In 1945, in the heat of war, a young John Pistone helped himself to a
book. Now he is giving it back.
To be fair, Mr Pistone, a private in George Patton’s army, never thought
of his act as theft. He just needed proof he was there.
“I thought who the hell’s going to believe I was in Berchtesgaden?” he
said. “I’m going to need some proof.”
As the Americans raced across southern Germany in the spring of 1945, Mr
Pistone recalled, the soldiers were intent on capturing as many German
soldiers as possible. And finding Hitler.
“They were giving up like mad by that time, but we were looking for
Hitler. Because they said he was still alive,” he said.
And so the young John Pistone found himself walking through the gates of
the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian
Alps.
“We had a feeling like we just missed Hitler,” Mr Pistone remembered. “It
seemed like… someone had just left in a hurry.”
The place had already been stripped bare by other American souvenir
hunters, but in a cabinet Mr Pistone found a large photo album, full of
immaculate black and white reproductions of paintings.
He had no idea what it was, but he thought it looked interesting and would
do nicely as a memento. For the next few months, until he made it back
home to Ohio, he lugged the volume around.
“That damn thing was heavy! But I was determined to get it home,” he
remembered.
For decades, the album sat on John Pistone’s shelf, brought out only to
show family and friends. His children called it “the Hitler book”.
But it was not until Mr Pistone decided to install a washer and drier in
an upstairs bedroom that the book came to the attention of a local history
buff who, in turn, contacted Robert Edsel, author and president of the
Monuments Men Foundation.
The Monuments Men were a group of some 345 men and women from 13 countries
who scoured Europe during and after WWII, looking for artistic and
cultural items stolen by the Nazis.
When he heard about the album, Mr Edsel figured he knew what it was, but
he flew from Texas to Cleveland to make sure.
“When I first saw it, there was little doubt in my mind about it being
authentic,” Mr Edsel said. “But the question was, as always, where did it
come from?”
Examination confirmed Mr Edsel’s initial hunch that the book was one of 31
albums that formed a catalogue featuring art selected by Hitler for
inclusion in a huge National Socialist museum of art, planned for the
Austrian city of Linz.
The museum, had it ever been built, would have included looted masterworks
from across the continent, but Mr Pistone’s album, Number 13, mostly
consists of reproductions of little-known German and Austrian 19th Century
paintings.