The Monuments Men: Saving Europe's Art in World War II

On 23 June 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the creation of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas.¹ As its name says, the aim was to protect monuments and salvage art in war zones. Its specialists also tracked down the art that Nazi Germany had stolen.¹

Only about two dozen of them worked on the front lines, tracking down looted objects. Two were killed in combat.¹

No object shows the stakes better than the Ghent Altarpiece, dated 1432, by Jan van Eyck and probably Hubert van Eyck, the masterpiece of the painter we met in did Van Eyck invent oil painting?³

It had already been a prize of war: the Treaty of Versailles, after the First World War, required its return to Belgium before peace with Germany could be concluded.³ In 1940 its panels were moved to Pau, in southern France, for safety. The Germans seized them on 3 August 1942, took them to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, then in 1944 to the salt mine of Altaussee, in Austria. There, in 1945, Monuments Man Daniel J. Kern examined them with the restorer Karl Sieber and the engineer Max Eder.⁴

After the fighting stopped, several hundred Monuments Men and Women stayed on in Germany, Austria, Italy and Japan.¹ Their work was patient and practical: identifying each object, finding its owner, and sending it back. In the years that followed, they returned millions of artistic and cultural items to the countries they had been taken from.¹

The same postwar investigations uncovered strange stories too, like that of the forger who sold a fake Vermeer to Göring. For another famous recovery, read how the Mona Lisa came back after the theft of 1911.