On 15 February 1944, the monastery, high on a peak overlooking the town of Cassino, was destroyed by 1,400 tons of bombs dropped by American bombers. The bombing was based on the fear that the abbey was being used as a lookout post for the German defenders. This position evolved over time to an admission that German soldiers were not garrisoned there but that the risk of the monastery becoming occupied justified the action.
As an artist I read this with horror. What frescoes, sculpture, paintings must have been destroyed?
Actually not as much as I imagined. Attached to this story of enormous carnage I found another of an unexpected nature.
In the Italian Autumn of 1943, two German officers, Captain Maximilian Becker, a surgeon in the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel of the same unit, with singular prescience proposed the removal of Monte Cassino’s treasures to the Vatican and Vatican-owned Castel Sant'Angelo before the war would come closer.
Image: German soldiers rescuing artworks from Monte Cassino
Both officers convinced church authorities and their own senior commanders to use the division’s trucks and fuel for the undertaking. They had to find the materials necessary for crates and boxes, identify skilled carpenters among their troops, recruit local laborers (to be paid with rations of food plus twenty cigarettes per day), and then manage the massive job of evacuation centered on the library and archive, a treasure literally without price. The Abbey’s archives, library and gallery included 800 papal documents, 20,500 volumes in the Old Library, 60,000 in the New Library, 500 incunabula, 200 manuscripts on parchment, 100,000 prints and separate collections.
The first trucks, carrying paintings by Italian old masters, were ready to go less than a week from the day Dr. Becker and Schlegel first arrived in Monte Cassino. Each vehicle carried monks to Rome as escorts; in over one hundred truckloads the convoys nearly depopulated the Abbey’s monastic community.
The task was completed in the first days of November 1943. In three weeks, in the middle of a losing war, in another country, it was quite an achievement.
Monte Cassino and Cassino have different meaning for the various participant nations of the battles. For the western Allies, monuments and inscriptions invoke God and country and sacrifice and freedom; for the Poles it stood as a "symbol of hope for their country." For the Germans and their veterans it was altogether different. Monte Cassino "represented the courage ... of their soldiers defending against Allied matériel strength," superior numbers and overwhelming firepower, a precursor of events to come. They "fought with ... great skill ... No crimes stain the German record here, nor were there any self-inflicted horrors like Stalingrad," and — that they were able to "save the treasures of Monte Cassino and the museum and gallery of Naples [endures as] a point of particular pride."**
** Ref. Wikipedia
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