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History (Education)

How a clever French museum director secretly saved the Louvre's artwork from Nazi plunder

When the Germans arrived, they were shocked to find the Louvre emptied of its treasures.

Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) (left), public domain (right)

The "Mona Lisa" and thousands of other art pieces were hidden around France during WWII.

People can often feel when war is brewing, and some take precautions just in case. A combination of political unrest, bombastic language and sabre-rattling from leaders, on-the-ground shifts in military presence or police activity and other indicators can signal that war is imminent, and in the 1930s, Jacques Jaujard saw the writing on the wall.

The deputy director of French National Museums foresaw Germany's invasion of France before the war even started, and he knew what was likely to happen when they arrived. The Nazis would plunder France's museums and loot the world's art treasures from the Louvre, but Jaujard wasn't about to let that happen. Major artworks started being evacuated from the Louvre in 1938, the year before the war even started.

- YouTubeyoutu.be

On August 25, 1939, Jaujard closed the Louvre for three days "for repairs" and put out and all-hands-on-deck call to pack up the thousands of pieces held in the Louvre—paintings, drawings, statues, vases, tapestries, and more—and put them in hiding. Museum curators, guards, students of the Louvre School, and even employees of a nearby department store helped with the effort.

It was no easy task. Transporting art treasures is an art in itself, since changes in humidity and temperature can damage them.

"They had to improvise, because nothing on such a grand scale had ever been attempted before — and the Louvre was, and remains really, probably the biggest museum in the world,” James Gardner, author of The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum, told the New York Post.

And it all had to be done in secret, without anyone who might inform the Germans catching wind of it. According to The Collector, between August and December 1939, two hundred trucks transported the Louvre's 3,690 paintings and thousands of statues and antiquities. The "Mona Lisa" was among the treasures evacuated, of course. She left the Louvre cushioned in velvet in an ambulance 10 days before the Germans arrived.

mona lisa, louvre, art, world war twoToday, the "Mona Lisa" sits safely behind glass at the Louvre.Victor Grigas

Throughout the war, the infamous smiling lady would be moved six times to abbeys and chateaux in the French countryside and a small museum in southern France, each time in a temperature-controlled armored van.

“The ‘Mona Lisa’ was like a resistance fighter who’s always trying to stay one step ahead from the approaching German army,” Gardner told the New York Post.

Items from dozens of other museums were also moved and spread throughout France, hidden in castles, chateaux, and abbeys in remote areas where they weren't likely to be discovered by Nazi invaders. Thousands of pieces all had to be categorized, catalogued, and dispersed.

the louvre, art museum, franceThe Louvre was first built in 1793.Benh LIEU SONG

When the Germans finally arrived at the Louvre, they were shocked to find it almost completely empty. They stared at frames with no art in them and some reproductions, such as a plaster copy of the Venus De Milo.

Thankfully, Jaujard and the Louvre's art also had a German ally on their side. Count Franz Wolff-Metternich was a German art historian appointed by Hitler to oversee France's art collection. Metternich, however, was not a member of the Nazi party and apparently did not want to see the world's greatest works of art fall into the hands of art-loving war criminals like Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels. Jaujard wrote in his diary that Metternich almost seemed relieved to find the Louvre empty when he arrived in 1940. Throughout the war, he used every means at his disposal to keep the art pieces safe while managing to avoid suspicion that he was trying to prevent them from being looted by the Nazis.

- YouTubeyoutu.be

The clandestine conspiracy to keep the Louvre's treasures safely away from Hitler's clutches worked. Though the Nazis stole thousands of pieces of art during the war, largely from Jewish families' private collections, they were unsuccessful in finding and taking the art that Jaujard and his colleagues had hidden.

In 1944, Jaujard was appointed Director of the French Order of Arts and Letters and helped establish the French Commission on Art Recovery. He would later become Secretary General of the Ministry of State in charge of cultural affairs. For his services during the war, he was awarded the Medal of the Résistance and named a Commander of the Legion of Honor.

Not too shabby for a man who dedicated his life to preserving and protecting the world's most beloved artwork.

Culture

Homophobe gets flawlessly murdered by words for comparing Pride Month to Nazi Germany.

This clap-back deserves its own parade 😂😂😂🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈



It's Pride Month, which many members of the heterosexual community choose to interpret as a time to celebrate their desire for victim hood by whining about how they don't get a month/parade/enough attention. It's exhausting and takes energy and focus away from the whole point of Pride Month: celebrating and empowering the LGBTQ community, and also, selling them things.



A prime example of attention-deprived cis, straight folks trying to make Pride Month about THEM, as if every freaking day isn't already about them, comes from a guy who goes by "A Gift from God" on Twitter. Sure, if by "God" you mean a cat, and by "gift" you mean a partially decomposing rat carcass.


This guy recently posted one of the worst tweets I've ever seen, and I've seen all the tweets. It did not end well for him. Here is the tweet, I am sorry:



"Being a heterosexual during #PrideMonth is like being a Jew back in nazi Germany," he wrote, before making his profile private (surely the best and only good decision this man has ever made). But too late—because this very, very, very bad tweet was captured by someone who posted it on Reddit, where it provoked this absolutely perfect clap-back from someone who goes by "GaydolphShitler." They wrote:

It's true. A sympathetic gay couple have sheltered me in their attic for the last 5 days. The gaystapo came yesterday and interrogated my benefactors, but they didn't search the house. At least not this time.
I'm putting them in terrible danger, but I don't know what else to do. I know what happens to those who protect breeders. They know it too. How long will the be willing to risk their lives for me? I trust them; I have to. What happens when the closet police come back, though? What happens when they are forced to choose between their safety and mine? I pray it doesn't come to that.
A crowd was marching in the street today. I could hear then chanting "YASS QUEEN, YASS QUEEN" through the walls of my hiding place. I can't tell if it's the stomp of their thigh high boots or my own shaking, but it feels like an earthquake. An earthquake inside my own head... my god, there's so many of them. I need to stay positive, but I can feel the spidery thread of hope slipping through my fingers.
Why didn't I listen after homonacht? I could have left. There was still time, but I didn't listen. There's no escape now; only hiding. Hiding and waiting for Pride Month to be over.

And THAT, my friends, is how you murder someone with words. The beautiful and epic takedown was captured and reposted on the sub-Reddit "MurderedByWords" where it went extremely viral. Here you can see the entire exchange in all its beauty:



Never been prouder to be a member of the LGBTQ community AND the Reddit community. Happy Pride to all except the homophobic shitbags!!!!!!

This article originally appeared on SomeeCards. You can read it here.

Last week, an 11-year-old girl was reprimanded and sent to the principal's office for telling several classmates to stop giving the nazi salute.

Yes, you read that right.

As part of an interactive fifth grade social studies class project at the McFadden School of Excellence in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, one student was assigned to portray Adolf Hitler, and according to Huffington Post, his teacher instructed him to give the Sieg Heil salute as part of his presentation.


The girl, whose father later shared the whole story, including back and forth between him and the school administration in a Twitter thread, noted that while she'd initially been given the opportunity to express why the situation upset her, afterwards she was told “not address it again.”

However, because fifth graders can be mean, several students who saw how upset the salute made the girl decided to perform it at her repeatedly.

Keith Jack Gamble, the girl's father, noted that the saluting continued for weeks until some 10 to 20 students were doing it. This finally culminated in Gamble’s daughter shouting “stop it” and “put your hands down" at her classmates, which led to disciplinary action taken against her for being “disrespectful with her tone and body language to teachers.” She was then sent to the principal's office.

While the school claims teachers intervened at the few confirmed instances of harassment and the principal said he gave the entire fifth-grade class a talking to, the school is taking no responsibility for the inciting assignment.

“It was never intended to be offensive and the salute was definitely not encouraged to be performed by the other students,” the school's communications director told HuffPost.

What was intended is hardly the point though. Fifth grade-aged children are incredibly impressionable, and by teaching them to use hateful gestures like that you're opening up a dangerous can of worms. What's perhaps even more troubling though is that the assigning teacher didn't seem to consider that the assignment might be offensive to other students in class in the first place.

The school has since agreed to stop including the nazi salute in history presentations, but many believe the damage has already been done.

This is hardly the first time the nazi salute has appeared in schools in America.

Most recently, a group of High School students in Wisconsin performed it in a group photo as a gag, even though it was distressing to a few students.

Hateful actions, even if they're not necessarily intended to be, are sadly contagious and educators have a responsibility to quell them rather than put them in their curriculum. This is especially important during this highly politically-charged time in America when racism and bigotry have been elevated by a number of divisive groups.

This hate can end with our children as long as we protect them from it as much as we can.

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DICK'S Sporting Goods

In a time when racism was infecting Germany and segregation was commonplace in the U.S., one man shattered world records, bridging differences with speed and grace.

That man was Jesse Owens, a black track and field star from Cleveland, Ohio, who had been breaking records since his high school days. On Aug. 4, 1936, at the Olympic Games in Berlin, he not only shattered a record, he foiled some of Hitler's propaganda plans.

Berlin had already won the bid to host the 1936 Olympics, a few years after the Nazi Party rose to power. It was a gesture of inclusion on behalf of the Olympic committee after Germany was devastated by World War I, but fascism was gaining ground in Germany as the Olympics approached.


In response to reports of Jewish athletes being banned from competing on the German Olympic teams, the U.S. and other countries threatened to boycott the 1936 Games.

Many Americans even began calling the 1936 event "The Nazi Games."

Fritz Schilgen carries the torch in the 1936 Olympic Games. Image via Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe/Wikimedia Commons.

"The very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed or race," the president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, responded to Germany’s persecution of Jewish athletes, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

However, many black athletes thought the boycott was arbitrary because they suffered racism at home on a daily basis. They viewed the Olympics as a place to transcend racism and change ideas about what it meant to be an American.

Since Germany wanted to avoid a boycott, they promised to include Jewish athletes on their Olympic teams and refrain from promoting Nazi ideology during the Games.

After much deliberation, it was eventually decided that the U.S. would compete.

Germany pretended to put on a show of tolerance and strength as the Olympics host. Nazi propaganda was hidden. Anti-Semitic imagery was temporarily removed. Germany’s 1936 Olympic team included one Jewish athlete, fencer Helene Mayer. But of course, this was nothing but a charade — a form of propaganda in itself. Of course, the Third Reich intended to use the very first televised Olympics (a big deal for all involved) to their advantage.

Not only was Hitler going to show the world he was building a master race, he was going to make a film about it.

He employed Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to film the 1936 Games.

Leni Riefenstahl behind the scenes. Photo by Oswald Burmeister/German Federal Archives/Wikimedia Commons.

The footage was indeed released in two parts, titled "Olympia Part I: Festival of the Nations" and "Olympia Part II: Festival of Beauty." The two films were released in 1938, showcasing the Nazi ideal of athletic Aryan bodies, cultivated into machines ready to serve the state.

But here’s the thing — as much as Riefenstahl tried to follow her mandate to show Aryan supremacy and not include footage of black athletes, Owens made the final cut. In fact, he makes direct eye contact with the camera before his long jump win.

Even Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite propagandist, couldn’t hide the truth of Owens' amazing athletic talents.

Owens’ defiant move followed by a series of wins effectively dashed Hitler’s dreams of declaring German superiority.

Jesse Owens at start of record breaking 200 meter race during the Olympic Games 1936 in Berlin. Photo via U.S. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division/Wikimedia Commons.

On Aug. 3, 1936, he won the gold medal in the 100-meter dash event. The next day, he won the long jump and then the 200-meter sprint on Aug. 5. On Aug. 9, Owens won the gold for the 4x100-meter sprint relay. The medal sweep was a record-breaking feat and was not repeated until 1984.

With only his speed, Owens managed to prove Hitler’s racist theories wrong.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and one of his ministers, wrote in his memoir, "Inside the Third Reich" that "[Hitler] was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvelous colored American runner, Jesse Owens."

In the end, it wasn’t German Olympic victories that made the news, it was Jesse Owens.

Jesse Owens in the long jump competition at the 1936 Olympics. Photo via German Federal Archives/Wikimedia Commons.

Between the filming and the "Olympia" release, any interest Hollywood previously had in Riefenstahl’s film was disrupted. Eventually, the film was recut into instructional videos for British military recruits. The Nazi material was removed.

Sports have a way of bridging gaps and bringing people of all different backgrounds together, from the athletes, to the cheap seats. Whether it’s athletes from countries across the world competing in the Olympic Games or parents cheering for their child’s baseball game, both spectators and players come together as a team to perform or to cheer.

Though the U.S. still had huge strides to make, and the atrocities of Nazi Germany had yet to be revealed, Owens for a brief moment triumphed over the racism of the 1930s. Breaking records and defying expectations, he became an American hero and a legend shared over the decades.

His historic win carries a message we should take into the present day. Racism has no place in society. It leads to the darkest of places. But discrimination and intolerance is outshined by truth even in the most unexpected times.

This story was produced as part of a campaign called "17 Days" with DICK'S Sporting Goods. These stories aim to shine a light on real occurrences of sports bringing people together.