The 40s: The Story of a Decade (49 page)

After viewing Germany’s ruins in their search for dependable receptacles, the Monuments men chose the Verwaltungsbau, in Munich, for the central collecting point for looted E.R.R. art, for the Hitler and Göring thefts and purchases, and for any other art from the occupied countries. This had been the Nazi Party’s administration building for South Germany, one of a solid, tasteless, white-stone pair of Party edifices—the other being Hitler’s headquarters building, the Führerbau, next door—which oddly escaped destruction in the ruination of Munich and which, in all their dual, matching ugliness, now dominate the Königsplatz, of whose earlier architectural charm little but the battered façade of the Glyptothek Museum remains. The central collecting point, soon known as the Bau to the Monuments men, was set up and run by Lieutenant Craig Smythe, U.S. N.R., of the National Gallery; Lieutenant Commander Hamilton Coulter, U.S. N.R., a New York architect; and Captain Edwin Rae, art instructor, University of Illinois. The Verwaltungsbau had been partially gutted, and its tons of secret, sacred Nazi documents—including lists of Party members as well as of anti-Nazis scheduled to be shot—had been scattered by post–V-E Day German mobs. The huge building had to be repaired, cleaned, lighted, staffed, and guarded at a time when a broom was a rarity, when coal was lacking, and glass for smashed windows and skylights had to be scrounged. Then, anti-Nazis had to be discovered among the German curators to aid in the colossal task. Finally, the Army, with the war over, with half a country to patrol, and with the art-target game only a memory, was naturally indifferent about lending good, strong G.I. guards to sit up night and day eying pretty pictures.

The Verwaltungsbau actually served not only as a collecting point but as a repatriation point; Allied art arrived in bulk and was then carefully parcelled out, on signed receipt, to the Allied countries to whom it had belonged before the Germans got hold of it. To facilitate the work, representatives of the Allied governments also functioned at the Bau. As art
items were tentatively identified, through catalogues or often by the Nazis’ own tags, they were placed in storerooms—each nation had its own—for further checking of ownership. When the identification was verified, the art was trucked off home, at the concerned nation’s expense, after a receipt had been signed releasing the Allied authorities from further responsibility. Art that had actually been bought by the Nazis from private owners was, as a rule, simply put into government custody, when it got home, on the principle that unless the former owner could prove that the property had been sold under duress, it should become the property of the state. The wrangling over ownership is still going on.

To complete their knowledge of the Nazi looting, it was necessary for the Monuments men to do considerable detective work, establishing—by interrogation and by locating and studying Nazi, collaborationist, and other documents all over occupied Europe—exactly how, by whom, and for which Nazi bigwigs this massive spoliation of art had been organized. On this complicated information was based one phase of the “crimes against civilization” with which some of the Nazi war criminals—especially Göring, Rosenberg, and Frank—were charged at the Nuremberg trials. Lieutenants Theodore Rousseau, of the National Gallery, and James Plaut, of Boston’s Institute of Modern Art, both of the Navy and both speaking fluent German and French, and Navy Lieutenant S. L. Faison, art professor of Williams College, made up a roving secret service for the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the Office of Strategic Services, which worked with the Monuments men. The only full-time Monuments detective was Lieutenant Walter Horn, a Hamburg-born anti-Nazi who for years had been art professor at the University of California. By the repeated use of his most effective phrase, in German, “If you are not telling me the truth, you will pay for it with your head,” he got Germans to tell him the truth. It was by this method that he obtained from a Nuremberg city councillor information as to the whereabouts of five of the greatest insignia of the Holy Roman Empire, including the real eleventh-century crown of Charlemagne, pipped with raw sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and amethysts and tipped with a jewelled cross, and the St. Mauritius thirteenth-century sword. Nazi propaganda had carefully spread the rumor, after V-E Day, that a certain S.S. officer had sunk these relics in the Zell-am-See. Actually, on highest Nazi Party orders, the insignia had been secreted in an aperture in a false wall, eight stories underground, in the bottom basement of an apartment house built on the rocky slope of the Nuremberg Paniersplatz. Today, the
interested visitor walks down (and later up) eight flights of stairs, accompanied by a slovenly janitor, to see the visible evidence of this ingenuous-looking, completely unsuspected hideaway—a jagged hole, such as any plumber might have made, leading into what appears to be a flue, such as any furnace might possess, just large enough to contain the five sacred relics, each fitted into its own beautiful locked, sealed, engraved, rustproof copper box. This cache of Holy Roman Empire relics was second in national sentimental and political value only to the royal and martial caskets at Bernterode. Ideologically, these two were the most important of all the German caches, laid by in a desperate hour against the Germanic comeback.

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While the Bau was functioning as the collecting point for looted art, a collecting point for the E.R.R. loot from Jewish libraries, synagogues, and private documentary collections was set up at Offenbach in an unbombed I.G. Farben building. Some German-owned art, mainly from the Rhineland, was installed in still another collecting point, at Marburg, in the Staatsarchiv building. The major collecting point for German-owned art, including that from the great Berlin museums, was settled at Wiesbaden, in the old Landesmuseum. Captain Walter Farmer, of the M.F.A. & A., took over the building, considerably the worse for wear, from the Army service troops, who had been using it as a joint clothing and D.P. center. Here, after he had overcome the customary difficulties of getting brooms, soap, and window glass, seventy-five rooms were filled with Germany’s most valuable art, usually still packed in the carefully labelled boxes in which the Germans had embarked it toward safety and hiding. There were hundreds of boxes, containing pictures by Cimabue, Mantegna, Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Bellini, and all the other great artists of Europe for centuries back. The Landesmuseum also housed hundreds of neat, sliding-panelled, annotated cases containing the German museums’ fine print and engraving collections—all packed as carefully as if they were food, awaiting the great day when the Reich would be victorious and could once again savor its art publicly, in its huge museums. The Landesmuseum’s so-called Treasure Room, kept under special guard, looked like the delirious dream of a private collector. Crowded into it was every kind of particularly precious art, piled in corners from floor to ceiling, spread on tables, ranged from the locked doors to the barred windows—objects in gold, in silver, studded
with diamonds, festooned with pearls, bloody with rubies; objects once held by kings, worn or collected by dukes, or revered by bishops, and all finally become the public property of the wealthy, powerful German State, under its Kaisers. An important part of the Landesmuseum job was to demonstrate to the Germans the Monuments–War Department idea that art has nothing to do with war or race; that it belongs first to everybody and second to the people who legally owned it; and that German art was simply being held by the Monuments unit in trust until responsible German authority could offer the guards and the housing such treasures required. As illustration of this theory, the Landesmuseum staged two exhibitions for the Germans of their own magnificent property—a superb painting show of early gems, including some by van der Goes and Bouts; and a fine engraving show, with the catalogues in both German and English.

Unfortunately, it was also at the Landesmuseum that the Monuments ideal was, in the opinion of the Monuments men themselves, betrayed. The two hundred and two German-owned pictures now cached in our National Gallery came from the Landesmuseum collection. In December, 1945, the Monuments officers, acting on orders received in November from Berlin to select—which they conscientiously did—a representative collection of German art, finished the job of packing it for transportation and sent a Monuments officer to accompany it on its hegira to our national capital. All this was unanimously disapproved of by Major LaFarge, then chief of M.F.A. & A. in the U.S. Military Government for Germany, the section’s other officers, and its men, as well as by most museum officials in the United States. Ironically enough, some of the pictures selected—paintings by Botticelli, Rubens, Rembrandt, and van Eyck—had, in June, 1941, been reproduced in an article in the Nazi Paris propaganda magazine
Signal
contemptuously denying an alleged Allied report that fourteen of Germany’s museum masterpieces had gone out to the vulgarian United States in exchange for millions of dollars in cash to aid in financing the Nazi war. The facts about what the Monuments men bitterly called the Westward Ho Plan for sending this collection of German art to the States are still obscure. What is known, however, is that, as far as Europe was concerned, the idea was first heard of in Berlin in July of that year, when President Truman was attending the Big Three Potsdam Conference. In a private meeting with certain chiefs of our American Military Government, in Potsdam, the suggestion to send the art was made, reputedly by General Clay, Deputy Military
Governor of the United States Zone. It is further reported that President Truman, perhaps thinking he was doing art a good turn, agreed to the suggestion. On the other hand, it has also been reported that the idea originated in the minds of non-museum men back in Washington, who decided not to identify themselves when the plan was bitterly criticized by the American press and museum people everywhere.

The protest by the Monuments men themselves did not carry any weight. In November, twenty-eight of the Monuments men operating in Germany sent a letter to their chief, Major LaFarge, deploring the fact that the United States was violating its concept, unique in military history, that the conquerors would leave conquered art untouched. What was even worse, they argued, was our government’s adopting the Nazis’ hypocritical line that the art was merely being taken into “protective custody.” Some of the Monuments men asked to be transferred out of their jobs, because they did not want to have anything to do with carrying out the order. They were cautioned that anyone who attempted to impede the shipment would be court-martialled. The official end of the Westward Ho squabble came when the office of Secretary of State Byrnes, in answer to all the criticism, told the press that the decision to transport the German art to Washington had been arrived at “on the basis of a statement made by General Clay that he did not have adequate facilities and personnel to safeguard German art treasures and that he could not undertake the responsibilities of their proper care.” The White House also told the press that the pictures would be returned to Germany “as soon as possible.” So far, they have at least been kept in dignified hiding in the National Gallery.

Since the pictures, valued at $80,000,000, were taken without our having consulted our three Allies in occupied Germany, it was feared that the United States had set a precedent for the removal of valuables, but England and France, at any rate, have not imitated us yet. The Russian Fine Arts officer in Berlin has, at last report, not given to our Monuments chief there any statement of his government’s attitude toward the disposition of German-owned art in the Russian zone, but it is known that some masterpieces from the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, including the Raphael Sistine Madonna (and its pensive little cherubs), are now on view in a Moscow museum, in a newly furnished room called the Dresden Art Room, or words to that effect.

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Today the M.F.A. & A., aside from its offices in Berlin, is practically inoperative in Europe. The work of returning the looted art from the Verwaltungsbau, which it was estimated would take six months from V-E Day, was finally completed, except for snag ends, last summer. The Wiesbaden Landesmuseum is now in the hands of a civilian representative of the U.S. Military Government. A few of the museum aesthetes of the old guard are polishing off final Monuments details in Munich, Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, and Berlin.

The Führerbau, twin of the Verwaltungsbau, also stands useless and empty today. Between these paired, pompous buildings once stood the two little Greco-Nazi Honor Temples, where the bodies of those who died in Hitler’s Munich
Putsch
reposed as public heroes of the Nazi State. The bodies were removed by the American Army after that State fell, and given a more modest burial elsewhere, and a few weeks ago the Army demolished the temples themselves. Inside the stripped Führerbau, Hitler’s workroom still contains recognizable elements of its former impersonal, tasteless luxury: the brown carpet on which he used to pace, now stained and torn, still covers the lengthy floor; the green marble mantelpiece before which his impressive desk stood, like an altar before the sacred fire, is intact; the sear wall covering retains its autumnal tint. The rest of the building is a void. This is the place where, eight and a half years ago, Prime Ministers Chamberlain and Daladier accepted from the exulting Führer and his Reichsmarschall the terms of Munich. The only furnishing left in the Führerbau’s long, once elegantly filled marble foyer, at the bottom of the grandiose staircase—which those two visiting plenipotentiaries climbed and descended between stiff lines of Nazi guards, while the democracies everywhere waited in suspense—is a large tattered globe of the world, slashed by the knives of passing G.I.s.