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The Princess Who Married a Monuments Man
A missing painting, a refugee princess, and a boy from Oklahoma — all the ingredients for a wartime love story
In 1940, one of the most valuable paintings in private possession was Hans Holbein’s Darmstadt Madonna, worth at least $1,000,000.¹ It belonged to a German prince, Ludwig of Hesse and by the Rhine.
When World War II broke out, Ludwig sent the painting to one of his estates in Silesia (modern-day Poland) for safekeeping. But when the Soviet Army marched on Berlin, they occupied Silesia along the way.
To keep the painting out of Soviet hands, a loyal retainer rescued it and drove west, narrowly escaping the bombing of Dresden along the way. After being shot at en route, he arrived in the city of Coburg, exhausted and afraid. He took the painting to a nearby fortress, Veste Coburg, and left it there.
Once the fighting ended, Ludwig heard that Veste Coburg had been looted by Poles and bombed by Americans. He asked the American occupying forces to help him find the painting…and the rest of the $40 million art collection he’d sent east for safekeeping.²
It was the perfect job for one of the Monuments Men, a group of Allied soldiers tasked with saving and retrieving as much valuable European artwork as possible.
‘Kissing a Hohenzollern’
On August 8, 1945, American soldier Clyde Harris was reassigned to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Branch. He was then posted to Darmstadt to gather information about the Holbein.
When Harris arrived at the Hesse family’s residence, Schloss Wolfsgarten, Prince Ludwig and his wife weren’t there…but Harris wasn’t totally out of luck. One of the 200 refugees gathered there was the former Crown Princess of Prussia.³ Her daughter, Princess Cecilie Viktoria, spoke English and volunteered to show Harris around the gardens while they waited for the painting’s owner.
