The Monuments Men

Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

Center Street

CHAPTER 1

Out of Germany

Karlsruhe, Germany 1715–1938

The city of Karlsruhe, in southwestern Germany, was founded in 1715 by theMargrave Karl Wilhelm von Baden-Durlach. Local legend held that Karl Wilhelmwalked into the woods one day, fell asleep, and dreamt of a palace surrounded bya city. Actually, he left his previous residence at Durlach after a fight withthe local townspeople. Still, always the optimist, Karl Wilhelm had his newsettlement laid out like a wheel, with his palace in the center and thirty-tworoads leading out from it like spokes. As in the dream, a town soon grew aroundhis palace.

Hoping the new city would grow quickly into a regional power, Karl Wilhelminvited anyone to come and settle where they pleased, regardless of race orcreed. This was a rare luxury, especially for Jews, who were relegated toJewish-only neighborhoods throughout most of Eastern Europe. By 1718, a Jewishcongregation was established in Karlsruhe. In 1725, a Jewish merchant namedSeligmann immigrated there from Ettlingen, the nearby town where his family hadlived since 1600. Seligmann thrived in Karlsruhe, perhaps because it wasn'tuntil 1752, when the town finally felt itself a legitimate regional power, thatanti-Jewish laws became the fashion. Around 1800, when inhabitants of Germanybecame legally obligated to take a surname, Seligmann's descendants chose thelast name Ettlinger, after their city of origin.

The main street in Karlsruhe is Kaiserstrasse, and on this road in 1850 theEttlingers opened a women's clothing store, Gebrüder Ettlinger. Jews wereforbidden by then to own farmland. The professions, like medicine, law, orgovernment service, were accessible to them but also openly discriminatory,while the trade guilds, such as those for plumbing and carpentry, barred theiradmission. As a result, many Jewish families focused on retail. GebrüderEttlinger was only two blocks from the palace, and in the late 1890s the regularpatronage of Karl Wilhelm's descendant, the Grand Duchess Hilda von Baden, wifeof Friedrich II von Baden, made it one of the most fashionable stores in theregion. By the early 1900s the store featured four floors of merchandise andforty employees. The duchess lost her position in 1918, after Germany's defeatin World War I, but even the loss of their patron didn't dent the fortunes ofthe Ettlinger family.

In 1925, Max Ettlinger married Suse Oppenheimer, whose father was a wholesaletextile merchant in the nearby town of Bruchsal. His primary business wasuniform cloth for government employees, like policemen and customs officials.The Jewish Oppenheimers, who traced their local roots to 1450, were well knownfor their integrity, kindness, and philanthropy. Suse's mother had served as,among others things, the president of the local Red Cross. So when Max andSuse's first son, Heinz Ludwig Chaim Ettlinger, called Harry, was born in 1926,the family was not only well-off financially, but an established and respectedpresence in the Karlsruhe area.

Children live in a closed world, and young Harry assumed life as he knew it hadgone on that way forever. He didn't have any friends who weren't Jewish, but hisparents didn't either, so that didn't seem unusual. He saw non-Jews at schooland in the parks, and he liked them, but buried deep within those interactionswas the knowledge that, for some reason, he was an outsider. He had no idea thatthe world was entering an economic depression, or that hard times bringrecriminations and blame. Privately, Harry's parents worried not just about theeconomy, but about the rising tide of nationalism and anti-Semitism. Harrynoticed only that perhaps the line between himself and the larger world ofKarlsruhe was becoming easier to see and harder to cross.

Then in 1933, seven-year-old Harry was banned from the local sports association.In the summer of 1935, his aunt left Karlsruhe for Switzerland. When Harrystarted the fifth grade a few months later, he was one of only two Jewish boysin his class of forty-five. His father was a decorated veteran of World War I,wounded by shrapnel outside Metz, France, so Harry was granted a temporaryexemption from the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of German citizenshipand, with it, most of their rights. Forced to sit in the back row, Harry'sgrades dropped noticeably. This wasn't the result of ostracism orintimidation—that did occur, but Harry was never beaten or physicallybullied by his classmates. It was the prejudice of his teachers.

Two years later, in 1937, Harry switched to the Jewish school. Soon after, heand his two younger brothers received a surprise gift: bicycles. GebrüderEttlinger had gone bankrupt, felled by a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, andhis father was now working with Opa (Grandpa) Oppenheimer in his textilebusiness. Harry was taught to ride a bicycle so he could get around Holland,where the family was hoping to move. His best friend's family was trying toemigrate to Palestine. Almost everyone Harry knew, in fact, was trying to getout of Germany. Then word came that the Ettlingers' application was denied. Theyweren't going to Holland. Shortly thereafter, Harry crashed his bicycle; hisadmission to the local hospital was also denied.

There were two synagogues in Karlsruhe, and the Ettlingers, who were notstrictly observant Jews, attended the less orthodox. The Kronenstrasse Synagoguewas a large, ornate hundred-year-old building. The worship center soared fourfloors into a series of decorated domes—four floors was the maximumallowable height, for no building in Karlsruhe could be higher than the tower ofKarl Wilhelm's palace. The men, who wore pressed black suits and black top hats,sat on long benches in the bottom section. The women sat in the upper balconies.Behind them, the sun streamed in through large windows, bathing the hall inlight.

On Friday nights and Saturday mornings, Harry could look out over the wholecongregation from his perch in the choir loft. The people he recognized wereleaving, forced overseas by poverty, discrimination, the threat of violence, anda government that encouraged emigration as the best "solution" for both Jews andthe German state. Still, the synagogue was always full. As the worldshrunk—economically, culturally, socially—the synagogue drew moreand more of the fringes of the Jewish community into the city's last comfortableembrace. It wasn't unusual for five hundred people to fill the hall, chantingtogether and praying for peace.

In March 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria. The public adulation that followedcemented Hitler's control of power and reinforced his ideology of"Deutschland über alles"—"Germany above all." He was forming, hesaid, a new German empire that would last a thousand years. German empire?Germany above all? The Jews of Karlsruhe believed war was inevitable. Not justagainst them, but against the whole of Europe.

A month later, on April 28, 1938, Max and Suse Ettlinger rode the train fiftymiles to the U.S. consulate in Stuttgart. They had been applying for years toSwitzerland, Great Britain, France, and the United States for permission toemigrate, but all their applications had been denied. They weren't seekingpapers now, only answers to a few questions, but the consulate was crammed withpeople and in complete disarray. The couple was led from room to room, unsure ofwhere they were going or why. Questions were asked and forms filled out. A fewdays later, a letter arrived. Their application for emigration to the UnitedStates was being processed. April 28, it turned out, was the last day the UnitedStates was taking requests for emigration; the mysterious paperwork had beentheir application. The Ettlingers were getting out.

But first, Harry had to celebrate his bar mitzvah. The ceremony was scheduledfor January 1939, with the family to leave thereafter. Harry spent the summerstudying Hebrew and English while the family's possessions disappeared. Somewere sent to friends and relatives, but most of their personal items were boxedfor passage to America. Jews weren't allowed to take money out of thecountry—which made the 100 percent tax paid to the Nazi Party for shippingall but meaningless—but they were still allowed to keep a few possessions,a luxury that would be stripped from them by the end of the year.

In July, Harry's bar mitzvah ceremony was moved forward to October 1938.Emboldened by his success in Austria, Hitler proclaimed that if the Sudetenland,a small stretch of territory made part of Czechoslovakia after World War I, wasnot given to Germany, the country would go to war for it. The mood was somber.War seemed not only inevitable, but imminent. At the synagogue, the prayers forpeace became more frequent, and more desperate. In August, the Ettlingers movedup the date of their son's bar mitzvah ceremony, and their passage out ofGermany, another three weeks.

In September, twelve-year-old Harry and his two brothers took the trainseventeen miles to Bruchsal to visit their grandparents for the last time. Thetextile business had failed, and his grandparents were moving to the nearby townof Baden-Baden. Oma (Grandma) Oppenheimer fixed the boys a simple lunch. OpaOppenheimer showed them, one last time, a few select pieces from his collectionof prints. He was a student of the world and a minor patron of the arts. His artcollection contained almost two thousand prints, primarily ex libris bookplatesand works by minor German Impressionists working in the late 1890s and early1900s. One of the best was a print, made by a local artist, of the self-portraitby Rembrandt that hung in the Karlsruhe museum. The painting was a jewel of themuseum's collection. Opa Oppenheimer had admired it often on his visits to themuseum for lectures and meetings, but he hadn't seen the painting in five years.Harry had never seen it, despite living four blocks away from it his whole life.In 1933, the museum had barred entry to Jews.

Putting the prints away at last, Opa Oppenheimer turned to the globe. "You boysare going to become Americans," he told them sadly, "and your enemy is going tobe"—he spun the globe and placed his finger not on Berlin, but onTokyo—"the Japanese."

A week later, on September 24, 1938, Harry Ettlinger celebrated his bar mitzvahin Karlsruhe's magnificent Kronenstrasse Synagogue. The service lasted threehours, in the middle of which Harry rose to read from the Torah, singing thepassages in ancient Hebrew as had been done for thousands of years. Thesynagogue was filled to capacity. This was a ceremony to honor his passage intoadulthood, his hope for the future, but to so many the chance for a life inKarlsruhe seemed lost. The jobs were gone; the Jewish community was shunned andharassed; Hitler was daring the Western powers to oppose him. After theceremony, the rabbi took Harry's parents aside and told them not to delay, toleave not tomorrow but that very afternoon, on the 1:00 p.m. train toSwitzerland. His parents were stunned. The rabbi was advocating travel onShabbat, the day of rest. It was unheard of.

The ten-block walk home seemed long. The celebratory meal of cold sandwiches waseaten quietly in an empty apartment. The only guests were Oma and OpaOppenheimer, Harry's other grandmother Oma Jennie, and her sister Tante (Aunt)Rosa, both of whom had moved in with the family around the time GebrüderEttlinger went bankrupt. When Harry's mother told Opa Oppenheimer what the rabbihad advised, the veteran of the German army went to the window, looked ontoKaiserstrasse, and saw dozens of soldiers milling about in their uniforms.

"If the war would start today," the canny veteran said, "all these soldierswould be off the street and in their barracks. The war will not start today."

Harry's father, also a proud veteran of the German army, agreed. The family leftnot that afternoon, but the next morning on the first train to Switzerland. OnOctober 9, 1938, they arrived in New York harbor. Exactly one month later, onNovember 9, the Nazis used the assassination of a diplomat to put into fullforce their crusade against German Jews. Kristallnacht, the Night ofBroken Glass, saw the destruction of more than seven thousand Jewish businessesand two hundred synagogues. The Jewish men of Karlsruhe, including OpaOppenheimer, were rounded up and put in the nearby Dachau internment camp. Themagnificent hundred-year-old Kronenstrasse Synagogue, where only weeks beforeHeinz Ludwig Chaim Ettlinger had celebrated his bar mitzvah, was burned to theground. Harry Ettlinger was the last boy ever to have his bar mitzvah ceremonyin the old synagogue of Karlsruhe.

But this story isn't about the Kronenstrasse Synagogue, the internment camp atDachau, or even the Holocaust against the Jews. It is about a different act ofnegation and aggression Hitler perpetrated on the people and nations of Europe:his war on their culture. For when Private Harry Ettlinger, U.S. Army, finallyreturned to Karlsruhe, it wasn't to search for his lost relatives or the remainsof his community; it was to determine the fate of another aspect of his heritagestripped away by the Nazi regime: his grandfather's beloved art collection. Inthe process he would discover, buried six hundred feet underground, something hehad always known about but never expected to see: the Rembrandt of Karlsruhe.

CHAPTER 2

Hitler's Dream

Florence, Italy May 1938

In early May 1938, a few days after Harry Ettlinger's parents accidentallysigned their applications for emigration to America, Adolf Hitler made one ofhis first trips outside Germany and Austria. The trip was a state visit toItaly, to meet his Fascist ally Benito Mussolini.

Rome, so vast, so monumental, so redolent of empire with its massive, columnedruins, almost certainly humbled him. Its splendor—not its current splendorbut the reflection of ancient Rome—made Berlin seem a mere provincialoutpost. Rome was what he wanted his German capital to become. He had beenmoving toward conquest for years, planning his subjugation of Europe, but Romesparked the idea of empire. Since 1936, he had been discussing with hispersonal architect, Albert Speer, a plan to rebuild Berlin on a massive scale.After Rome, he told Speer to build not just for today, but for the future. Hewanted to create monuments that over the centuries would become elegant ruins sothat a thousand years into the Reich, humankind would still be looking in awe atthe symbols of his power.

Hitler found the smaller-scale Florence, the art capital of Italy, similarlyinspiring. Here, in the intimate cluster of buildings that marked the birthplaceof the Italian Renaissance, was the cultural heart of Europe. Nazi flagsfluttered; the citizens cheered; but the artwork moved him. He spent more thanthree hours in the Uffizi Gallery, staring in wonder at its famous works of art.His entourage tried to keep him moving. Behind him, Mussolini, who had neverwillingly stepped foot in an art museum in his life, muttered in exasperation,"Tutti questi quadri ..."—"All these paintings ..." But AdolfHitler would not be hurried.

As a young man, he had dreamed of being an artist and an architect. That dreamhad been crushed when his application to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna wasrejected by a panel of so-called art experts he believed to be Jews. He hadwandered in the wilderness for a decade, almost destitute and virtually livingon the streets. But his true destiny had finally revealed itself. He was notdestined to create, but to remake. To purge, and then rebuild. To make an empireout of Germany, the greatest the world had ever seen. The strongest; the mostdisciplined; the most racially pure. Berlin would be his Rome, but a trueartist-emperor needed a Florence. And he knew where to build it.

Less than two months earlier, on Sunday, March 13, 1938, Adolf Hitler had placeda wreath on his parents' grave in his adopted hometown of Linz, Austria. Theafternoon before, March 12, had seen the fulfillment of one of his greatambitions. He, who had once been rejected and ignored, had crossed from Germany,which he now ruled, into his native Austria, which he had just annexed into theReich. At every town, the crowds cheered his convoy and mobbed his touring car.Mothers cried with joy at the sight of him; children showered him with flowersand adulation. In Linz, he was hailed as a conquering hero, a savior of hiscountry and his race.
(Continues...)Excerpted from The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel, Bret Witter. Copyright © 2009 Robert M. Edsel Bret Witter. Excerpted by permission of Center Street.
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