
Posey was born on April 5, 1904, in Morris, Jefferson County, to Mary-Kelly and James Wesley Posey. Posey was the third of seven children. The family moved to Tarrant, a working-class neighborhood north of Birmingham, when he was 13. Posey attended Birmingham's Central High School, graduating in the spring of 1922. Posey's family, like many in Alabama at that time, was poor, but he was able to attend API in Auburn, Lee County, on a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship. Posey was supposed to switch out every other year with his brother, Owen, so both could attend college, but Robert did so well that he stayed at Auburn and completed two degrees: a B.S. in Architectural Engineering in 1926 and a B.S. in Architecture in 1927. At the same time, Posey was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserves. (He would hold that rank until his promotion to first lieutenant on April 1, 1940.)
After graduating in 1927, Posey moved to Birmingham, where he joined the architectural firm Miller, Martin & Lewis. He worked on Robert Jemison Jr.'s development of Mountain Brook Village, with its English Tudor-style architecture and naturalistic design layout. Following the financial crash of 1929, he moved to New York in search of better opportunities. Shortly thereafter, Posey enrolled in post-graduate work at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, earning a certificate in architectural design in 1932. The following year, he married New York native Alice Gwendolyn Montgomery; the couple would have two children.

As the Allies fought their way across France in the summer and fall of 1944, Posey was tasked with protecting and preventing further damage to war-ravaged cultural treasures along the Normandy coast. Posey did whatever he could to protect the bombed-out churches and cultural landmarks in the cities of Saint-Lô, Coutances, Saint-Malo, Les Iffs, and Rennes. But Posey and other MFA&A personnel were hampered by a lack of logistical support, such as transportation, and in many instances the most they could do was post "Off Limits" signs and move on.
In December 1944, Posey was joined in his efforts by Private First Class (PFC) Lincoln Kirstein, a Harvard graduate who would go on to a stellar career in the American arts world after the war, most notably as a co-founder of the New York City Ballet. Posey and Kirstein gathered information, located local artworks, and did their best to repair damaged buildings and monuments in the aftermath of the fighting while trying to prevent further destruction.
By happenstance, in March 1945 Posey was suffering from a toothache and the Army dentist was hundreds of miles away, so Kirstein located a dentist in the German city of Trier. Posey and Kirstein explained to the dentist that they were there to protect monuments and art, and he suggested they meet his son-in-law who was a major in the German Army and had the same job. After a long and harrowing ride through the German countryside they finally arrived at a forest cottage to meet the dentist's son-in-law, Hermann Bunjes. Early in the war, Bunjes had worked for Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring and helped Göring remove private French artworks to Germany. A scholar of French Gothic sculpture and a fellow art lover, Bunjes felt comfortable divulging critical information about the art the Nazis had stolen in France and, more importantly, where it was hidden in a salt mine near the Austrian alpine village of Alt Aussee.
Posey and Kirstein arrived in Alt Aussee on May 12, 1945, less than a week after the war in Europe was declared over. They and some local miners cleared a small entrance to a mine, and the pair entered on May 13th. There, they found more than 6,500 paintings and many more drawings, prints, sculptures, and other objets d'art, including Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna, Vermeer's The Astronomer, and Van Eyck's The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.


Posey was proud of his contributions to the war effort, but he rarely spoke about his experience. Nor did he keep in long-term contact with Lincoln Kirstein or any of the other MFA&A officers with whom he served. Although he left Alabama in 1929, family members have related that Posey was proud of his Alabama roots and always considered himself a southerner. Posey retired from SOM in 1974 and died on April 18, 1977, at the age of 73. On the day of his interment at Birmingham's Elmwood Cemetery, the Belgian government sent a bouquet of flowers in gratitude to Posey for rescuing the Ghent Altarpiece.
Additional Resources
Edsel, Robert M., with Brett Witter. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. New York: Center Street, 2010.
Additional Resources
Edsel, Robert M., with Brett Witter. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. New York: Center Street, 2010.
Howe, Thomas C., Jr. Salt Mines and Castles: The Discovery and Restitution of Looted European Art. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1946.
Kirstein, Lincoln. "The Quest for the Golden Lamb." Town & Country September 1945.
Nicholas, Lynn H. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Plaut, James S. "Loot for the Master Race." Atlantic Monthly 178 (September 1946): 57-63.
———. "Hitler's Capital." Atlantic Monthly 178 (October 1946): 73-78.
Posey, Robert K. "Protection of Cultural Materials During Combat." College Art Journal 5 (January 1946): 127-31
Rorimer, James J. Survival: The Salvage and Protection of Art in War. New York: Abelard Press, 1950.