


Ettlinger joined the Army after he graduated from high school, in Newark, and became an American citizen in boot camp. On his nineteenth birthday, while he was in a truck heading east from France to southern Belgium, a sergeant came running and ordered him off the convoy. Ettlinger had been selected to be a translator at the trials at Nuremberg, but he hit Munich first and, bored by the waiting that characterizes war—“eating, sleeping, and goofing off,” as he puts it—volunteered his services to an American who needed help decoding German documents. That was James Rorimer, who went on to become a curator at the Metropolitan Museum. Hitler had been amassing art stolen from Jews for an eventual Führermuseum, an Albert Speer-designed complex that would include an opera house, a parade ground, and a Hitler hotel. Rorimer became one of the three hundred and forty-five people, from thirteen countries, who tracked down and returned more than five million looted art objects. Ettlinger was happy to join him.

Over a rushed supper, Ettlinger, who is bald and speaks with a heavy German accent, sat with Dorothy Kahan, his companion of ten years, and talked about his upcoming trip to Europe. He would meet Clooney at a special screening of “The Monuments Men” in Berlin. And Baden-Wuerttemberg, his home state, was bestowing upon him the rare Staufer Medal in Gold, its highest order of merit for service to the state. Speaking about his childhood to Rachel Lithgow, the director of the American Jewish Historical Society, he exclaimed, “I used to swim in the Rhine River!”

Kahan said, “Harry’s family goes back to the fifteen-hundreds in Germany.”

“Fourteen!” he corrected. “1450.”

In Karlsruhe, Ettlinger said, he planned to see the Rembrandt self-portrait that is the city’s pride and joy, a work that he, being Jewish, had not been able to visit as a child. His grandfather, a businessman who founded the local art society, got a print instead. During the war, Ettlinger recovered the print from the Nazis; his grandfather’s copy hangs in his living room in New Jersey.

He was modest about his achievements. “I was helpful in two salt mines, to see to it that nine hundred boxes out of forty thousand boxes were returned to the rightful owner outside of Germany,” he said. (The Nazis stored art, sculpture, tapestries, and other valuables plundered from state museums and private collections in salt mines and castles throughout Germany and Austria.) “That was my job: get those boxes with their art in them, O.K., and get ’em up in the elevator and see to it that they get put in the trucks.” He also sent the stained-glass windows of Strasbourg Cathedral, in seventy-three crates, back to Alsace. Elsewhere in the mines, he found firecrackers, which the Nazis planned to set off when Hitler won the war. He said that, before he left Germany, “I got some miners to light fireworks in the city of Heilbronn to celebrate the Fourth of July.”

During the screening, Ettlinger sat in the second row, between Kahan and Lithgow. When the character based on him, Sam Epstein, showed up onscreen, played by the English actor Dimitri Leonidas, Lithgow jabbed him in the ribs.

“That’s you!” she said. “I bet you were better looking.”

“I was,” he said.

Photograph: Daniel Naupold/DPA/AP



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