[MSN] His mission -- to save art looted by Nazis. Here's how he did it.

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His mission -- to save art looted by Nazis. Here's how he did it.
Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, May 4, 2007

Bernard Taper dreamed about Raphael's "Portrait of a Young Man,'' the most
prized painting looted by the Nazis that has never been found. He spent two
years searching for the Raphael in ravaged post-World War II Germany -- and
for many other works he did recover -- as an art-intelligence officer with
the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the U.S. military. 

"It's the most valuable single thing that's still missing,'' says Taper, a
longtime writer for the New Yorker, one-time Chronicle reporter and retired
UC Berkeley journalism professor. He tracked down many artworks in 1946 and
'47, including objects German peasants had looted from an abandoned train
carrying booty pilfered by Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring. A connoisseur of
luxury, Göring had amassed thousands of paintings, sculptures and others
works during his tenure as the second-most powerful man in Nazi Germany. 

Taper is sitting in the sunny living room of the Berkeley home he shares
with his wife, poet Gwen Head, recalling the slippery art advisers, black
marketeers and such top Nazis as Albert Speer he interrogated 60 years ago.
On the table is a book published by the Polish government, in English titled
"Wartime Losses, Foreign Paintings, Volume I,'' with Raphael's curly-haired
young man on the cover (the portrait belonged to the Czartoryski Museum in
Krakow). He's become the poster child for the countless artworks stolen by
Hitler and his Nazi henchmen from Jewish homes and art galleries, civic
museums, private collections and churches across Europe -- tens of thousands
of them still missing -- during the reign of the Third Reich. 

"The Nazis were not just the most systematic mass murderers in history, they
were the greatest thieves,'' says historian Jonathan Petropoulos in the
potent new documentary "The Rape of Europa,'' which screens at the San
Francisco International Film Festival next Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and
plays at the Krakow and Jerusalem film festivals next month. Taper is one of
several of the so-called Monument Men who appear in the film. They describe
the vast hordes of art, furniture and religious objects the Nazis stashed in
castles, salt mines and bunkers in Germany and Austria, and the noble
efforts to recover, protect and return them to the countries from which they
were stolen. 

Jointly written, produced and directed by three San Francisco filmmakers --
Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham -- "The Rape of Europa'' is
based on the 1995 book of the same name by Lynn Nicholas. Seven years in the
making, the documentary delves into the Nazis' obsession with art, and the
fervor for not only wiping out entire races but also their cultural
patrimony as well. And it tells the story of the people who tried to salvage
the remnants of European culture and those still working to repair the
damage: the Monument Men on the front lines in Italy who sought to protect
historic buildings and artworks from Allied bombing (sometimes
unsuccessfully); the working people at the Louvre in Paris and the Hermitage
in St. Petersburg, who struggled to save their cultural heritage; and the
Italian conservators still piecing together the shattered frescoes from the
Camposanto in Pisa, destroyed by Allied shells. 

"I was fascinated with this issue of art and culture being like mana,
invested with some kind of soul,'' says Berge, who met his co-directors in
the early '90s in the documentary film masters' program at Stanford. "The
Nazis wanted to eliminate it, and all these other people wanted to protect
it. You could kill all the people, but if the objects remained, there would
be something left of the soul. And the Nazis were trying to eliminate every
vestige of it.'' 

Rather than dealing in obvious terms of good and evil, Cohen says, "it was
central for us to get all those gray areas. We wanted to get into the
mind-set, to understand the Nazis' obsessive art collecting -- not only the
collecting but the eradication -- and what it said about them. We felt
strongly that this was a new lens to look at this period of history through,
and we could bear witness in a different way than how we were taught about
the Holocaust.'' 

A failed artist, Hitler had begun collecting art and using it as propaganda
after his rise to power in the 1930s. He had more than 16,000 works of
modern art, which he labeled "degenerate,'' purged from German museums. They
were destroyed, sold or traded for Old Masters. Other high-ranking Nazis
began collecting, following the example of the Führer, who planned a great
museum of European art, honoring his reign, in his provincial hometown of
Linz, Austria. Many of the stolen Rembrandts, Vermeers and Boticellis were
earmarked for Hitler's museum. 

When American art experts learned of the Nazi looting, they convinced
President Franklin D. Roosevelt to form a commission to try to save European
monuments and artworks as the Allies prepared to invade Europe. Officers
with art and curatorial backgrounds were assigned to Army units to advise
the advancing troops about what buildings were worth saving. They made
aerial photographs marking monuments not to be bombed. A strategic bombing
of the vital Florence rail yards spared the city's great art treasures, but
the Germans blew up historic bridges as they retreated. 

The ranks of the Monument Men included such later well-known figures as
James Rorimer, future director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
Lincoln Kirsten, director of the New York City Ballet (Taper wrote the
definitive biography of the great Russian-born choreographer Kirsten brought
to America, George Balanchine). One of the most lauded Monument Men was
Capt. Deane Keller, a Yale art professor charged with protecting Italian art
and buildings. A medieval cemetery with vast Gothic galleries containing
treasured frescoes, the Camposanto was accidentally hit during the battle
for Pisa, and the lead roof melted over the frescoes and marble work. 

Over the next several weeks, Keller got Italian soldiers to clean the place
out and pick up thousands of fresco fragments. He got U.S. Army engineers to
build a temporary roof to shield works that survived, hunting up the
materials wherever he could, and sent art conservators from Rome and
Florence to tend to the works. Keller, who later rescued a horde of looted
works by Michelangelo, Botticelli and Raphael and accompanied their
triumphant return to Florence, was buried in Camposanto after his death in
1992. 

"My story is not as heroic or as glamorous as those of the earlier Monuments
people, whom I look on as legendary figures, truly chivalric in their
courage, enterprise and dedication to a cause,'' Taper wrote in a 1995
essay, included in a book "The Spoils of War,'' the title of an
international symposium he participated in that year. 

"I was in the Army for three years, and I didn't fire a shot at anybody and
nobody fired a shot at me. That's the definition of a good war,'' the
white-haired Taper, sharp at 89, says with a smile. But he did his part to
bring forth light, in the form of recovered art, from the darkness of the
war. 

Born in London and educated at UC Berkeley, Taper was drafted into the U.S.
Army in 1943. He served in intelligence and infantry units before being sent
back to Berkeley to learn Chinese in preparation for work as a liaison
officer assigned to Chaing Kai-Shek's army in China. But at the last minute,
the entire class was sent to Germany, where the war was over. 

"It was the Army. Why do you think they invented words like 'snafu'?" laughs
Taper, who was assigned to Patton's Third Army, then sent to Munich to write
intelligence reports. Lunching outdoors one day at an officers' club, he
fell into conversation with a dashing chap named Walter Horn, an Aryan
German who abhorred Hitler and left, became a professor of medieval history
at UC Berkeley and saw combat action during the war. 

"He started telling me marvelous, fascinating stories about what it was like
in his job to search for lost and stolen art,'' recalls Taper, who had begun
contributing to the New Yorker and the Nation while serving in occupied
Germany. Horn was desperate to go home, but couldn't until he found a
successor for his art-investigating job. "When he met me he found his
successor,'' says Taper, who told Horn he wasn't an art historian and
probably wasn't qualified. Horn said the Monuments section was "lousy with
art historians,'' but what was needed was somebody who knew how to ask
questions. As a budding journalist, Taper fit the bill. 

As a further inducement, Horn told him he would have the use of a white BMW
roadster, wouldn't have to wear a uniform, could travel freely without
orders and would meet women. "And he said if nothing else, there's all this
art you can look at,'' recalls Taper, quick to point out that he got a brown
Audi sedan, not the promised BMW. For about six weeks, Taper was in charge
of the Army's art-collecting center at Wiesbaden, which was filled with not
only looted art but works from various German civic collections. 

"They had fantastic stuff there,'' Taper says. "In the office, across the
whole back wall, was Watteau's 'Embarkation for Cythera,' and a wonderful
Degas, where you look up through the orchestra pit, through the beards of
the musicians, at these elegant dancers. It was from the Frankfurt Museum.''
As Taper says in the documentary, "Just that office alone was worth the
price of admission to World War II.'' Outside the door stood a
5,000-year-old stone Nefertiti, which also stopped Taper in his tracks. "I
couldn't just brush by. I had to stop and commune with her.'' 

Building on the work of previous Monument Men, such as his friend Stewart
Leonard, a bomb diffuser who single-handedly removed 22 mines from the
Chartres Cathedral and later opened crates containing priceless books and
Dürer drawings, Taper tracked down mostly mid-level missing artworks, by
painters like the 16th century Dutch artist Mierevelt and his Flemish
contemporary Teniers, as well church statuary and other looted objects. 

"Probably the best artwork I helped recover was from Göring's train,'' Taper
says, abandoned on a rail siding not far from Neuschwanstein Castle, where
Allied troops found a huge cache of stolen art. The locals had heard there
was schnapps on board, Taper says, and after stealing the schnapps, they
took the rest of the stuff, which included late-Gothic wood statutes and a
15th century School of Rogier van der Weyden painting. "Not bad,'' says
Taper, who had the bright idea of tapping the de-Nazifed German police to
help him find stolen goods. 

He learned that the Gothic statutes had been taken by a cabinetmaker named
Roth. When caught, the man said he'd seen the objects lying in the mud and
"took pity on them'' by taking them home. "After that,'' Taper says, "when
we had an interrogation, we'd say, 'Did you steal that, or did you just take
pity on it?' " 

Searching for the missing Raphael, Taper questioned many people, including
the art advisers to Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of the occupied Polish
area called "General Gouvernement.'' Frank kept the Raphael, along with a
Rembrandt and Leonardo's "Lady with an Ermine'' -- both of which were found
and returned to the rightful owner -- in his Krakow residence. As the
Russians advanced on Krakow, Frank and his entourage left in a rush, taking
all three masterpieces with them. They stopped in various towns on their way
to Bavaria. By the time Frank was captured in Neuhaus, the Raphael had
vanished. 

Taper spent many hours questioning Frank's first art adviser, the
"infamous'' Kajetan Mühlmann and his successor, Wilhelm Ernest von
Palezieux, whom Taper found in the French occupation zone. He got
conflicting stories -- all of these characters suffered from what Taper
calls "selective amnesia'' -- tracked down all the leads, but came up
empty-handed. A number of important missing works have cropped up in recent
years as paintings have come on the market and governments open their files.
The Russians, who suffered mightily at Hitler's hands, still have loads of
things Stalin took from Germany when the Red Army got back what was left of
the stolen Russian art. Taper doesn't know if the Raphael will ever
resurface. 

In addition to returning looted works, "a major part of our task was the
fostering of the public German institutions,'' says Taper, who still recalls
concerts held in freezing halls in bombed-out cities across Germany, which
fed defeated spirits. "That was all they had.'' 

Taper thinks the work the Monument Men did was not only important in terms
of equity, but also as ritual and symbol. "It was a symbol that there were
higher values than victory, higher values than patriotism,'' he says. "It
was a rare kind of behavior, which was a disinterested doing of good.'' 

In "The Rape of Europa,'' an Army doctor named Leonard Malamut, who was on
hand when American soldiers discovered Hitler's vast horde of loot a quarter
mile down a salt mine in the Austrian Alps, says: "All this accumulated
beauty had been stolen by the most murderous thieves that ever existed on
the face of the Earth. How they could retain the nicety of appreciation of
great art and be exterminating millions of people nearby in concentration
camps, I couldn't understand then and I can't understand it today.'' 

Taper may not understand, but he can fathom it. "Human beings are
complicated,'' he says. "I've read enough Shakespeare to know.'' 

Still, "amid all the sickening evidence of man's depravity and
destructiveness,'' he wrote, it was good to "help preserve some of the
things mankind had done that one could not only bear to contemplate but even
take joy in.'' 

"The Rape of Europa": The film that documents the work of Bernard Taper and
other Monument Men screens at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
For more information, go to fest07.sffs.org. 
E-mail Jesse Hamlin at jhamlin at sfchronicle.com. 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/04/DDGQSPJJD753.DTL