On the cold morning of January 28th, 1945, Harry Ettlinger received the best birthday present he had ever received
. The 19-year-old army soldier was shivering behind a truck from France to southern Belgium. There, a month of fierce fighting has just ended, but the fighting continues. The Germans began to retreat in the New Year, and Private Ettlinger and thousands of other soldiers gathered to fight back. ""We were on our way east, "Ettlinger recalled," when this sergeant ran out. " The next three men grab your gear and come with me, he shouted. I am one of them. I got off the bus. The related content relives the rise and fall of the Third Reich plundering Iraq < P >, and the army needs an interpreter in the upcoming Nuremberg War trial. It has been noticed that Ettlinger speaks German for the same reason as a native: he is a native. Ettlinger was born in Karlsruhe on the Rhine. He fled Germany with his parents and other relatives in 1938, just before the shock of Krista Nacht made Hitler have a very clear idea about Jewish families like him. The Ettlinger family settled in Newark, New Jersey, where Harry finished high school and was drafted into the army. After several weeks of basic training, he found himself back in Germany, a place he had never expected, where the last chapter of the European war was written as smoke and blood.
Ettlinger's Nuremberg mission disappeared without a trace. He was caught in a completely unexpected war. He went deep into German salt mines, castles, abandoned factories and empty museums, where he worked with the Monument Man, a small group of 35 art historians, museum curators, professors and other unknown soldiers and sailors in the departments of monuments, fine arts and archives. Their task, which began in the uncertain peacetime in May 1945, was to find, protect and return millions of looted works of art, sculptures, books, jewels, furniture, tapestries and other cultural treasures, which disappeared or were displaced due to seven years of drastic changes.
This conflict engulfed a large number of cultural relics paintings by Vermeer, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Raphael, Leonardo, Botticelli and other small artists. Museums and houses throughout Europe have been deprived of paintings, furniture, ceramics, coins and other items, and many churches in continental Europe have also been deprived, and silver crosses, stained glass, bells and painted altars have disappeared since then; The ancient Torah disappeared from the synagogue; The whole library was packed with trains.
"This is the biggest theft of cultural objects in history," said Charles A. Goldstein, a lawyer who organized the Art Restoration Committee to promote the return of stolen works. I have seen various figures, but there is no doubt that the scale is astronomical.
At the instigation of Adolf and his imperialist Herman, it was the most systematic robbery, which swept away thousands of major works of art in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Russia and other war-torn countries. In fact, the Nazis organized a special group of art consultants, called Einstein Stab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), to plunder European masterpieces. The selected works are detailed in about 8 volumes of leather-bound photos, which provided guidance for the German Defence Forces before invading a country. According to this list, Hitler's army transported millions of cultural treasures back to Germany, in the words of the Fuehrer, in order to "protect the cultural treasures there". On the other hand, the Soviet Union organized a so-called trophy committee to select the best from Germany's legal and plundered collections in order to retaliate against the previous plunder. At the same time, national art collections all over Europe packed their precious collections away, hoping to protect them from Nazi plunder, allied bombing and Russian plunder. This September, 1939, Mona Lisa was stuffed into an ambulance and evacuated from the Louvre. During most of the war, she had been running around. In a continuous country winery, Leonardo's socialite escaped capture through no less than six address changes. Nefertiti, a beauty queen with a history of 3,3 years, was quickly transported from Berlin to the safety of the Kaiser Rhoda potash mine in Meckel, central Germany, where thousands of boxes of potash from the National Museum were stored. Jan Van Eyck's Ghent Altar painting, a masterpiece plundered by the Nazis from Belgium in the 15th century, was transported to the mine in Altossi, Austria, where it spent the last months of the war with other cultural treasures.
When the smoke clears, Hitler plans to dig up many of these trophies and display them in his hometown Linz, Austria. There, they will be exhibited in the new Foehrer Museum, which will be one of the best museums in the world. This project died with Hitler in 1945, when Ettlinger and other monuments found the missing works of art and provided them with shelter until they could return to their country of origin.
"That's why our war was different," Ettlinger, now 82, recalled that it had made a policy, that is, it didn't share the spoils with the winners. The idea of returning property to its rightful owner in wartime is unprecedented. That's our job. We don't have much time to think. We just started working.
It means Ettlinger, which means that it is a long and tedious process to clean up the works of art in the salt mines of Heilbronn and Kochendorf in southern Germany from 7 feet underground every day. Most of these cultural relics have not been looted, but they legally belong to German museums in Karlsruhe, Mannheim and Stuttgart. From September 1945 to July 1946, Lieutenant Ettlinger, Lieutenant Dell v. Ford and German workers classified underground treasures, searched for works with questionable ownership, and transported paintings, antique musical instruments, sculptures and other items to the upper part, and transported them to allied collection points in Germany, USA. At the main collection points in Wiesbaden, Munich and offenbach, other antiquities groups arranged items according to their countries of origin, and made emergency repairs and claims assessment for delegations that came to recover their treasures.
Perhaps the most famous discovery in Heilbronn is the stained glass windows of Strasbourg Cathedral in France. Under the supervision of Ettlinger, these windows were packed in 73 boxes and shipped home directly without passing through the collection point. "The window in Strasbourg was the first thing we sent back," Ettlinger said, as a gesture of goodwill, according to the order of General dwight eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces. "The window was welcomed home by a huge celebration, which not only shows that Alsace is free again after centuries of German rule, but also shows that the allies intend to restore the fruits of civilization."
Most of Ettlinger's comrades-in-arms have been trained in art history or museum work. "It's not me," Ettlinger said. "I'm just a kid from New Jersey." But he works hard, and it's essential to master German, and he has a good relationship with miners. He was promoted to technical sergeant. After the war, he returned to New Jersey, where he obtained a degree in engineering and business management and produced nuclear weapons guidance systems. " "To tell you the truth, I'm not as interested in these paintings as I am in other things over there," said Ettlinger, who is now retired in Rockway, New Jersey.
As soon as he arrived at the Cochindorf mine, Ettlinger was shocked to learn that the Third Reich planned to use 2 yuan to turn it into an underground factory with 1, workers from nearby concentration camps. These plans were dashed by the invasion of the Allied Forces, but there was a chill over the mines. Ettlinger remembered his great fortune every day: if he hadn't fled Germany in 1938, he might have ended up in such a camp. On the contrary, he found himself in an ironic position, supervising German laborers and working with former Nazis who helped plunder French works of art. ""He knows where things are, "Ettlinger said. My own feelings can't blend in.
Being understaffed and underfunded for a long time, these monuments were ridiculed by service colleagues as "Golden Star Repairmen". They soon learned to build with few things and move like pirates. James Rorimer, the curator of the medieval collection in the civilian life of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an example for all Venus fixers, who follow him in the face of authority and are creative and fearless. When some of General Eisenhower's aides filled the Supreme Commander's residence with old paintings and furniture from Versailles, Rorimmer angrily ordered them to move away, convinced that he was only engaged in maintaining the best civilization.
Captain Rorimmer arrived in Haier Brown in ten days' battle, because the city cut off the power supply, which led to the failure of the water pump in the mine and threatened the flood of underground treasures. He made an urgent appeal to General Eisenhower, who forgave the officer's earlier furniture removal action, sent military engineers to the scene, started the pump, and rescued thousands of works of art from drowning.
Rorimmer also confronted the feared General George S. Patton. Both of them want to take over the former Nazi party headquarters in Barton, Munich, as the command center of the third army in his region, responsible for handling works of art. Somehow, Rorimmer persuaded Barton that he needed more construction, and Barton found other offices. After the war, when Rorimmer was elected as the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, few people were surprised to see his performance in action. He died in 1966.
"It made him a little furtive," said Kenh C.Lindsay, an 88-year-old Milwaukee native. Before reading Rorimer's achievements, he hated military life very much and applied for a transfer from the signal force. In July 1945, he became a commemorative figure and reported to the collection point in Wiesbaden.
There, Sergeant Lindsay found his new boss, Captain Walter I. Farmer, an interior decorator from Cincinnati. He was busy wandering around the former Landesmusen Building, a 3-room building that used to be a national museum before the war and an air force headquarters during the conflict. It miraculously escaped the explosion again and again, but it still shattered every window. The heating system has been paralyzed, a US military warehouse has sprung up in the former art gallery of the museum, and displaced German citizens have taken over the remaining corners and gaps of the old building. Farmer, Lindsay and 15 other German workers deposed these unauthorized occupants in less than two months, lit the stove, eliminated the bomb, sealed off the surrounding area, and prepared a batch of works of art for the museum from the wartime warehouse.
"It was a nightmare," Lindsay recalled. He lives in Binghamton now, and he was the head of the art history department of new york State University. We had to fix that old building. Ok, ok, but where can you find 2 pieces of glass in a bombed-out city?
The farmers themselves deployed a crew member to steal the glass from the nearby air base, and they came back with 25 tons of glass, and that's it! "Lindsay said that the farmer has theft in his veins. God bless him! My job is to let the workers install glass so that we can have some protection for the works of art that are about to be accepted.
Lindsay greeted the first motorcade on the morning of August 2th, 1945. At that time, 57 trucks loaded with goods rumbled to the collection point in Wiesbaden under the escort of armed tanks. Captain Jim Rorimmer rode at the front of the motorcade, like a proud monarch, and one art team after another extended for miles from Frankfurt. When the first trucks reversed to the storage area in Wiesbaden and began to unload without accident, Rorimmer turned to Lindsay. "You did a good job," he growled, and then ran to the next crisis. Lindsay said, "This is the only compliment I have received since I joined the army."
After the cruelty of a long war, when an old friend appeared in Wiesbaden that morning, the people gathered there were particularly moved. Germans and Americans breathed a sigh of relief when the box containing Queen Nefertiti rolled onto the dock. ""Here comes the painted queen, "a worker shouted. She is safe! After escaping from Berlin, he survived being buried in a mine, tottered on the bombed road to Frankfurt, and lived in seclusion on the vault of the Capitol. This beloved statue finally came here.
She will have many companions in Wiesbaden, where a large group of trucks will keep coming for ten days. By mid-September, the building was full of antiques from 16 Berlin National Museums, oil paintings from Berlin National Art Gallery, silverware from Polish churches, ceramic boxes, a pile of antique weapons and uniforms, thousands of books and an ancient Tora Mountain.
When a high-level delegation from Egypt and Germany came to inspect Nefertiti, Lindsay arranged an unveiling ceremony, which was the first time that someone watched the Queen of Egypt for more than a year. The worker pried open her box. Lindsay peeled off a protective tarpaulin inner package. He came to a thick layer of white glass fiber buffer. "I bent down to take away the last piece of packaging material, and suddenly I saw Nefertiti's face," Lindsay said. She looked back at me, 3 years old, but as beautiful as when she lived in the 18th dynasty. I carried her out and put her on a pedestal in the middle of the room. At that time, every man in that place fell in love with her. I know it is.
The majestic Nefertiti, carved from limestone and painted in realistic tones, ruled in Wiesbaden until 1955, when she was sent back to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. She lives in a respectable place today, attracting a new generation of admirers, including her Egyptian compatriots, who believe that she was smuggled out of the country in 1912 and should be repatriated. Although Egypt has recently renewed its claim against Nafititi, Germany has been reluctant to give her up, even temporarily, for fear that she may be damaged in transit. In addition, the Germans said that any work legally imported before 1972 can be preserved according to a UNESCO convention. Yes, the Egyptians said, but nefertiti is illegally exported, so the convention does not apply.
at least nefertiti has a family. The same cannot be said of the cultural treasures of ending the war as orphans, because they have no identifiable parents and no place to go. These include hundreds of torch scrolls and other religious objects looted from European synagogues, which have been salvaged to build a Nazi museum dedicated to "Jewish issues." Many of these items were owned by individuals or communities wiped out by the Third Reich. They had their own rooms in Wiesbaden.
They have been wandering in the corridors of the vast land museum, and Lindsay felt unconsciously shivering every time he passed the Torah room. "This is a disturbing situation," he said. We know what brought these things. You can't sleep at night.
The list of famous paintings and sculptures in Wiesbaden was cut and repatriated.