Someone Talked is a production of the National D Day Memorial Foundation, recorded at Media Squatch in Bedford, Virginia.

The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Foundation, Media Squatch or program sponsors.

Greetings, welcome to Someone Talked.

And I'm your host, doctor John C.

McManus from Missouri S and T.

Alongside, as always are my dear friends and partners in crime from the National D Day Memorial Foundation, John Long and April Cheek Messia.

How are you on this fine, wonderful beginning of Spring Day.

Oh wonderful, wonderful, and so excited about our topic today.

I'm very excited.

I love talking about cemeteries.

I really do.

Yeah, I've spent a lot of time in cemeteries.

Heavently, all because cemeteries are full of history, right and people, the you know, history of people, which I think is certainly what animates all of us.

And I think that's fair to say about our guests today.

So we have Robert Edsel with us, and I want to give you a little bit of background on Robert.

So Robert was, you know, a very successful businessman in the oil and gas industry and then eventually decided to devote himself full time to history, and he's of course very famous now for having written an incredible book called The monuments Men, which became a major motion picture, and what I would say about it, of course, is just one of the five books that he's published, and it's not our main focus today, but we do want to discuss it with him to some extent.

What was really, from my perspective as a World War Two historian, so impactful about monuments Men.

When we think about what the Nazis did and what we often call the Holocaust or whatever, of course, we have I think rightly so focused on the human catastrophic side of that, the destruction of human beings as slave labors, as you know, in genocide and all this kind of stuff too.

What I think that Robert's work really kind of expanded our view of what this really was.

That it wasn't just about the destruction of people and the conquests or whatever.

It was about the appropriation, the theft, the destruction of cultural you know, artistic treasures, something things that the course could never be replaced either.

And I mean that was I think an amazing contribution.

So Robert, it's it's such pleasure to have your.

Pleasure from your work has been inspirational to all of us work in this arena, and I just appreciate being invited and your curiosity about this new book.

Yeah.

Absolutely so.

Your new book, of course, is called Remember Us, American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom and a Forever Promise for US in World War Two, and it's it's an amazing piece of work.

I can't wait to delve into all the particulars with you, but we first we've got to ask about monuments Men a little bit.

Of course.

That was a very big best seller for you made into Star Studs film George Clooney.

Anybody there who might not be familiar with the book and the story, you know, what was it about, and how did you get how did you get involved in this?

What brought you to it?

Curiosity is the culprit in all of my books.

I was, as you said, business guy and had acute understanding that thirty nine becomes fifty nine with the snap of the fingers, and there were all these other things.

I was interested in it, and I didn't want to be somebody that, at fifty nine or older, was saying, you know, I always thought about doing so and so, so I sold my business, and I didn't have a plan about where I was going, but I just knew at the rate I was, at the rate of the work that I was doing, I was just completely inundated with it and there was never going to be a better chance to get off the merry go round.

So I moved to Florence and I started studying art and architects.

And I was reading about seven or eight this week because I had the chance to read during in the day.

Bet in this category, we're reading at night, and you know you always ended up rereading the same pages over and over again.

But I was standing on I was reading a lot of books about World War Two while I was studying art and architecture.

And I was standing on the Pantavecchio in Florence, which was the only bridge not blown up by the Nazis in August nineteen forty four when they fled north, And I wondered, well, if Europe was so beat up during the war sixty five million lives, claimed, how is it so many works of art and cultural treasures survived, and who were the people that saved him?

And I started asking people that I've made friends with Europeans and they all said, I don't know.

That's a great question.

What's answer?

And I said, well, you live here, you ought to know.

And to the person over years they all said, I don't know.

I never thought about it.

And that was really an epiphany for me because all these things had been put back largely the way they looked before the war.

So the French have a phrased trump loya a trick of the eye, and that's in essence what's ended up happening.

But of course they couldn't have been there during the war.

They would have been destroyed.

So who were these people that moved all these things?

And we're not talking about a million things, We're talking about tens of millions of things.

Every museum in Europe evacuated, things moved to countryside villas and chateau because the great concern was that Allied bombing would target the cities and these things would be destroyed by fires.

It was the fire and the fire bombing that the monument's officers were so concerned about.

So my focus wasn't on the bad guys, because they are always bad guys during the war.

I wanted to know who are the good guys, Who are the people that volunteered to do this exceptional work that allows us to go to Europe today and enjoy these great treasures of civilization that otherwise might not be there.

And that was really the inspiration, Robert.

I mean, I think everybody's heard of the movie Monuments Man came out, I think in twenty fourteen.

George Clooney, first of all, just love love the book, love the stories that you bring out, like Rose Vallon is one of my favorites, and just you know the role that she had for example, and you know, working at the Jade Poem Museum and kind of recording all of this.

But it brought to attention for a lot of people what exactly they were doing and the important role that they had in saving all of these precious artifacts.

Can you tell us a little bit, you know, the impact of the film on the story and getting it out there?

Did you and did you have much historical input as a as an advisor?

Good question.

When I when I wrote the book, I write books and construct books the way I imagine a film would be played out.

So I see the scenes in my head on this and then try and bring those to life in a book.

And I always thought Monuments Men was the layup of all time as far as being made into a film.

But of course, who cares about Robert Etzil thinks in that context.

Imagine everyone writes a book thinks that.

But my first book was a book I had to self published, Fauled Rescuing DaVinci, which is largely a gathering of photos to tell this whole story.

And I did that because not having a CV and never having written a book, I thought this will be my CV.

I'll show people images of things that they know and let them see how they look during the war, and then it won't challenge my credibility.

And I had a publisher say, well, that's not going to work because no one's interested in World War Two anymore.

Now this is two thousand and three, two thousand and four.

Think of all the World War Two movies, Academy Award nominated and winning films have been made since then.

I said, well, I don't think that's the case.

And they said, well, it's already been done, and I said, hey, save me for myself the name of the book, and I won't do it.

Well, of course they couldn't because it hadn't been done, and that then led me to think about, you know, there's abound to be some of these guys that are still alive.

And I went around to start trying to find him, and in the course of twenty years I found seventeen monuments men, mostly America, but a few were British, and four monuments women and spent countless hours with them.

They all became friends.

I know they're family members.

They're all gone now.

I've presided over a number of their memorial services.

They were remarkable men and women that were educators, artists.

Some were artists themselves who walked away from successful careers.

So I wanted their story as it was told to me, to come through and be exciting, much like Stephen Ambrose did in his interview in the World War two veterans of Cornelius Ryan long before him.

And when I finished monuments Men, it did not go to the bestseller life, and there were a lot of different reasons why, but that was a big disappointment.

And then we were in this period a few months after the book came out that we'd gotten a call from George Clooney's agent saying there's interest there, and we're of course very excited about that and that was in a December, and the suggestion was to come out in January.

And then there was no phone call in January, nothing, And I was pressballing.

I mean, it's like, wait, you were waiting that in front of me and then nothing happens.

Well, we didn't find out until years later that because of the success of a film he'd done up in the Air about traveling around firing people, that thing blew up in a good way, and the press junk.

It was extended and the timing just didn't work.

Timings, as we all know in life, the big thing.

So I started writing Say in Italy, which is a story about what the monuments officers did in Italy, which was just it was such a different set of circumstances it required a different book.

The looting was not target Jews per se.

It was more incidental to war.

Of course.

It happened before we had roots on the ground in northern Europe.

And I had friends coming by saying, you got to stop doing this.

You're going to go broke spending money, researching, writing and all that, and that was a very real concern of mine.

But I kept telling people that there's going to be a film made, and they said, declare victory and go home.

You've done enough.

I said, I'm going to finish the book on Italy and if there's nothing that happens by then I will have to stop.

And literally, I was in writing the last chapter of Saving Italy three years later in twenty twelve, and my agent called and said, you're getting ready to get an offer from Clooney and to speak to the craziness of what it's like being an author.

My response was, why are you bothering me?

I'm finishing the last chapter of this book I've been working on for two years.

Why are you bothering me?

And my agent said, did you hear what I said?

And I said, yeah, when you get it, you call me.

Well anyway, Sure enough, a few hours later she did get an offer, so I went out to meet with them and I asked what they were trying to do.

And I asked George, I said, why do you want to make this film?

And he said, are you kidding?

I'm as artist.

We get a chance to make a film about a major story of World War Two that's not been told here seventy years later, and it's about artists saving art, you know, the number reader of all time.

And I said, that's great.

And he said, how are you going to feel about us changing things around?

And I said, as long as you respect the fact that this was an American led idea, that the American and British were the ones that made it happen.

There were two Monuments officers killed during combat, an American and British soldier that in the general the President Eisenhower, I'm sorry, President Roosevelt endorsed it.

General Marshall, the unsung hero of World War II in my book, and General Eisenhower both made it happen in the field, issuing orders, investing authority for the Monument's officers to have some control over what happened, not a whole lot, but some, And in a break with thousands of years of civilization, the conquering army gave everything back to the people that belonged to that had never happened before.

That is ENESCO and operation before we have UNESCO in nineteen forty forty five at the end of the world.

I said, as long as you respect those things, you change it any way you want to make the most exciting film that can be made, Because I'm not really an author, I'm a messenger, and the message is, let's not do dumb things like we did in Iraq in two thousand and three forgetting or not being aware of protecting cultural heritage, because it blows up in our face and in an instant you piss off a billion and a half people around the world that think you just don't care about their culture.

And that's not the case.

But I realized in this instance, it wasn't a matter of us not knowing our history.

Sorry of us forgetting our history.

We just didn't know it.

And that was really the impetus to create the Monuments of Men and Women Foundation was to take this legacy and put it to use and be smarter about how we go about these things in future conflict.

Yeah, I mean, it's a classic example of not knowing history leading to something bad.

I mean what I'm referring to what happened in Iraq, and I mean, and of course it's it's something of the element of war that it destroys things and people and whatnot, you know.

I mean, that's I don't.

Get into the issue, you know, and you get this.

I don't get into the issue whether we should or shouldn't have gone into Iraq, that's irrelevant for the purpose of discussion.

The question is, if you are an invading force, what is your responsibility to protect the cultural treasures of that country?

And the answer is it's absolute.

You're the new sheriff in town, You're going to be the only sheriff if you're the concinforce, and you ignore this at your own peril.

And we learned that in a very very painful way.

Yeah, absolutely, one hundred percent.

And so when the movie becomes a real project, was it the kind of thing where you were out there on set working with them or they just they bought your book and then they have created control and then that's how the whole thing worked.

It's kind of funny when I when I went out there, true story, I of course, well know how bad the traffic is in La So I went out the night before and had a car service arranged to take me because I didn't want to get worse than getting you know, lost, just not even make it or be late.

So they dropped me off of this nondescript bank building where their office was and maybe they're the company's smokehouse.

And I went to the bank building and the whole way over there, I'm thinking, you know, there have been so many close calls.

We thought this was going to happen.

We thought it was gonna happen in two thousand and nine.

You know, maybe this time it's really going to happen.

I mean, when when you're into this situation, you have so many time as you think this thing's gonna lift off and you're on your way, that you get beaten down so much that even something that looks like a sure thing you just don't believe it.

And of course there's millions of people that have had films option that then are never met, books that are optioned that are never made in the film.

So the whole way over I'm thinking, maybe this is really gonna happen.

So I get out of the car and I'm thinking this the whole way on the way over there, in the hour that it takes to get there, I'm thinking this is I'm walking through this labyrinth of the hallway down the second floor and it's a windowless office and there's a buzzer, and so I buzz it and I hear a voice say smokehouse, and I said, it's Robert, that's aliving a point with George Clooney at ten o'clock.

That alone gets your attention when you hear your voice say this.

So I hear the door automated lock open, and I walk in in this long, wrectangle, long rectangular room and there was like an intern or something sitting at the desk on the opposite end, and he never even looks up at me, and he says, do you want validation?

I said, are you kidding?

Of course I want validation.

Who in the world doesn't that want validation?

This is it.

And it's like a college kid looks up at me and says, for your car, I want it, idiot.

I love it.

He says to me, definitely trouble getting over here, and I said, no, no, but I should have got a good story story about validation.

Yes.

Yeah.

So when I was asked to go out there, I asked his writing partner, Grand Heslalf, how old do you want me to come?

And I said, we just need you for a day, and I said, no problem.

So I get there and at lunch time they both walk out and then come back in and say can you stay?

And I said, well, I'm here all day and they said no.

I like the rest of the week.

Sure, no problem.

So I was there for a week and they've done a lot of work already.

George had already asked Capeline Chet to come on, and there were some other actors that you know, Daniel Craig was supposed to be in the film, but Casino Royale had come out and that had blown up, so they substituted Hugh bonavill in there, which is you know, that's pretty fantastic.

Also, we spent all week talking about things that had happened, things they were thinking about doing, and then I was involved and looking at the script and giving them comments, and they were gracious and wanting to know what I thought.

They made a lot of creative decisions I didn't agree with.

I felt like how both of these monuments officers were killed in real life was far more dramatic than what they ended up coming up with.

But one thing you have to understand and working with Hollywood, is those are all artists also, and they all want to put their own imprimature on how they tell a story, and they're very conscientious about the audience that they have to get.

Bought some of the seats to be able to recoupit and that's a challenge for period pieces.

So there were things I didn't agree with, but I will say I've said this over and over and over again.

George Clooney got this film made when nobody else would make it, and he got it done on the strength of his personal relationships of getting these other actors and actresses involved in the film.

What a cast.

I mean, nine of the most famous actors, including Cape Blenchett, in the world, and they wanted to do this film.

This is a group of actors that could do anything they want they want to do, but they wanted to make this film because the same reason that George did.

And when the budget increased, they found a second studio to come in and cover the cost.

And so we all owe Georgia Debta gratitude because had he not been so determined to see this film made.

Imagine if you want to think of it like this, this is one hundred and fifty billion dollar, two hour public service ad starting nine of the most famous people in the world, all speaking about the importance of preservation of art and cultural heritage.

No rich person in the world, any of the obvious suspects, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos no one's going to donate one hundred and fifty million dollars to do that, and even if they did, it's the star power of these actors that managed to get people to know about it.

So it's done unbelievable things for spreading this, including most recently something we're very proud of three years ago, finally convincing the United States Army to reinstate monuments officers for the first time since World War Two, as crazy as that sounds.

And now we have young men and women who have expertise in various technology areas as archaeologists and just computer scientists that are doing amazing work helping provide information in Ukraine and other problem areas.

And if we find ourselves in another conflict somewhere, we will have monuments officers that can be embedded with groups.

So you know, that's a that's a pretty big achievement, and I don't think that would have been possible without the visibility, the global visibility of the Monument's Men film.

Robert, you mentioned the Monument Monuments Men and Women Foundation that you know got started from the popularity of the book in the movie, So tell us a little bit more about its work.

And if you have a recent success story you want to share, we'd love to hear that.

Well.

The Monument's Men and Wim Foundation I started in two thousand and seven, even really about the same time I was starting to write the Monument's Men book, and that's been a you know, it's been a real challenge because you're you're, on the one hand, writing a book is an all consuming task.

I mean, it is a it's a different definition of obsessiveness if you're going to do it, because you just have to be you have to throw yourself into the research and make sure it's accurate.

And then of course running a foundation is not for the timid as well.

But I was having happened to me, I'm sure what happened to Stephen Ambrose and Cornelis Ryan on a smaller scale, which was as I was talking to these monuments officers and other people that were that knew them and were involved during the war, they were giving me their diaries, their notes, photographs that nobody had seen before, and we just gathered so many things and I could see which waves was going.

And of course Stephen Ambrose and Nick Mueller, his good best friend that had the idea of creating the D Day Museum that now is a national World Wars Museum that already already carved the path for what to do in this situation.

So you know, we have a foundation.

We take these things in, we gather them all, finding an immense amount of out of print books and material which was important to gather.

And the whole idea was to first of all, thank these men and women that no one ever knew of because by the time their work finished in nineteen fifty one, the world was engaged in the Cold War.

They'd moved on, and the monuments officers men and women understood what all combat veterans know, which is the real heroes are the men and women that did not come home.

And they didn't want to come home and bang their chest about what they've done.

They just wanted to get back on with their lives and resume work.

So no one ever knew about what they'd done.

And one of the questions I asked them when I interviewed them was do you regret not coming home and talk about it?

And to the person that all said yes, that was a mistake because now people don't know about it unless you're able to get the word out there, and so the Foundation not only wanted to recognize and honor these men and women, which we did at the highest level in twenty fifteen.

They were conventional Gold Medal, which is our nation's highest civilian award, which involves nothing less than getting a bill passed in Congress two thirds support to both houses.

And I don't need to say anything more about how difficult that is to accomp President Obamas signed it into law, and we helped with the design of the medal, and that was a joyous moment to have four of the monument's officers still living on stage and hundreds of their family members from fourteen different countries all present in the halls of Congress to see that happen.

We have created educational programs.

We have a lot of times we find missing works of art and cultural treasures, oftentimes picked up by soldiers, usually as souvenirs of war, not having any idea of the cultural importance of them.

Sometimes, yes, soldiers have deliberately taken them, but in the magnanimity of Americans in twilight of their lives, they have gone to extraordinary links to make sure these things get back to their rightful owners.

So we facilitate that.

We don't charge anybody for doing that.

And then, most recently, after fourteen years of pleading, haranguing the Army to create monuments officers, we weren't the only ones.

That were others that were trying to do it also that were in service.

But you know a lot of time visiting bases talking to civil affairs officers that were getting ready to go on deployment, just letting them know, look, these are the footsteps you're walking in.

And Generalisenhower makes doing that easy because who does not want to stand in that shadow?

And I have leaned so heavily on those images on Eisenhower's in my opinion immortal quote that in a democracy, at least there always stands beyond the materialism and destructiveness of war, those ideals for which it was fought, and one of those ideals was a preservation of cultural heritage.

And that not ideals don't expire, they don't like, they don't like a shelf life.

It still matters today, it should still matter to us today, and so I'm so pleased that the Army now has invested the resources to make that happen.

And it was immense pride to be asked to deliver the first commencement addressed to these monuments officers at the Smithsonian in two thousand and twenty two.

As I recall, so, you know, we've accomplished a lot of great things, but there's a never ending amount of work left to be done.

Yeah.

I mean, if we stand for anything, it is this the preservation of culture, the preservation of heritage, of value, systems, of ideals, all these things like you're saying, Robert, I mean, in your work has done that in a tangible way, and it speaks to impact obviously the impact of monuments men, but also these concepts too.

And I think, you know, I can really relate to what you're saying too in terms of walking in in the boots of the past.

You were doing it in terms of the these amazing people who had preserved the art and culture in World War Two, because they were experts on that, who were of course obviously portrayed in your book in the movie.

For me, it was it was, you know, trying to get across to young infantrymen that they're walking in the boots of people in the past who happened to be in the same unit, you know, and so it really is much the same thing, and you know what it speaks to I think, in a way is the human story that I think it is fair to say it attracts both of us to this.

And so I mean you now with your new project remember Us.

So again the title of the book is Remember Us, American sacrifice, Dutch freedom and a forever promised for in World War Two.

I mean this to me is the ultimate human story in many levels.

So I wonder if you could maybe walk us through how how you got to this project.

What what are the key themes that you're emphasizing, You know what undergirds the book in that.

Well, I have said to people, and I know it sounds like the proverbial author selling trying to sell his product here, but I truly believe this monuments men story saving Italy's story immensely important.

And I'll say one other thing about that before we turn the page and go to Remember Us.

When I try and explain to people why that matters, I take it down to this simple explanation.

People.

A lot of people don't pay attention to our military.

I mean I never wander through an airport without seeing someone in uniform.

And I take my six and eight year olds over and we stand there and we shake their hand and thank them for their service.

You can say it's corny.

You can sometimes you'll hear some guys in uniform say they're kind of embarrassed about it, but by god, do it.

Do something to let them know you appreciate the fact that they're doing this.

And I tell people in my audiences if you're one of these people that says, well, like matters, because I believe if we put one hundred and first airborne troops in Hyde Park in England and our most long standing friendship and leave them there long enough, someone's going to start sniping at them.

Because nobody likes to see foreign troops on your soil.

Nobody.

And when we're in these hostile environments, the longer our troops are there, the more of them that are going to get killed.

It's just axiomatic to conflict.

And we're a digital society.

We don't think about this, but ninety percent of the countries in the world they live off paper.

And these bad guys they don't just go in and destroy the cultural treasures.

They destroy the tax records, the business records.

So you have a community like one in Iraq if all those things are flooded, and they did flood them, and there are no tax records to determine who owns a house, who owns a business, that our guys are stuck there longer, and the longer we're there, the more soldiers we have killed unnecessarily.

So it matters if you don't even care about art history, culture, if you think that that's a total waste of time, but you think that you care about our soldiers, you have to care about this.

You have to or else we're going to lose more lives.

So that's why it matters.

So I honestly believe remember Us is more important than my work on monuments men and women, as important as I think that is because it goes to the core value of our country since the founding fathers, and that is that we defend our own freedom.

And these are the men and women that do it, and we have historically, at least until current situation in Ukraine, helped other countries defend their freedom.

That has what set the United States of America apart from every other country in the world all this time.

And if we don't venerate these warriors of ours and provide them with the resources that they need.

The and the national community.

Those of us who are who are not in uniform, those of us, which is ninety eight percent of the country who have never done a damned thing for the freedom that was handed to us, then we're not going to succeed as a country.

And so when I see Memorial Day weekends that many Americans have no idea what Memorial Days about, and others may think it's a three day weeknd to go to the baseball market eat hot dogs, and by all, I mean go to the baseball market and eat hot dogs and enjoy that freedom.

But remember that there are men and women who served in uniform, buried in overseas cemeteries and buried in national cemeteries in this country, who gave their lives to pay for us to think what we want to think, to have the rights that we have to do what we want to do.

And I think we owe them a debt of gratitude because we haven't had to serve.

Their service kept us from having to do it.

And that eighty year piece evident that I grew up with and you all grew up with two is a high water mark and civilization I don't know if we're going to sustain that.

It's teetering now, and it's so I think this book's hugely important because the Dutch have in many ways become more American than we are because they do what we used to do.

They go to the cemetery, they venerate and honor these men and women that got them their freedom, and it's still fresh in their memory even though it's eighty years later, and nice of how much is at risk it is, and how easy it is to lose it, how damn difficult it is to get back.

Look at what's happening in Ukraine from day to day and at the end of the day.

I truly believe all of us want to be remembered some way, somehow, by somebody, and the Dutch have given us a beautiful example of how to do that.

That's so well said Robert, and really you're speaking our language.

I think we all talk about this every Memorial Day and beyond, not just on Memorial Day.

And if we're not venerating our war dead, I mean that has a real impact too on young people who decide to join up today, because if they see that we are not thankful, we're not grateful for those sacrifices, why in the world would you want to join, you know, the military today.

And so I think when people see that we do indeed remember and pay tribute, that has a tremendous impact.

And so love what you said, and love the individual stories in your book and how you weave those together.

And I was really struck by one of them.

You talk about Jefferson Wiggins, who was a black sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps who becomes basically, you know, responsible for, you know, digging many of these graves and taking care of those bodies.

And you said in two thousand and eight, when he was eighty three, he was contacted by a Dutch historian for an oral history of the Netherlands American cemetery and as soon as he heard the word mcgratten, his adrenaline flowed and he became angry.

How dare she asked me about that, jeff thought, as he politely, as politely as he could, he told her no.

And of course later I think he would talk about it.

But can you talk about the challenge that you had in collecting and researching these in depth stories and how difficult that was because it looks like many of them didn't talk about it like mister Wiggins for a long time.

John and your team there understands so well with veterans.

There's a way to go about talking to them.

It's a whole nother language, and I think I think elderly people are heat seeking missiles for bullshit.

They've heard it all, they've been pitched, they've been talked, they've been schmoozed, and they know who really wants to listen.

And it works with grandchildren because grandchildren are like elderly people, time's not an element.

They don't wear a watch, and boy do these men and women have stories to tell, but they're not going to open up and tell them if someone's not going to sit there as many hours as they want to talk and listen, and they also want some vetting.

They want to know you know something about their union, their history.

They don't want to have to give you a World War two primer.

So there's just I don't know.

It's a language you learned to speak.

And I'm at my best listening when I'm speaking to veterans because I understand how important it is and I'm trying to pick up on things Kriageman to talk about.

So Jeff wick I spent a lot of time with his widow, who's a wonderful lady, and she's the one that encouraged him that it was time to talk about this, and he did it even though he really didn't want to.

And it was sad to hear her tell me.

He was never the same for the rest of his life, the last four or five years of his life, in the sense that he was much more melancholy, and it really weighed on him because he had found a way to put these horrific memories of the task of being a grave digger.

I mean for the audience simply the assignment.

Jeff was grew up in a family of sharecroppers in Alabama and Dothan, Alabama, and his earliest memory as a six or seven year old was hearing the crackling sound outside the jack they lived in and opened the blinds and saw burning cross and ibman there who were wanting to know where his dad was because they wanted to hang in.

And his crime was he'd sold a bail of cotton at a time when the owner of the plantation or farm refused to sell it because there were low prices, but he needed to feed his family and to think then that he joins the army at sixteen and a half.

He lies about his age because his aunt, who'd always or sorry his grandma had had such an influence on him, always told him, if you ever get a chance to get away, you know, find a way to find a way to get out of here.

And he saw some army recruiter that saw this strapping young boy and figured he was eighteen or close enough.

And Jeff signed this thing and then went in the quartermaster and only to find himself in October or early November rather forty four being told by his CEO, you know, have the guys ready at four in the morning.

What are we going to do, sir?

You'll find out in the morning.

And they get off the truck and the smell and the sound of shovels hitting hard ground quartermaster squad there.

You know, it was just shocked because they realized, we're digging graves.

There's no wood in these graves, there's no coffins.

These are bed sheets that create a very tactile environment.

These soldiers in the worst conditions.

They estimated that the road that they had to build for this cemetery that's in Margrot and Netherlynds would take a couple of weeks.

It took months because the mud with the clay and it just swallowed up every material they put on the ground.

It disappeared.

Finally built a corduroy road of lumber that they ended up strapping together to be able to drive over.

But it was just horrible conditions, freezing cold, sleet later snow, and they're having to lift up bodies.

Of course, it's very dangerous because all these bodies have live ammunition on them.

Sometimes guys have a grenade that the pins pull in their hands rigor mortis, or they're frozen and they start to thaw.

So this is the first concern.

They're removing any personal identification objects off.

There's a stripping line that greater registration officers are going through to take all identifying materials.

But ultimately it's a function of the army.

And there's no film or book that I know of that's ever told this story of war other than specific books about here's what happens with the dead person, here's how you do it.

We've never done that because, in my opinion, our telling of world War two as Americans is, we got attacked, we were way behind, we got caught up, we got involved, we won, we came home.

We move on, and in Abroax that's all true.

But there's four hundred and five thousand Americans and their families that did not move on, and they couldn't move on even when they tried to move on, because there's nothing to move on with.

There's no object to grieve with.

There's no body, there's nothing, and there's nobody to write.

There's no phones, there's no You send a letter of the War Department, you know, good luck that goes in the waste beIN or just sits there and unresponded to.

So what these men had to do, You know, we need troops to provide fuel, ammunition, food.

We would write about those things, the Red Ball Express.

We don't ever talk about a function of the of war, which isn't If it happens, it's gonna happen, and someone's got to deal with it.

In general, Simpson, to his re markable credit, hold his ninth Army soldiers.

Nobody's being buried on enemy soil, period, the only one that did that.

And they ferried these casualties.

From Germany across the border to Mark Gratton, which was just ten miles away from Achan, the most westerly German city, until in the late stages in April and May, we were so far east into Germany and the casualties were so great that they couldn't make the round trip, and they buried them for weeks or a couple of months, and the minute the war was over, they were exhuming them and taking them to Mark Rotten to honor what he had promised.

You can't know this story and not find yourself in tears at times swelled up with pride as an American for the effort that our great Registration soldiers went to honor this promise and find everybody that was missing.

Thank you for sharing that, Robert, because uh, you know, we we here in Bedford have spent twenty five years researching the question who died on D Day?

And along the way we have developed enormous respect for Graves Registration.

So absolutely, but let me ask you about the cemetery in Mark Rotten.

Do you well, we just got trained out, John, Why don't you ask the question?

And what do you will cut all this?

Yeah?

Sure, yeah, so so of course, the central part of the story is the Netherlands American Cemetery of Mark Rotten, which I think maybe all of us have visited, and obviously you know it very very well, having you know, done this project.

So what is your own personal connection to the to that cemetery.

Well, I I you know, you asked earlier, and I veered off.

I knew about the cemetery.

In fact, I had been there and two thousand and twelve with the monument's officer Harry Etlinger, who was a German jew that fled Germany and came the United States and then was drafted in the army.

I mean, who can make this stuff up and goes back to fight in his old country representing a new country.

But Harry and I visited the cemetery and along with a group of people, and we paid our respects to Captain Walter Hutchhausen, who was the one American Monument's officer who was killed in Germany on April second, nineteen forty five.

So you know, no one wants to be the last casualty, no one wants to be killed at all.

But you sure don't want to do it.

You're a month away from the war ending and you end up being killed.

So hutch House is buried there.

And in two thy fifteen, in conjunction with us setting up this Congressional Gold Medalt ceremony at the request of the Speaker of the House to honor the monuments and women, I received a response from Captain Hutchhausen's nephew, who was in his seventies, saying, absolutely, my wife and I will be there.

By the way, here's a photograph that we took of Frieda, who we were with recently.

That's all he said.

And I looked at this photo and I thought, Frieda, Frieda, I don't know any freedom of acts this woman.

She's in her eighties, she's got a full head, a crown of white hair.

And I kept thinking for three or four days, and I finally thought, you know, the only Freeda I know of is that young girl in the Netherlands who in September forty five wrote Harvard University seeking the name and address of Walter Hutchhausen's mom because she wanted to let her know that she walked five miles every day to the cemetery to put flowers on his grave because they knew it and it occurred to me, Oh my god, she must be alive.

Now.

I wrote about this letter that she wrote Harvard at the very end of monuments Men and wrapping up that story, and it never occurred to me to wonder was she alive.

And as a consequence, I thought, you know what, next time in London.

She lives outside line because she married a British soldier.

I need to go meet her.

And my wife said, are you thinking about some book here?

And I said, now, are you kidding?

I feel duty bound.

She's probably the last person that saw him when he was alive.

I just want to go talk to her and hear a story.

Well, anyway, that's how it started.

It was pure curiosity.

And I went to go meet her and she starts flipping through her albums of photographs.

Do you want to see when the American tanks that liberated us drove past our house on September thirteen, ninety forty four?

Yeah?

Do you want to see when these this tank stopped and these three American tankers got out and asked if they could hold my one year old niece because they'd seen nothing but death since they landed in Europe and they wanted to hold something living.

Several of them have children that had been born that they hadn't met yet, and I thought, you know, keep going, keep telling me these stories.

And then after hours of this, she said, you know about the cemetery, right, and they said, yeah, yeah, I know about cemetery.

You've been out there, Yes, I've been there.

You're sure.

I'm very sure.

I was out there with one of the monuments men.

So you know about the grave adoption program, right?

And I said the what?

And she said the grave adoption program and I said, no, I don't know about that.

Tell me about that.

And that's when my life changed again.

And I walked away from there saying I'm going to go off and do some research here because you're telling me things that I don't know anything about and I'm not able to process it.

And we're at four hours of this, and I did.

I came back about four months later, having read what I could, and said, Okay, start all over again.

Tell me everything you told me, and we'll go from there.

And that's how it began.

I just felt like like I did the same thing on the monuments men.

How is it eighty years after the war that every American doesn't know that there are Dutch people that have been watching over every one of our soldiers for eighty years without cessation.

How do we not know that story in the United States?

And we need to know that story and that's how it started.

Wow, well, this is we've reached the end of our time for this episode.

We'll pick it up on the next episode.

Again, the book is called Remember Us and it's a great teaser for our second episode.

Robert, So, this is how you got to the story.

Then we'll delve a little bit more in the specifics of the story in the next episode.

Robert Edsel, it's been such a pleasure to have you on.

Thanks, thank you, John So John Long, please tell us about today's We salute you.

Today and we salute you feature.

We honor the service of Pfc.

Ellsworth M.

Heck, a brave paratrooper, fell on d Day along with several of his brothers in arms, in an act of German brutality that to this day remains unresolved.

We will use Private Heck's sacrifice to recount the little known story of the m of a massacre of June sixth, nineteen forty four.

Ellsworth Heck was born in nineteen oh seven, West Virginia, and grew up into a high school football star in his hometown of Huntington.

When the US entered World War Two, he was working for International Nickel Company in West Virginia, but like many patriotic Americans, Heck rushed to enlist and further volunteered for paratroop training.

Despite being a good decade older than most of the recruits.

He was assigned to HQ Company of the first Battalion, five or seventh PR eighty second Airborne Division.

On D Day, Heck and his stick of paratroopers were to jump in the vicinity of sam Araglice, but, as so often was the case, that morning, anti aircraft fire and the cloudy weather led to a mind of some four miles.

The men landed in the vicinity of the small village of MVA.

One paratrooper was severely injured in the jump, fracturing his pelvis.

The ranking officer, Lieutenant Robert Shutt, gathered his men in a small woods and sent three out to reconnoiter.

While those men were scouting, the small party was found by German troops and a firefight ensued.

Three of the paratroopers were killed, but later autopsies revealed that they were bludgeoned to death, not killed by enemy fire.

The three scouts heard the firing and rushed back to the woods, arriving only in time to see that the surviving paratroopers had been captured.

Ellsworth, Heck, Lieutenant Shut and the rest were taken to MVA for interrogation.

Shut as an officer, was taken away for further questioning, and the trooper with the broken pelvis was evacuated to a German hospital.

He would later be They rescued and survived the war, but Lieutenant Shutt would be killed a month later trying to escape from German custody.

Back to Ellsworth, Heck and the other three men left in m of A for reasons that have never been discovered.

After a couple of hours, these four paratroopers were marched back to the woods where the earlier firefight had taken place there, despite their clear status as prisoners of war entitled to Geneva Accord protections, each man was shot in the back of the head.

The German soldiers never identified took pains to make the scene look like all seven deaths had taken place during the earlier combat.

Later that day, French civilians from MVA found the bodies and took them for burial in the village cemetery, carefully noting the scene and collecting dog tags in personal effects.

They immediately recognized that a massacre had taken place.

MVA was liberated by American forces on June seventeenth, and soon after that investigators arrived to look into the reports of atrocities.

The dead Americans were exhumed and examined.

The villagers and the three surviving scouts were questioned.

While it was clear that war crimes had taken place, there was no way at that point to uncover who was responsible.

No charges could ever be filed, and eighty years later still no one knows who committed the murders of the prisoners of war.

Lest we ever forget Ellsworth, Heck's comrades in arms who died at Mvey that day were Delmore McIlhaney, Robert Werner and Anthony Hitstaller.

Daniel Tillman, Andrew Kleing and Robert Watson were the three men killed in the earlier firefight.

Another paratrooper from their stick, John Cottona, was killed some distance away, apparently in a separate exchange of fire with the Germans.

All are remembered on the Necrology Wall at the National D Day Memorial in MV.

A marker at the cemetery today recalls the have an American parashoutists killed in their village.

Another sign near their location of the murders calls the massacre quote an act of barbarism and enjoins passers by to never forget.

Although the story is not well known, and although it is only one unsolved crime against humanity in a war that was marked by unexcelled atrocities, we can promise that as long as the National D Day Memorial remains open, the victims of MVA massacre will indeed never be forgotten.

Pfc Ellsworth, Heck and your other fallen comrades, we salute you all, even if justice was never satisfied.

We honor your sacrifice, thank you for your service, and thank you for doing your part to.

Save the world.

Well that this speaks to one of many remarkable things that memorial is doing, the Necrology project.

So these are guys that you have personally documented through your preference and the others who have been involved with this.

I mean, it's you know, how do you put a price on that.

Yes, and their names are on the wall, but often, you know, you see the c names, you don't always know the backstory, and this is one that needs to be.

Remembered, definitely.

It speaks to some of the ferociousness and savagery of the fighting right at the beginning of the invasion too, where you know you have this the other five or seven guys around grind too, there's some of that as well, and horrible, horrible circumstances.

Yeah, So anyway, thanks for that, John, We greatly appreciate it.

And again I let to thank our guest Robert Edzel, author of Remember Us and of course monuments Men.

Robert, it's been just so much fun to sit down with you in this episode, and we look forward to sitting down you with you in the next one.

Thanks.

Thanks, well great.

You can email our team at podcasts at dday dot org.

Again, that's podcast at dday dot org.

We really enjoy hearing from you.

If you're enjoyed our discussions on World War Two and its lasting impact, please subscribe to this podcast, share it with your friends, rate it, and leave us a review.

Help us share the lessons and legacies of d Day and World War Two.

Thanks for joining you, sir, hoping take care.

Promotional consideration for Someone Talked is provided by Framatome, an international leader in nuclear energy.

Learn more at framatome dot com.

This program was supported by a grant from Virginia Humanities, headquartered at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The State Humanities Council connects people and ideas to explore the human experience and inspire cultural engagement.

Connect online at Virginia Humanities dot org.

Located in Bedford, Virginia, the community that suffered the highest known D Day loss per capita in the United States, Congress warranted the establishment of the Nations Monument to D Day in this emblematic American home front.

Receiving no federal or state funding, the memorial is operated and maintained by a private foundation and donor support.

Explore the National D Day Memorial, plan your visit and learn more about upcoming events at dday dot org.

Join the conversation.

Email our team at podcast at dday dot org for the National DDA Memorial Foundation.

And Someone Talked, I'm Angela Hatcher.

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