'Monuments Men' are honored

WASHINGTON - Before Richard Baranick was a successful Chicago architect, he helped safeguard some of Europe's most valuable pieces of Western culture plundered by the Nazis.

Seventy years later, it remains difficult for him to fathom the theft of millions of paintings, sculptures, drawings, pieces of furniture and other objects at the close of World War II, detailed by Robert Edsel in his 2009 book, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. The book was later made into a film by George Clooney.

"All for their own selfish pursuit," said Baranick on Thursday, before he and three of the surviving "Monuments Men" - Harry Ettlinger, Motoko Fujishiro Huthwaite, and Bernard Taper - were honored with the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the nation's highest civilian awards.

They were members of an Allied unit assigned to recover the works of art stolen from homes, museums, churches, and elsewhere. The roughly 350 civilian soldiers - mostly middle-aged men and women who were historians, architects, and museum personnel before the war - were part of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section.

Baranick, born in 1924, served in the Army in France and Austria before signing up to help move looted materials to the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point in Germany.

"The Americans cared about the cultural traditions of Europe," he said. "We did everything we could to salvage what the Nazis had done. It's the best we could do."

According to Edsel, more than five million cultural objects were seized by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

In May 2014, Congress voted overwhelmingly to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the unit for its heroic role in preserving works of cultural importance. Relatives of deceased Monuments Men also attended Thursday's bipartisan ceremony, along with members of Congress.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said the Monuments Men, some of whom descended hundreds of feet into salt mines to recover pieces, saved the "creativity that connects us to the heritage of civilization."