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

Monuments Men : Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History
ISBN: 9781848091030
Publication Date: 3 June 2010

From 1943 to 1951, 350 or so men and women from thirteen Alliednations served as the men and women of the Monuments, Fine Arts andArchives section (MFAA) of the Allied armed forces, the eyes, ears andhands of the first and most ambitious effort in history to preserve theworld's cultural heritage in times of war.

They were known simply asMonuments Men. But during the thick of the fighting in Europe, fromD-Day to V-E Day, when Germany surrendered, there were only sixty-fiveMonuments Men in the forward operating area. Sixty-five men to coverthousands of square miles, save hundreds of damaged buildings and findmillions of cultural items before the Nazis could destroy them forever.

Monuments Men is the story of eight of these men in the forwardoperating theatre: America's top art conservator; an up-and-comingyoung museum curator; a sculptor; a straight-arrow architect; a gay NewYork cultural impresario; and an infantry private with no priorknowledge of or appreciation for art, but first-hand experience as avictim of the Nazi regime.

They built their own treasure maps from scraps and hints: the diary ofa Louvre curator who secretly tracked Nazi plunder through the Parisrail yards; records recovered from bombed out cathedrals and museums;overheard conversations; a tip from a dentist while getting a rootcanal. They started off moving in different directions, but ended upheading for the same place at the same time: the Alps near theGerman-Austrian border in the last two weeks of the war, where thegreat treasure caches of the Nazis were stored: the artwork of Paris,stolen mostly from Jewish collectors and dealers; masterworks from themuseums of Naples and Florence; and the greatest prize of all, Hitler'spersonal hoard of masterpieces, looted from the most impo...