Allied Art Hunters: Saving Beauty

As part of his twisted vision of the future, Adolf Hitler planned to construct the world's finest museum — the eponymous Führermuseum — in his hometown of Linz, Austria. By stocking it with the world's greatest works of art, he hoped to showcase the superiority of Aryan artists over their supposedly "degenerate" Jewish counterparts. Within months of invading Poland in 1939, Nazi troops began seizing selected pieces — including paintings by Raphael, Rembrandt and Vermeer — from churches, museums and private art collections. The artworks were then hidden in mines and remote castles for safekeeping until the war ended.

In his new book Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, American art detective Robert Edsel tells the little-known story of the men and women who worked to stop that dream from becoming reality. During and after World War II, a total of 365 volunteers in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the Allied Forces dedicated themselves to recovering Europe's pillaged treasures. Without vehicles of their own, these so-called Monuments Men — mostly middle-aged art historians, curators and museum directors — hitchhiked through Europe following clues they gleaned from, among other things, conversations overheard at the dentist, interviews behind enemy lines and Nazi records recovered from bombed-out cathedrals. By 1951, they had restituted 5 million objects — including 5,000 church bells the Nazis had planned to melt down. (See pictures of Adolf Hitler's rise to power.)

Historical details come thick and fast, but Edsel manages to keep the narrative breezy. The book's best moments come as the war draws to an end and the Monuments Men discover booty in the salt mines at Altaussee in northern Austria. There, Hitler's troops had stored 10,000 of their most prized pieces, including Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges, a 4-ft. (1.3 m) marble statue found "lying on her side on a filthy brown-and-white mattress." The Monuments Men wrapped her in coats, paper and rope before placing her in a cart. "I think we could bounce her from alp to alp, all the way to Munich, without doing her any harm," an American conservationist said at the time. Instead, they sent her to Belgium. After two years in a cold, dark mine, the Madonna was home.

Read a Q&A with Robert Edsel.