Book Review

MONUMENTS MEN: A book review.

I have been interested in the promotions seen on TV of the movie, so I ordered the book on my Kindle. At first read the book is quite scholarly but does not read so deadly dull that you lose interest. I was also interested in reading about some World History that never got covered in my high school classes. We were barely taught to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.

It all starts with a little back history. England began evacuation, preservation schemes for major art early on 1938, valuable stuff stored deep in the wilds of Wales.

Prior to D Day, General Eisenhower wrote an order establishing the Monuments Men group. Most of the men who were members were conservators or managers of well known American museums.

The story is told from the viewpoint of several of the men. They were amongst the troops almost from the beginning, however, they did not have senior military commanders, support, personnel. They were pretty much on their own armed only with the order from Eisenhower and ingenuity.

Eventually the group got a little better organized and supported. It is very hard to make official reports with eight copies without a typewriter and even harder if it gets stolen.

These gentleman discovered a salt mine that held millions of dollars of gold bullion, gold coins and gold teeth that had been removed from Death Camp Jews. The mine also held thousands of pieces of looted art work.

One of these pieces was the Alter piece of Ghent. See picture above.

Oh yeah and the mine was rigged to be blown up according to the Nero Policy by Hitler. The miners actually removed the bombs before the mine could be blown up.

Hollywood has to cut and edit to get the story to fit the time length so the movie cannot reflect exactly what happened; boys look for looted art, boys find looted art, boys break their backs getting looted art back to Poland, France and eventually even to Germany. At one point a French conservator reported that she had spied on the Nazi's shipments of art from her place of work. One place was Neuchshwanstein (Think Sleeping Beauty's castle). On their way there they stopped in many smaller German castles and even met an ancient German Duchess; very high German, imperial and nasty. Hope that bit made it into the movie.

The Monuments Men were also tasked to evaluate monuments such as partially destroyed towns such as Cologne, not much left. This is the only war in such an effort was made to save, preserve and conserve so much art. There has never been a repeat for any war. One of the men volunteered in 1953 for the Korean War and was refused. There have been efforts to help restore art looted from Iran with some partial success. I guess the decision makers decided that restoring looted art was not worth the effort if people were dying of radiation poisoning.

I definitely want to order the movie when it becomes available. I truly do not enjoy dragging myself to a movie theater especially if some guy decides to start shooting.

I recommend the book if you are feeling scholarly.