Editing Battle of Monte Cassino (section)

===Evacuation and treasures===
[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-729-0003-13, Italien, Überführung von Kunstschätzen.jpg|thumb|right|Unloading of Monte Cassino property in the Piazza Venezia in Rome]]
In the course of the battles, the ancient abbey of Monte Cassino, where St. Benedict in AD 516 first established the [[Benedictine Rule|Rule]] that ordered [[monasticism]] in the west, was entirely destroyed by Allied bombing and artillery barrages in February 1944.{{refn|group="nb"|It would not be the first time the abbey had been demolished over the centuries: between 577 and 589 Monte Cassino was destroyed by the Lombards; by the Saracens in 883; and by an earthquake in 1349.<ref>Hapgood & Richardson, p. 31</ref>}}

Some months earlier, in the Italian autumn of 1943, two officers in the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, Captain Maximilian Becker and Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel, proposed the removal of Monte Cassino's treasures to the Vatican and Vatican-owned [[Castel Sant'Angelo]] ahead of the approaching front. The officers convinced church authorities and their own senior commanders to use the division's trucks and fuel for the undertaking. They had to find the materials necessary for crates and boxes, find carpenters among their troops, recruit local labourers (paid with rations of food plus twenty cigarettes a day), and then manage the "massive job of evacuation centered on the library and archive",<ref>Hapgood & Richardson, p. 33</ref> a treasure "literally without price".<ref>Hapgood & Richardson, p. 4</ref> The richness of the abbey's archives, library, and gallery included "800 papal documents, 20,500 volumes in the Old Library, 60,000 in the New Library, 500 ''[[Incunable|incunabula]]'', 200 manuscripts on parchment, 100,000 prints and separate collections".<ref>Gontard, Friedrich. ''The Chair of Peter, A History of the Papacy''. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1964, p. 154</ref> The first trucks, carrying paintings by Italian old masters, were ready to go less than a week from the day Becker and Schlegel independently first came to Monte Cassino.<ref>Hapgood & Richardson, p. 35</ref> Each vehicle carried monks to Rome as escorts; in more than 100 truckloads, the convoys saved the abbey's monastic community.<ref name="Hapgood & Richardson, p. 37">Hapgood & Richardson, p. 37</ref> The task was completed in the first days of November 1943. "In three weeks, in the middle of a losing war, in another country, it was quite a feat."<ref name="Hapgood & Richardson, p. 37"/> After a mass in the basilica, Abbot {{interlanguage link|Gregorio Diamare|it|Gregorio Diamare}} formally presented signed parchment scrolls in Latin to General [[Paul Conrath]], to ''tribuno militum Julio Schlegel'' and to ''Maximiliano Becker medecinae doctori'' "for rescuing the monks and treasures of the Abbey of Monte Cassino".<ref>Hapgood & Richardson, p. 38</ref>

Among the treasures removed were [[Titian]]s, an [[El Greco]], and two [[Francisco Goya|Goyas]].<ref>Hapgood & Richardson, p. 15</ref>