Entertainment, Books - Air Force Times

Rescue mission

Most books about war focus on the battles, the lives lost and the strategic meaning of it all. "Rescuing Da Vinci" is something else altogether. This is a book about the contrast of good and evil and how two armies that each conquered Europe -- first the Nazis, and then the American-led Allies -- treated the treasures in their paths.

That the Nazis sought to destroy the cultures of their Slavic neighbors is no surprise. That they systematically stole artistic treasures under a plan devised by the Führer himself to establish an enormous, lavish museum in his hometown of Linz, Austria, probably is. Author Robert Edsel and a team of researchers spent three years pulling together this compelling collection of vintage photographs and stunning quotations to tell the story of the Nazis' bizarre artistic sensibilities and of a rejected artist who inflicted his revenge upon the entire continent.

Adolf Hitler had once aspired to be a painter. "Never!" his father had said, and yet young Hitler persisted. Hitler was, in fact, a reasonably good painter and considered himself an artist until his dying day. But when he was not accepted into the art academy in Vienna, his dreams were dashed. The "Führer Museum" he planned for Linz was to be a rebuke to Vienna, the cultural capital of his native country, and was intended to make Linz eclipse Vienna as a cultural center.

Hitler's partner in crime, Hermann Goering, considered himself a connoisseur, Edsel writes, and had his own personal curator. He told a conference of Nazi occupation commissioners in 1942, "I intend to plunder, and do it thoroughly." Later, after the war, he complained to an American Army psychiatrist during the Nuremburg trials, "They ... tried to paint a picture of me as a looter of art treasures." His excuse: "During a war, everybody loots a little bit."

Yet if the world had never seen an invading power so hungry to loot its neighbors' museums and personal art collections, neither had it seen a power so resolute in protecting those treasures.

Contrast Goering with Gen. Omar Bradley, for example, who wrote in a memo to his commanding generals, "We are a conquering army, but we are not a pillaging army."

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower told commanders that architectural treasures were not more valuable than the lives of American troops, but if they could be saved, they should be saved. Indeed, as Edsel writes, more than a year before D-Day, the Army had begun to assemble its own team of curators, the "Monument Men," to help identify churches and other treasures to be avoided in Allied bombing.

But it was only after the Americans invaded that the extent of the German looting was clear and that vast stashes of stolen works from France, Italy, Poland and elsewhere were uncovered. Edsel writes that the troops may not have always recognized the value of the art, but stockpiles of gold, diamonds and cash "needed little explanation."

To a modern service member, some of this will now begin to be eerily familiar. A photograph of Nazi gold and cash reserves lined up in the bottom of a salt mine in Germany brings to mind images of Saddam Hussein's gold hoards in Iraq; old Army photographs documenting U.S. troops unearthing masterworks by Manet, Rembrandt and Vermeer will remind you of images of soldiers sorting through the riches of Saddam's palaces after the 2003 invasion; pictures of the Nazis looting their victims are reminiscent of Iraqis looting antiquities from Baghdad museums following the fall of Saddam's regime.

The book is a labor of love for Edsel, who is not a trained art historian but a Dallas businessman and collector who became fascinated with the subject while living in Italy. This is not a novel or a small book -- it's a coffee-table collector's edition with high production values and exceptional reproduction. The book is not available through online booksellers such as Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble, but check out the author's interactive Web site, www.rescuingdavinci.com to buy the book or for more information about Edsel's project.

Much is said about how the media miss too many of the good things that the military does. Even though it recounts a tale that is more than 60 years old, "Rescuing Da Vinci" is one of those good-news stories that makes one proud to be an American and proud of what makes our nation and our military different.

‘Rescuing Da Vinci.’ By Robert Edsel. Paurel Publishing. 320 pages. $55.