You gotta have art: Hitler and Goering admire their ill-gotten gains in The Rape of Europa.
This aspect of World War II history was employed for
dramatic purposes in two Burt Lancaster war flicks from the 1960s, John
Frankenheimer’s The Train and Sydney Pollack’s Castle Keep, with both features exploring the wartime dilemma that must be decided between saving precious artworks or human lives. And Europa’s
tale of stolen masterpieces must begin with some backstory on Hitler
himself, an art-school reject who rebelled against the newer methods of
expression presented by modern art. Hitler’s early watercolors of city
squares reveal that he was “a mediocre painter,” sniffs art historian
Jonathan Petropoulos, “not terrible, but clearly not gifted.” More
troubling, however, is the connection Petropoulos makes between the
Jewish jurors who voted Hitler out of the Austrian art academy and
Hitler’s own anti-Semitism.
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Hitler’s rise to power enabled him to declare modern art
as “degenerate” and Germanic paintings of heroic he-men as superior,
which led to his intense purification process of Europe—although that
didn’t stop Hitler and Luftwaffe head Hermann Goering from amassing
their own private collections of history’s most important art
treasures. Europa boasts impressive archival footage and photos
of these two goosestepping creeps, including Hitler wearing a civilian
hat in one shot and another with him near the Eiffel Tower. Some color
film clips of Vienna’s buildings adorned with red, swastika-detailed
bunting, as well as damaged storefronts with the word “Jude” and
ethnic-stereotype cartoons painted on the walls, still rate as shocking.
The ways in which dedicated curators and townsfolk managed to circumvent the Nazi menace inform Europa’s
documentary; the Louvre, for example, spirited its paintings and
sculptures from harm’s way by loading up 37 eight-truck convoys and
having them shipped off to countryside chateaus. (The “Mona Lisa” was
trucked in a sealed ambulance to ensure safety from possible humidity.)
In Florence, Michelangelo’s 14-foot-high statue of David was entombed
in a brick capsule, a precaution against bombing raids. Still, the
Third Reich’s reign was far reaching: Film clips show that Russian
composer Tchaikovsky’s home was transformed into a motorcycle repair
garage.
Perhaps this documentary’s most little-known fact, at
least for audiences who are 60-plus-years removed from World War II’s
history lessons, concerns the Allied forces’ attempts to save Europe’s
classic monuments from collateral damage. Footage shows the Monte
Cassino Abbey, a mountaintop retreat built some 1,400 years earlier by
Benedictine monks, yet in World War II the abbey ended up as part of a
Nazi stronghold that was wiping out advancing infantrymen. After much
deliberation, the Air Force bombed the abbey, unaware that the Nazis
never actually occupied the structure; Europa then unspools a
Fascist newsreel that propagandizes the situation, claiming that the
abbey was “destroyed by Anglo-American art gangsters.”
The Rape of Europa is crammed with historical
tidbits like that, as this solid documentary provides some unusual
context to further deepen the psychotic paranoia of Hitler’s art
“jones” amid his attempted destructions of entire cultures and
civilizations.
—Bill DeLapp
