Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (26 page)

Sometime during late winter, Keller drew a cartoon and sent it to his friend and fellow Monuments officer, Sheldon Pennoyer. Above a sarcastic caption that read “A.M.G.–5th Army and Regional Cooperation,” Keller drew a caricature of himself standing, one foot balanced on a stack of books, with a large wooden paddle in midair and a grin on his face, preparing to rump-swat Lieutenant Fred Hartt, whom he had begun referring to as the “Tuscany kid.” In the background, hanging on the wall, was a smiling Madonna, a spectator seemingly poised to watch and applaud the event with glee. That aspect of Keller’s drawing was playful, but his effeminate depiction of Hartt, with his fleece jacket, gold ring, and elongated fingernails, reflected an uncharacteristic pettiness on Keller’s part.

Keller felt ambivalent about Hartt, but he needed him. Hartt’s knowledge was invaluable. No one knew how many more months of fighting remained, or what kind of destruction they might find on the advance northward. The Florentine treasures were still missing, their location unknown to the Monuments officers. The passing of winter would bring a spring offensive. The search for the treasures, or what was left of them, would resume. And the two Monuments officers in the best position to find them were barely speaking.

FOR THREE AND
a half years, Nazi Germany had terrorized the Soviet Union, causing the brutal deaths of tens of millions of Red Army soldiers and innocent civilians. On Hitler’s orders, Wehrmacht troops had razed entire cities and towns. Now the tide had turned. Six million Red Army soldiers filled with thoughts of revenge amassed along the front, which by February 2, 1945, was less than thirty miles from Carinhall, the palatial country estate of Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Aware the end was near, Göring and his art adviser sorted through his collection, deciding which items should be evacuated immediately. The first train left in early February, bound for hiding places in southern Germany. The masterpieces from Naples were not among them.

More than a year earlier, shortly before his fifty-first birthday, Göring’s private secretary had informed him that the army division bearing his name wanted to present a generous gift. Discovering that they intended to deliver the Naples treasures from Monte Cassino, Göring declared that he would, “Under no circumstances allow such things to be presented to [him] as birthday presents.” Despite the dubious manner in which he had assembled much of his collection, such a prolific collector of art could not be seen accepting stolen masterpieces from the Naples museums. The Reichsmarschall and his agents had worked too hard to create the appearance of legitimacy.

Instead, Göring instructed his art adviser to accept the objects taken from the Abbey of Monte Cassino, but only for a temporary display at Carinhall. Several months later, he had the Naples paintings transferred to Kurfürst, an antiaircraft bunker near Potsdam. Sculpture and other objects from the abbey remained at his estate until early February 1945, when he began shipping his collection south. Göring then arranged for all of the masterpieces from Naples to be delivered to the Reichschancellery in Berlin, with instructions for Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, to send them on to Munich.

22

SWITCHING SIDES

EARLY MARCH 1945

O
n March 8, 1945, seven men dressed in civilian clothes, including four senior officers of the SS, boarded a train in the Swiss border town of Chiasso, bound for Zurich. They occupied two travel compartments, hidden from view. SS General Karl Wolff had reason to stay out of sight on the journey into neutral Switzerland. Acting on his own initiative, without the knowledge of Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring, much less the Führer, Wolff had decided to take a calculated gamble. Being spotted by border officials, spies, or informants would put his life at risk.

From the moment of his transfer to Italy in the fall of 1943, Karl Wolff had been at the center of intrigue. In May 1944, Wolff had found himself inside the Vatican, engaged in conversation with Pope Pius XII and discussing an end to the hostilities. He had promised the pope he would do anything he could to facilitate an early end to the war. But the fall of Rome on June 4, 1944, prevented a follow-up meeting with the Vatican leader. Wolff now had a plan that would fulfill his promise.

AS A WELL-EDUCATED
and cultivated man, Wolff understood that he would be held responsible—by the Führer and history—should the works of art from Florence, worth billions, be damaged or destroyed. But the situation also presented opportunity. Controlling the artistic patrimony of an entire nation might provide a bargaining chip.

Throughout the late summer and fall of 1944, Carlo Anti and other Italian art officials pleaded for their works of art to be transferred to Stra (near Venice), the Borromean Islands in Lago Maggiore, or Sondalo (in Lombardy). Any of these locations would have placed the works under the control of Italian authorities. Wolff remained unmoved, however, stating that the artworks “were safer in a German Gau [district] than upon an Italian Island.” German stubbornness convinced Anti “that the transportation of works of art to Alto Adige is part of pre-meditated plan.”

In late October, a partially recovered Consul Gerhard Wolf and Professor Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich, a member of the Kunstschutz, tried to make headway. Heydenreich wrote Colonel Langsdorff, asking him to urge General Karl Wolff to allow Italian art officials to inspect the two repositories near the Brenner Pass and receive lists of their contents. After two weeks without a response, Heydenreich wrote Langsdorff a second time. A curt reply followed: “Gauleiter Hofer would not allow Italian visitors, that the Führer and General Wolff alone would decide the fate of the works of art.” Langsdorff closed by inquiring, ominously, why Heydenreich “was showing so much interest in the Italians.”

On November 27, 1944, Wolff personally reassured Carlo Anti of “the Führer’s promise that the artworks are, and stay, the undisputed property of Italy.” Over the following two days, he finally allowed Anti, accompanied by Langsdorff, to conduct an inspection of both repositories. Langsdorff attempted to show Anti only the works belonging to the Italian state and to conceal the private collections. Anti’s limited inspection was the only occasion when any Italian official had access to the repositories.

Anti also received an inventory list, but it contained only those items taken from the Villa Bossi-Pucci repository in Montagnana. Wolff explained that he had supplied partial lists because he wanted Mussolini to be the first Italian to receive the documents. By March 1945, however, neither Mussolini nor any other Italian official had seen the complete lists. Anti lost his patience, writing one of the Kunstschutz representatives to say, “Without these my inspection was reduced to an interesting and very nice trip thanks to the friendliness of our German colleagues, but nothing more.” Despite Wolff’s assurances, some Italians remained convinced that “without a doubt the Germans will take the art with themselves once they withdraw.” Even Mussolini proved powerless; a message expressing his “wish that the confiscated articles be transported to the Borromean Islands” was simply ignored.

Ironically, the greatest threat to Wolff’s control over the Florentine treasures came from within his own circle. Austrian Gauleiter Franz Hofer, one of the “radical Nazi fanatics” who had originally suggested the treasures be taken to “Innsbruck or Bavaria,” was determined to maintain control over all activities in what he considered
his
territory. He had already upbraided Wolff by reminding him that anyone contemplating activities in the Alto Adige region “should address me personally with possible proposals.” At one point, Hofer even demanded that several paintings from the Florence collections be given to him as compensation for allowing them to be stored, as if they were his “guests.” Wolff flatly rejected the Gauleiter’s preposterous suggestion.

Sometime after January 26, 1945, Wolff had received a written order, characterized as a “Policy Instruction,” which had been issued by Martin Bormann, on behalf of the Führer: “Based on the Führer’s orders, the existence of all confiscated works of art, especially paintings, objects of artistic interest and weapons of artistic importance, in Greater Germany and the Occupied Territories, is to be reported to the Führer’s advisors in such matters; who, on consideration of the individual cases, will send a report to the Führer through me, so that the Führer can himself decide what use he will make of the acquired articles.”

Coming at any other moment, Bormann’s order would have seemed routine and innocuous. But just weeks earlier, Wolff had received instructions from Himmler to relocate the Florentine artworks to the Führer’s main art repository at Altaussee, Austria. Both orders revealed the growing sense of desperation among German leaders in Berlin. Stalling, Wolff informed Himmler that he was “unable to do this owing to lack of MT [motor transport] and petrol.”

While transport and gasoline were indeed in short supply, Wolff had the rank and resources to effect their transfer, just as he had granted Langsdorff the means to continue his “rescue” operation in Tuscany in July 1944. This new tactic, however, represented more than just a clever blocking maneuver. Wolff had crossed the divide by lying to the head of the SS.

Presumably as an insurance policy, Wolff ordered his staff to prepare an album of photographs of the Florentine artworks. He informed Langsdorff and others that the album would be presented to the Führer on his fifty-sixth birthday, April 20, 1945. Wolff chose not to provide the more precise explanation: he might need the album as protection in case trouble arose. The Führer’s love of art was hardly a secret; Nazi Party leaders and German industrialists had for years given him paintings and other objects. Alfred Rosenberg and his ERR looting organization had taken things a step further by delivering leather bound albums—catalogues, essentially—containing photographs of stolen items.

But Rosenberg, a political weakling, had prepared the ERR albums in a bid to save his position. Wolff ordered preparation of the Florentine album as part of his plan to save his life. Showing Hitler the good work he had been doing, protecting the artistic wealth of Florence, might just act as a shield if Himmler or Kaltenbrunner attacked him for not relocating the works to Altaussee.

THE CRUSHING DEFEAT
of German forces in the Ardennes Forest at the hands of the Western Allies paled in comparison with the losses they were incurring in the fight to prevent Soviet soldiers from seizing Berlin. In January and February alone, German losses on the Eastern Front totaled more than six hundred thousand men, five times worse than in the Ardennes. As the Vistula-Oder campaign advanced Soviet soldiers to within forty-five miles of Berlin, the day of reckoning for German atrocities in the eastern lands neared. Germans—soldiers and civilians alike—knowing there would be no mercy, were terrified. Langsdorff noted in his diary that “millions were unable to be evacuated before the Russians’ arrival” onto east German soil. “It is a situation of madness from which common sense can see no way out.” Wolff knew the Allied bombings that had temporarily closed the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy had “prevented the German soldier [from] receiving news from home, just at the time when he was feeling the greatest anxiety about his relatives owing to the Russian advance.” This caused an increasing “collapse of morale” among German soldiers and officers stationed in Italy.

By the end of January 1945, Wolff had become convinced the war was “irretrievably lost.” As he later noted, German officers who “had taken part in the spearhead of the Ardennes Offensive . . . had been promised eight days’ air superiority to be effected by 3000 Luftwaffe sorties a day; but Allied [antiaircraft] fire and defenses had proved too strong, and they themselves had seen scarcely a German plane.” While the average German soldier still placed faith in Hitler’s assurances that new secret weapons would turn the tide in Germany’s favor, Wolff knew that if such armaments had existed, they would have been used during the critical Ardennes battle or against the Soviet advance. Any remaining doubt vanished on February 6, during one of his regular trips to Berlin. Wolff asked his sources whether such “wonder weapons” existed. The absence of “a straight answer” confirmed his suspicions that they did not.

Certain the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance would eventually collapse, Hitler believed he only needed to hold out long enough for nature to take its course. At a military briefing on August 31, 1944, the Führer stated his firm conviction: “The moment will come when the tension between the Allies will become so great that the break will occur nevertheless. All coalitions in history have disintegrated sooner or later. One only has to wait for the right moment, no matter how hard it is.”

By early February 1945, however, Hitler’s two senior SS officers in Germany decided to wait no longer. Realizing that the Nazi regime was faltering, and motivated by self-preservation, Himmler and Ernst Kaltenbrunner made secret overtures to the OSS. One report stated that the two men were “contemplating the liquidation of ‘war-mongers’ within the Nazi Party,” such as Bormann, with the goal of negotiating an end to the war. OSS leaders viewed this as “a sign of the increasing disintegration within the Nazi Party.” A later report from the chief of the OSS mission in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, added, “Although persons of the Himmler, Kaltenbrunner type could naturally gain no immunity from us, as long as they believed this were possible, it might give us an opportunity to drive a wedge in the SD [
Sicherheitsdienst
—the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party].”

Wolff used his February 6 Berlin visit to petition the Führer to approve making contact with the Western powers to explore a political solution. While Hitler didn’t authorize him to proceed, neither did he order him to abandon the idea. During that trip, the SS general attended a briefing on Hitler’s scorched-earth plans for northern Italy. According to the plan, Wolff’s troops would be responsible for destroying industrial capacity, power plants, port installations, and basic services as they relinquished areas of control. Kesselring’s frontline forces would then demolish bridges and tunnels as they retreated. There was no end game, no objective to the destruction other than to slow down the enemy advance and buy time, hoping the Western Allies would split with the Soviets.

Nazi Germany had reached the abyss—no future, and no way out. Many of those in Hitler’s immediate circle were preparing for the worst. Unwilling to link his survival to the Führer’s fate, Karl Wolff had developed a secret plan to surrender an entire German army—some one million men in Italy—to the Western Allies.

That Wolff even had an opportunity to attempt such a plan owed much to a strange mixture of geography, weather, and luck. While Hitler and his commanders battled Western Allied forces and the Soviet Red Army, German and Fascist Italian soldiers in northern Italy waited idly for the snow to melt before the anticipated Allied spring offensive. The comparative calm in Italy lowered Wolff’s profile and placed him under far less scrutiny than his peers in Berlin. At that stage of the war, Kesselring and Wolff commanded Germany’s most intact fighting force. Wolff’s troops also controlled the Brenner Pass, “the most important route for the supply and reinforcement of the Southern Front.” It served as the gateway to a mountainous area bounded by southern Bavaria, western Austria, and the Alto Adige region of Italy that came to be known as the Alpine Redoubt.

In August 1944, Dulles sent a telegram to Washington describing the perceived threat posed by the Alpine Redoubt: “The Nazi theory is that by stationing 1,000,000 troops on the Vorarlberg, Austrian and Bavarian Alps, together with sufficient material [
sic
], they could resist for a period extending from 6 to 12 months.” This was but one of many reports on German plans sent to decision makers in Washington and London arguing that the Nazis intended this to be their last stand. It proved one of the great intelligence misreads of World War II.
*

The following month, Gauleiter Hofer received a transcript of one of these reports from an SS officer reporting to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), which was run by his fellow Austrian Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Sensing opportunity, Gauleiter Hofer submitted a report to the Führer recommending the immediate construction of an Alpine defensive fortification—not the Alpine Redoubt holdout that increasingly concerned the Allies. Hofer noted that his objective of “exploiting skillfully and rapidly the ‘redoubt psychosis’ might help us to open diplomatic negotiations which could bring the war to a satisfactory end.” Like SS General Karl Wolff, Gauleiter Hofer also had a plan for surviving the war.

Bormann received Hofer’s report in November 1944 and ignored it. Undeterred, Hofer resubmitted his proposal week after week. Eventually Hitler summoned him for a meeting, and on April 20, 1945, approved construction of an Alpine fortress. By that stage of the war, however, the Nazis had insufficient resources to construct and stock anything approaching the strength of the mythical Alpine Redoubt. But that reality didn’t deter Reichsminister of Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels from aggressively promoting the Redoubt myth, in which a phantom army of guerrilla fighters is capable of holding out indefinitely.