Behind The Movie, Tales From The Real-Life 'Monuments Men'
George Stout, the real-life conservator and museum director who helped start the Monuments Men, is the basis for Clooney's character — who explains, in the film, why the team's mission is a critical one:
"You can wipe out a generation of people," he says. "You can burn their homes to the ground, and somehow they'll still come back. But if you destroy their achievements, and their history, then it's like they never existed."
That part of the story is true, as far as it goes. The Nazis stole artwork on a scale like no one before or since. They plundered museums and churches across Europe and seized works from Jewish collectors. In response, the U.S. created the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the army — better known as the Monuments Men. Charles Parkhurst, its deputy chief, was featured in the documentary The Rape of Europa, released a year before he died in 2008.
"There was lots of German art hidden where they thought it would be safe during the fighting," Parkhurst said in the documentary. "And it was our duty to search, and find, and save."
They found stuff everywhere — hidden in caves, bank vaults, remote castles, even in salt mines.
Harry Ettlinger, now 88 and living in New Jersey, was born in Germany but fled with his parents when Hitler came to power. Drafted into the army in 1944, he wound up wound up in the Monuments Men in part because he could speak German. That's how Ettlinger found himself hundreds of feet below ground in a salt mine in southern Germany, sifting through 40,000 cases of artworks that the Nazis had stored there for safekeeping.
"It became part of my job to actually take the case, and ... have it brought to the surface," he says.
i i