Eagle head of the Führerbau of Munich

On June 23, 1943, President of the United States of America, Franklin D. Roosevelt, created the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, or also known as the Roberts Commission, named after its President Owen J. Roberts. Tasked with promoting the conservation of cultural property in the various theaters, this commission issued lists and reports on cultural treasures to the military units, so that these items could be protected as much as possible from bombings and destruction. This inventory work was previously carried out by the Harvard Group, formed of Harvard professors and the American Committee of Learned Society, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and composed of art historians and collectors, as well as artists themselves. The main initiative of the Roberts Commission was the creation of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section. These men and women, who are known as the Monuments Men, come from the most prestigious cultural institutions and universities in the United States, such as the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton colleges, or the Society of Architectural Historians.
One of them was First Lieutenant Doda Conrad. Enrolled in 1942, he was part of the landing in North Africa, (Operation Torch in November 1942), the Italian campaign, and the landing in Provence in August 1944. Secretary to Lieutenant General Lucius Clay, commander of the American forces in Germany, in late April 1945, he met Lieutenant-colonel Mason Hammond, a Harvard college professor, who suggested that he join the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section in Berlin, following the orders of Captain Calvin Hathaway. Promoted to First Lieutenant in September 1945, he was transferred to the Central Collecting Point in Munich. Located on the Königsplatz, in the Führerbau (Arcissstraße 12) where the Munich treaties were signed in 1938, the Central Collecting Point was tasked with collecting artworks stolen by the Germans to try to return them to their former owners (individuals or museums), such as the famous Lady with a Ferret by Léonard de Vinci, from the Czartoryski Foundation of Kraków.
Among the tasks he had to complete, Doda Conrad also had to de-Nazify the buildings of the Third Reich. To do this, he had the two eagles on top of the Führerbau removed and had their heads cut off with a welding torch. He had one sent to his close friend, Countess Marie-Blanche de Polignac (daughter of Jeanne Lanvin). In his memoirs, he told the tale of the fate of this eagle's head. "At the end of the 1960s, by the greatest of coincidences, my subordinate role at the service of the United States government saw me reunited with General Koenig, with whom I had been in touch during the American occupation of Germany, when I was a sub-lieutenant. Now, there I was, deputy to the ambassador of the United States, also as an underling! This time, it was the famous eagle from the Führerbau in Munich that was in question. For twenty years, the eagle had been perched on the corner of the balustrade on the roof of the Polignac Town Hall, on Rue Barbet de Jouy, and had caught the eye of passersby from time to time. The demolition of the hotel having been decided, I was able to salvage the eagle and donate it to the Musée de l'Armée. "