
                                               From 1943 to 1951,  350 or so men & women from thirteen Allied nations served as the men & women of the Monuments,  Fine Arts & Archives section (MFAA) of the Allied armed forces,  the eyes,  ears & hands of the first & most ambitious effort in history to preserve the world's cultural heritage in times of war. They were known simply as Monuments Men. But during the thick of the fighting in Europe,  from D-Day to V-E Day,  when Germany surrendered,  there were only 65 Monuments Men in the forward operating area. Sixty-five men to cover thousands of square miles,  save hundreds of damaged buildings & find millions of cultural items before the Nazis could destroy them forever. Monuments Men is the story of eight of these men in the forward operating theatre: America's top art conservator; an up-&-coming young museum curator; a sculptor; a straight-arrow architect; a gay New York cultural impresario; & an infantry private with no prior knowledge of or appreciation for art,  but first-hand experience as a victim of the Nazi regime. They built their own treasure maps from scraps & hints: the diary of a Louvre curator who secretly tracked Nazi plunder through the Paris rail yards; records recovered from bombed out cathedrals & museums; overheard conversations; a tip from a dentist while getting a root canal. They started off moving in different directions,  but ended up heading for the same place at the same time: the Alps near the German-Austrian border in the last two weeks of the war,  where the great treasure caches of the Nazis were stored: the artwork of Paris,  stolen mostly from Jewish collectors & dealers; masterworks from the museums of Naples & Florence; & the greatest prize of all,  Hitler's personal hoard of masterpieces,  looted from the most important art collections & museums in Europe & hidden deep within a working salt mine
- a mine the Nazis had every intention of destroying before it fell into Allied hands. How does the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History end? As is often the case,  history is often more extraordinary than fiction.                                             
