Francis Waterhouse Bilodeau was born in Augusta, Maine, on January 25, 1915. He first became interested in art as an undergraduate student at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he worked part-time through the National Youth Administration (a Works Progress Administration precursor to work study), painting the walls and ceilings at the university’s art museum. He became an enthusiastic student of art history. After earning his bachelor’s degree in history in 1938, he joined the staff of the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey. He worked first in the Lending Department and later in the Registrars’ Department, where he supervised the care and preservation of American paintings and sculptures. In 1940, he took a year off to expand his knowledge of graduate level classes in art history at Yale University. He earned his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1942.

Bilodeau’s graduate studies were placed on hold when he was inducted into the US Army in October 1941. He served with the 12th Engineer Combat Battalion, 8th Infantry Division, which landed on Omaha Beach in July 1944, and gradually progressed through northern France into the Rhineland. In late April 1945, just before the end of the war in Europe, Bilodeau joined the MFAA and was assigned to the Marburg Central Collecting Point that August, where he worked alongside Monuments Men Captain Walker K. Hancock and Second Lieutenant Sheldon Keck. Upon his discharge from active military service in February 1946, Bilodeau remained at Marburg in a civilian capacity in order to serve as the collecting point’s last director. At that time, thousands of works of art and other cultural objects had yet to be restituted to their countries of origin.

When Marburg officially ceased all operations in August 1946, its records were sent to the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point. Bilodeau also transferred to Wiesbaden, first as acting director while Monuments Woman Captain Edith A. Standen was on leave and finally as director upon her departure. Bilodeau’s activities as director included the planning of numerous exhibitions of looted art, the first of their kind in postwar Germany. In Marburg, he formed a valuable relationship with the Kunsthistorisches Institut of Marburg University, which placed the full resources of its library and staff at Bilodeau’s disposal. Bilodeau later converted the Marburg Central Collecting Point into the new home of the Marburg University Library and the State Archives.

In August 1946, Bilodeau supervised the reinterment of the bodies of President Hindenburg and his wife, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and Frederick’s father, Frederick William I. The four elaborately decorated caskets, along with other royal treasures, had been secreted away by Adolf Hitler, who intended to resurrect their coffins as symbols of a Fourth Reich. American forces discovered them deep in the Bernterode salt mine in late April 1945. Monuments Man Captain Walker K. Hancock then supervised their careful removal to the surface with the assistance of Monuments Men Lieutenant George L. Stout and First Lieutenant Stephen Kovalyak. Assigned the codename “Operation Bodysnatch,” the mission remained a closely guarded secret. After the caskets were refused resting places in both the British and French Zones of Occupation, Bilodeau settled on a spot nearby at St. Elizabeth’s Church (Elisabethkirche) in Marburg. Today, the remains of Frederick the Great rest in the forecourt of Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, Germany. His father’s remains are nearby in the Kaiser Friedrich Mausoleum at the Church of Peace in Sanssouci Park.

Bilodeau departed Wiesbaden in April 1947 and returned to the Newark Museum. In the years before his retirement in 1972, he held positions at museums and galleries across the United States, including Sheldon Swope Art Gallery in Terre Haute, Indiana, the R. W. Norton Gallery in Shreveport, Louisiana, Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina, and Chapellier Galleries in New York. In 1954, he became supervisor of education for the New York Historical Society. He remained active as a scholar, a consultant, and an engaged alumnus of Bowdoin College until his death.

In 1998, for his devoted service to the conservation of cultural heritage at the postwar collecting points, Bilodeau was awarded a Letter of Commendation from the Federal Republic of Germany. In that letter, the Germain foreign minister thanked Bilodeau for his work in protecting the works of art and for his organization of art exhibitions: “[b]y many accounts these were the first art exhibitions held in post-war Germany.” Further, he wrote that, “[y]our distinguished, indeed exemplary service . . . remains unforgotten.”

Francis Bilodeau died in New York on June 16, 2004, at the age of 89.