Was Col. Seymour Pomrenze , my grandfather , more of a Clooney or a Damon ? It 's not a question I ever thought my family would be discussing . But with the release of `` The Monuments Men '' movie , it was one we jokingly started talking about . The movie tells the story of an `` unlikely World War II platoon , tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful owners . '' It 's touted as `` Ocean 's Eleven '' meets World War II . In the film , a motley crew of architects and art experts risk shootouts with Nazis as they try to protect and save cultural artifacts . The movie is n't bad . For me , though , it 's special because without it and the book it was based on , I may never have known that my grandfather was one of the real-life Monuments Men . As a kid , I knew my grandfather had been a colonel in the U.S. Army , which I thought was pretty cool . I also knew he had been an archivist , which was decidedly a bit less cool . To me , he was the kind , quiet and slightly reserved grandfather who came with my attention-grabbing , larger-than-life grandmother . The family joke was always that he was the colonel , but she was the general . We never really talked about what he did , so I figured it involved boring record keeping . Still , with a distinctive last name , I got a kick out of being `` the colonel 's grandson . '' Before the movie , there was the book of the same name written by Robert Edsel and the foundation he started . Edsel 's passion for the subject and his belief that the Monuments Men ( almost 350 men and women from 13 countries ) had n't received proper recognition led him to interview my grandfather and others for his book . That 's when we first learned his story -- not only what my grandfather had done , but also the scope and significance of what he achieved . Near the end of World War II , my grandfather volunteered for the OSS ( the intelligence agency that was the precursor to the CIA ) , hoping to go overseas . He was assigned to its Research and Analysis division and spent the last months of the war in India , Burma and China . But it was his post-war assignment that would make him a Monuments Man . In early 1946 , he was assigned to Offenbach , Germany . Because of his previous work in the National Archives , he became a 29-year old army captain tasked with overseeing a depot filled with whole libraries , documents and cultural artifacts that had been looted by the Nazis . When he first walked into the depot , `` you feel like crying , '' he said in a 1989 interview . `` Here was the horrible , tragic evidence of what happened , '' he said , calling it the `` cultural Holocaust . '' His job was to make sense of the millions of volumes , a thousand Torah scrolls and other objects and to figure out a way to get them back to the countries and institutions they belonged to . It does n't sound like an exciting or adventurous job -- not surprisingly , you do n't see a character like my grandfather in the movie . But for a quiet , methodical and analytical archivist and the gargantuan task he was up against , it was the perfect match . The Offenbach Archival Depot , first under my grandfather and then his successors , managed to restitute more than 3 million objects . Some of the more prominent collections that he helped to return , both at Offenbach and in later assignments , included the Rothschild family archives to France , the Rosenthaliana and Spinoza libraries to the Netherlands , and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research collection , which ended up in New York . In the grand scope of World War II , it 's a tiny story line . Just a small measure of justice . According to my father , my grandfather `` really felt he was doing his job . He did n't feel like he was n't recognized , did n't think he was a hero . '' He enjoyed and appreciated being part of a group of Monuments Men awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2007 , but did n't feel like he needed it . He passed away in 2011 , but if he were alive today , I think his reaction to the movie would have been the same -- he would have gotten a kick out of it , but probably would have waited to see it on DVD rather than go to the red carpet premiere . The way he described it , `` here I was , a little captain , and I got thrown into this historical Jewish episode . '' As someone who loved him but never felt like I knew him the way I wish I could , it 's a big deal to recast the way you see your grandfather when he 's 90 years old . It helps me understand why the archivist was just as cool as the colonel ( as proved by a fellow archivist geeking out over finding a marker he once used ) , and makes it that much more special when I meet someone who still calls me `` the colonel 's grandson . ''
`` The Monuments Men '' movie rekindles memories of a grandfather 's Army service . In 1946 , Seymour Pomrenze oversaw a depot of cultural artifacts looted by Nazis . Pomrenze 's job was to get them back to the countries and institutions they belonged to . The depot , under him and his successors , managed to return more than 3 million objects .