Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (19 page)

Poggi certainly knew that the safest place for a painting was hanging on the wall of a museum. Once it began a journey, the risks of damage increased dramatically. Moving uncrated paintings in trucks exposed them to dust. Canvases were vulnerable to tears, punctures, and scratches. Vibration alone could cause the wood of a panel painting to split. Poggi also knew well that paintings on panel are reactive to sudden changes in humidity. Low humidity during winter weather diminishes the moisture in the wood, increasing the risk it might crack. Sculpture, whether marble (more durable) or terra-cotta (more fragile), was always at risk of being chipped, much less ruined if dropped. Subsequent moves would compound these risks even further, especially if the men handling the works of art were soldiers, untrained in dealing with such fragile and precious objects and acting in haste.

On June 18, 1944, Poggi had attended a meeting with Carlo Anti, General Director of Fine Arts under Mussolini’s Social Republic, and SS Colonel Alexander Langsdorff, head of the Kunstschutz, to discuss how best to protect the Florence repositories from the looming battle. Anti insisted that the treasures be evacuated again and moved north, but his argument ignored the shortage of transportation and the speed with which enemy troops were approaching Tuscany. After a heated discussion, Poggi prevailed. The art would remain in the existing repositories. “It is too late,” Anti noted ominously in his diary.

In early July, Social Republic officials once again pressed for the works of art to be transported northward. Certain that he knew what was best for “his” works of art, Poggi shrewdly parried the request with the Medici Family Pact of 1737, which required that their collection (the core of the Uffizi and Pitti collections) “never be removed or taken outside its capital and the Grand Duchy.” At this stage of the war, Poggi had no real power to keep Fascist officials or the Germans from removing works of art. Clever excuses and tricks were his only tools.

Several days later, Poggi received a shocking telephone call from the German Consul, Dr. Gerhard Wolf, informing him that Wehrmacht troops had loaded 291 paintings from the Villa Bossi-Pucci repository at Montagnana onto trucks and taken them to the small town of Marano sul Panaro near Modena, some ninety miles north of Florence. This was the same villa Colonel Metzner had questioned Poggi about just days earlier. “At one blow at least an eighth of the most prized contents of the Uffizi and Pitti had vanished.” Further queries by Consul Wolf later revealed the treachery: the paintings had been taken—and were already en route north—
before
Metzner’s portentous meeting with Poggi on July 4.

Gerhard Wolf requested that Langsdorff report to Florence to resolve the matter. Without transportation, Poggi could do nothing. On Sunday evening, July 16, Poggi received a call from Consul Wolf’s assistant, advising him that a different German unit had removed works of art from a second, as-yet-unidentified repository. Poggi should expect to take custody of them at German Military Headquarters, in Florence’s Piazza San Marco, the next day at 8 a.m. With no sign of Langsdorff, and no further word about the disposition of the artworks from Villa Bossi-Pucci, this latest news horrified and infuriated Poggi.

The following morning, Poggi and other officials watched three German trucks pull into Piazza San Marco, right on time. The officer in charge of the operation, Colonel Hoffmann, informed them “that since the castle of Oliveto was under the fire of the Allied artillery, the military command of the area had decided on the immediate transport to Florence of the works of art.” The unloading of paintings commenced, notably those from the Horne Foundation museum and altarpieces from the city’s churches—eighty-four paintings, twenty-three crates, and five frames. For reasons Hoffmann didn’t explain, more than one hundred paintings had been left behind. While Poggi tried to make sense of it all, the custodian of the repository at the Castello Guicciardini in Oliveto, Augusto Conti, who had accompanied the trucks into Florence, discreetly informed him that Hoffmann’s explanation was a lie. The area around the castello had been quiet, void of any combat activity.

Conti then shared even more distressing news. Two panel paintings by German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder—
Adam
and
Eve
—had been loaded into an ambulance. He had no idea what had happened to them after that. Poggi knew both paintings well—and he knew that Hitler did too. During the Führer’s 1938 tour of the Uffizi, Poggi remembered watching how much Hitler had admired the German painter’s works. The disappearance of such masterpieces, which had entered the collection of the Medici in the late eighteenth century, caused great alarm among Florentine officials.

Langsdorff finally arrived in Florence on July 17. Poggi assumed he could rely on the senior representative of the Kunstschutz, just as he had in May, when Langsdorff had provided cranes, trucks, and personnel to return Ghiberti’s Baptistery doors to the Pitti Palace. Poggi began by informing Langsdorff of the removals from the Castello Guicciardini in Oliveto that Colonel Hoffmann had delivered just hours earlier. That a portion of the contents from the Oliveto repository never made it to Florence, in particular the two Cranach paintings of
Adam
and
Eve
, worried him. These removals violated the agreement made among Poggi, Carlo Anti, and Langsdorff at their June 18 meeting: in the event of any emergency evacuations of repositories, works of art were to be brought to Florence. Under no circumstances could this occur again.

Langsdorff assured Poggi that not only would he investigate what had happened to the missing items, he would accept full responsibility for locating and returning the Cranach paintings to Florence. As part of his investigation, Langsdorff asked Poggi to prepare a memorandum summarizing what he knew about the removal of art from the Villa Bossi-Pucci. When the report was completed, he wanted it delivered to the Hotel Excelsior, where he had a room overlooking the Ponte Santa Trinita and the Ponte Vecchio. This response hardly satisfied Poggi, but, under the circumstances, he could do little else.

News of continued Allied advances forced Langsdorff to reassess orders he had received from Army High Command (OKH) three days earlier, stating, “The rescue of art objects by the troops has to generally be stopped.” The order also included a directive stating that any art objects that had already been removed should be turned over to the “bishops of Bologna or Modena.” German troops had in fact attempted a delivery of the Montagnana items, but the bishops had turned them away, stating they didn’t have sufficient space to store the items nor did they have authority to accept such responsibility.

From Langsdorff’s point of view, these orders presented a conundrum: following them meant the Florentine treasures would be left in their repositories, unguarded, in what would soon be battle zones. But removing them from the countryside villas not only would violate his orders, it also would expose the works of art to possible Allied air attacks. Confident that he would have the support of SS General Karl Wolff, Langsdorff decided to ignore the previous arrangements with Poggi and Anti and to proceed with evacuations of the repositories.

In an effort to keep German Military Government informed of his decision, he sent a message: “Some art deposits in villas in countryside are now in range of artillery fire. A fortnight ago when I had acquired a lorry to bring the contents back to Florence, the Italian Superintendents asked me to refrain from doing so because of the danger from aerial attacks. Am taking in hand immediately supervision and direction of evacuation measures by our own troops.” The time had come to move the art north for safekeeping.

Langsdorff drove to Oliveto later that evening to determine what had happened at the Castello Guicciardini, in particular to the Cranachs, before checking on the hundred or so works of art that hadn’t been removed. Before midnight, he phoned Poggi to report that he had inspected the castello and relocated those paintings left behind to the cellar for additional safety; everything there was now fine. He insisted that he was also hot on the trail of the missing Cranach paintings, and he repeated his promise to find and return them to Florence.

What Langsdorff didn’t tell Poggi was that the Cranachs were already safe. In fact, they were in his possession, “handed over by the troops . . . asking me to take them north, so that they would not fall into the hands of the British or the Americans.” In the course of his debriefing of Infantry Regiment 71’s Oberleutnant Feldhusen in Oliveto, Langsdorff learned that the Cranachs had been “separated from the rest because they were ‘Germanic art’ and could not be exposed to the danger of being returned to Florence.” Never mind the fact that Infantry Regiment 71 had traveled those same unsafe, bomb-cratered roads into Florence two nights earlier. He then wrote out a receipt for “two undamaged pictures,
Adam
and
Eve
, by Lukas Cranach which are to be taken to Germany by the undersigned, MV Abt. Chef Langsdorff,” and handed it to the Oberleutnant. Using the safe passage afforded by an ambulance, Langsdorff and his “passengers”—
Adam
and
Eve
—set out for Florence, just as he had assured Poggi he would do.

Wednesday evening, July 19, Poggi stopped by the Hotel Excelsior to visit with Langsdorff and deliver the memorandum he’d been asked to prepare concerning the Montagnana removals. Much to Poggi’s surprise, Langsdorff had already checked out and departed Florence. Had Poggi thought to ask the concierge, he might have learned that Langsdorff left the hotel with two life-size parcels that, oddly enough, had arrived two nights before in an ambulance.

In just two weeks, Poggi had been duped by the German Military Commander of Florence, Colonel Metzner, and lied to by the officer who delivered the works of art from Oliveto, Colonel Hoffmann. But those two betrayals paled in comparison to the disappointment he felt toward Langsdorff. Unlike the other two officers, Langsdorff was the senior German Kunstschutz official in Italy. He had an obligation to protect art, not to steal it.

15

GUARDIAN ANGELS

LATE JULY–AUGUST 3, 1944

F
lorence claims a centuries-long heritage of creative genius. The city evolved from early Roman settlements in the first century BC as the well-developed Etruscan society began to move down from the hills of nearby Fiesole to settle along the Arno River. It became an autonomous city-state in 1115. By the early fourteenth century, the city had emerged as a center of international commerce. Its currency, the gold florin, and the banking dynasty it produced, the Medici family, became known throughout Europe. Through their support of the arts, the Medici anchored the Italian Renaissance, Western civilization’s most prolific period of artistic achievement since the days of Greek democracy in Athens. Such a group of polymaths as those who arose in Florence—artists, architects, writers, philosophers, and inventors—has rarely been equaled in recorded history.

Michelangelo spent most of his life in Florence. Giotto, Masaccio, Botticelli, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael all found patronage there. Filippo Brunelleschi applied mathematics to ancient architecture to conceive the dome of the city’s magnificent cathedral, the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore, often referred to simply as the Duomo. Lorenzo Ghiberti wrought from bronze perfect expressions of human anatomy to produce the world’s most exquisite doors for the cathedral’s Baptistery. Guido di Pietro, better known as Fra Angelico, created frescoes and panel paintings that helped define the early art of the Renaissance. Writers and philosophers, including Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli, crafted definitive works on the heavens and the underworld, European cultures, and human nature itself. Galileo, the father of modern science, peered at the stars from his various homes, including Villa dell’Ombrellino, atop the hill of Bellosguardo.

The twentieth-century city, a place of “the past contending with the present,” still boasts twisting cobbled streets, many barely wide enough for vehicles, upon which walked these immortal scholars and artists. Their sculpture decorates the city’s piazzas; their paintings adorn its churches; and their creative thought fills its archives and libraries. One of the city’s two most important bridges, the Ponte Santa Trinita, “represented the pledge of love and faith between one bank and the other.” To cross the Ponte Vecchio, the famous double-tiered bridge from which Dante dreamed of Beatrice, his muse for
The Divine Comedy,
is to pass into another time.

Once a navigable river of transportation and commerce, the Arno became the lifeblood of the city’s early development. Prime real estate of the day could be found on the
Lungarno
(along the Arno), in particular near the Ponte Vecchio, and the streets emanating from each end—Via de’ Guicciardini to the south, and Via Por Santa Maria to the north. There, the dynastic families constructed their
palazzi
and medieval towers, braiding the city’s future growth with its glorious past.

No other family matched the power and prestige of the Medici. The patronage of its members funded and supported the arts and each of its disciplines, including painting, sculpture, architecture, and gardening. They also expanded their personal residence, the Pitti Palace, and its magnificent Boboli Gardens. In 1560, Duke Cosimo I commissioned the construction of the city’s administration offices along the north side of the Arno. But twenty-one years later, his son, Francesco I, began converting the facility—the
Uffizi
(offices)—into a gallery to house the family’s burgeoning art collection.

Atop the Ponte Vecchio and its numerous jewelry stalls is the less-visited Vasari Corridor. This private passageway, constructed in 1565, connected the Uffizi and the Pitti and provided the Medici with an escape route in the event of political unrest. Its narrow hallways are decorated with more than a thousand paintings, mostly self-portraits, by many of the artists whose works adorn the walls of the city’s museums and churches. Farther north is the Palazzo Vecchio (the town hall), the Duomo, and the Accademia, home to the world’s most famous piece of marble, Michelangelo’s
David
. In the summer of 1944, war placed this legendary city, and centuries of creative achievements, in danger of utter destruction.

ON NOVEMBER 10, 1943,
Adolf Hitler remarked to Ambassador Rudolf Rahn, “Florence is too beautiful a city to destroy. Do what you can to protect it: you have my permission and assistance.” Hitler’s affection for the city initially gave Florentine Superintendent Giovanni Poggi and other city officials hope that Florence would be spared the fate of Naples. The fact that Rome and Siena had escaped major damage also encouraged them. But, as Allied soldiers inched closer each day, a small group of dedicated souls—now seen as guardian angels of Florence—became increasingly concerned that the coming battle would overtake their city. They had few resources and dwindling options.

These benefactors’ best hope was to push Germany and the Allies to jointly declare Florence an “open city,” first suggested by the Director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Friedrich Kriegbaum. But for a city to be declared “open,” it had to be undefended; there could be no military targets; and both sides had to have freedom of entry. In Florence, German forces had positioned two artillery batteries in the della Gherardesca and dei Semplici Gardens. They had stationed soldiers at numerous mortar positions in the city. Additionally, Florence, like Rome before it fell to the Allies, served as a major rail transport hub for the German Army. Even after the Allies’ air attacks on the Santa Maria Novella and Campo di Marte marshaling yards, men and materiel moved through the city.

Undaunted by these facts, German leaders referred to Florence as an “open city,” accusing the Allies of refusing to publicly affirm that designation. For their part, the Allies wouldn’t declare Florence an open city until the Germans removed their guns and soldiers. The standoff held through the spring and early summer of 1944, while Allied forces were engaged in combat operations hundreds of miles to the south. Things grew much more urgent following the liberation of Rome in June and of Siena in July.

City officials believed that their portable art treasures, tucked away by Poggi in Tuscan villas, were safe. But protecting the city’s architectural treasures still depended upon securing an official, unequivocal declaration of Florence as an open city. Members of the principal group working toward this designation were the German Consul, Gerhard Wolf; the Archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa; the Extraordinary Envoy and Minister Plenipotentiary of San Marino to the Holy See, Marchese Filippo Serlupi Crescenzi; and the Swiss Consul in Florence, Carlo Alessandro Steinhäuslin. These four men did more to save Florence than anyone else.

After four years of service in the German Army, Gerhard Wolf attended Heidelberg University, where he met Rudolf Rahn, who would become a lifelong friend. In the years following graduation, both would enter Germany’s Foreign Service. Seeking to distance himself from the Nazi Party, Wolf accepted a position as the German Consul to Florence.

Cardinal Dalla Costa, a seventy-two-year-old prelate, was another of the city’s guardians. Soft-spoken yet forceful, he assumed an increasingly visible role in defense of the city. During Hitler’s 1938 visit, he ordered that the windows of his palace be shut in symbolic protest. He declined to participate in the official celebrations, explaining that he did not worship “any other cross, if not that of Christ.” As the situation became more desperate, the cardinal agreed to issue notices that stated, “His Eminence Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, Archbishop of Florence, declares that this building and the artworks inside, are under the protection of the Holy See.” While he pleaded with the German commanders to respect Florence as an open city, he did so knowing that, “in order to truly protect Florentine works of art, it would be necessary to place a huge pavilion made of impenetrable steel and unbreakable bronze, to cover the entire city.”

Cardinal Dalla Costa was not the only representative of the Catholic Church fighting to save Florence. Marchese Filippo Serlupi Crescenzi enjoyed the favor of Pope Pius XII and Dalla Costa. This entrée proved helpful to Giovanni Poggi. “I had to ask Serlupi to avail of his relationships with the high personalities of Vatican City,” Poggi later said, “to turn the interest of the Holy Father towards the monuments and works of art of Tuscany and put them under the protection of the Holy See.”

Behind the scenes, Serlupi, a lawyer by profession, risked his life taking action to help friends in need. Using his diplomatic status as cover, Serlupi offered assistance to individuals being hunted by the Nazis and Fascists, including the famous art scholar and collector Bernard Berenson, an American Jew. The seventy-nine-year-old Berenson owned a home, Villa I Tatti, filled with early Italian paintings and an extensive art library that had become a gathering place for collectors, dealers, and students of art worldwide. According to Berenson, “Marchese Serlupi did not miss one chance to come in aid.”

Carlo Steinhäuslin, a native Florentine and heir to the eponymous private banking firm, brought a patrician’s concern to the effort. As Consul for Switzerland, his diplomatic privileges—like those of Serlupi and his close friend Consul Wolf—created opportunities to help others, albeit at considerable risk. Steinhäuslin was particularly concerned with protecting the city’s water pipes, which ran under the bridges. His position as a diplomat of the most prominent neutral nation earned him the ear of German Colonel Fuchs, recently appointed the Commandant of the city.

In spite of the Führer’s November 1943 assurance to Ambassador Rahn about protecting Florence, the city was becoming more militarized, not less. In late January 1944, British officials inquired through the Vatican whether or not there would be an official German declaration of open-city status. Germany’s Ambassador to the Holy See, Ernst von Weizsäcker, could only provide “an official declaration of the unofficial declaration and then only verbally and not in writing.” Consul Wolf then made four separate visits to Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring, seeking his support for proposals to limit military access to the city center. Kesselring agreed and then commented that he had “never realised what it was like to fight in a museum, until [I] came to Italy.”

On June 3, Gerhard Wolf received a copy of a very disturbing letter from General Alfred Jodl, the OKW Chief of Operations Staff: “I therefore have to say with my greatest regret—that hope for Florence to come out of this war unharmed, can only be very slight.” The reply devastated Wolf, Germany’s chief nonmilitary representative in Florence, along with Cardinal Dalla Costa and Swiss Consul Steinhäuslin.

Consul Wolf’s sustained diplomatic efforts won him the trust of prominent Florentines. On numerous occasions he used the power of his position to rescue important citizens and partisans from Captain Mario Carità, a sadistic Italian who headed the
Ufficio Politico Investigativo
(Political Office of Investigations). Working out of a home—
Villa Triste
(House of Sorrow)—on via Bolognese, Carità, who at one time had expressed a desire to become “the Himmler of Italy,” had constructed a basement torture chamber so gruesome that even some Nazi SS officers found it disturbing. Carità and his henchmen used grisly methods to extract confessions from victims before their execution. Colonel Dollmann described “tables laden with thick whips, rods of steel, pincers, manacles, the whole paraphernalia of mid-twentieth-century persuasion.”

By late July, stress took a severe toll on Wolf’s health. With the impending withdrawal of German forces from Florence, Rahn gently ordered his friend to leave the city and report to the German Embassy at Fasano, near Kesselring’s headquarters. Some in Florence, fearing for Wolf’s safety, pleaded with him to stay, in particular his close friend Carlo Steinhäuslin, but on July 28 Gerhard Wolf left the city in the hands of his countrymen, “ashamed of what the German soldiers had the courage to do.”

ON SATURDAY, JULY 29,
German commanders contacted city officials and asked for a map that detailed the central bridges, including the Ponte Santa Trinita, the Ponte Vecchio, and adjacent buildings. By the time Poggi found out about this ominous inquiry and informed Dalla Costa, German forces had posted a proclamation on buildings, issued on orders of Colonel Fuchs, that all inhabitants within 330 to 660 feet of the Arno—more than fifty thousand people—had to vacate their homes by noon the following day.
*
In a hollow effort of reassurance, Fuchs stated that the order was purely a cautionary measure meant to spare the population from attack by the enemy. Instructions specified that all personal belongings were to be left behind.

By Sunday, the British Eighth Army, just south of the city center, prepared to advance on Florence. Stuck on the German side of the line, Poggi, Dalla Costa, and Steinhäuslin composed a letter to Colonel Fuchs that recited Germany’s many previous assurances about open-city status and pleaded for permission to contact the Allies to continue open-city negotiations. Upon receipt of the hand-delivered letter, Fuchs, who had once said, “For me a bridge is just a bridge,” said he didn’t have authorization for any member of their group to cross the line. In his view, there was no evidence that the Allies intended on recognizing Florence as an open city.

The last realistic chance for Florence to avoid becoming a battleground had in fact ended ten days earlier with German Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg’s failed effort to assassinate Adolf Hitler at his Wolfsschanze headquarters near Rastenburg. As Consul Wolf later observed, it would have been “quite impossible for any one to ask [the Führer], let alone receive permission to make direct contact with the enemy. Hitler would have considered it as an act of treachery on Kesselring’s or Rahn’s part if such contacts were made.”

On July 30, Ambassador Rahn finally reached Kesselring’s headquarters in Recoaro to make what seemed a final plea on behalf of the city. Rahn stood before an angry and unsympathetic Kesselring, who gripped one of the thousands of leaflets dropped from the sky by the Allies the day before. The leaflets contained a “Special Message” to all Tuscans from Allied General Harold Alexander. One sentence in particular stood out: “It is vital for Allied troops to cross Florence without delay in order to complete the destruction of German forces on their retreat northwards.”