One of six surviving Monuments Men, 88-year-old Harry Ettlinger was tapped for the group in January 1945, the final year of World War II. A valuable member of the team because of his ability to read and speak German, a 19-year-old Ettlinger went down into European salt mines to discover and restitute some of the hundreds of thousands of works that the Nazis systematically stole from private and public collections across Europe. Ettlinger still lives in New Jersey where he emigrated with his family from Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1938. ARTINFO had the chance to speak with Ettlinger at a special screening of George Clooney’s upcoming film, “Monuments Men,” at New York’s Center for Jewish History.
After you were drafted you were assigned to search for looted artworks hidden in salt mines and castles. Did you ask for that task or was it randomly assigned to you?
I was drafted and trained as an infantryman and sent back overseas back to Europe and just as I was about to be shipped with 25 other soldiers to go into the Battle of the Bulge, I got pulled out and spent the next three months traveling from the France/Belgium border to find myself in Munich. I traveled with this temporary camp and there somebody came to me and said to me, “I understand you can speak and read German. They could use you in that office over there.” So, the next morning I went and opened the door and there was an officer standing there. And I said, “I understand you could use somebody who could speak and read in German. I would like to volunteer to do that job.” The captain said great, go sit down here and this man will tell you what to do. That was my entry into the Monuments Men. The man that I volunteered to turned out to be Jim Rorimer, who was one of the leading Monuments Men.
You recovered the stained glass windows of the Strasbourg Cathedral and a Rembrandt self-portrait. Where did you find them? What was it like pulling them out?
These treasures were stored in two salt mines among 40,000 cases. For safety purposes, salt mines are not like coal mines. They are a great environment: 65 degrees Fahrenheit, clean atmosphere, huge halls. It turned out that they [the Nazis] turned them into underground factories. That was the interesting part. One of them was a factory where they were on their way to make jet engines five years before we even got started on them. The workers were Hungarian Jew slave laborers and if they had been successful, the German air force would have been able to shoot down every one of our planes in the battle and extend World War II by one to two years. That fact became evident to a French heroine, Rose Valland, who informed Captain Jim Rorimer about it who realized the criticality that the American force should come to that mine in Heilbronn to stop the production of everything. The fact that they were being used for storage was really secondary.
Do you have a favorite artwork that you found?
The Rembrandt self-portrait. The art museum in the city that I lived in, Karlsruhe, it was their pride and joy.
Did you have an appreciation for art before you joined the Monuments Men?
I had an appreciation for art. My grandfather was a collector of prints. While I did not end up in the art field, nevertheless I have a great appreciation for art and what it did for our way of life.
