ABSTRACT
In general the Monuments officers in Germany had little time to become involved in such long-term projects. They travelled incessantly and usually alone. In the course of these peregrinations they gradually discovered more than two thousand caches in everything from castles to cowsheds, in which were hidden, often with great ingenuity, not only superb works of art but the re cords and artifacts of the maddest Nazi undertakings and most hideous experiments. The owners of the castles or the assigned guardians of the valuables greeted the Monuments men with attitudes ranging from nasty and suspicious, through arrogant or obsequious, to co operative and we1coming. There were few signs of guilt or compunction. A certain number complained about their deprivations. After five years ofwar, the low-ranking MFAA officers, who were often not so low-ranking at horne, and who frequently arrived in muddy field uniforms after hours of travel by jeep only to be received with condescension by elegantly dressed schloss owners, were sometirnes hard put to be polite. One officer, confronted by an arrogant German noblewoman who complained that Polish DPs were making a mess of her schloss, sharply retorted that it was not his compatriots who had brought the Poles to Germany. There were frequent complaints about the 'inconvenience' caused by the Allied occupation. The geIitle sculptor Walker Hancock remarked later that it seemed not to occur to many Germans just how much 'inconvenience' Hitler had caused the rest ofthe world.
