The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History [Hardcover]

Robert M. Edsel (Author), Bret Witter (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 3, 2009

At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.
In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Momuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.
Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

WWII was the most destructive war in history and caused the greatest dislocation of cultural artifacts. Hundreds of thousands of items remain missing. The main burden fell to a few hundred men and women, curators and archivists, artists and art historians from 13 nations. Their task was to save and preserve what they could of Europe's great art, and they were called the Monuments Men. (Coincidentally or not, this book appears only briefly after Ilaria Dagnini Brey's The Venus Fixers: The Untold Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II, Reviews, June 1.) Edsel has presented their achievements in documentaries and photographs. He and Witter (coauthor of the bestselling Dewey) are no less successful here. Focusing on the organization's role in northwest Europe, they describe the Monuments Men from their initial mission to limit combat damage to structures and artifacts to their changed focus of locating missing items. Most had been stolen by the Nazis. In southern Germany alone, over a thousand caches emerged, containing everything from church bells to insect collections. The story is both engaging and inspiring. In the midst of a total war, armies systematically sought to mitigate cultural loss. (Sept. 3)
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Review

"After World War Two I served as a British member of the 'Monuments' section in Germany. Our task, I believe, was truly important - we were restoring to Europe evidence of its own civilization, which the War seemed virtually to have destroyed - and I was lucky to have had a chance to participate. It is excellent that Mr Edsel has now recorded this remarkable episode, and I am grateful to him for devoting so much energy to telling the stories of those involved" -- Anne Olivier Bell "In the great storytelling tradition of my longtime friend, Stephen Ambrose, Monuments Men is a marvelous addition to the many great books on World War II and is a reminder that we fought to save western civilization as well as our freedom. Robert Edsel's brilliant work tells the story of how a small unit of American soldiers raced across the front lines in Europe to rescue the art treasures of western culture that had been stolen by the Nazis. Edsel's book is a thriller, in the style of Indiana Jones, but in this case it's all fact and great history. I read the book from cover to cover - couldn't put it down!" Dr. Gordon 'Nick' Mueller, CEO/President and co-founder of the National World War II Museum "Highly Readable ... a remarkable history" Washington Post "Engaging and inspiring" Publishers Weekly --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Center Street (September 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1599951495
• ISBN-13: 978-1599951492
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.5 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (105 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy > Cultural Policy
  • #4 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Museum Studies & Museology
  • #15 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > International & World Politics > European

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 90 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A FASCINATING ACCOUNT OF A NEGLECTED WW2 TOPIC September 3, 2009

By Paul Gelman

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The most devastating damage and acts of looting of art objects in the annals of history took place during World War Two.These were perpetrated by the Nazi hordes ,carefully directed by the Fuhrer himself.The Nazi army was perpetually pillaging the finest art in Europe.The vain Goering and Alfred Rosenberg were among the main culprits involved in those brutal crimes against the human creative talent.
Fortunately,there was a Western Allied effort to mitigate combat damage, primarily to structures-churches,museums, and other various monuments.In the course of those brutal years, particularly during 1943-1944,the Allies paid much more attention to finding and protecting cultural items which were stolen from their owners,many of which were Jews.The bosses of the Third Reich transported more than five million cultural objects to many sites in Germany, where they hid them , hoping that one day they would not only be the masters of the world, but also the masters of art.
More than 350 men and women served as Monuments People.This number was culled from thirteen nations.In the end, only a handful of them were active and this book is their story.It was the responsibility of this group to save as much of the European culture as it could.
Mt. Edsel has been living in Florence ,Italy, in the 1990s when he wondered how so many of Europe's monuments and other works of art could have survived this unprecedented orgy of destruction.Thus, he set out to conduct a very careful process of extremely meticulous research which led him ultimately to interview those soldiers who have risked and dedicated their lives pursuing this mission.Many of them were art curators,scholars, educators, architects and archivists in their early forties....There are captivating chapters on the fate of museums in Western Europe, such those in France, Belgium,Holland and Italy.You will meet well-known paintings and the fate of them.Among these are the "Mona Lisa" and "The Night Watch".There arealso letters written by the heroes of this book to various relatives of theirs and some directives given or sent to Nazi officials.
Mr. Edsel's forte in the book is especially interesting when describing what happened during and after 1945 in Altaussee, Austria- a site where many tunnels served as sanctuaries for an enormous number of stolen works, as well as another chapter devoted to the Merkers salt mine in Germany where the largest paintings from the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin were placed for safekeeping (along Germany's gold reserve and paper currency).
We are also informed that the castle of Neuschwainstein, which was built by Mad Ludwing of Bavaria in the ninetennth century, served as a key Nazi repository of the greatest works of art stolen from France.It took the Monuments Men six whole weeks to empty it.Some of the stolen art objects belonged to the Rothschild collection in France.
This is an originally told and well-researched chapter with a happy
end, not only because of the outcome of those devoted men and women, but also because they finally got the right historian and researcher who is responsible for bringing up their extrordinary achievements, and for whom humanity shoud be more than grateful.I must warn you: once you start reading the book, you will not put it down easily.
Five points go to this book! Read more ›

69 of 82 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars An exciting and dramatic story; told in a pedestrian & choppy way September 18, 2009

By S. McGee TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Even before the first shots of World War II were fired in September 1939, Adolf Hitler was dreaming of transforming his hometown of Linz into a kind of Nazi cultural capital, and his political aides were helping him earmark works of art from around Europe that could be added to his collection. Unlike today's avid collectors, however, Hitler opted to obtain his works via looting, confiscation or as a kind of trade for the owner's survival, safety or escape from the Nazi regime. The fight to retrieve this art and return it to its former owner goes on to this day; the Amber Room is still missing from the Tsarist palaces of St. Petersburg, while works by Klimt have only recently been returned to the families of their original owners.

That's the backdrop against which Robert Edsel (and his writer, Brett Witter) craft their story of the adventures of six very different "Monuments Men", a motley crew of artists, curators and other types who landed on the beaches of Normandy in the wake of D-Day and, hitchiking from one town to another, battled to protect, rescue and, later, retrieve lost masterpieces. The material in the book is compelling, but the way in which it's delivered and presented falls short, which astonished me given the sheer drama of the quixotic adventures of the monuments men. Part of the problem are the ultra-short chapters (sometimes only three or four pages), which just gave me a chance to immerse myself in what one of the monuments men was up to before it jumped, sometimes both geographically and thematically, to another chapter dealing with something else. I ended up feeling dizzy and distracted.

I also struggled with two elements in the writing of the book.... Firstly, Edsel has chosen to pay tribute to the individuals involved by providing a lot of detail of their personal lives. Alas, this doesn't do much for the narrative, even in the case of Harry Ettlinger, whose dramatic last-minute emigration to the United States in 1938 opens the book. (He later becomes one of the monuments men.) Most of their lives are relatively ordinary, and while I'm sure they loved their wives and children and worried about their ability to pay the bills, in the context of the rather choppy structure, this just becomes a distraction that doesn't propel the book forward. (That's not to say the same information couldn't have been conveyed in vignettes scattered throughout the book; it simply felt like I was struggling through a rather dull preamble.) Secondly, for a book about the preservation of monuments, there's little attention to the art history itself. Reading about the preparation of the lengthy list of buildings that the Allies had labeled as to be protected, I wondered about how it was composed. What criteria were used? Did people argue over the inclusion or exclusion of some locations? I did ferret out some tidbits, but this is a book more about the people and the derring-do than about the art, and anyone not well-informed about the importance of Van Eyck, Michaelangelo, etc. could find this frustrating.

There's already an excellent book that deals with similar material in print -- The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War -- and the stark contrast between the two doesn't favor Edsel's offering. True, he goes into greater depth than Nicholas on the adventures associated with the recovery of the art work. But returning to glance into Nicholas's book, I realized that I, at least, valued the broader context it offered me into the whole tragic episode, from the first thefts and the persecution of artists like Chagall, to the pesky issues that still surround the debate over who owns some of these works of art. If you've read Nicholas's book, and want to delve more deeply into this particular part of the story, this is a laudable effort. It's just not a great book in its own right. Read more ›

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars With some editing could have been five stars October 12, 2009

By Lance B. Hillsinger

Format:Hardcover

The search for artwork stolen by the Nazis in WWII has been aptly described as "the greatest treasure hunt in treasury." As the soldiers who participated in this hunt were also charged with saving historical churches and other historical monuments, they were referred to as "Monument men."

The heoric quest of the Monument Men is an undertold story of WWII. Outside of art scholars and musuem curators, few are aware of the details of their saga. In his book, Robert Edsel provides us the details. He spent many years conducting research for this book and, particularly in the latter half of the story, the reader is rewarded by his effort.

While the research is impressive, I give "Monument Men" just four stars. With some better editing, it could have been a five star book. Here are some examples of the poor editing:

1) Early in the re-telling we are introduced to the only female character of importance, but we do not learn her backstory until some chapters later. Keeping the reader "in the dark" about the background of a main character is a literary technique fit for a mystery --- not an important work of non-fiction.

2) About halfway in the story we are told about an explosion behind allied lines. However, we do not learn the results of that explosion into well into the next chapter -- a chapter that concerns a different monument man hundreds of miles away. Again, the reader is given a mystery, and has to wait for the facts.

3) Seperate from the main body of the text, the author includes several relevant (and some marginally relevant) letters. The typeface used for German/Nazi sources is very similar, if not identical, to the typeface used from allied sources.... Since the first few letters are from Nazi sources, the reader is setup to expect letters with the particular typeface will be from Nazi sources. In any reprinting of this book, there should be clearly different typefaces for Nazi and Allied sources.

Still, these flaws aside, a strong four stars. Read more ›