Photo from National Archives and Records Administration: Harry Ettlinger, of Rockaway Township, right, and Lt. Dale Ford worked for the Monuments Men in 1946 when they uncrated a Rembrandt self-portrait that had been stored in a salt mine in Germany.
Harry Ettlinger, of Rockaway Township, and Lt. Dale Ford worked for the Monuments Men in 1946 when they uncrated a Rembrandt self-portrait that had been stored in a salt mine in Germany.
Ettlinger, 83, of Rockaway Township, was part of a group called The Monuments Men at the end of World War II, given the task of recovering art stolen or stored by the Nazis. Their work was largely unacknowledged for decades, but gained notoriety over the past few years, partly because of writer Robert Edsel.
Edsel's latest book, "The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History," went on sale this past Thursday.
The group's official name was the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the Allied military forces, and over time 350 men and women were assigned to it. Nine are still alive, according to Edsel. They helped recover millions of items and restored them to their owners.
"We did what no country had done before," said Ettlinger, a retired engineer who was a U.S. Army private at the end of World War II, and later promoted to sergeant. "We did not steal. We gave it back. We changed attitudes. Instead of being considered the devil, we were considered the angel."
Staff photo: Elbaliz Mendez: Harry Ettlinger, 83, of Rockaway Twonship, talks about his experiences as so-called Monument Man. His unit had the task of locating artwork stolen by or simply stored for safe-keeping by the Nazis.
Edsel, in an interview last week, said the Monuments Men helped shape the way Americans were perceived in Europe after World War II. Some were art experts who later held important positions at museums around the world. Many pieces of art they recovered had been stolen from Jewish families.
"A lot of Jews have said to me this is a whole other way to see the Holocaust," Edsel said.
Ettlinger had grown up in Karlsruhe, Germany, where his family owned a women's fashion store. But the store was boycotted because his family is Jewish, Ettlinger said, so his parents fled to the U.S. in 1938 to make a living.
He was drafted into the U.S. Army when he turned 18 and was on his way to combat during the Battle of the Bulge in January 1945 when he was pulled off a truck because he spoke German. The Army needed translators.
He later worked with the Monuments Men and Army Capt. James Rorimer, who had been a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later became its director. Ettlinger translated documents related to the location of artwork. He was asked to translate during an interview with Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler's friend and photographer.
By then, Ettlinger knew that his paternal grandmother had died in a Nazi concentration camp.
"I kept my anger to myself," he said.
He accompanied Rorimer to Berchtesgaden, where Hermann Goering stored a collection of stolen art. Near the end of the war, Goering tried to move some of that collection by train to another village where residents stole many of the items. Some tore apart tapestries to use as curtains. Ettlinger then went to the Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria, which contained property stolen from the Rothschild family.
Ettlinger later spent 10 months working in salt mines at Heilbronn, Germany, retrieving art packed in thousands of crates. He helped recover stained glass windows that were returned to Strasbourg Cathedral in France. That, he said, was the first piece of art returned under the direction of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.
But most of the art found in the salt mines had been stored for safekeeping, rather than stolen, Ettlinger said. That included the most famous painting taken from the mine, the Stuppach Madonna by Grunewald. Rorimer offered $2 million to purchase the painting from the church that owned it, Ettlinger said, but was turned down.
And in the spring of 1946 Ettlinger went down an elevator into the mines to check on the condition of a Rembrandt self-portrait that was sent from his hometown museum to be stored. A photographer took a picture of him and another man opening the crate. Ettlinger said he thought about his connection with the painting, but it stirred only a little emotion.
"I'm thinking of the bigger picture," he said.
One day, he received a letter from his maternal grandfather, Otto Oppenheimer, who told him that before leaving Germany he'd packed his art collection of prints in a warehouse at Baden-Baden. Ettlinger got a ride there and, with a driver named Ike who was a Holocaust survivor, ended up staying in a hotel suite once reserved for the Kaiser of Germany.
"That night, a private and a Holocaust survivor slept in a bed reserved for the Emperor and Empress of Germany," he said.
He came home in 1946, studied mechanical engineering, married a woman named Mimi Goldman and had three children. They lived in Parsippany for years as Ettlinger worked for a company that provided the military with submarine missile guidance systems. His children grown, and now a widower, Ettlinger lives in a Rockaway Township apartment where some of his grandfather's prints decorate the walls and others are piled in a closet.
About a year ago, he said he found a print that had been overlooked — based on the same Rembrandt self-portrait he found in the salt mines. The original is safe in a museum called Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, a painting from his hometown that he never got to see in person until he opened a box to help save it for everyone else.