Seventy years after helping recover stolen art from the Nazis, Harry Ettlinger gets to see his story on the big screen In the searing heat, some 700 feet deep in the bowels of the Kochendorf salt mine in Germany, Harry Ettlinger prised open one of the 40,000 mud-crusted crates stacked by the shaft. Inside, piled high, were scores of paintings. Haltingly, he unwrapped the first. Inside the packing paper, its vibrant colours glancing off the flickering light of his pit lamp, the distinctive features of Rembrandt gazed back. Harry recognised it at once. Six years before, in 1938, as a 13 year old art lover in his native Karlsruhe in Germany, he had yearned to see the Dutch artist’s iconic self-portrait that hung in the town’s museum. But as a German Jew, ostracised and under threat, he wasn’t allowed inside the building. Now, in 1944 with war raging around him as the Allies routed the Nazis troops, Harry, who had fled Germany and was now an American GI, knew his discovery of the precious icon - one of five million art works looted by Hitler’s troops - would be saved for posterity.
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Harry Ettlinger fled the Nazis then returned to help recover stolen art work
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WWII hero's story made into a Hollywood film featuring George Clooney
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Ettlinger will soon be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for bravery
Although he fled Germany just prior to @placeholder, he said it was not hard to take up arms against his home country