author

Thomas Carr Howe

1904–1994

An art museum director turned Monuments Man, he wrote from firsthand experience about the race to recover artworks looted during World War II. His best-known book brings readers into the salt mines, castles, and collecting points where Europe’s cultural treasures were found and returned.

1 Audiobook

Salt mines and castles: The discovery and restitution of looted European art

Salt mines and castles: The discovery and restitution of looted European art

by Thomas Carr Howe

About the author

Thomas Carr Howe Jr. was an American museum leader and writer best known for Salt Mines and Castles: The Discovery and Restitution of Looted European Art. He studied at Harvard and went on to spend nearly four decades as director of San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor, building a career at the center of museum life.

During World War II, Howe served in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program, the group later known as the Monuments Men. In Germany and Austria, he helped locate, safeguard, and restitute artworks stolen by the Nazis. Records from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and the Monuments Men and Women Foundation also note honors he received for that work, including recognition from France and the Netherlands.

His writing stands out because it is direct, practical, and deeply informed by lived experience. Salt Mines and Castles, first published in 1946, remains an important firsthand account of the effort to protect cultural heritage in the aftermath of war.