Walter Horn

Walter William Horn (18 January 1908 - 26 December 1995) was a German-American medievalist scholar noted for his work on the Timber vernacular architecture of the Middle Ages.

Horn was born in Germany, but fled Nazism and spent most of his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became the university system's first art historian and co-founded the History of Art department.

A naturalized citizen of the United States, Horn served in the U.S. Army during World War II and then in the special intelligence unit that tracked down art works plundered by the Nazis.

His most celebrated exploit was the recovery of the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, also known as Charlemagne's Imperial Regalia.

As a scholar, Horn is most noted for his work on the medieval architectural drawing known as the Plan of Saint Gall.

He earned his doctorate in 1934 at the University of Hamburg, studying under Erwin Panofsky.

He continued his studies from 1934 to 1937 as a research associate at the German Institute for the History of Art in Florence, Italy.

His dissertation, Die Fassade von Saint-Gilles, on the façade of Saint-Gilles, Gard, was published in 1937.

Horn fled Germany in opposition to the Nazi regime.

In 1938, Horn moved to the United States and began his long association with the University of California, Berkeley, as a lecturer.

A year later, he was given a permanent position as the first art historian in the University of California system.

During this time, he married Ann Binkley Rand.

"Being thus confronted a second time with a disruption of my academic career, and feeling unable to expose my wife and my son to the consequences of being denied continuance of my civilian occupation upon return from military duty, it is with profound regret that I find myself compelled to yield to the pressure which the Regents saw fit to exercise in order to extort from me a declaration concerning my political beliefs. I am enclosing the requested statement, signed. I should like to make known that, in doing so, I am acting against the better precepts of my conscience and for no other reason than that of protecting my family against the contingencies of economic distress. ... It was in avoidance of pressures of this type that I left Germany in 1938 and came to this country. 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."

Kantorowicz noted that Horn's letter "illustrates the grave conflict of conscience and savage economic coercion to which, after fifteen months of pressure and struggle, he had finally to yield."

Horn's early position as research associate in Florence gave him firsthand knowledge of the city's medieval church architecture and produced two important studies, Das Florentiner Baptisterium (1938), an analysis of the fabric and ornamentation of the Florence Baptistry that established new criteria for its dating, and Romanesque Churches in Florence: A Study of Their Chronology and Stylistic Development (1943), which included an examination of the masonry construction of San Miniato al Monte.

Horn became a naturalized citizen in 1943, dropping the forename Adolf because of its associations with the war.

That same year, he volunteered for military duty in the U.S. Army.

By 1945, he was a lieutenant in the Third Army under General George S. Patton.

Horn's skills as a native speaker of German were put to use in interrogating prisoners of war.

After the war, he continued as a special investigator in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, using his expertise as an art historian to track down art that had been stolen or concealed by the Nazis.

In 1945, Horn succeeded in recovering the Imperial Regalia of Charlemagne, the crown, sceptre, and jewels of the Holy Roman Empire.

These had been kept hidden by Germans who hoped to return to power even after their defeat by the Allies.

The incident has been elaborated, sometimes with inaccuracies, by writers who take particular interest in the Holy Lance, the spear supposed to have pierced the side of Jesus during his crucifixion.

This artifact is sometimes called the Spear of Destiny and identified with the Vienna Lance, one of the components of the regalia.

Horn appears in narratives about the lance's retrieval from the possession of Adolf Hitler in works by occultists and conspiracy theorists.

Usually identified as "Lt. Walter William Horn," he is purported to have retrieved the lance at the behest of Patton on the day of Hitler's death, 30 April 1945.

Returning from the war, Horn married Alberta West Parker, a physician, who became a Clinical Professor of Public Health at UC Berkeley.

Horn served until 1946, attaining the rank of captain.

In 1949, Horn and his family became embroiled in the controversy at his university over a loyalty oath requirement.

During the era of the Cold War, the Red Scare, and McCarthyism, the Board of Regents at the University of California began to require that all university employees sign an oath affirming their loyalty to the state constitution and denying their membership or belief in organizations advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.

The requirement met with resistance, and in the summer of 1950 thirty-one professors who refused to sign were fired, despite their stature as "internationally distinguished scholars."

Horn's fellow medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz resigned rather than sign the oath, stating his reasons in two letters to the university president that were only published in English decades after the episode.

Kantorowicz also presented a letter from Horn, who had signed the oath under protest.

In the letter dated 23 August 1950, Horn, then acting chairman of the art department, pointed to his former military service and to his voluntary reactivation that same month as a reservist in the Armed Services.

Horn was present as a guest of Austria at the reopening of the rooms dedicated to the Reglia at the Hofburg Museum in 1987.

Horn was born in the town of Waldangelloch in rural Baden as Walther Wilhelm Adolf Horn.

His mother was Matilde Peters; she married Karl Horn, a Lutheran minister.

Walter attended a Gymnasium in nearby Heidelberg and went on to study art history at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Berlin.

Additions: for recovery of Imperial Regalia, see Sidney Kirkpatrick, Hitler’s Holy Relics, Simon and Schuster, 2010.