Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis

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Authors: Robert M. Edsel
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Harvard who had become a pioneer in the conservation of works of art. Stout spent World War I as an army private stationed at a hospital unit in Europe, then returned home to attend the University of Iowa, where he studied drawing. After saving his earnings for five years, Stout returned to Europe and toured the great cultural centers of civilization. By then, he was hooked. His calm, methodical, and studious personality equipped him perfectly for the science of art conservation.
    Stout possessed a rare combination of visionary and patient thinking merged with the know-how and discipline to get things done. During the Spanish Civil War, Stout studied and recorded the impact of new innovations in bombing on the preservation of art—none with more far-reaching implications than the development of incendiary bombs and their consequent fires. He also maintained contact with friends in the German museum community, who wrote him about the Nazis’ removal of some museum directors and curators—and art they judged “degenerate”—from German institutions during the late 1930s.
    After Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Stout took the initiative to write a field manual on the protection of works of art during armed conflict. This pamphlet incorporated his many insights from years of analysis. Stout believed it was only a matter of time before the course of the war turned and American boys would again be back in Europe fighting their way to Berlin. This time, however, the stakes would be much higher than in World War I; developments in the technology of warfare threatened to destroy much of the heritage of Western civilization. To prepare America’s soldiers, Stout worked closely with Paul Sachs, founder of Harvard’s Museum Studies course, to pitch his idea for what would become known as “Monuments officers” to the War Department. By the summer of 1943, Stout’s efforts had led to the creation of the Roberts Commission—and, indirectly, the transfer of Mason Hammond, Professor of Classics, to the war zone. * After the call went out, more than two hundred men volunteered, most with exactly the expertise needed, hoping to be transferred to the new “program” being endorsed by the War Department.
    The urgency of getting Hammond in theater required the army to fly him to his first destination, Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers, rather than send him by ship. Although initially called an “adviser,” Mason Hammond was, in fact, the first Monuments Man. He reported for duty on June 7, only to discover that “the assignment for which I was destined was not concerned with the Monuments of North Africa. It has, therefore, proved impossible as yet to make any inspection of these, chiefly because of the difficulty of securing transport.” That single issue—transport, as in “lack thereof”—proved the most consistently vexing challenge the Monuments Men would confront.
    In one of his first letters from North Africa to Samuel Reber, a friend working in the army’s Civil Affairs Section in Washington, DC, Hammond went as far as he ever would in expressing his frustration: “It is unfortunate that they did not give me more explicit information as to the job [while] in Washington, as they sent me out in a great hurry. . . . I doubt if there is need for any large specialist staff for this work, since it is at best a luxury and the military will not look kindly on a lot of art experts running round trying to tell them what not to hit.”
    Hammond’s letter didn’t mention how frustrating it was to work within an organization as slow moving and at times inflexible as the United States Army. While he knew quite a lot about Italian art, Hammond wasn’t an expert on the monuments of Sicily. Knowing that the army expected him to be fully prepared, on just a few weeks’ notice, he tried to learn what he could. But the army had placed the public library in Algiers off-limits, fearing that his

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