‘Monuments Man’ Review: On the Hunt for the Art Hitler Stole

James Rorimer (1905-1966) was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when America entered the war. (He would serve as the museum’s director from 1955 until his death.) Beginning in August 1944, two months after D-Day, he spent the remainder of the war first in France, then in Germany and Austria, as what was officially known as a Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives officer. His memoir of that time, “Survival: The Salvage and Protection of Art in War,” published in 1950 and long out of print, has now been reissued as “Monuments Man: The Mission to Save Vermeers, Rembrandts, Da Vincis, and More From the Nazis’ Grasp.”

A project of the author’s children, Louis and Anne, “Monuments Man” comes with extensive footnotes, sidebars and abundant photographs. It also features an introduction by Lynn H. Nicholas, whose “The Rape of Europa” (1994) remains the definitive chronicle of this baleful episode in the cultural history of the West. The result is a book that combines the best of two genres: It is a vivid, boots-on-the-ground memoir that puts you at the center of the action. (“The Tuileries Garden and the Champs-Élysées had seen hideous combat,” Rorimer writes of post-Liberation Paris. “The bores of the guns ringing these areas were still hot from the last shells they had fired.”) At the same time, the book has the broad historical context of the best scholarly studies. “Monuments Man” is an utterly extraordinary—and extraordinarily important—book.

Rorimer volunteered for service in the Army after Pearl Harbor. Upon arriving in Normandy, his assignment was to assess the damage to the region’s churches and other historic structures, a task so vast he likened it to “trying to scoop up wine from a broken keg.”

Several months earlier, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had announced that “inevitably, in the path of our advance will be found historical monuments and cultural centers which symbolize to the world all that we are fighting to preserve. It is the responsibility of every commander to protect and respect these symbols whenever possible.” Eight decades on, that remains the best argument in defense of cultural heritage, even in an environment where lives are on the line. But as Rorimer was to find, it quickly collided with the reality on the ground: an invading army battling to secure territory while advancing to defeat the enemy. When he asked for permission to check on Mont St. Michel, the island abbey off the Normandy coast, one commanding officer barked, “This is 20th-century war. Who gives a damn about medieval walls and boiling pitch?” In the end he was allowed to go—and found the abbey intact.

After several weeks Rorimer was ordered to Paris, where his already large job became exponentially larger. “We started out to preserve monuments,” he said in a postwar interview. “We ended up catching thieves and their loot.”

Hitler had planned a vast German cultural center in Linz, Austria, for after the war. One feature was to be a Führermuseum featuring the cream of Europe’s artistic patrimony. To that end, he initiated a campaign of systematic looting of museums, churches, art galleries and private collections across much of Europe, the objects put on trains and shipped east to salt mines and remote castles in Germany and Austria. The project was overseen by Hermann Goering and run by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). In Paris they used the Jeu de Paume museum as the primary collection point, inventorying the stolen art and recording its destination before shipping it out. Goering and Hitler used the operation to enrich their personal collections, too, with the former making no fewer than 20 visits to the Jeu de Paume to make his selections.

In its long history, Europe had seen nothing like this. Rome had been sacked many times, and Napoleon had carried on an extensive campaign of looting, but this was vastly different. The Nazis were motivated by the glorification of a monstrous ideology, furthering the aims of the Final Solution—many of the hundreds of private collections belonged to Jews—and straightforward cupidity. One of the most dispiriting photographs in the book shows Hitler presenting Goering with an Old Master painting as a birthday present—Europe’s art treasures reduced to the playthings of dictators and their henchmen.

Scale was another factor. Rorimer writes that the German mine in Kochendorf held 30,000 cases filled with art works. That was one mine of eight. Then there were the castles, railroad cars and the Nazi leaders’ individual hideaways. Small wonder that Rorimer was moved to ask himself whether a full inventory would ever be possible.

The Nazis broke with historical precedent in one further respect: Hitler decided that if he couldn’t have the spoils, nobody could. When the Allies secured the Altaussee mine in Austria, they discovered that it had been rigged with explosives meant to be detonated by retreating German forces. Among the treasures they found inside were Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432), perhaps the supreme work of the Renaissance in northern Europe; Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna (1501-04); and Vermeer’s “The Astronomer” (c. 1668).

Fortunately, there was one unexpected obstacle to Hitler’s grand ambitions: a modest, low-level functionary at the Jeu de Paume named Rose Valland, whom Louis and Anne Rorimer rightly describe as “the secret savior of French culture.” At night Valland would take home the lists of artworks and their destinations, copy them and return them to their files in the morning, passing the information to the director of the Louvre and the Resistance. These were activities that, had she been caught, could have cost her life. Yet, as Rorimer writes, “Her blind devotion to French art made no allowance for any thoughts of personal danger.”

When Rorimer met her, Valland was coy and wary about what she knew, reluctant to release or even acknowledge the existence of her trove of information. But he gradually gained her trust, thus securing the roadmap the Allies needed to recover Europe’s lost art. This makes Rorimer a hero too. Without that bond, the story might have had a very different outcome.

“Monuments Man” is a book to be read slowly in order to properly digest its story of individuals working with limited resources, often sketchy information and at great personal risk to keep faith with the great emblems of European civilization.

Just as important is the book’s larger lesson. Wandering through our museums today, with their thoughtful displays and well-tended objects, it’s easy to take their collections for granted. But as Hitler, the Taliban, Islamic State and now Vladimir Putin have demonstrated, the life of art isn’t permanent but contingent. And it is destined to remain so as long as barbarism and malice endure.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Arts in Review editor.