Fırat Erez

In April 1945, crates labeled "Marble – Do Not Drop" were carried deep into a salt mine in the Austrian Alps. They weren't marble. They were 500-kilogram bombs. The Nazi gauleiter of the region, August Eigruber, wanted to blow the mine before the Allies could reach it. Inside were thousands of stolen masterpieces, including Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna, the Ghent Altarpiece, and Vermeer's The Art of Painting. Local miners quietly pulled the bombs out and sealed the entrances before he could follow through. A few weeks later, two American soldiers squeezed through a small opening into the mine. One of them, Lincoln Kirstein, would later co-found the New York City Ballet. They were Monuments Men. The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program was about 345 men and women from 14 countries. Museum directors, curators, architects, art historians, librarians. Most were too old for normal combat roles, and many had never fired a weapon. They went into the war zone anyway, often with no vehicle, no staff, and barely any authority, armed mostly with lists of churches and buildings the Allies were supposed to avoid bombing. Then they started finding what the Nazis had stolen. It was everywhere. Castles, salt mines, monasteries, private homes. Neuschwanstein, the fairy tale castle in Bavaria, was packed with art looted from French Jewish families. Much of it was found because of Rose Valland, a quiet French museum employee in Paris who spent four years secretly writing down everything the Nazis shipped out of her building, where it came from, and where it was going. The Germans had no idea she could understand them. One of the most remarkable stories belongs to Harry Ettlinger. He was a Jewish teenager who fled Karlsruhe, Germany in 1938. As a boy he'd never been allowed into the city museum to see its famous Rembrandt self-portrait, because Jews were banned. Seven years later he came back wearing a US Army uniform, working in a salt mine near Heilbronn, and found that exact Rembrandt sitting in the dark. He finally saw it for the first time in his life. Two Monuments Men were killed in action. Walter Huchthausen, an American architect, was shot while trying to recover an altarpiece near the front. By the end, they had helped recover and return an estimated five million artworks and cultural objects. They kept working for six years after the war, returning pieces to the countries and families they were taken from. Almost all of them went home and went back to quiet museum and university jobs. Most of America never knew their names until 2015, when they were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

October 30, 1944. In a cold, forested mountain in eastern France, a battalion of Japanese-American soldiers breaks through to a trapped group of Texans who have been surrounded and written off, and saves them. The rescue of the Lost Battalion by the 442nd Regimental Combat Team is one of the most heroic and heartbreaking episodes of the war, made by men whose own families were locked in camps back home. To understand it you have to know who these soldiers were. They were Nisei, American-born citizens of Japanese descent. After Pearl Harbor, in a shameful act of wartime hysteria and racism, the United States had rounded up some one hundred and twenty thousand people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, most of them American citizens, and imprisoned them in internment camps behind barbed wire, having committed no crime but their ancestry. And yet thousands of young Nisei men volunteered to fight for the country that was imprisoning their families, to prove their loyalty in blood. They formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and their motto was "Go for Broke." They would become, for their size and length of service, the most decorated unit in the history of the United States Army. In October 1944 the 442nd was fighting in the Vosges Mountains of eastern France, in miserable conditions, cold rain, mud, dense forest, dug-in German defenders. Nearby, a battalion of the 36th Infantry Division, Texans, had pushed too far forward and been cut off, surrounded by the Germans on a wooded ridge. Some two hundred men were trapped, running low on food, water, and ammunition, their situation growing desperate, and they became known as the Lost Battalion. Efforts to reach them failed. So the 442nd was ordered to break through and save them. What followed was five days of the most savage fighting the regiment ever experienced. The Nisei soldiers had to attack uphill through the forest, into prepared German positions, under artillery that burst in the treetops and rained shrapnel and wood splinters down on them, the same horror I described in the Hürtgen. They fought yard by yard through the trees, taking terrible casualties, sometimes rising to charge machine guns head-on because there was no other way forward. They would not stop. They clawed their way up the ridge toward the trapped Texans. On the 30th, they broke through and reached the Lost Battalion. The surrounded Texans, who had almost given up hope, saw the Nisei soldiers coming through the trees to them. Around two hundred and eleven men of the Lost Battalion were saved. And the price the 442nd paid for them was staggering. The regiment suffered far more casualties rescuing the Lost Battalion than there were men in the battalion they saved, well over the number of men rescued, with many killed and hundreds wounded in those five days. They spent more of themselves than they got back, in pure arithmetic, and they did it without hesitation. The whole story is layered with a bitter, magnificent irony. Here were American soldiers whose parents and siblings were, at that very moment, behind barbed wire in American internment camps, suspected and imprisoned for their ancestry, and these same young men were dying in a French forest to rescue other Americans, proving a loyalty they should never have had to prove. The 442nd came home as the most decorated unit of its size in American history, laden with medals, including, eventually, many Medals of Honor, a number of them awarded belatedly decades later when old racial injustices in the awarding were finally corrected. The rescue of the Lost Battalion on the 30th stands as a monument to them, and to the whole contradiction they embodied: men betrayed by their own country who served it with a valor almost beyond belief, and who, by going for broke in that cold mountain forest, helped shame a nation into eventually confronting the wrong it had done to them.

October 29, 1944. The Red Army launches its offensive to take Budapest. Stalin wanted the Hungarian capital captured within days, in time for the anniversary of the Russian Revolution on November 7. It took more than three months. Hitler declared Budapest a fortress city and ordered it held at all costs. By late December, the Soviets had surrounded it, trapping tens of thousands of German and Hungarian troops along with around 800,000 civilians. What followed was one of the longest and bloodiest city sieges of the war. Fighting raged house to house and street to street. People froze and starved in basements while artillery tore the city apart. Inside, the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross carried out a massacre of their own. They marched Jews to the banks of the Danube, ordered them to take off their shoes, and shot them so their bodies fell into the river. Today, sixty pairs of iron shoes sit on the riverbank as a memorial. One man stood in their way. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg handed out protective passports and set up safe houses, saving thousands of Jews from deportation and murder. The siege ended in February 1945. Tens of thousands of civilians were dead. Days after the Soviets arrived, Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet officials. He disappeared into the Soviet prison system and was never seen in freedom again.