Exploring the FAIC Oral History Project in Light of the "Monuments Men" Film

By Rebecca Rushfield, for a Google Art panel that was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Feb. 7, 2014
The FAIC oral history interviews contain material on a wide variety of subjects some of which are of interest primarily to conservation professionals while others will have a much wider audience. The recent opening of the film “Monuments Men” gave Rebecca Rushfield a chance to explain what the archive of interviews held on the subject of the preservation of Western cultural heritage before and during World War II.
The Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program under the Civil Affairs and Military Government Sections of the Allied armies was just one aspect of the effort to protect Western cultural heritage during World War II. Each nation put in motion plans for protecting its monuments be it by encasing historic buildings in scaffolding, supporting walls, and sandbags or by moving its most important artifacts far from the line of fire. Information about these efforts is available in archival documents and publications, but the events are most vividly and personally captured in the reminiscences of their participants.
The Oral History Project of the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation was established in 1974. Its first interview was a five-person discussion held in Mexico City on September 4, 1974. That interview touched upon the subject of conservation efforts during World War II and included as a participant George Stout, one of the “Monuments Men.” Using excerpts from interviews in the FAIC archives, I will present several individuals’ stories of the art and monuments protection efforts leading up to and during World War II.
 
In 1941, George Stout was the head of the Harvard University Fogg Art Museum conservation department. He recalled the preparations for the coming war that took place at Harvard University. ” I was asked to sit with the American Defence Harvard Group – they were interested in public opinion and cultivating attitudes. When Pearl Harbor came and everyone got the wind up. Francis Taylor had a meeting of mostly museum directors and a few technical people … there were half a dozen of us – discussing what are we going to do about evacuating our museums – getting things out where they won’t be bombed, all that kind of thing.”
A conference on the emergency protection of works of art was planned. Stout recalled, “It was planned after December of ’41 – and held … March, ’42.”
Well, actually, we had it almost demanded of us really, by kind of a general pressure of public opinion – what are you doing? Are you getting ready? Everybody thought we were going to be bombed any moment the way London had been. There was all that pressure of public alarm that was quite current in those early months of our entry into the Second World War.”
In1941, Craig Hugh Smyth was a senior research assistant at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. When the decision was made to move the Gallery’s treasures away from Washington, D.C. to a location less likely to be bombed, he was put in charge of the move. He said, “In December of ’41 came Pearl Harbor and the National Gallery had to evacuate its pictures and I was sent with them, to take care of the collection of the country. So I had the experience of nothing to do, except look at pictures and sculpture. I was there for about 6 weeks to 2 months, I think. With my wife—we had just gotten married that year. It was a great start—I must say—to have our own collection. “ … “[The paintings] were in the Biltmore House at Asheville, N.C. The National Gallery never did things by halves…if it was going to have a house in the country, it would have the best house in the country—so to speak.”… “It was great. But it was far in the country and nobody was supposed to know that National Gallery pictures were there. But the National Gallery wasn’t very wise and they shipped these things down with great labels on the outside…that said precisely what was in them! So the whole countryside knew and we had a guard—a force of guards there—my first administrative post. And one of the guards decided that the Germans would attack and come up the river—which was so small that no one could come up it.”
Harold Plenderleith, head of the Scientific Laboratory at the British Museum remembered that in the 1930s, “I was once asked about giving lectures to the Portuguese army by our foreign office. Well, I happened to know something about the war, you see. I was asked to go and give them a talk about preservation of the cultural property in the event of armed conflict. About a fortnight before, the foreign office telephoned to say, “Was everything all right for my lecture?” “Oh, yes,” I said. “Oh, that’s all right then you will be lecturing in French, of course.” “Not on your life,” said I. “Oh yes but we want you to do it in French. What I did was to write out the lecture in detail in English and get it to a professional to put it into French. Then learn the thing off by heart in French which was a terrific effort. I first of all had to give this lecture in Madrid. Half the audience was in uniform-brass hats and so on. I did my little histories and showed them some frightful war time slides that I had drawn and painted specially to horrify them and they were tremendously impressed! I was immediately invited to go and do it again in Oporto.”
He recalled that “A few years later, in 1938 a year or so before the outbreak of the Second World War, we realized that we were heading for possible disaster if war should break out. [Ian] Rawlins and I wrote a little booklet about first aid treatment of museum material. I forget what it was called–our text was never published. It was diverted to the protection of museum objects in war-time. This got to the attention of the directors of museums in London, particularly the British Museum. They asked if they could see it and later on said they would take it over and they published it. That was fine. We were involved by this means. We had gotten most of the practical information disseminated and urgently needed before we were involved in war in 1939. For example, how to make standard boxes to be stored in minimum space so that they could be speedily made up into containers in emergency. Lists of stuff we should get together while the going was good and could have standing by. We had all that planned and they published the thing so that it was ready in good time. Then the Ministry of Works purchased large quantities of essential materials and made them available to museums and picture galleries for use in protecting the collections in war time.”
As war came nearer, “My job was to assist the director whose name was Sir John Fordyce. He planned the actual siteing of the objects when it became necessary to decentralize and I used to trudge around to help him in selecting sites and in deploying caretaker staff. [The objects] were taken to about 15 of the sort of major house in England – country houses. Decentralization we called it. Then after that there came what we called, “The Baedeker bombing.” The Germans started bombing these bigger houses. (for the coming war Baedeker is a well known guidebook.). That became a great source of worry and we couldn’t by this time get any of the good bomb-proof sites for they had all been acquired already by others. We were quite stumped. Someone went to Churchill for advice and he said, ‘Well, you might like to have a look at an underground limestone quarry near Bath. I’ll allocate a quarry and you can see that.’ “
When war came, Plenderleith was too old to be commissioned, so he was put in charge of the safety of the Museum. He said, “I had no staff. You see everyone who was there was in the army or engaged in war work. I had had my “whack” in the army in the First World War. Of course, I was now over age and of course much more useful at the museum than anywhere else. I knew the museum. It was a very complicated structure; acres of rooms. I had to train staff from other departments who didn’t know the museum. Where were the places you could get out if you were trapped? Where were the places where the most valuable things were kept? Where were the keys? … I used to arrange training emergencies you see on Sundays for example, a wooden hoop covered with paper like a drum and marked as an incendiary bomb – 500 pounds bomb, I would stick that somewhere in the museum and then I would blow off the alarm. These trainees were the salvage people, it was their job to find the so called bomb and take appropriate action. They were timed, you see. They had to report what action they had taken. Where was the nearest hydrant, because we had our own pressure hydrants all over the museum? They had to act as firemen too. We used to have that sort of emergency training and it served to be very valuable… I lived at the museum all the time. I was asked to go in and do this by Sir John Fordyce the Director to come in on the weekend that the war was declared, September 1939.”
When the U.S. entered the War, Craig Smyth was young and was commissioned in the Navy. He recalled how he became part of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives unit. “Well at the end of the war, the Allies knew that they were going to have to deal with the art objects in Germany. That A: which Germany owned, that which was stored off in various repositories and B: the works of art that the Nazis had taken from occupied countries. There was already a Monuments Art and Archives section of the United States army, but as the war drew to a close, I knew they were going to have more people in it. So they looked for people already in the armed services, who had some experience. And I was suddenly ordered to—in France and then into Germany, and then assigned there to establish a collecting point in Munich for works of art in that—in the Southern section of Germany, which had to be taken in from repositories. And above all, the Hitlerian loot, which was in the salt mines in Austria especially—but in other places too—so for a year, I was the head of this establishment and ran the Collecting Point and began repatriation of works of art to the countries that they were stolen from. And obviously—yet again—it was a question of taking emergency care of objects that were in bad condition. So I learned something about that in the process, but I also learned how hearty works of art can be. Some of them had been through an awful lot.”
A laboratory was established and staffed. Smyth recalled, “This was a thing that required in the end, a staff of—well, first and last—over a hundred people, which had to be Germans. We had to find people whom we thought we could trust. Which was not hard to do in fact. There were people who came out of the walls, who had stayed away from the Nazis. And among them, some really good people…. So yes, I was the one who made decisions, but very often there was somebody else who said, this has to be done. It was an odd thing that the amount of responsibility that came to the head of a Collecting Point like that, because the Allies were supposed to have a great international committee to decide about all such things and decide about what works of art went back to the countries from which they had been taken. And in the end, the head of the Collecting Point was the person to ask—so it was all very odd.”
While Smyth’s recollections were of the work that took place at the end of the war, Caroline Keck recalled her husband Sheldon Keck’s participation in an earlier, more dangerous event. She said, “In England by D-Day and in France a few weeks later, he [Sheldon] was almost lost during the debacle in the Heurtgen Forest. At long last he was assigned to the Arts Unit as a technical sergeant.” Sheldon and Walter Huchthausen, another member of the MFAA unit were together and accidently drove their jeep into a battle line of the Ruhr Pocket. “Walter’s body saved Sheldon’s life. Both fell from the jeep into foxholes. Later, our advancing troops found Sheldon. Walter had been killed instantly.”
Caught up in the glamour of our talk about great art, we sometimes forget that the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives personnel were part of the military and as such were exposed to all of the dangers of war.