Embroidered History: The Bayeux Tapestry Once Coveted by the Nazis Embarks on a Historic Loan

This month it was announced that the Bayeux Tapestry will return to England next year for the first time in over 900 years, as a loan to the British Museum from the French State. Measuring nearly 70 meters (230 feet) in length, the eleventh-century embroidery is historically priceless. It depicts the Norman Conquest of England across fifty-eight scenes of needlework in wool thread on linen cloth, including those that recount the 1066 invasion led by William the Conqueror, then duke of Normandy. Widely considered to have been commissioned by William’s half-brother, it is thought to have been created by Anglo-Saxon women, most likely in Canterbury.

An episode from the embroidery depicting the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Public domain via Wikipedia

After being housed for centuries in the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Bayeux, the textile was granted state protective status from local officials following the French Revolution. It has only left the Bayeux region twice in its centuries of history and was transported to the Louvre on both occasions: first during the Napoleonic era and again during World War II.

When Napoleon planned to invade England in 1803, French officials had the textile transported to Paris to be shown at the Louvre, then known as the Musée Napoléon, most likely as an instrument of propaganda. Napoleon’s intended conquest of England never materialized, and it returned to Bayeux.

Jacques Jaujard (right), director of the French National Museums, inspects a portion of the Bayeux Tapestry at the Louvre. OWI staff photo by Richard Boyer, Archives des musées nationaux, Archives nationales, France

During the Nazi occupation of France, the Bayeux Tapestry once again commanded the attention of those in power, who coveted the tapestry not only as an artistic treasure but also to exploit its iconography to promote their perverted racial ideologies.

It’s a war saga recounted firsthand by Rose Valland in her memoir, The Art Front (originally published in French as Le front de l'art):

One of the art treasures from our national collections that stirred in the Germans a growing interest until the end of the Occupation was Queen Matilda’s famous embroidered work, the Bayeux Tapestry....

…The attention it garners to this day was even more pronounced during the war, as the Germans believed it had a certain contemporary quality.

…To them, the Bayeux Tapestry was testimony of a prestigious past that they believed pointed to their own greatness.

To safeguard it, the textile was stored underground at the Hôtel du Doyen in Bayeux in 1939, where it remained until 1941. By that time, a year into the occupation of France, the German occupiers had begun taking an increased focus on the cultural treasure.

Years earlier, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had founded the Ahnenerbe, a pseudoscientific division of the Schutzstaffel (SS) dedicated to researching ancient culture and heritage related to the so-called Aryan race. Under its supervision, analysis was conducted on the textile, including measurements and color studies with watercolor reproductions.

As Valland noted in The Art Front:

Admired beyond the German border for reasons of race rather than aesthetics, it had been cataloged as a fundamental work of Saxon history.

Threatened yet again, the Bayeux Tapestry was relocated that same year to the French state art repository at the Château de Sourches. On June 27, 1944, it was transported to the Louvre under Nazi escort—the German occupiers had not abandoned their ambition goals to claim the cultural treasure for themselves. However, their plan to seize the work once in Paris was ultimately foiled by the advancing Allied forces, as the liberation of Paris drew near following the D-Day landings.

This historic loan to England comes just months after the Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein announced the discovery of a linen fragment removed from the underside of the Bayeux Tapestry by textile archaeologist Karl Schlabow, one of the German experts who worked for the Ahnenerbe. Since this cultural treasure is an asset of the French State, the fragment will be returned to France later this year.

Recognized in UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register since 2007, this embroidered linen, and symbol of our shared cultural heritage, remains protected and preserved by French local and state officials, as well as the dedicated staff of the Bayeux Museum, for future generations.

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