By Robert M. Edsel

“How can I describe the strange, strange combination of experiences each day here in this beautiful place brings!” [Walker Hancock] wrote Saima. “The eyes have one continual feast. It is late in the spring. Flowering trees are everywhere and the charm of the romantic little towns and the fairy tale castled countryside is enhanced by all this freshness. And in the midst of it all—thousands of homeless foreigners wandering about in pathetic droves. 

Germans in uniform, mostly with arms and legs—or more—missing. Children who are friendly, older ones who hate you, crimes continually in the foreground of life. Plenty, misery, recriminations, sympathy. All such an exaggerated picture of the man-made way of life in a God-made world. Ifit all doesn’t prove the necessity of Heaven, I don’t know what it means. I believe that all this loveliness showing through the rubble and wreck are just foreshadowings of the joys we were made for.”

(Edsel and Witter 2009, 311)

More than sixty years after the death of Adolf Hitler, we still live in a world altered by his legacy. His personal belongings are scattered, although many have made their way into public museums and collections. Most of his library books are in the U. S. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and eighty volumes may be found at Brown University in the John Hay Library’s Rare Book collection. Many of his paintings and watercolors are stored at the National Museum of the U. S. Army, Army Art Collection. The original duplicates of his last will and political testament are at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the Imperial War Museum in London.

His beloved Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) still stands in Munich, although today as the Haus der Kunst, home to temporary exhibits of contemporary art. But the lasting impact of his bitter reign is best measured in more ephemeral ways: fifty million loved ones who never returned home from the war to rejoin their families or start one of their own; brilliant, creative contributions never made to our world because scientists, artists, and inventors lost their lives too early or were never born; cultures built over generations reduced to ashes and rubble because one human being judged groups of other human beings less worthy than his own.

(Edsel and Witter 2009, 401)

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References

Edsel, Robert M., and Bret Witter. 2009. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. N.p.: Center Street.

ISBN 978-1-59995-149-2