How a young group of American spies saved Greeces precious artifacts

Shortly after the occupying Nazi army goose-stepped into Greece in the spring of 1941, officers of the Wehrmacht entered Athens’ neoclassical National Archaeological Museum.Their goal: To take possession of a treasure of antiquities — a statue of Zeus, the Mask of Agamemnon and thousands of other pieces — and return all to the fatherland as their leader had ordered.Along with his “Final Solution” for the Jews — some 70,000 would be exterminated in Greece alone — and his desire to eventually rule the world, Adolph Hitler bizarrely believed that ancient Greece was founded by Aryans.

Thus he had instructed his Nazi classicists to pull from the earth what he thought would be Germanic finds, finally proving the connection with ancient Greece.But they had no success, because there were no such finds.They came away empty-handed, as  did the shocked Nazi officers who had entered the museum in Athens with high expectations Instead, all of the treasures were gone — many buried underground as insurance against the Nazi occupation.As author Stephan Talty writes in his new book, “The American School of Spies: The Archaeologists Who Fought the Nazis and Saved the Treasures of Ancient Greece” (Dutton), “The relics were all saved.”Talty’s in-depth account reads like a real-life Indiana Jones story, focusing on the efforts of classicists and archaeologists to save the ancient Greek artifacts from Hitler.For years, the Nazis claimed “Aryans were the creators of the world’s first great civilization…Hitler and his lieutenants were fixated, in varying degrees, on ancient Greece and its artifacts,” according to the author.Hitler was especially “besotted” by a “crouched, naked male athlete [known as] the Discobolus,” or discus thrower, Talty writes.

The statue was celebrated in “Olympia,” filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s propagandist documentary about the 1936 Olympics.To do battle against the Nazi occupation of Greece, as well as Hitler’s...