The 40s: The Story of a Decade (48 page)

Then, in April, 1945, in the mountains of Germany and Austria, our armies made the first of a series of spectacular, melodramatic discoveries of enemy-hidden subterranean treasure troves, which turned out to be the most dazzling, rich, compact underground depots of art in history. The first buried cache was found on April 2nd by elements of the Eighth Infantry Division, in the Westphalian copper mine at Siegen. As a matter of fact, Lieutenant Stout had already discovered it, at long distance (and had tipped off Headquarters to be on the lookout for it), while studying an annotated Nazi art catalogue he had come on in Aachen, whose rich cathedral treasures had been hidden at Siegen. He had also borrowed the cathedral’s curate as a sort of guide. When the Monuments men finally entered the mine with the curate, its corridors were without light and reeked of the mine’s sulphur and the stench of a vast, departed German civilian population, which had hidden there in semi-suffocation for two weeks, first from the
Amerikaner
bombs and then from the incoming
Amerikaner
soldiers, who butchered children, the German radio had warned. Deep in the mine, behind a locked door, the Monuments men found the German caretakers and the art they took care of—among other things, more than four hundred great pictures.

Later, when the Eighth Infantry turned the mine into an exhibition place, it posted at the mouth a sign, bearing its insigne (a golden arrow), that read, “Golden Arrow
ART MUSEUM
(Siegen Copper Mine). Europe’s Art Treasures
RESTORED
. Paintings of the
OLD MASTERS
, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Delacroix, Van Gogh, Holbein. Bones and Crown of
CHARLEMAGNE
. Original Music of
BEETHOVEN
. Discovered and Guarded by the 8th
INFANTRY DIVISION
.” The manuscript of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, taken from the Beethoven House in Bonn, was indeed in the mine; the Charlemagne crown there was only a modern exhibition copy, which our officers and troops tried on as happily as if it had been the real thing; Charlemagne’s bones were merely a part of
his skull, imbedded in a silver, jewelled, life-size bust. The mine had been equipped with a dehydrating plant, but our bombs had wrecked it in January, and in the interim some of the damp pictures had become encrusted with a green, plush-like mold that made the people in them look as though they were suffering from a novel skin disease. The art—much of it still carefully packed in boxes sitting comfortably on floor boards, since the Nazis never spared labor in fitting up their underground art repositories—was again somewhat disappointing to our soldiers, because it hadn’t been stolen from one of our Allies: it was merely Kraut riches, which included the Aachen Cathedral’s tenth-century gemmed cross and twelfth-century crosier and enamelled gold shrine; canvases by Stephan Lochner; church and museum treasures from Münster and Alsatian Metz (which the Germans had always rated German); and the best of the contents of the Rhineland’s wealthy museums, including the Essen Volkwang Museum’s collection of French moderns, which was among the finest in Europe.

On April 6th, four days after the Siegen find, the American Army uncovered its second German cache—the Kaiseroda salt mine, at Merkers, in Thuringia. This discovery satisfied everybody and definitely put art on the war map. The Merkers art got a high ranking because it was mixed up with the colorful personality of General Patton and with a new type of treasure that really made sense—millions of dollars’ worth of gleaming, solid gold. The Merkers mine was a lucky discovery of the 347th Infantry of Patton’s Third Army. An M.P., Private Mootz by name, was told by a couple of French deportee women that what looked like a sawmill on yonder hill was the entrance to a salt mine filled with gold and other treasures so vast that when, a few weeks before, they had arrived from Berlin, it had taken scores of slave laborers seventy hours to carry the stuff into the place of hiding, seven hundred metres underground. The first visit by one of the M.P.’s officers disclosed that the mine also contained a Prussian State Collections curator and a British war prisoner, who had helped to tote the gold and knew exactly where it was. Before many hours had passed, the mine was bristling with extra M.P.s, a tank battalion to guard the mine head, a reinforced rifle company thrown around its four other entrances, and jeeps everywhere, armed with machine guns. The area also boiled with excited reconnaissance parties, special details, and Intelligence and Counterintelligence. When a number of officers, accompanied by an American banker, a gold expert who had been hastily flown in from Paris, descended into the
mine and reached the cache, they saw a breathtaking sight: five hundred and fifty canvas bags, each containing a million reichsmarks in gold; four hundred smaller bags, containing brick gold; and, to one side, sordid boxes of gold fillings from Jews’ teeth and their gold wedding rings, which the Nazis had thoughtfully saved from the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. On second glance, the officers also noticed some art. According to German bankers, with which Army Intelligence seemed to find the countryside teeming, Patton’s Third had discovered the entire gold reserve of the Nazi State’s Reichsbank. This was the first instance in modern military annals of a belligerent’s capturing his enemy’s every red cent. The American banker appraised the gold at $250,000,000. It was known that Germany started the war with a gold reserve of $50,000,000, so the Nazi conquests had really paid. Part of the Merkers bullion was identified as belonging to Belgium, which in panic had passed it to France in 1940, which had later passed it to Dakar, from which Vichy later ordered it passed to the insistent Germans.

The Army’s first report—an unofficial one, since no Monuments men had yet been invited in to have a peek—said that the Merkers art treasures were not masterpieces. Actually, the Merkers art was so masterly that it was worth at least twice as much as the Merkers gold. Two hundred and two of its German pictures, once the pride of Berlin’s now wrecked Kaiser Friedrich Museum and at present cached in the Washington National Gallery, were alone valued at $80,000,000. The lovely polychrome head of the Egyptian Queen Nofretete, found in a wooden box labelled
“Dic Bunte Königin”
(“The Multicolored Queen”), was only one extremely valuable item in the Merkers trove of art from fifteen Berlin state museums. On the sixth day after the discovery came the distinguished visitors—Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, Eddy, and Patton. All fourteen stars, representing the top brains and valor of our Army in Europe, descended into the mine in the same elevator, operated by a grim German. Soon after that, the gold was removed—rapidly. Protected by fighter planes, ack-ack guns, and anti-tank guns, the gold was trucked to Frankfurt and its rather less bombed Reichsbank vaults, where, at last official reports, it remains, the most heavily guarded cache in Europe. For nine months before the Merkers find, Monuments men had been disparagingly known in the Army as “those guys with their goddam art.” The Merkers gold and Patton’s personality had made art itself important. An art cache was thereafter known as an “art target,” and all Patton’s rivals itched to strike one too. Clearly, art finds meant publicity to any
outfit’s Public Relations officer. Capturing towns was valorous and still the aim of the war, but capturing art was a glamorous new idea.

Patton’s lucky Third made the next strike, too, with the discovery, in May, just before the European war’s end, of the art cache in the salt mine of Alt Aussee, up in the mountains near Salzburg. Among its sixty-seven hundred paintings was the great Hitler Collection for the museum he planned to set up in memory of his mother at Linz, in Austria, plus the art stolen in Italy by the Hermann Göring Division as a present for its chief’s 1944 birthday. To two of the Third’s Monuments men, Captain Posey and Pfc. Kirstein, Alt Aussee’s cache was far from a surprise. Months before, in Trier, they had squeezed a tip about it from a German who had been connected with the French headquarters of E.R.R.,
der Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete
, or the Reich Leader Rosenberg Task Force for Occupied Territories, the official German art-looting organization. The two Monuments men had been impatiently waiting ever since for their outfit to fight its way to the mine. Once the Allies entered Germany, there was a steady trickle of tips about art in the Allied Intelligence reports. These were assembled in England by British and American Monuments officers and passed back to the proper authorities on the Continent. German prisoners also added tidbits of news, and from interrogations of the German population, then anxious to please, came an incoherent but informative mass of facts, clues, and rumors about hundreds of German art hideouts. There had been, to start with, a list, filched from the E.R.R. offices in Paris, of the six German aboveground hideouts, at Neuschwanstein, Chiemsee, Kögl, Seisenegg, Nickolsburg, and Kloster Buxheim. This list had been stolen by the French in 1942, when our Monuments men were still miles and years away from their goal. The major art, however, had been moved by the time the Monuments men caught up, in 1945. The terrible success of the Allied bombing had driven art, considered by the Nazis more valuable than their people, to safety in new hideouts, often unknown to the Allies, underground.

· · ·

The fourth big German cache was discovered by the United States First Army in the twenty-four kilometres of underground passages of a salt mine at Bernterode, in the Thuringia Forest. At first view, it was perhaps the most startling of all. It featured the caskets of Feldmarschall von Hindenburg and his wife; of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm I, his bier decorated
by a wreath and red ribbon bearing the name of his admirer, Adolf Hitler; and of Prussia’s most revered king, Frederick the Great. Using Scotch tape, the methodical Germans had attached to each coffin lid a paper label bearing the name of the occupant scribbled in red crayon. The effect of this morbid scene was enhanced by an array of two hundred and twenty-five German battle banners, the relics of centuries of Prussian campaigns. Around Frederick the Great’s coffin lay those of his Sans Souci Palace treasures that he had loved most—dozens of his paintings by Watteau, Chardin, Lancret, and Boucher, and boxes containing his library, most of the books in French and all of them bound in scarlet leather. Mixed in with swastika-marked flags were the sparkling insignia of earlier German greatness—the Hohenzollern crowns fabricated for Friedrich Wilhelm I and Sophia Dorothea in 1713 (with the jewels missing, these having been “removed for honorable sale,” as an accompanying German note stated); a gold
Totenhelm
, or death helmet, dated 1688, for dead kings lying in state; a blue enamel royal orb, or
Reichsapfel;
two magnificent royal swords, dated 1460 and 1540; and an 1801 Hohenzollern sword and scabbard, the latter a terrific, yard-long, tawdry blaze of diamonds and rubies.

The French, Italian, and Russian slave laborers milling about the neighborhood when the liberating troops arrived said that the caskets had been hauled in a few weeks before under the supervision of the highest German military men and had been walled up in such secrecy and so quickly that they hadn’t known what was being hidden away. It was the presence of fresh mortar in the main mine corridor that had led four sergeants and two corporals of the 330th Ordnance Depot Company, an art target hopefully in mind, to start digging through five feet of still damp masonry. What they had discovered was the sacred elements of Germanic revivalism—in readiness if and when Hitler failed. Bernterode was the most important political repository in all the Reich. By coincidence, our Monuments men brought the caskets out of the mine on V-E Day, while their radio was dialled to the Armed Forces’ network, over which London’s celebration of the great event was being broadcast. To the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Frederick the Great, in a bronze coffin so vast that there was only a half inch to spare, rose majestically on the mine elevator, and just as he reached the free air, there sounded the monarchial strains of “God Save the King.”

In a brick kiln in the town of Hungen was the most insultingly housed cache of all. Here were hidden the most precious Jewish archives, tomes,
and synagogue vessels from all over Europe, including the Rosenthalian collection from Amsterdam and that of the Frankfurt Rothschilds. In the kiln, the repository for the Jewish material Rosenberg planned to use in his projected postwar academy, where anti-Semitism was to be taught as an exact science, priceless illuminated parchment torahs were found cut into covers for Nazi stenographers’ typewriters or made up into shoes. Here, too, were thousands of Jewish identity cards, marked with a yellow “J,” all that remained of Jews who had perished in Nazi crematories.

· · ·

Having found thousands of items of looted art, far from home, and of German-owned art, displaced from its bombed-out museum habitat, the Monuments men, after V-E Day, were faced with the final two problems of their arduous war-and-peace job. The first was the physical act of removing this art—either heaving it up, sometimes heavy and sometimes light, but always valuable and breakable, from the bowels of the earth or from the castles in which it had been stored and transporting it along ruined roads and across streams without bridges. The second problem was to find safe places to put the art in. The first was the harder. The terrible technical difficulties were made quite clear in a rhetorical question one Monuments officer put to a friend: “How would
you
go about hauling up a close-to-life-size Michelangelo marble statue of the Virgin and Child from the bottom of a salt mine, in a foreign country, with the mine machinery
kaput
from our bombs, with nearly no help from our Army, since it was authorized to give nearly none, without proper tools, without trained handlers, and without even the tattered bed coverlets of the moving man’s trade to use as padding?” Monuments men used what they found in German military stores for padding. Gasproof Nazi boots were cut into wedges to use as buffers between paintings; gasproof capes made ideal waterproofings; the full-length German sheepskin coats, tailored for the disastrous Russian campaign, were perfect to wrap around sculpture. For labor, the Monuments men, in their desperation, used any willing human being they could find—Polish, French, Russian, Belgian, Dutch, and Baltic slave workers, male and female, all grimly delighted to help pry loose Germany’s loot, and minor German jailbirds, in the jug for stealing our Army rations and lent by petty German officials eager to curry favor with the conquerors. Some of the newer Monuments men were young curators from rich American museums who had never moved anything heavier than a Degas pastel. During the first summer, autumn,
and winter following the peace, the Monuments men—under the supervision of Lieutenant Stout, the Fogg Art Museum expert, as Monuments chief for all the evacuations in the 12th Army Group area, which comprised the German-Austrian mountains and took in six hundred big and little depositories—spent months in red-tape-bound, wearying, exciting, maddening, and often incoherent work, and by the time they were through they had removed a large percentage of the Nazi-hidden art, much of it with their own hands.