Meet The Real Monuments Men
World War II produced few heroes quite as unlikely as those who inspired George Clooney's epic.
This piece originally appeared in Esquire Weekend.
Until relatively recently next to nothing had been written about the men of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archive (MFAA) sub-commission, aka the Monuments Men. That these individuals became the subject of a war epic written, directed and produced by Oscar-winning leading man George Clooney seems quite absurd. But then nothing about this idiosyncratic band of brothers chimes with traditional notions of warfare and heroism.
The Monuments Men came into being on the back of one of the greatest public relations disasters of the Second World War. In striving to prize Italy from Benito Mussolini’s clammy grasp, Allied forces destroyed any number of buildings of historic importance. The most notable casualty was the thousand-year-old Abbey of Monte Cassino which was reduced to rubble in just two short days.
Not that everyone was too concerned. Many military figures argued that a few broken building were as nothing next to the defeat of an enemy power. There were those, however, who saw parallels between this sort of destruction and the tactics Adolf Hitler had employed during the Blitz.
Others still, such as the 47-yearold curator and art conservationist George Stout, seized on the notion that a keen interest in arts and culture was an indication of a healthy civilisation. After all, had not Winston Churchill when asked to reduce the arts budget replied “Then what are we fighting for?”
And so a call went out to the great universities and art galleries of Europe and North America. Brains rather than brawn were what the MFAA were looking for and they got them by the bucket-load.
Besides Lieutenant George Stout (the inspiration for Clooney’s Frank Stokes), there was Major Ronald Balfour, a fortysomething Cambridge graduate who was more at home in his private library than on the field of battle. There was Second Lieutenant James Rorimer – a whippersnapper at 39 – who knew more about medieval art and New York’s Metropolitan Museum than machine guns and mortars. There was Walter ‘Hutch’ Huchthausen who quit his position as a design professor at the University Of Minnesota to aid the war effort. And then there was Frenchwoman Rose Vallard who couldn’t have looked less like her movie equivalent Cate Blanchett but had such a keen understanding of European art and such a knack for spycraft that she became invaluable to the Monuments Men and their mission.
Up and running by the spring of 1944, the Monuments Men came into their own in the wake of the D-Day landings. Though their objectives were relatively straightforward – to retrieve pieces of art looted by the Nazis and to warn the Allies to avoid striking at targets of historical and/or cultural importance – the accomplishment of them was complicated by a shortage of numbers (there were initially only eight MFAA personnel on the continent) and the begrudging attitudes of those at the military end of the Allied operation.
That said it didn’t take long for Stout and Co. to demonstrate their worth. When it was discovered that the road to the great cathedral of Chartres had been booby trapped in such a way that an explosion might actually level the building, young Stewart Leonard single-handedly took on the task of saving a structure widely regarded as the most beautiful in the western world. Like all of the Monuments Men’s endeavours, this display of courage went unrecognised by the high command. Leonard, though, felt it had been reward enough “to sit in Chartres Cathedral, the cathedral that I helped save, for almost an hour. Alone”
It was as the war moved eastwards that the sub-commission’s metal was truly tested however. With the liberation of each new town came fresh evidence of Nazi looting. From the cathedrals of Ghent and Bruges, the enemy lifted two bona fide masterpieces, Van Eyck’s Adoration Of The Mystic Lamb and Michelangelo’s Madonna And Child.
Had the pieces suffered the same fate as the ‘degenerate’ artwork of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali and been reduced to ashes and rubble? Fortunately, research by the Monuments Men revealed that both items were still in existence and coveted by the Fuhrer who intended to give them pride of place in a museum in Linz, his Austrian birthplace. The question was, just where had he hidden them?
To say any more might spoil a film that, at its very best, is similar in feel and style to that classic World War II caper movie Kelly’s Heroes. Better perhaps to end with an anecdote rich in the bizarre coincidence that coloured so many of the Monuments Men’s activities. Just 18-years-old when he was assigned to the group, Private Harry Ettlinger had been born and raised in the German city of Karlsruhe. He and his family only left the Fatherland in the late 1930s when it became clear how Hitler planned to answer ‘the Jewish question’.
After two years of extraordinary service under George Stout, Ettlinger found himself in possession of a Rembrandt self-portrait. Delighted though he was to retrieve such a work, it wasn’t until many years later that Ettlinger found out that the painting had been hanging in the Karlsruhe art gallery when he was growing up in the city. Back then, being Jewish, he was unable to visit the gallery gaze upon Rembrandt’s brilliance. But now as a ‘hero of civilisation’ as all the Monuments Men became known, he’d ensured that the painting could be enjoyed by all people of all races and creeds for all time.