Summary of Robert M. Edsel's The Monuments Men

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The Monuments Men were a group of men and women from thirteen nations, who volunteered for service in the newly created Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section. They were tasked with saving as much of the culture of Europe as they could during combat.
#2 The city of Karlsruhe, in southwestern Germany, was founded in 1715 by the Margrave Karl Wilhelm von Baden-Durlach. It was a rare luxury for Jews to be allowed to settle where they pleased, and in 1718, a Jewish congregation was established there.
#3 The Ettlingers were not strictly observant Jews, but they still went to the Kronenstrasse Synagogue. The synagogue was a large, ornate hundred-year-old building. The men wore pressed black suits and black top hats, and the women sat in the upper balconies.
#4 In March 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria. The public adulation that followed cemented Hitler’s control of power and reinforced his ideology of Deutschland über alles, or Germany above all. In July, the Ettlingers moved up the date of their son’s bar mitzvah ceremony, and their passage out of Germany another three weeks.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Military
• World War II
• History
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669395867
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Robert M. Edsel's The Monuments Men
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Monuments Men were a group of men and women from thirteen nations, who volunteered for service in the newly created Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section. They were tasked with saving as much of the culture of Europe as they could during combat.

#2

The city of Karlsruhe, in southwestern Germany, was founded in 1715 by the Margrave Karl Wilhelm von Baden-Durlach. It was a rare luxury for Jews to be allowed to settle where they pleased, and in 1718, a Jewish congregation was established there.

#3

The Ettlingers were not strictly observant Jews, but they still went to the Kronenstrasse Synagogue. The synagogue was a large, ornate hundred-year-old building. The men wore pressed black suits and black top hats, and the women sat in the upper balconies.

#4

In March 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria. The public adulation that followed cemented Hitler’s control of power and reinforced his ideology of Deutschland über alles, or Germany above all. In July, the Ettlingers moved up the date of their son’s bar mitzvah ceremony, and their passage out of Germany another three weeks.

#5

In September 1938, Harry Ettlinger, who was 12 at the time, went to visit his grandparents for the last time. His grandparents were Jewish, and they were moving to Baden-Baden. Opa Oppenheimer showed him a few select pieces from his art collection.

#6

When Harry Ettlinger returned to Karlsruhe, he was not looking for his relatives or the remains of his community. He was there to retrieve the art collection of his grandfather, which had been stolen by the Nazis.

#7

In early May 1938, Adolf Hitler made one of his first trips outside Germany and Austria. He met with his Fascist ally Benito Mussolini in Rome, and spent more than three hours in the Uffizi Gallery staring in wonder at its famous works of art.

#8

The Führermuseum was to be Hitler’s artistic legacy. It was to be the most spectacular art museum in history, and it would house the personal collection he had begun amassing in the 1920s.

#9

Hitler had already purged the German cultural establishment by 1938, rewriting the laws to strip German Jews of their citizenship and confiscate their art. He would use these laws to gather the great artwork of Europe and sweep it back into the Fatherland.

#10

The American museum community had been buzzing with activity since the Nazis took Paris in 1940. It had taken the British almost a year to retrofit an enormous mine in Manod, Wales, for the safe storage of evacuated artwork.

#11

The American Museum community was summoned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the morning of December 20, 1941. They were there to discuss the possibility of an air raid on a major American city.

#12

The American museum community was shocked by the images Sachs presented. They had unanimously agreed that America’s museums would remain open as long as humanly possible.

#13

In time of war, museums are important to the community. They are a source of inspiration and fortification for the spirit on which victory depends.

#14

Stout’s solution was to train a large new class of conservators, who could handle the largest and most dangerous upheaval in the history of Western art. He proposed the training would take five years, even as he admitted the art world was in crisis.

#15

The Führer has decided that the ownership status before the war in France, before the declaration of war on 1 September 1939, will be the criterion for seizing cultural goods. He has reserved the right to decide what should be done with them.

#16

George Stout was not a typical museum official. He was a blue-collar kid from the small town of Winterset, Iowa, who went straight into the army after graduating from the University of Iowa in 1926. He spent five years saving up for the tour of the cultural centers of Europe that was the unspoken prerequisite of a career in the arts.

#17

The art world realized that Germany’s powerful weapons had made the bulk of Europe’s great artistic masterpieces susceptible to destruction. The Europeans and British began to develop plans for protection and evacuation, and George Stout began to slowly compile a set of scientific principles for the evaluation and preservation of paintings and visual arts.

#18

Stout was convinced that only his dedicated corps of special workmen, trained in art conservation, could accomplish anything of lasting value in the coming war. But the museum directors were trying to land a high-level cultural committee to advise the military.

#19

The decision to enlist in the navy gnawed at him because of his family. He was married and the father of two sons, and he knew that his modest military pay would barely support them.

#20

The Einsatzstab Rosenberg, in cooperation with the Chief of Military Administration in Paris, would seize Jewish art property in France. The Chief of Military Administration Paris would auction the art objects, and the proceeds would be assigned to the French State for benefit of the French dependents of war casualties.

#21

In 1943, the British reached Leptis Magna, a Roman ruin only sixty-four miles east of Tripoli. It was here that Lieutenant Colonel Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler, Royal Artillery, British North African Army, beheld the majesty of Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus’s imperial city.

#22

The British army was repeating the same mistake the Italians had made in 1940, when they claimed that the ruins of Cyrene were destroyed by British and Australian troops. The most complete Roman ruin in Africa was Leptis Magna, and the British army was doing nothing to protect it.

#23

When an archeologist and artillery captain from the London Museum, Lieutenant Colonel John Bryan Ward-Perkins, and an archeologist from the American Museum of Natural History, William L. Woolley, were assigned to help protect Libya’s ancient sites, they insisted that the sites be made accessible to troops.

#24

In 1943, American President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met for a secret summit in Casablanca, Morocco. They agreed on an invasion of Europe, but not across the English Channel. They would go in through the back door: the island of Sicily.

#25

The Allies landed in Sicily on the night of July 9–10, 1943. Hammond, low on the priority list for transportation, didn’t arrive in Syracuse until July 29. In Syracuse, his first headquarters, the weather was warm but pleasantly breezy. There was nothing for him to do.

#26

The American commission that was created to protect and salvage art and historical monuments in Europe was not the frontline specialist force that Stout had envisioned, but another layer of bureaucracy.

#27

The arrival of the principal shipment of ownerless Jewish cultural property in the salvage location Neuschwanstein was reported on March 20, 1941. It was secured by my staff for Special Purposes in Paris. The shipment consisted chiefly of the most important parts of the collections Rothschild, Seligmann, Bernheim-Jeune, Halphen, Kann, Weil-Picard, Wildenstein, and David-Weill.

#28

The Battle for Italy was one of the bloodiest of the war. The campaign hadn’t been easy since the Italians surrendered on September 3, but Hitler had anticipated Italy’s lack of resolve and stationed German troops throughout the country.

#29

The abbey of Monte Cassino, which had been founded by Saint Benedict around AD 529, was a sacred ground and a symbol of the preservation and cultivation of the things of the mind and the spirit during times of great stress.

#30

The abbey at Monte Cassino was destroyed by Allied bombing in February 1944. It would take the Allies three months to capture the mountain. The Germans and Italians turned the tables on the Allies, suggesting that if the Allies were willing to destroy a historic site, the Germans and Italians would be the barbarians and traitors.

#31

I took the liberty to present you with a folder containing photos of some of the most valuable paintings that my Einsatzstab, in compliance with your order, seized from Jewish art collections in the occupied Western territories. These photos represented an addition to the collection of 53 valuable objects of art that had been delivered to you previously.

#32

The first spring buds were on the trees in Shrivenham, a small rural village about halfway between Bristol and London. The mood was different there than it was in the cities, as the soldiers were overpaid, oversexed, and overfed, but they were still terrified.

#33

The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives subcommission was a joint operation between the United States and Britain, run by the Civil Affairs branch of the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories. They were in charge of conservation issues.

#34

The American military and museum community was able to create the conservation corps based on the lessons learned in North Africa and Sicily.