Walter W. Horn: Monuments Man and Architectural Historian
- Beverley Eddy
- Nov 7, 2025
- 31 min read
Updated: Nov 10, 2025
Before becoming a “Monuments Man,” Dr. Walter William Horn had made a name for himself as a specialist in early Christian and medieval architecture. This would hardly seem to qualify him for advanced work in military intelligence, and yet it was precisely Horn’s scholarship that endeared him to SHAEF1 and assured him two of his most important assignments in postwar Europe.
Walter was born on January 18, 1908 in Waldangeloch, Germany, a town on the Neckar River that is located about 25 miles south of Heidelberg. His father, Karl Friedrich Horn, and his grandfather were Lutheran pastors; his mother Matilde, née Peters, was an amateur poet. Walter had an older brother Rudolf, an older sister Elsbeth, and an older half-sister Friedl.
The children were all encouraged to pursue academics, and to excel in athletic and cultural pursuits. Walter took up the violin, although he never excelled in playing it.2 Indeed, the one remarkable memory he had of it occurred in the winter, when the Neckar River was frozen over, and he took a shortcut across the ice with his violin in hand. The ice broke, Walter fell in and was swept away by the current. A Jewish girl saw the accident and managed to break a hole in the ice and pull him—and his violin—to safety.
Walter’s athletic skills were considerably greater than his musical ones: he became an accomplished javelin thrower and was even considered a possible contender for the 1936 Olympics.
Indeed, Walter’s golden youth was marred only by the hunger and deprivation caused by the First World War. To escape this, his parents sent him to Sweden for a brief period to live at a farming commune run by fellow Lutherans. But he still experienced more permanent aspects of the war: his favorite uncle, whom he had always considered a second father, died “horribly” of a gunshot wound, and many other men of that generation were permanently disabled or maimed.3
Both Walter and Rudolf were not only strikingly handsome and exceedingly bright young men; they were also highly successful at making sexual conquests among the girls they met while they were students in Heidelberg. Through their academic and athletic achievements both Rudolf and Walter became competitors for their father’s attention. Their father was an enthusiast of the Roman historian Tacitus, and he often took the children to the Roman ruins outside Heidelberg. He also shared with them his abiding interest in Externsteine, a group of sandstone pillars in the Teutoburg Forest of northern Germany that was the site of a Paleolithic worship ground, a sacred pagan pillar, and an astronomical calendar. The father’s interests rubbed off on both boys: Rudolf even published a paper on Externsteine before becoming an assistant professor of archaeology at Heidelberg University. Walter, who was five years younger than Rudolf, studied art and pan-Germanic prehistory while a student in Heidelberg, Berlin, and Hamburg.
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Walter earned his doctorate in art history in Hamburg, under the mentorship of Erwin Panofsky, a world-renowned German-Jewish scholar whose term of employment was coming to an end because of the forced removal of all Jews from German academe in April 1933.
Horn became one of Panofsky’s devoted disciples. Under Panofskh’s guidance he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the facade of the Romanesque abbey church in Saint-Gilles-Gard, in southern France, a meticulous study that corrected previous datings of the sculptures there by showing the classical influences in southern French art of the 12th century. He received his doctorate in 1934, and the dissertation was published in 1937.
Through Panofsky Horn also experienced at close hand the murderous intentions of Hitler’s new anti-semitic laws. Until then, Horn had not taken much notice of a person’s race or religion, and had, in fact, had serious romantic relationships with two Jewish women. But now he sat down and read Hitler’s Mein Kampf and was appalled at the anti-Jewish program spelled out in its pages. As his sister would recall it, Walter had broken family decorum by breaking into the family study while his father was working on his Sunday sermon. “You had just finished reading Mein Kampf,” she reminded him, and “You were angry as all hell that none of the rest of us would listen to what you had to say.”4
Panofsky left Germany in 1934 and encouraged all his students—especially his Jewish ones—to do so as well. Walter listened. He left Germany in 1934 and moved to Florence, Italy, where he served three years as a research associate at the German Institute for the History of Art. There he was admitted to the elite salon of museum collectors and art historians presided over by the American Jewish art critic Bernard Berenson.
While in Florence, Walter produced two serious studies. One, “Das Florentiner Baptisterium” (The Florentine Baptistry, 1938), was a carefully detailed analysis of the fabric and ornamentation of the building undertaken while excavations were going on there. Colleagues from 1934 remember him as “following the handrail, climb[ing] up the tiny steps on to the hexagonal roof the the Baptistry.[…] Then he ascended still further—and crept up to the lantern on top of the roof.” 5 It was there that he discovered an inscription that no one had ever seen before. By paleographically dating this inscription and by carefully studying the baptistry’s building materials, Walter was able to disprove its widely accepted Roman or early Christian origin and to date construction of the building as occurring between 1096 and 1207.
The other, “Romanesque Churches in Florence: A Study of their Chronology and Stylistic Development (1943), “examined San Miniato al Monte’s masonry techniques and construction as well as the concept and system of bay division and changing proportions in these early medieval churches.” This lay the foundation for his decades-long exploration of the ways in which classical and northern concepts intersected and were spatially articulated. 6
Walter had hoped to ride out the Nazi storm in Florence, but his stay was cut short when he learned that an SS officer was coming to Florence to “recruit” him for a position in Germany as a pan-Germanic scholar. Fortunately, Water had already acquired an updated German passport in September, 1937, and on the very day of the officer’s visit to Florence, on February 7, 1938, Walter bought a steerage class ticket to Cuba and set sail from Genoa. He had 50 dollars in his pocket for the new life he hoped to start in America.
Walter got an emigration visa to the United States in August and arrived in New York with six dollars in his pocket. He was more fortunate than most German refugees, in that he had a list of influential American contacts that he had made through Bernard Berenson’s Florence salon. These helped him obtain freelance lecture assignments at various museums and colleges. Unfortunately, they didn’t always pay extremely well; often he had to use the lecture fee from one engagement to pay his train fare to the next.
He had one remarkable experience during his year of guest lecturing when, after delivering a lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, he was offered a ride back to New York with a wealthy art patron. On the way they stopped off for a visit at a large mansion in Hyde Park. Walter had a delightful luncheon conversation with his hostess and her friend only to discover, after leaving the house grounds, that he had just dined with Eleanor Roosevelt and Brooke Astor.
In 1939 Walter was called as a lecturer in art history to the University of California, Berkeley, by Worth Ryder, one of the several artists and art instructors who had become acquainted with Walter at Bernard Berenson’s villa in Florence. The very next year Walter received a permanent appointment as the first art historian in the University of California system. And he remained at Berkeley for the rest of his career, creating an art department, establishing its PhD program in art history, and developing its library, slide collections, and art museum.
Also in 1940, Walter married Anne Elizabeth Binkley, an architecture student whom he had met during his lecture tour in Chicago, Illinois, and who had then come to join him at Berkeley. The two bought a sizable lot in Port Richmond and Walter drew up a plan with architects Ernest Born and Serge Chermayeff for a house to be built on its cliff with walls of windows that would overlook the ocean. This aroused some official concern as to Walter’s
loyalty to America, and he was treated for a while as a possible spy who might be intending to use his new property for sending signals to German submarines. Suspicion subsided when, in June 1943, he became a naturalized American citizen and marked the occasion by changing the German spelling of his first name, Walther, to Walter, and by officially dropping Adolf as one of his middle names. Meanwhile, work on construction of the new house had to be postponed until after the war.
Walter had not, it appears, married Anne Binkley for her intellect or her creative talents. In his view, “Lake Forest’s former beauty queen […] had Betty Grable curves and the sultry allure of Rita Hayworth,” and he had candid photos to prove it. For the first six months of their marriage they enjoyed uninhibited sex everywhere, in cars, on the beach, in his office, and on weeklong camping trips in the High Sierras. Then it stopped; Walter blamed himself, saying that he was too cerebral for her and that he did not share his inner life with her. The marriage, he said, “was over before it ever began,” and Anne fled, more and more frequently, back to her family and friends in Chicago. 7 In July, 1943, Walter was drafted into the US Army, causing further erosion in his marriage.
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Walter was already 36 when he joined the Army. While completing basic training in Field Artillery at Fort Roberts, a large Army replacement training center located in central California, he earned his credentials as a marksman and was preparing to be shipped overseas when he came down with a sinus infection. According to his wife Anne, this infection proved to be his salvation, since, in the six weeks before he could join the next company of recruits, he was assigned to wash windows. She claimed that he performed this task so thoroughly and enthusiastically that his commander recommended him for officer’s training. And the Army, which now recognized his linguistic abilities—fluency in German, French, English, and Italian—also took note of him and sent him to Camp Ritchie Maryland to train in military intelligence.
What Walter did not know is that he had already been earmarked on September 16, 1943 by Paul J. Sachs, of Harvard University’s Department of Fine Arts, as a possible recruit for the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. This commission had been established by President Roosevelt on June 23, 1943, for the purpose of providing the Army field units with information and maps regarding the location of cultural treasures, in the hope that they could, whenever possible, be protected. It was an assignment most frequently doomed to failure, given the exigencies of modern warfare and the Allies’ policy of carpet bombing urban centers. The commission’s clumsy name was quickly reduced to the shorter “Roberts Commission” after its chairman, Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts. Sachs was a member of this commission. He had interviewed Walter, and his recommendation was sent on to the Army at Fort Roberts. There Sachs noted that the scholar turned infantryman “Private Horn” spoke “perfect German,” his French and Italian were “very good,” and he knew snippets of “some other European languages.” He had, Sachs stated, “broad, general knowledge of fine arts,” and possessed an “attractive personality,” making him “generally well qualified” for work with the commission. 8 The commission had proposed the war-time establishment of a Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) unit within the military to assist in protecting and recovering European cultural property. The men who served there would become popularly known as “Monuments Men” and Walter seemed a perfect fit.
Walter was not immediately assigned to the MFAA, but at Camp Ritchie he acquired the skills that would make him a superb interrogator later able to track down priceless artifacts
where others had failed. He was enrolled in the 13th class, and trained in French interrogation. An important aspect of this course involved developing the ability to quickly access the individual strengths and weaknesses of one’s subjects and then to use psychological techniques for “breaking” them and eliciting crucial wartime information. The course ended just before Christmas 1943, and Walter was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, from where he graduated as a Second Lieutenant and Infantry Platoon leader on July 25, 1944. A month later, he was alerted for departure for Europe. His first posting was as an interrogator of prisoners of war in England. There he came to the attention of British art critic and collector Douglas Cooper. Cooper now echoed Paul Sachs’s recommendation that Walter be assigned to MFAA, writing in a letter to Lt. Col. Geoffrey Webb, the British adviser to the MFAA at SHAEF that Walter was “both a good scholar and a very nice man,” who knew “many of the museum people” and was “of course […] fluent in German.” 9
Again, any assignment to MFAA was put on hold, and Walter was sent instead to the VII Corps (Seventh Army) as a leader of its interrogation team 962. A few months later he was assigned to serve as officer in a Mobile Field Investigative Unit (MFIU) in General Patton’s Third Army. Here he interrogated primarily SS officers before finally being sent to serve the Third Army as an Intelligence Officer under SHAEF, interrogating “first, captured German military personnel; later political internees, party officials, Gestapo and the various German Intelligence services.” He had, he said modestly, “gathered some experience in interrogation.” 10
Although, at the time, he was not assigned to MFAA, Walter did acquire valuable information regarding the location of priceless artworks that the Nazis had secreted in Nuremberg. On February 23, 1945, he was completing his interrogation of 48-year-old prisoner Fritz Huber, a private from the German 2nd Panzer Division, when he was moved by pity over the man’s obvious suffering from cold and sleeplessness to offer him a cigarette and a cup of coffee and to ask if he had any additional information that might be of interest to Army intelligence. Huber fortuitously asked Walter if he was interested in art. His family, he said, ran an antique shop in Nuremberg, next to an apparently innocuous parking garage. In reality the garage hid the camouflaged doors to a secret tunnel two hundred feet below ground in which hundreds of art works were being stored in a temperature-controlled environment. Huber knew of this because his parents ran the antique shop; his father maintained the tunnel’s ventilation unit, and his mother regularly checked the artwork in the tunnel’s storage rooms for possible mold or insect damage. There was a sealed vault in the tunnel. Two keys and a five-digit lock combination were required to open the foot-thick outer door and an inner door with steel bars.
This vault held the “most valuable artifacts in all of Europe”: the crown jewels and coronation regalia of the Holy Roman Empire. 11 Nearly all these items dated from the 11th through the 14th century and included the king’s robes, embroidered with pearl-studded pictures of camels and lions, the king’s shoes and gloves; two swords; the royal crown, scepter, and orb; and the “spear of destiny”—the ancient Roman spearpoint alleged to have pierced Jesus’ side at the Crucifixion. Obviously Adolf Hitler saw a connection in these relics to a long, distinguished “Aryan” past and considered himself its worthy successor. These relics of the first and second German empires appeared to mythicize Aryan continuity and give legitimacy to Hitler’s proclaimed third “Reich.”.
Walter immediately wrote this information up in a report that he sent to headquarters. And he heard nothing about it again until he was finally assigned to MFAA as a fine arts intelligence officer on July 20, 1945. Upon reporting to his immediate superior, Colonel Mason Hammond, he was told that he was to set up a small Intelligence unit to investigate and recover objects that had disappeared from the collections of artworks already retrieved by the Monuments Men. “There is some shady business going on in the zone,” Hammond said. “Valuable things have disappeared. […] We need a man who has experience in interrogation, who knows something about art, who is familiar with the German set-up, and speaks the lingo.” 12
But, three days later, the Colonel told him that he had a new assignment, that the five most important pieces of the Crown Treasure of the Holy Roman Empire had disappeared from their secret vault in Nuremberg before the Americans had arrived to recover the many art pieces secreted in the tunnel. His task was now to find these treasures—the crown, the orb, the scepter, and the two swords, and he was given 30 days to do so. Walter found this assignment especially fitting, since it was he who had learned about the location of the vault and tunnel from Private Huber several months earlier. And he knew that, even now, with Hitler dead and his armies defeated, the Allies had good reason to fear that these items had been removed from the tunnel vault with the aim of using them as a rallying point for Nazi resistance and dreams of a fourth Reich.
At the beginning of his investigation Walter learned that intelligence reports indicated that the crown jewels had been sunk to the bottom of Lake Zell, a mountain lake in Austria. But Walter was skeptical. He began his inquiries in Nuremberg, where he learned from the local MFAA officer about two city councilors who had held the keys to the cave and vault. He, like Walter, interviewed the men, and was told, convincingly, that, prior to the Americans entry into the city, they had been instructed by the mayor to deliver the treasures to an unnamed SS officer, who had driven off with them in his car. Again, Walter was unconvinced. Neither man could give the rank of that SS officer, nor the exact date on which he had allegedly taken the Crown Jewels. And he knew that Germans were meticulous in matters involving army rank and the dating of important events
Of the two city councilors, Walter selected Dr. Johann Fries as the one most likely to break
under interrogation, and he had him imprisoned for a night before questioning. The next morning Walter told Fries about the seriousness of his removal of the crown jewels. If he failed to reveal any knowledge as to their whereabouts, he told him, Fries could be found guilty of complicity in a Nazi underground movement and be condemned to death. He then asked Fries if he was willing to swear an oath that his story about the removal of the jewels was true. Fries said he was. Walter then asked him to write down this oath as Walter dictated it to him. It was at the point where he was told to write “(swear by) Almighty God” that Fries stopped writing and asked Walter what he would do with the jewels if he recovered them. Walter said they would be restored to their legal owners, either in Nuremberg or in Vienna. At this point Fries confessed that he and his fellow councilor had fabricated the story of the jewels’ seizure by the SS, and said that he would lead Walter to their new hiding place in Nuremberg. The crown, the orb, the scepter, the imperial sword, and the ceremonial sword had in fact, been walled into a tunnel alcove not more than 1000 yards away from their original hiding place. Walter had been given a month to discover the location of the crown jewels; he completed the mission in two and a half weeks. He took the next week and a half to deal with family matters.
His main concern was now to get his mother and half-sister our of Jena, where they were living under Russian occupation, and to bring them to join his siblings in the West. He managed the crossings by bribing the border guards with whiskey, sardines, and nylon stockings, entered Jena, and found both women still living in his half-sister’s house. She was unwilling to leave her home, but Walter’s mother was easily persuaded to come to Heidelberg under American protection and to be reunited with her son Rudolf and daughter Elsbeth.
This was also Walter’s first meeting with his siblings since coming to Europe as an American soldier. The reunion with Rudolf was a muted one. Walter knew that Rudolf had become a Nazi member, and he believed that he had served as full professor at Heidelberg University, witnessing the turning over of Jewish students to Nazi authorities, the burning of books in front of the university library, and the torching of the city’s two synagogues. He didn’t ask his brother for any details, but he believed that Rudolf had lost his University position and that he had virtually no chance of recovering his academic status.
Rudolf didn’t even try to disabuse him. He had, in fact, been teaching at the University of Göttingen until being called to the German foreign office for the last two years of the war to
work in its cipher and news department. And he would be returning to Göttingen to continue a distinguished career as a classical archaeologist specializing in Greek sculpture. Walter didn’t share his past history, either; he never told his brother about his life in the States or his recovery of the Imperial crown jewels. Of the three siblings, Elsbeth was clearly suffering the most. Her husband, the former Chancellor of the University of Leipzig, was in a Russian labor camp, and she had had no word from him in the last four months.
The siblings spent their brief time together retreating into the past and reliving childhood memories. They went hiking to the old Roman ruins that their father had so loved, camped at a favorite fishing spot, and went with their mother to lay flowers on their father’s grave. Walter’s sister asked him if he was considering staying on and making a career in Heidelberg. But Walter decided that that was now impossible. He was reminded by his sister that no one in his family and none of his fellow students or professors at the University had ever actually sat down and read Mein Kampf as he had. It was, he remarked, “the most popular unread book in the nation,” and he “could not imagine setting foot in a German classroom without being reminded of that fact.”13 Walter left the family on August 14, and returned to Frankfurt.
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There were two centers in the American zone that were designated as collection sites for the recovered art rescued by the Monuments Men: Munich and Wiesbaden. Walter was now sent to the site in Munich to establish an Art Document Center there, so that all records, card files, correspondence, and documentation relating to the thousands of recovered art works would be united and made available for research and study. In recognition of his recovery of the Crown Jewels, Walter had been promoted to First Lieutenant; now he was made Chief of the MFAA’s Intelligence Unit.
Walter’s work at the Art Document Center was exacting and arduous. There one had to coordinate recovered art works with documents that claimed former ownership. And, if the Allies had recovered only part of a stolen collection, it was necessary to try and trace the rest of the works. Some American soldiers had appropriated art works for themselves; these had to be retrieved. Some Europeans filed claims for artworks without being able to document their former ownership. Walter had to negotiate with Russia to get lists of artworks missing from museums and private owners in what was now Soviet-occupied territory.
Because of all these obstacles, there were delays in establishing a formal art restitution program, and General Eisenhower was growing impatient. On October 3, 1945, he ordered an immediate token return of cultural objects stolen from Czechoslovakia. These objects, along with thousands of other art works, had been recovered from the Alt Aussee salt mine in Austria and were intended to become part of a huge Führer-Museum that Hitler was planning to have constructed in Linz. Walter arranged for this transfer to take place in Banz Castle, a former Benedictine Abbey north of Bamberg, Germany. The prize piece in this
collection was the Hohenfurth altar, a cycle of nine paintings depicting scenes from the life of Christ. Dating from 1345-1350, this work was considered one of the most important examples of European Gothic painting.
That same month a member of the MFAA Branch in Austria reported that Martin Bormann’s personal assistant, Dr. Helmut von Hummel, had removed a priceless collection of approximately 100 pounds of gold coins from the Alt Aussee salt mine in the spring of 1945 and taken them to a new hideout. These coins, which the Nazis had seized from twelve Austrian and Czech monasteries, formed the world’s most complete coin collection and were worth millions of dollars. Von Hummel had disappeared, as had his boss Bormann. The disappearance of the coins, von Hummel, and Bormann—Hitler’s private secretary and head of the Nazi party chancellery—created cause for concern. The coin collection was not only extremely valuable; it was irreplaceable. The fear was that the coins would be used to facilitate the flight of Nazi war criminals to Brazil and/or to fund diehard Nazis as they worked to create a Fourth Reich.
Walter had held preliminary investigations in November and December of 1945 with the two men who had been ordered to deliver the coins to von Hummel in April of that year. According to their reports, they had delivered the coins to von Hummel in Berchtesgaden, and von Hummel had taken them to Zell am See. One of the men believed that when it became evident that the Allies were closing in on him, von Hummel had returned the treasure to the church. The Americans doubted this rumor.
Walter managed to track down one of von Hummel’s assistants, who confirmed making the trip with him to Zell am See on May 6; this was the last time the assistant had seen the coins. Walter also interviewed von Hummel’s two former stenotypists. And he sent an assistant, Lt. Ernst Bloch, to Salzburg and Mondsee, Austria to interview von Hummel’s wife Edeltraut and her neighbors. All confirmed that the wife had had no contact with her husband since May. Since she and her children had TB, she was not taken into American custody.
Walter determined to conduct his own investigation of Edeltraut von Hummel. He went to her with the knowledge he had already gathered from von Hummel’s typist and stenotypists, and from von Hummel’s mother. He had also read all her correspondence, which Lt. Bloch had confiscated on his own fruitless visit to her home. When Walter first met Edeltraut (Traudl), he already knew of her previous love affair and the lover’s death, the Sunday concerts she and her husband listened to on the radio, her favorite composers, and her favorite recipes. He also knew that she and her husband were completely devoted to one another. Knowing that Lt. Bloch had been unable to coerce information from Edeltraut by threat of force, Walter decided to use his much-vaunted charm as the tool to break her.
Surprisingly, this was Walter’s first trip to Austria. As with the crown jewel recovery, he was given four weeks to complete his mission—with the possibility of extension, if necessary. He was also given a white BMV convertible sports car rather than the usual jeep for carrying out his assignment.
Walter had completed his assignment in Nuremberg in two-and-a-half weeks. This assignment took six. Edeltraut met Walter with open hostility, but he quickly defused the situation by bringing up the reason for his visit at once, and then not mentioning it again. Instead he talked about the many things they had in common: their European backgrounds,
their loss of friends in the war, separation from family members, and, especially, art and music. And they spent their time together exploring the Austrian countryside and visiting old churches and monasteries. After weeks of gaining her trust, Walter took Edeltraut to the monastery at St. Florian, where her favorite composer, Anton Bruckner, lay buried. Only then did he again broach the reason for his visits and told her that some of the Nazis’ stolen coins had come from that very abbey. Edeltraut broke down and agreed to contact her husband. 14
To Walter’s surprise and pleasure, Helmut von Hummel revealed that in May 1945, he had safely returned the coin collection to the archbishop of Salzburg. He then gave himself up into American custody after Walter agreed to grant him and his wife an undisturbed week-long holiday beforehand.
In their time together, Walter had come close to seducing Edeltraut. But she, too, had had an equally strong effect on him. Nearly twenty years later, in recalling this episode of his life in one of his many lectures about his war activities, Walter wrote that “When, after the six most wonderful weeks […] I drove down into Salzburg, with an SS major and 5 Million dollars worth of gold coins in my car, I was overcome by a profound sadness with regard to my success: I should have liked to spend the rest of my life looking for gold coins in the Austrian mountains.” 15
Walter was promoted to captain and, although he was discharged from active army service in November, 1946, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve. He now returned to Berkeley to be reunited with his wife Anne and to celebrate the Christmas holidays with her in Mexico. But when Walter announced his intention of returning to Germany to continue his work with the art restitution program, Anne had had enough. The war had already kept the two of them physically apart for well over two years. During this time she had not been idle; she had studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology under the renowned architect Mies van der Rohe and been awarded her B.S. degree in 1945. But she had also been convinced that Walter would return to the States immediately after the war and that they would build a new, richer life together. Now Anne issued an ultimatum and, when he declined it, she sued Walter for divorce.
Anne would go on to marry the designer/painter Paul Rand in 1949. And Walter would return from Europe in 1948 and resume his work at the University. He was proud of the work he had done in art restitution in Europe. But he was a student of medieval architecture, and he had seen the damage that carpet bombing had inflicted on old churches, homes, and monasteries throughout Europe. As he pointed out in his postwar lectures, mobile art works could be moved and preserved in underground mines and bunkers. But “the destruction which our bombs wrought […] is a nightmare. Architecture […] could not go underground. It is here that the war took its heaviest toll. The record of these losses is not yet taken.” 16 _______________________________
But Walter was now back in the States and had finally moved into the Port Richmond home that architects Ernest Born and Serge Chermayeff had designed for him before the outbreak of the war. It was here that he spent the remainder of his life. And on April 14, 1949 he married Alberta West Parker, a practicing pediatrician nine years younger than he. Walter’s colleagues remember that he kept his “roving eye” throughout his lifetime; nevertheless, the marriage to Alberta was a happy one of professional equals and lasted until his death in 1995. They had three children: Michael, Peter, and Rebecca.
Walter resumed his position at Berkeley and became one of the university’s “best-loved and most influential teachers and one of this university’s most effective leaders.” 17 Before that, however, he experienced an extremely stressful period during which his position was put in jeopardy.
Walter’s return to the university coincided with a period of intense Cold War fears of subversive communist activity in America, fears that would peak with the June 1950 outbreak of the Korean War. That year Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had already stoked Americans’ fear of communism by asserting in a Lincoln’s birthday address that he had a list of Communist Party Members active in the US State Department and by claiming that Soviet spies had also infiltrated American universities, the US Army, and the film industry. Berkeley had anticipated these fears by drawing up a loyalty oath in June 1949, that required all its faculty members to swear that they would uphold the Constitution of the United States and that they were “not a member of the Communist Party, or under any oath, or a party to any agreement, or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath.”
Now Berkeley’s president, Robert G. Sproul, was demanding that every faculty member sign and return a notarized copy of this oath by April 30, 1950, or else their contracts at the university would be terminated. On April 21 he repeated this demand to those faculty members who had not yet returned the required oath. Walter was one of them. He, like many others who received this reminder, chose to petition the Regents that they be freed from this arbitrary requirement. Walter wrote a petition on May 12, pointing out that he “had sworn the oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States with pride and gratitude, both as a civilian and as a soldier.” His main argument against signing the required oath was that this new contractual obligation “cannot accomplish what it promises, namely, to protect the University from the subversive (who will set his signature on any sheet of paper)”; on the contrary the contract “furthers rather than checks erosion of the foundation of actual faith and trust on which the structure of our whole democracy stands.”18 On July 18th he joined a group of 30 senior professors at Berkeley who signed on to a challenge sent to the president by psychology professor Edward C. Tolman that the required oath violated California’s state constitution, given that the University of California was a public trust to be kept “entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence." 19 Ultimately, however, Walter reluctantly signed the university’s loyalty oath on August 23. The timing was significant: he wrote that he “had been ‘compelled’ to sign the contract, ‘because “he had been recalled to active service as a captain in the Army [on August 21st] and was unwilling to leave his wife and son without economic protection.”20 Significantly, in his letter to President Sproul, Walter could not refrain from adding that: “It was in avoidance of pressures of this type that I left Germany in 1938 and came to this county. And it was in the desire of contributing to the eradication of such methods that I volunteered during the last war to take up arms against the country of my birth. I am expecting my recall to active duty in the present conflict with the bitter feeling that, this time, I shall be fighting abroad for the defense and propagation of Freedoms which I have been denied in my professional life at home.”21
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During the 1950s both Walter and his wife Alberta made significant career progress. Walter was an extremely popular and enthusiastic instructor, and he was called upon again and again to give public lectures. He was often asked to speak about the recovery of the Habsburg crown jewels, but he also lectured on medieval church mosaics, on Anglo-Saxon and Celtic art, and even on California barns.
And he became a campus leader. In the 1950s and 1960s Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek was a polluted stream in a degraded habitat; Walter was instrumental in restoring the habitat and preserving the creek as an open stream; also, as a member of the university’s committee on outdoor art, he advocated placing Sterling Calder’s sculpture “ The Last Dryad” there in Faculty Glade. According to his university memorial, “Berkeley’s presidents and chancellors called on his wisdom and experience in developing the university’s libraries, humanities and language curriculums, in planning and construction of the University Art Museum, and in implementing the overall campus plan.” And in 1961 he founded the University of California Press’s separate branch of California Studies in the History of Art; he served until 1987 as its general editor. The purpose of this press, he said, was to provide promising young scholars a means of publishing their work, and he obtained a large grant for the press that guaranteed the highest quality in design and printing. 22
In his scholarship Walter formed a partnership with the San Francisco architect of his Port
Richmond home—Ernest Born—in his evolving work on the intersection between northern and classical elements in early medieval architecture. In his article “On the Origins of the Medieval Bay System” [1958], he showed how the structure of bay-divided medieval stone churches (Romanesque and Gothic) evolved from a common form of three-aisled timber buildings—manor halls, storage centers, barns, and market buildings—found throughout northern Europe and traceable back to the fourth century BC. He and Born co-authored nine articles on medieval barns and market halls in England and France; then, when Walter received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, the two men published The Barns of the Abbey of Beaulieu at Its Granges of Great Coxwell and Beaulieu St. Leonards [1965]. As with his studies in Florence, Walter’s work involved meticulous on-site examination of building materials, measurements of each structural element, and careful recording and photographing of his findings. Born worked on text and layout and created the many architectural drawings that accompanied them.
Meanwhile, Walter’s wife Alberta gave birth to two of her three children during the 1950s; she also shifted her career focus from pediatric practice to work in public health and served as director of maternal and child health for Berkeley’s public schools. Later, in the 1960s, she served as consultant to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, by assisting with the formation and early operation of neighborhood health centers throughout the United States. And in July 1969 she was appointed Clinical Professor of Public Health at Berkeley. She was an avid collector of early California painting, Eskimo sculpture, and art pottery. She joined Walter in his many travels and supported him in the development of art museums in San Francisco and at Berkeley. And she served as editor/proof reader for his publications.
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In his studies of vernacular timber buildings, Walter had devoted a great deal of attention to the 9th-century architectural construction plan for the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland. This idealized plan showed 40 vernacular buildings designed to support the abbey and its church; these included everything from a refectory, a kitchen, a bathhouse, a hen house, a kiln, a mill, a bakery, a brewhouse, a house for distinguished guests, and a hospice for pilgrims and paupers. In the 1960s, Walter and Ernest Born (who was now a member of the Berkeley faculty) were commissioned to provide a new reconstruction model of all these buildings for the Council of Europe exposition that was convening in Aachen and reviewing and evaluating the state of research about the Age of Charlemagne. As their editor recalls it, “research for the Aachen model eventually accumulated such a wealth of new information about building in the Carolingian era that Horn and Born decided to collaborate in writing a book.”23 This “book” became an exhaustively detailed three-volume edition of over 1000 pages that was published by the University of California Press on December 25, 1979. For twenty years Walter focused all his research efforts onto the St. Gall plan, solving such difficult questions as the scale of the buildings indicated on the plan—and whether this scale was consistently applied throughout, where the stairs were located that led to a second story, and the purpose of the square symbol drawn in the center of each building in the plan.
Because of this, the plan for the various buildings, such as the house of bloodletting, raised many questions. Because the process of bleeding put patients in a venerable position, the plan showed that the house had four corner fireplaces in a addition to a central, open fire. From this Walter assumed that fire safety would demand that the walls of the house be built of masonry rather than wood.
Also, because the span of the house was 35 feet wide, most medieval buildings of such a span would have had additional support in two rows of free-standing inner posts. Walter and Ernest Born therefore introduced four additional posts carrying roof plates. And, for good measure, Walter introduced into the text a brief discussion of the history of bloodletting, its immense popularity in medieval times, the procedure and length of required convalescence, and medieval superstitions about the effects on bloodletting caused by moon, tide, and seasons. Discourses such as these occurred throughout the work, and dealt with everything from bathing to livestock breeding. Walter’s text, in fact, recreated all aspects of Carolingian life and thought. And Ernest Born’s beautiful layout, typography, and architectural drawings made the work so desirable that, despite its high cost, the 2500 copies of this work sold out in less than a year.
Reviews were overwhelmingly laudatory. As Peter S. Prescott noted in Newsweek: “The Plan of St Gall is, beyond any doubt, one of the great feats of modern historical reconstruction. Its text, for all its erudition and determination to set right the errors of previous scholars, is lucid and accessible to the layman […]. Besides, it is a pleasure to the eye and hand; like a medieval abbot, the authors appear to have surveyed the corruption all about them and determined to establish an example of perfection. In this they have succeeded.” 24 Honors abounded. The authors received twelve book awards for scholarship, bookmaking, and typography; these included awards from the Académie d’Architecture in France and the American Institute of Architects. Three years later, editor Lorna Price released a one-volume, 120-page overview of this work, retaining the typography, layout, and quality paper of the original in a form affordable to the general public.
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In 1974 Walter retired from Berkeley; to honor him, the University published in a single volume his first two books, Die Fassade von Saint-Gilles and Das Florentiner Baptisterium, in English translation.
He remained active in the years following his retirement from the university. For his final published work, he teamed up in 1981 with Jenny White Marshall, a research assistant in the Berkeley art department who had recently completed her doctorate at UCLA on the monasteries of the offshore islands of Ireland, and with Grellan D. Rourke, conservation architect with the National Monument Service of the Irish Board of Works, to investigate the remains of the forgotten hermitage located on the south peak of Skellig Michael, an island off the Coast of County Kerry.
For six summers the three made the treacherous climb up this peak with surveying equipment, notebooks, and cameras in order “to examine, measure, and record” all that remained of the hermitage: this included extensive stone walls, partial walls of the oratory, paving stones, leacht, water basins, a damaged Celtic cross (ring cross), as well as rough stairs, and the toeholds necessary for ascension to the hermitage’s three remote terraces located on narrow ledges of the peak. It was, arguably, the most remote hermitage in the Christian world. Walter found the setting most appealing. It was here, colleagues noted, that “this dynamic, urbane, cultured, and gregarious man found contemplation and solitude.” 25
The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael was a lavishly produced book, filled with maps, drawings, and many of Walter’s own photographs. It was, fittingly, published by the University of California Press in the California Studies in the History of Art series that Walter had founded twenty years earlier. One critic wrote that the book was “a love story between
the authors and the island and between the publishers and the authors,” with “color photography breathtaking in its depiction of natural beauty.”26 The hope was that proceeds from this book would fund the authors’ larger study on the island’s monastery; the work on this was undoubtedly cut short by Walter’s death in 1995, although Jenny White Marshall and Grellan Rourke would go on to publish two more books on Irish island monasteries: High Island, an Irish Monastery in the Atlantic, and Illaunloughan Island, An Early Medieval Monastery in County Kerry.
Significantly, in their book on the Skellig Michael hermitage, Walter noted in a footnote the reasons for his disagreeing with his co-authors as to the location of the hermit’s cell, while allowing his colleagues’ conclusion to stand in the main text. But he also added an appendix to the work which presented, tangentially, a “new interpretation” on the origin of the Celtic Cross. Here he argued that this ring cross did not develop from a simplified version of the encircled Roman Christogram [Chi-Rho], as scholars had always argued, but derived instead from the Egyptian evolution of the Coptic Ankh. Both of these editorial actions proved Walter’ willingness to allow colleagues and students to present their own views, while at the same time giving expression to his own thoughts and theories.
Although The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael was Walter’s last publication, he continued his lifelong study of three-aisled timber halls of northern Europe right up until the month of his death. And he did not forget his work with the Monuments Men, either. In 1995, he made a special trip to Vienna to view the collection of the Holy Roman Imperial crown jewels that he had tracked down in Nuremberg 50 years earlier. It must have been pleasing to him to see these items now properly displayed in the treasury vault of the Vienna Hofburg Palace.
Walter died of pneumonia at his Port Richmond home on December 26, 1995. He was 87 years old.
Beverley Driver Eddy
October 2025
Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.
Unless otherwise noted, all the material about Walter’s pre-academic life was found in Sidney D. Kirkpatricks’s excellent study Hitler’s Holy Relics, New York, London: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
Kirkpatrick, 101.
Kirkpatrick, 249.
Beate Fricke on Walter Horn: Approaching a Famous Dark Horse.” https://www.arthistory.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/general/newsletter2010.pdf.png
“Walter Horn, History of Art: Berkeley 1908-1995,” digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu › record › files
Kirkpatrick, 30.
Nara, EU, OMGUS - Cultural Affairs Branch, 1946-194, Series: “Records Relating to Monuments, Museums, Libraries, Archives, and Fine Arts,” 1946-1949, 146. Accessed through fold3.com.
Greg Bradsher, “A Monuments Man Investigator: Walter Horn,” US National Archives, posted in Monuments Men. https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2014/01/30/a-monuments-man-investigator-walter-horn/
Walter W. Horn, “The Finding of the Crown Jewels: A Sketch of Monuments and Fine Arts Activities in World War II.” Lecture delivered 4 Oct. 1965, 10. Smithsonian Archives of American Art. https://sova.si.edu/record/aaa.hornwalt/ref206q=sketch+of+monuments+and+fine+arts+activities+in+world+war+II
Kirkpatrick, 7.
Horn, “The Finding of the Crown Jewels,” 15. I have taken most of the information about the recovery of the jewels from this typed manuscript.
Kirkpatrick, 250.
Peter Watson tells of Horn’s recovery of the missing gold coins in his novel, The Nazi’s Wife, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985, noting that “The central encounter in this story actually took place in Salzburg in the aftermath of World War Two.” Watson interviewed Walter extensively before writing the work; Walter’s friends and colleagues all agree that, except for name changes, some changes in timing and in minor characters, the work is a remarkably accurate rendition of the event. Walter’s report to his superiors bears this out.
Walter W. Horn, “Recovery of Missing Crown Jewels,” Lecture delivered at a luncheon meeting of Andy Anderson’s group of senior citizens, 23 March, 1983, 26. https://www.si.edu/object/archives/components/sova-aaa-hornwalt-ref207
Horn, “The Finding of the Crown Jewels,” 25.
“Walter Horn, History of Art: Berkeley 1908-1995,” digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu › record › files › in memoriam1996
Walter Horn papers, Series 4: University of California, Berkeley Administrative Files, Box 3, Folder 1
UC Berkeley, The Bancroft Library, John Francis Neylan papers, BANC MSS C-B 881, Box 177:1950 #3 Loyalty Oath. cubanc_15_1_00326929a.pdf
“More on Regents Backing the Non-Signers at UC,” San Francisco Chronicle, 25 Aug. 1950, 7.
UC Berkeley, The Bancroft Library, Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The Fundamental Issue: Documents and Marginal Notes on the University of California Loyalty Oath, Bancroft F870.E3 K18. Cited in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Horn. Tolman went on to sue the California regents and, in April 1951, Berkeley was ordered to reinstate all those who had been fired for their refusal to sign the loyalty oath.
“Walter Horn, History of Art: Berkeley 1908-1995,” digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu › record › files › in memoriam1996
The Plan of St Gall in Brief, by Lorna Price, based on the work by Walter Horn and Ernest Born, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California, 1982, X.
Cited in endpaper to Lorna Price, The Plan of St Gall in Brief.
“Walter Horn, History of Art: Berkeley 1908-1995,” digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu › record › files
Eric C. Fernie, Speculum, 68:3, 803.
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