous wars, then
stolen by the Germans in World War II.  Who were the rightful
owners of those pieces?  I felt somewhat conflicted reading about
the race to evacuate an immense store of art before the Russian army
could arrive.  I'm not all that sure that the Russians did not have
just as much claim to that art as the Allied forces did.

This is a book full of details, perhaps more than some readers will
want.  Edsel appears to have done very extensive research.  Some of
the stories could have been trimmed; others are fascinating.

The book includes letters written by several of the main
characters to their wives back in the U.S.  That helps give the
reader some emotional contact with the people in this effort to
save art and culture.

A few of the Monuments Men died in the theater of operations: this
is non-fiction, remember.  But, given the amount of destruction and
fighting in Europe at that time, perhaps it's due to good fortune
that as many of them survived.  The stories are a bit disjointed;
mostly they are stories of separate efforts.  However, the
narratives do come together from time to time so as to make a bit
more of a cohesive story out of it.  And, there is enough
continuity to make you care about the people we're following.  And,
that's why I appreciated the concluding pages of the book, which
gives a short sketch of each Monuments Men's life (and Rose
Valland's, too) after the war.

01/07/2011

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