It was nearly two o’clock by the time we were ready to start. I was now so familiar with the road between Munich and Salzburg that I felt like a commuter. Just outside Salzburg, Lamont began looking for signs that would lead us to a Quartermaster depot. He finally caught sight of one and, after following a devious route which took us several miles off the main road, we found the depot. We were issued two compact and very heavy wooden boxes bound with metal strips. We dumped them on the floor of the command car and drove on into town.
Across the river, we picked up a secondary road which led out of the city in a southeasterly direction. For some miles it wound through hills so densely wooded that we could see but little of the country. Then, emerging from the tunnel of evergreens, we skirted Fuschl See, the first of the lovely Alpine lakes in that region. Somewhere along its shores, we had been told, Ribbentrop had had a castle. It was being used now as a recreation center for American soldiers.
Our road led into more rugged country. We continued to climb and with each curve of the road the scenery became more spectacular. After an hour’s drive we reached St. Gilgen, its neat white houses and picturesque church spire silhouetted against the blue waters of St. Wolfgang See. Then on past the village of Strobl and finally into the crooked streets of Bad Ischl, where the old Emperor Franz Josef had spent so many summers. From Bad Ischl our road ribboned through Laufen and Goisern to St. Agatha.
Beyond St. Agatha lay the Pötschen Pass. The road leading up to it was a series of hairpin turns and dangerous grades. As we ground slowly up the last steep stretch to the summit, I wondered what route George was using for his convoys from the mine. Surely not this one. Large trucks couldn’t climb that interminable grade. I found out later that this was the only road to Alt Aussee.
On the other side of the pass, the road descended gradually into a rolling valley and, in another half hour, we clattered into the narrow main street of Bad Aussee. From there it was only a few miles to Alt Aussee. Midway between the two villages we hoped to find the house of our OSS friends.
We came upon it unexpectedly, around a sharp bend in the road. It was a tall, gabled villa, built in the gingerbread style of fifty years ago. Having pictured a romantic chalet tucked away in the mountains, I was disappointed by this rather commonplace suburban structure, standing behind a stout iron fence with padlocked gates, within a stone’s throw of the main highway.
Jim and Ted received us hospitably and took us to an upper veranda with wicker chairs and a table immaculately set for dinner. We were joined by a wiry young lieutenant colonel, named Harold S. Davitt, who bore a pronounced resemblance to the Duke of Windsor. He was the commanding officer of a battalion of the 11th Armored Division stationed at Alt Aussee, the little village just below the mine. Colonel Davitt’s men constituted the security guard at the mine. He knew and admired our friend George Stout. It was strange and pleasant to be again in an atmosphere of well-ordered domesticity. To us it seemed rather a fine point when one of our hosts rebuked the waitress for serving the wine in the wrong kind of glasses.
During dinner we noticed a man pacing about the garden below. He was Walter Andreas Hofer, who had been Göring’s agent and adviser in art matters. A shrewd and enterprising Berlin dealer before the war, Hofer had succeeded in ingratiating himself with the Reichsmarschall. He, more than any other single individual, had been responsible for shaping Göring’s taste and had played the stellar role in building up his priceless collection of Old Masters.
Some of his methods had been ingenious. He was credited with having devised the system of “birthday gifts”—a scheme whereby important objects were added to the collection at no cost to the Reichsmarschall. Each year, before Göring’s birthday on January twelfth, Hofer wrote letters to wealthy industrialists and businessmen suggesting that the Reichsmarschall would be gratified to receive a token of their continued regard for him. Then he would designate a specific work of art—and the price. More often than not, the piece in question had already been acquired. The prospective donor had only to foot the bill. Now and then the victim of this shakedown protested the price, but he usually came through.
In Hofer, the Reichsmarschall had had a henchman as rapacious and greedy as himself. And Hofer had possessed what his master lacked—a wide knowledge of European collections and the international art market. Göring had been a gold mine and Hofer had made the most of it.
Hofer had been arrested shortly after the close of hostilities. He had been a “guest” at House 71 for some weeks now, and was being grilled daily by our “cloak and dagger boys.” They were probing into his activities of the past few years and had already extracted an amazing lot of information for incorporation into an exhaustive report on the Göring collection and “how it grew.” Hofer was just one of a long procession of witnesses who were being questioned by Plaut and Rousseau in the course of their tireless investigation of the artistic depredations of the top Nazis. These OSS officers knew their business. With infinite patience, they were cross-examining their witnesses and gradually extracting information which was to lend an authentic fascination to their reports.
Hofer’s wife, they told us, had ably assisted her husband. Her talents as an expert restorer had been useful. She had been charged with the technical care of the Göring collection—no small job when one stopped to consider that it numbered over a thousand pictures. Indeed, there had been more than enough work to keep one person busy all the time. We learned that Frau Hofer was living temporarily at Berchtesgaden where, until recently, she had been allowed to attend to emergency repairs on some of the Göring pictures there.
We turned back to the subject of Hofer, who had not yet finished his daily constitutional and could be seen still pacing back and forth below us. He was, they said, a voluble witness and had an extraordinary memory. He could recall minute details of complicated transactions which had taken place several years before. On one occasion Hofer had recommended an exchange of half a dozen paintings of secondary importance for two of the very first quality. As I recall, the deal involved a group of seventeenth century Dutch pictures on the one hand, and two Bouchers on the others. Hofer had been able to reel off the names of all of them and even give the price of each. It was just such feats of memory, they said with a laugh, that made his vague and indefinite answers to certain other questions seem more than merely inconsistent.
Listening to our hosts, we had forgotten the time. It was getting late and George would be wondering what had happened to us. There had been a heavy downpour while we were at dinner. The weather had cleared now, but the evergreens were dripping as we pulled out of the drive.
The road to Alt Aussee ran along beside the swift and milky waters of an Alpine river. It was a beautiful drive in the soft evening light. The little village with its winding streets and brightly painted chalets was an odd setting for GIs and jeeps, to say nothing of our lumbering command car.
We found our way to the Command Post, which occupied a small hotel in the center of the village. There we turned sharply to the right, into a road so steep that it made the precipitous grades over which we had come earlier that afternoon seem level by comparison. We drove about a mile on this road and I was beginning to wonder if we wouldn’t soon be above the timber line—perhaps even in the region of “eternal snow” to which Roger had once so poetically referred—when we came to a bleak stone building perched precariously on a narrow strip of level ground. Behind it, a thousand feet below, stretched an unbroken sea of deep pine forests. This was the control post, and the guard, a burly GI armed with a rifle, signaled us to stop. We asked for Lieutenant Stout. He motioned up the road, where, in the gathering dusk, we could distinguish the outlines of a low building facing an irregular terrace. It was a distance of about two hundred yards. We drove on up to the entrance where we found George waiting for us.
He took us into the building which he said contained the administrative offices of the salt mine—the Steinbergwerke, now a government monopoly—and his own living quarters. We entered a kind of vestibule with white plaster walls and a cement floor. A narrow track, the rails of which were not more than eighteen inches apart, led from the entrance to a pair of heavy doors in the far wall. “That,” said George, “is the entrance to the mine.”
He led the way to a room on the second floor. Its most conspicuous feature was a large porcelain stove. The woodwork was knotty pine. Aside from the two single beds, the only furniture was a built-in settle with a writing table which filled one corner. The table had a red and white checked cover and over it, suspended from the ceiling, was an adjustable lamp with a red and white checked shade. Opening off this room was another bedroom, also pine-paneled, which was occupied by the captain of the guard and one other officer. George apologized for the fact that the only entrance to the other room was through ours. Apparently, in the old days, the two rooms had formed a suite—ours having been the sitting room—reserved for important visitors to the mine. For the first few days there was so much coming and going that we had all the privacy of Grand Central Station, but we soon got used to the traffic. George and Steve Kovalyak shared a room just down the hall. Lamont had spoken of Steve when we had been at Hohenfurth, and I was curious to meet this newcomer to the MFA&A ranks. George said that Steve would be back before long. He had gone out with Shrady. That was Lieutenant Frederick Shrady, the third member of the trio of Monuments Officers at the mine.
While Lamont and I were getting our things unpacked, George sat and talked with us about the work at the mine and what he expected us to do. As he talked he soaked his hand in his helmet liner filled with hot water. He had skinned one of his knuckles and an infection had set in. The doctors wanted to bring the thing to a head before lancing it the next day. I had noticed earlier that one of his hands looked red and swollen. But George hadn’t said anything about it. As he was not one to relish solicitous inquiries, I refrained from making any comment.
George outlined the local situation briefly. The principal bottle-neck in the operation lay in the selection of the stuff which was to be brought out of the various mine chambers. There were, he said, something like ten thousand pictures stored in them, to say nothing of sculpture, furniture, tapestries, rugs and books. At the moment he was concentrating on the pictures and he wanted to get the best of them out first. The less important ones—particularly the works of the nineteenth century German painters whom Hitler admired so much—could wait for later removal.
He and Steve and Shrady had their hands full above ground. That left only Sieber, the German restorer, who had been at the mine ever since it had been converted into an art repository, to choose the paintings down below. In addition Sieber had to supervise the other subterranean operations, which included carrying the paintings from the storage racks, dividing them into groups according to size, and padding the corners so that the canvases wouldn’t rub together on the way up to the mine entrance. Where we could be of real help would be down in the mine chambers, picking out the cream of the pictures and getting them up topside. (George’s vocabulary was peppered with nautical expressions.)
In the midst of his deliberate recital, we heard a door slam. The chorus of “Giannina Mia” sung in a piercingly melodic baritone echoed from the stairs. “Steve’s home,” said George.
A second later there was a knock on the door and the owner of the voice materialized. Steve looked a bit startled when he caught sight of two strange faces, but he grinned good-naturedly as George introduced us.
“I thought you were going out on the town with Shrady tonight,” said George.
“No,” said Steve, “I left him down in the village and came back to talk to Kress.”
Kress was an expert photographer who had been with the Kassel Museum before the war. He had been captured when our troops took over at the mine just as the war ended. Since Steve’s arrival, he had been his personal PW. Steve was an enthusiastic amateur and had acquired all kinds of photographic equipment. Kress, we gathered, was showing him how to use it. Their “conversations” were something of a mystery, because Steve knew no German, Kress no English.
“I use my High German, laddies,” Steve would say with a crafty grin and a lift of the eyebrows, as he teetered on the balls of his feet.
We came to the conclusion that “High German” was so called because it transcended all known rules of grammar and pronunciation. But, for the two of them, it worked. Steve—stocky, gruff and belligerent—and Kress—timid, beady-eyed and patient—would spend hours together. They were a comical pair. Steve was always in command and very much the captor. Kress was long-suffering and had a kind of doglike devotion to his master, whose alternating jocular and tyrannical moods he seemed to accept with equanimity and understanding. But all this we learned later.
That first evening, while George went on with his description of the work, Steve sat quietly appraising Lamont and me with his keen, gray-green eyes. He had worked with Lamont at Bernterode, so I was his main target. Now and then he would look over at George and throw in a remark. Between the two there existed an extraordinary bond. As far as Steve was concerned, George was perfect, and Steve had no use for anyone who thought otherwise. If, at the end of a hard day, he occasionally beefed about George and his merciless perfection—well, that was Steve’s prerogative. For his part, George had a fatherly affection for Steve and a quiet admiration for his energy and resourcefulness and the way he handled the men under him.
Presently Steve announced that it was late and went off to bed. I wondered if he had sized me up. There was a flicker of amusement in Lamont’s eyes and I guessed that he was wondering the same thing. When George got up to go, he said, “You’ll find hot water down in the kitchen in the morning. Breakfast will be at seven-thirty.”
Steve roused us early with a knock on the door and said he’d show us the way to the kitchen. We rolled out, painfully conscious of the cold mountain air. Below, in the warm kitchen, the sun was pouring in through the open door. There were still traces of snow on the mountaintops. The highest peak, Steve said, was Loser. Its snowy coronet glistened in the bright morning light.
When my eyes became accustomed to the glare, I noticed that there were several other people in the kitchen. One of them, a wrinkled little fellow wearing Lederhosen and white socks, was standing by the stove. Steve saluted them cheerfully with a wave of his towel. They acknowledged his greeting with good-natured nods and gruff monosyllables. These curious mountain people, he said, belonged to families that had worked in the mine for five hundred years. They were working for us now, as members of his evacuation crew.
We washed at a row of basins along one wall. Above them hung a sign lettered with the homely motto:
It rang a poignant bell in my memory. That same admonition to wash before eating had hung in the little pension at near-by Gründlsee where I had spent a summer fifteen years ago.
Our mess hall was in the guardhouse down the road, the square stone building where the sentry had challenged us the night before. We lined up with our plates and, when they had been heaped with scrambled eggs, helped ourselves to toast, jam and coffee and sat down at a long wooden table in the adjoining room. George was finishing his breakfast as the three of us came in. With him was Lieutenant Shrady, who had recently been commissioned a Monuments officer at Bad Homburg. Subsequently he had been sent down to Alt Aussee by Captain Posey. He was a lean, athletic, good-looking fellow. Although he helped occasionally with the loading, his primary duties at the mine were of an administrative nature—handling the workmen’s payrolls through the local Military Government Detachment, obtaining their food rations, making inspections in the area, filing reports and so on. After he and George had left, Steve told us that Shrady was a portrait painter. Right now he was working on a portrait of his civilian interpreter-secretary who, according to Steve, was something rather special in the way of Viennese beauty. This was a new slant on the work at the mine and I was curious to know more about the glamorous Maria, whom Steve described as being “beaucoup beautiful.” But George was waiting to take us down into the mine. As we walked up the road, Steve explained to us that the miners worked in two shifts—one crew from four in the morning until midday, another from noon until eight in the evening. The purpose of the early morning shift was to maintain an uninterrupted flow of “stuff” from the mine, so that the daytime loading of the trucks would not bog down for lack of cargo.
At the building in which the mine entrance was located we found George with a group of the miners. It was just eight o’clock and the day’s work was starting. We were introduced to two men dressed in white uniforms which gave them an odd, hybrid appearance—a cross between a street cleaner and a musical-comedy hussar. This outfit consisted of a white duck jacket and trousers. The jacket had a wide, capelike collar reaching to the shoulders. Two rows of ornamental black buttons converging at the waistline adorned the front of the jacket, and a similar row ran up the sleeves from cuff to elbow. In place of a belt, the jacket was held in place by a tape drawstring. A black garrison cap completed the costume.
The two men were Karl Sieber, the restorer, and Max Eder, an engineer from Vienna. It was Eder’s job to list the contents of each truck. Perched on a soapbox, he sat all day at the loading entrance, record book and paper before him on a makeshift desk. He wrote down the number of each object as it was carried through the door to the truck outside. The truck list was made in duplicate: the original was sent to Munich with the convoy; the copy was kept at the mine to be incorporated in the permanent records which Lieutenant Shrady was compiling in his office on the floor above.
In the early days of their occupancy, the Nazis had recorded the loot, piece by piece, as it entered the mine. The records were voluminous and filled many ledgers. But, during the closing months of the war, such quantities of loot had poured in that the system had broken down. Instead of a single accession number, an object was sometimes given a number which merely indicated with what shipment it had arrived. Occasionally there would be several numbers on a single piece. Frequently a piece would have no number at all. In spite of this confusion, Eder managed somehow to produce orderly lists. If the information they contained was not always definitive, it was invariably accurate.
George was anxious to get started. “It’s cold down in the mine,” he said. “You’d better put on the warmest things you brought with you.”
“How cold is it?” I asked.
“Forty degrees, Fahrenheit,” he said. “The temperature doesn’t vary appreciably during the year. I believe it rises to forty-seven in the winter. And the humidity is equally constant, about sixty-five per cent. That’s why this particular salt mine was chosen as a repository, as you probably know.”
While we went up to get our jackets and mufflers, George ordered Sieber to hitch up the train. When we returned we noticed that the miners, who resembled a troop of Walt Disney dwarfs, were wearing heavy sweaters and thick woolen jackets for protection against the subterranean cold.
The train’s locomotion was provided by a small gasoline engine with narrow running boards on either side which afforded foothold for the operator. Attached to it were half a dozen miniature flat-cars or “dollies.” The miners called them “Hünde,” that is, dogs. They were about five feet long, and on them were placed heavy wooden boxes approximately two feet wide. The sides were roughly two feet high.
Following George’s example, we piled a couple of blankets on the bottom of one of the boxes and squeezed ourselves in. Each box, with judicious crowding, would accommodate two people facing each other.
At a signal from Sieber, who was sardined into a boxcar with George, one of the gnomes primed the engine. After a couple of false starts, it began to chug and the train rumbled into the dim cavern ahead. For the first few yards, the irregular walls were whitewashed, but we soon entered a narrow tunnel cut through the natural rock. It varied in height and width. In some places there would be overhead clearance of seven or eight feet, and a foot or more on either side. In others the passageway was just wide enough for the train, and the jagged rocks above seemed menacingly close. There were electric lights in part of the tunnel, but these were strung at irregular intervals. They shed a dim glow on the moist walls.
George shouted that we would stop first at the Kaiser Josef mine. The track branched and a few minutes later we stopped beside a heavy iron door set in the wall of the passageway. This part of the tunnel was not illuminated, so carbide lamps were produced. By their flickering light, George found the keyhole and unlocked the door.
We followed him into the unlighted mine chamber. Flashlights supplemented the wavering flames of the miners’ lamps. Ahead of us we could make out row after row of huge packing cases. Beyond them was a broad wooden platform. The rays of our flashlights revealed a bulky object resting on the center of the platform. We came closer. We could see that it was a statue, a marble statue. And then we knew—it was Michelangelo’s Madonna from Bruges, one of the world’s great masterpieces. The light of our lamps played over the soft folds of the Madonna’s robe, the delicate modeling of the face. Her grave eyes looked down, seemed only half aware of the sturdy Child nestling close against her, one hand firmly held in hers. It is one of the earliest works of the great sculptor and one of his loveliest. The incongruous setting of the bare boards served only to enhance its gentle beauty.
The statue was carved by Michelangelo in 1501, when he was only twenty-six. It was bought from the sculptor by the Mouscron brothers of Bruges, who presented it to the Church of Notre Dame early in the sixteenth century. There it had remained until September 1944, when the Germans, using the excuse that it must be “saved” from the American barbarians, carried it off.
In the early days of the war, the statue had been removed from its traditional place in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament to a specially built shelter in another part of the church. The shelter was not sealed, so visitors could see the statue on request. Then one afternoon in September 1944, the Bishop of Bruges, prompted by the suggestion of a German officer that the statue was not adequately protected, ordered the shelter bricked up. That night, before his orders could be carried out, German officers arrived at the church and demanded that the dean hand over the statue. With an armed crew standing by, they removed it from the shelter, dumped it onto a mattress on the floor of a Red Cross lorry and drove away. At the same time, they perpetrated another act of vandalism. They took with them eleven paintings belonging to the church. Among them were works by Gerard David, Van Dyck and Caravaggio. The statue and the pictures were brought to the Alt Aussee mine. It was a miracle that the two lorries with their precious cargo got through safely, for the roads were being constantly strafed by Allied planes.
Now we were about to prepare the Madonna for the trip back. This time she would have more than a mattress for protection.
In the same mine chamber with the Michelangelo was another plundered masterpiece of sculpture—an ancient Greek sarcophagus from Salonika. It had been excavated only a few years ago and was believed to date from the sixth century B.C. Already the Greek government was clamoring for its return.
On our way back to the train, George said that the other cases—the ones we had seen when we first went into the Kaiser Josef mine—contained the dismantled panels of the Millionen Zimmer and the Chinesisches Kabinett from Schönbrunn. The Alt Aussee mine, he said, had been originally selected by the Viennese as a depot for Austrian works of art, which accounted for the panels being there. They had been brought to the mine in 1942. Then, a year later, the Nazis took it over as a repository for the collections of the proposed Führer Museum at Linz.
We boarded the train again and rumbled along a dark tunnel to the Mineral Kabinett, one of the smaller mine chambers. Again there was an iron door to be unlocked. We walked through a vestibule into a low-ceilinged room about twenty feet square. The walls were light partitions of unfinished lumber. Ranged about them were the panels of the great Ghent altarpiece—the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb—their jewel-like beauty undimmed after five hundred years. The colors were as resplendent as the day they were painted by Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432.
This famous altarpiece, the greatest single treasure of Belgium, had also been seized by the Germans. One of the earliest examples of oil painting, it consisted originally of twelve panels, eight of which were painted on both sides. It was planned as a giant triptych of four central panels, with four panels at either side. The matching side panels were designed to fold together like shutters over a window. Therefore they were painted on both sides.
I knew something of the history of the altarpiece. It belonged originally to the Cathedral of St. Bavon in Ghent. Early in the nineteenth century, the wings had been purchased by Edward Solly, an Englishman living in Germany. In 1816, he had sold them to the King of Prussia and they were placed in the Berlin Museum. There they had remained until restored to Belgium by the terms of the Versailles Treaty. From 1918 on, the entire triptych was again in the Cathedral of St. Bavon. In 1933, the attention of the world was drawn to the altarpiece when the panel in the lower left-hand corner was stolen. This was one of the panels painted on both sides. The obverse represented the Knights of Christ; the reverse, St. John the Baptist.
According to the story, the thief sent the cathedral authorities an anonymous letter demanding a large sum of money and guarantee of his immunity for the return of the panels. As proof that the panels were in his possession, he is said to have returned the reverse panel with his extortion letter. The authorities agreed to these terms but sought to lay a trap for the culprit. Their attempt was unsuccessful and nothing was heard of the panel until a year or so later.
On his deathbed, the thief—one of the beadles of the cathedral—confessed his guilt. As he lay dying, he managed to gasp, “You will find the panel ...” but he got no further. The panel has never been found.
In May 1940, the Belgians entrusted the altarpiece to France for safekeeping. Packed in ten cases, it was stored in the Château of Pau together with many important works of art from the Louvre. The Director of the French National Museums, mindful of his grave responsibilities, obtained explicit guarantees from the Germans that these treasures would be left inviolate. By the terms of this agreement, confirmed by the Vichy Ministry of Fine Arts, the Ghent altar was not to be moved without the joint consent of the Director of the French National Museums, the Mayor of Ghent and the German organization for the protection of French monuments.
Notwithstanding this contract, the Director of the French National Museums learned quite by accident in August 1942 that the altarpiece had just been taken to Paris. Dr. Ernst Büchner, who was director of the Bavarian State Museums, in company with three other German officers had gone to Pau the day before with a truck and ordered the Director of the Museum there to hand over the retable. A telegram from M. Bonnard, Vichy Minister of Fine Arts, arriving simultaneously, reinforced Dr. Büchner’s demands. Nothing was known of its destination or whereabouts, beyond the fact that it had been taken to Paris.
There the matter rested until the summer of 1944. With the arrival of Allied armies on French soil, reports of missing masterpieces were received by our MFA&A officers. The Ghent altarpiece was among them. But there were no clues as to where it had gone. Months passed and by the time our troops had approached Germany, our Monuments officers, all similarly briefed with photographs and other pertinent data concerning stolen works of art, began to hear rumors about the Lamb. It might be in the Rhine fortress of Ehrenbreitstein; perhaps it had been taken to the Berghof at Berchtesgaden or possibly to Karinhall, Göring’s palatial estate near Berlin. And then again it might have been flown out of the country altogether—to one of the neutral countries, Spain or Switzerland.
Captain Posey and Private Lincoln Kirstein picked up additional rumors from museum directors in Luxembourg. They had heard that the altarpiece was in a salt mine, but they had also been told that it was in the vaults of the Berlin Reichsbank. It was impossible to reconcile these conflicting pieces of information. Finally, near Trier, Posey and Kirstein tracked down a young German scholar who had been in France during the occupation. Lincoln told me later that it was hard to believe that this unassuming fellow had been high in the confidence of Göring and other members of the Nazi inner circle. From him they learned that the altarpiece had been taken to Alt Aussee.
Then followed the rapid advance across Germany. To Posey and Kirstein it was a period of agonizing suspense. They couldn’t be sure that Third Army would move into the area in which the mine lay. Just as their hopes began to fade, occupancy of the cherished area did fall to Third Army. Tactical troops were alerted to the importance of the isolated mountain region. It was of no significance as a military objective and would doubtless otherwise have been left unoccupied for the moment. They pressed forward through Bad Ischl and the wild confusion of capitulating German troops to the wilder confusion of surrendering SS units in the little village of Alt Aussee itself. From there it was but a mile to the mine.
When they reached the mine, they found it heavily guarded by men of the 80th Infantry Division, but the mine had been dynamited. It wasn’t possible to go into the mine chambers. Armed with acetylene lamps, Posey and Lincoln entered the main tunnel. They groped their way along the damp passageway for a distance of a quarter of a mile or more before they reached the debris of the first block. After assessing the damage they returned to consult the Austrian mineworkers. The miners said it would take from ten days to two weeks to clear the passageway. Captain Posey thought that the Army Engineers could do it in less than a week, perhaps in two or three days. Both were wrong. They entered the first mine chamber the next day.
And now, here before us, stood the fabulous panels which they had found on that May morning a few weeks before. While we examined them, Sieber pieced out the one gap in the story of the altarpiece: the Nazis had taken it from Paris to the Castle of Neuschwanstein where a restorer from Munich worked on the blisters which had developed on some of the panels. The altarpiece remained at the castle for two years. It was brought to the mine in the summer of 1944. Pieces of waxed paper were still affixed to the surface of the panels, on the places where the blisters had been laid. The big panel representing St. John had split lengthwise with the grain of wood. This had happened at the mine. Sieber had repaired it, and George said he had done a good job. As we were leaving the Mineral Kabinett, Sieber asked me if Andrew Mellon really had offered ten million dollars for the altarpiece. People had said so in Berlin. I hated to tell him that the story was without foundation, so far as I knew.
When we came out of the mine at noon we found that Steve and Shrady had finished loading two trucks. They said they had enough pictures left to fill two more. The afternoon crew would be coming on at four. In the meantime it was up to Lamont and me to select at least two hundred paintings, so that the loading could go on without interruption.
After lunch we returned to the mine with Sieber. This time the trip on the train was much longer. Our objective was a part of the mine called the Springerwerke. Owing to the peculiar honeycomb structure of the mine network, it had been necessary to establish guard posts at intervals along the tunnels. One of these was at the entrance to the Springerwerke. Two GIs were on duty. It was a dismal assignment as well as a cold one. They were bundled up in fleece-lined coats which had been made for German troops on the Russian front. George and Steve had obtained about two hundred of these coats and were using them for packing unframed pictures. Each time a convoy of empty trucks returned from Munich, they counted the coats carefully to make sure that none had disappeared.
The Springerwerke contained more than two thousand paintings. They were arranged in two tiers around three sides and down the center of a room fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. In one section we found thirty or forty Italian paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the well known Lanz Collection of Amsterdam. Next to them we came upon the group of canvases, which the Germans in their greedy haste had filched from Bruges when they had made off with the Michelangelo Madonna. Aside from these two lots, the pictures had been stored according to size rather than by provenance. It was a bewildering assortment. Quality was to be our guide in making this initial selection. And as a kind of corollary, we were to set aside for shipment all pictures bearing the infamous “E.R.R.” stencil—the initials of the Rosenberg looting organization. We had Sieber and four of the gnomes to help. Sieber stood by with list and flashlight. Two of the gnomes hauled out the pictures for us to examine. The other two put protective pads of paper filled with excelsior across the corners of the ones chosen.
By the end of the afternoon we had picked out between a hundred and fifty and two hundred paintings. The crew which had come on at four had already gone up with one trainload. We took stock of the lot waiting to go. We hadn’t done so badly: our selection included works of Hals, Breughel, Titian, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Rubens, Van Dyck, Lancret, Nattier, Reynolds, and a raft of smaller examples of the seventeenth century Dutch school. Not a dud among them, we agreed smugly.
Before we knocked off for supper, Sieber showed us an adjoining room divided into small compartments. Each one contained a miscellaneous assortment of art objects—pictures, porcelain, bric-a-brac of various kinds. Each compartment bore a label with the name of a different family, fifteen or twenty in all. They were the pilfered possessions of Viennese Jewish families. Our feelings were of both pathos and disgust. After working with the fruits of looting on a grand scale, we found these trifles sordid evidences of greedy persecution.
Lamont and I spent the next two days in the Springerwerke. We worked nights as well. It was a molelike existence. On the third morning we transferred our base of operations to the Kammergrafen, the largest of the mine caverns and the most remote. It was three-quarters of a mile from the mine entrance. Whereas the other mine chambers were on one level, the great galleries of the Kammergrafen were on several. Beyond those in which floors had been laid, there were vast unlighted caves of echoing blackness.
The galleries were so high that those on the first level could accommodate three tiers of pictures between floor and ceiling, while those on the second had four tiers.
The records listed six thousand pictures. In addition there were quantities of sculpture, hundreds of examples of the very finest eighteenth century French cabinetwork, tapestries and rugs, and the books and manuscripts of the Biblioteca Herziana in Rome—one of the greatest historical libraries in the world. Kammergrafen was quality and quantity combined, for here had been stored the collections for Linz.
Among the pictures, for example, were canvases from the Rothschild, Gutmann and Mannheimer collections, the celebrated tempera panels of the fourteenth century Hohenfurth altarpiece, Rembrandts and other great Dutch masters from the stock of Goudstikker, who had been the Duveen of Amsterdam, a collection of French pictures known as the “Sammlung Berta,” and hundreds of nineteenth century German paintings, these last the objects of Hitler’s special veneration.
The sculpture ranged from ancient to modern, with notable emphasis on examples of the Gothic period. There were Egyptian tomb figures, Roman portrait busts, Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, exquisite French marbles of the eighteenth century and delicate Tanagra figurines. A bewildering hodgepodge of the plastic arts.
There were tapestries from Cracow, furniture from the Castle at Posen, rows of inlaid tables and cabinets from the Vienna Rothschilds, shelves and cases filled with the finest porcelains, prints and drawings of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the decorations from the Reichskanzlei in Berlin, and Hitler’s own purchases from the annual exhibitions of German art in Munich. Such was the Kammergrafen treasure. And the best of it, as I have said before, was to have adorned the galleries of the unbuilt Führer Museum at Linz, the city by the Danube which Hitler aspired to raise to the dignity of Vienna.
The rarest treasure of that collection was the celebrated Vermeer Portrait of the Artist in His Studio. This superb work of the seventeenth Dutch master, by whom there are only some forty unquestioned examples in the world, had been for years in the collection of Count Czernin at Vienna. The collection was semipublic; I had visited it before the war. Known simply as the “Czernin Vermeer,” the picture had long been coveted by the great collectors. It had remained for Hitler to succeed where others had failed: he acquired this masterpiece in 1940 for an alleged price of one million, four hundred thousand Reichsmarks—part of his earnings from the sale of Mein Kampf. He boasted at the time that Mr. Mellon had offered six million dollars for it. Whether the sale was made under duress is still a matter of controversy. Members of the Czernin family today contend that it was. The picture has now been returned to Vienna where the matter will be ultimately decided.
Rivaling the Vermeer in international significance were the fifteen cases of paintings and sculpture from Monte Cassino. The paintings included Titian’s Danaë, Raphael’s Madonna of the Divine Love, Peter Breughel’s Blind Leading the Blind, a Crucifixion by Van Dyck, an Annunciation by Filippino Lippi, a Sacra Conversazione by Palma Vecchio, a Landscape by Claude Lorraine, and Sebastiano del Piombo’s Portrait of Pope Clement VII. Among the sculpture were antique bronzes of the greatest rarity and importance from Herculaneum and Pompeii. All had belonged to the Naples Museum. In 1943 the Italians had placed them, together with one hundred and seventy-two other cases of objects from the Naples Museum, in the Abbey of Monte Cassino for safekeeping. The following January, arrangements were made for all of the cases to be returned to the Vatican. When they arrived, fifteen were missing. Members of the Hermann Göring Division had carried them off as a birthday gift for the Reichsmarschall. Göring was incensed, when he learned of the arrival of these treasures, and refused to accept them. There is reason to believe that such was his reaction, for he had striven to maintain a semblance of legality in his art transactions. Even this rapacious collector could not have interpreted the behavior of his loyal officers as “correct,” so far as the Monte Cassino affair was concerned. After the Reichsmarschall’s refusal of the cases, they were brought to Alt Aussee for storage, pending their later return to Italy.
The Springerwerke had been child’s play compared with the task confronting us in the Kammergrafen. We began arbitrarily with the big pictures. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Van Dyck, Rubens, Rembrandt—all were represented in profusion. Many of them were from private collections in Holland, Belgium and France, and were unknown to us save through reproduction. It was a great lesson in connoisseurship, particularly when we had exhausted the “stars” and come to the lesser masters. The Dutch school of the seventeenth century was abundantly represented. There were scores, hundreds, of still lifes and flower paintings. My predilection for them amused Lamont and Sieber. I had always admired these incredibly deft creations of the seventeenth century Dutch artists, and here was an unparalleled opportunity to study them.
There was one peculiar thing about our selections: if a picture looked good to us down in the mine, it invariably looked better when we examined it later in the light of day at the mine entrance. This happened time and again. I remember one instance in particular. The painting was a large Rembrandt, a study of two dead peacocks. Down in the mine we had looked at it without much enthusiasm, though we admired it, and had even hesitated to include it in that first selection, which was to number only the best of the best. The next morning, as it was being loaded onto the truck, we were struck by its distinction.
And I remember the next time I saw that picture: it was at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was included in the small group of outstanding Dutch masterpieces returned to Holland by special plane as a gesture of token restitution in the name of General Eisenhower!
Lamont and I liked Sieber, the German restorer. Lamont referred to him as the “tragic Gilles in white.” Not that there was anything particularly tragic about him, any more than there was about the plight in which most Nazis found themselves. He made no bones about having joined the Party in the early thirties—ironically enough at the suggestion of one of his clients, a Jewish art dealer, who had thought it would be a good thing for Sieber’s business. Sieber had been a restorer of pictures in Berlin and had done a little dealing on the side. It was the half-mournful expression he perpetually wore, together with his white costume, that accounted for Lamont’s appellation. George had described him as a good, run-of-the-mill restorer, perhaps a little better than average. He had sized him up as a man ninety-eight per cent preoccupied with his profession and possibly two per cent concerned with politics. And George, as I think I have observed before, was a good judge of men. Sieber was a quiet, willing worker. He was neither fawning on the one hand, nor arrogant on the other. When you asked him a question, you always got a considered answer.
One evening we drew Sieber out on the subject of the attempted destruction of the mine. We had heard several versions of this fantastic plot and, according to one, Sieber had been instrumental in foiling the conspirators. The story was as follows: On the tenth, thirteenth and thirtieth of April 1945, Glinz, the Gauinspektor of Ober-Donau, had come to the mine with eight great cases marked in black letters “Marmor—Nicht stürzen,” that is, “Marble—Don’t drop.” He was acting on explicit instructions from Eigruber, Gauleiter of the region, to place them at strategic positions in the mine tunnels. Each case contained a hundred-pound bomb. Had these bombs been detonated, the entire contents of the mine would have been destroyed. The resulting cave-ins would have blocked every means of access. It would have taken months to repair the apparatus which carried off the water seeping constantly into the mine chambers. By that time the treasures they contained would have been completely ruined. It is generally agreed that Eigruber had obtained Hitler’s tacit consent to this artistic Götterdämmerung, if not his actual approval of it.
I learned later that Captain Posey found a letter from Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, stating in the first paragraph that the contents of the mine must, at all costs, be kept from falling into the hands of the enemy. And then the second paragraph stated that the contents of the mine must not be harmed.
Members of the Austrian resistance movement got wind of this diabolical plan and took Sieber into their confidence. His intimate knowledge of the mine passageways enabled him to set off small charges of dynamite here and there along the tunnels without endangering the contents of the chambers beyond. The resulting damage was slight and served a twofold purpose: it gave the impression that the mine had been permanently walled up; and, if that ruse were discovered, immediate access to the art works themselves was denied the plotters. Eigruber did discover that his attempt had been thwarted and in his rage gave orders for the counterconspirators to be rounded up and shot. But by that time it was the seventh of May, so the tragedy was mercifully averted.
Sieber told the story in a straightforward, factual way. I don’t think it mattered to him who got control of the mine, but it was simply unthinkable that any harm should come to the precious things it housed. It was very much to his credit that he never capitalized on the part he played in this affair. The only other reference he made to it was when he later showed us the places where he had set off the charges of dynamite.
During all the time we were at the mine, Sieber made only one request of us. It came at the very end of our stay and was reasonable enough: he asked if we could expedite his return to Germany. There seemed to be little prospect of regular employment for him in Austria, but that was of less concern to him than the welfare of his wife and young daughter who lived with him in a house near the mine. Some months later, one of our officers tried to get him a job in Wiesbaden, but he was not acceptable to the Military Government authorities there because of his political affiliations. The last I heard of him, he and his family were still at Alt Aussee, waiting for permission to go back to Germany. I hope they finally got it.
Our concentrated efforts underground produced the desired results. Pictures were coming out of the mine at such a prodigious rate that George called a halt. Enough of a backlog had been accumulated to make further selection down in the mine unnecessary for a couple of days. Lamont and I had better help with the actual loading.
Loading a truck was a specialized operation, and George had perfected the technique. Lamont, Steve and Shrady were his pupils. That left me the only neophyte. So far I had had experience only with the loading of cases and heavier objects such as furniture and sculpture.
Packing pictures, especially unframed ones—and there were a great many of the latter at Alt Aussee—was an altogether different problem. The first step was to place a length of waterproof paper over the side bars of the truck and spread it smoothly on the floor to the center of the truck bed. For this we had a large supply of stout, green, clothlike paper which had been used by the Wehrmacht as protection against gas attacks. Then a strip of felt was laid over the paper. The third step was to place “sausages” in two rows, end to end, on the floor of the truck. The space between the rows would depend on the size of the pictures to be loaded, for they were intended to cushion the shock as the trucks rumbled along over bumpy roads. The “sausages” had been George’s invention. Packing materials of all kinds were at a premium, and certain types just didn’t exist. To make up for the lack of the usual packer’s pads, George had improvised this substitute. In one of the mine chambers he had found a large supply of ordinary curtain material of machine-made ecru lace. This had been cut up into yard lengths, eighteen inches wide. When rolled around a central core of coarser cloth, or sometimes excelsior, and tied with string, they were a very satisfactory “ersatz” product. We used to refer to them augustly as the pads made from Hitler’s window curtains. Their manufacture was periodically one of the major industries at the mine. George had trained a crew of the gnomes and they loved to turn them out. It was easy work. Seated at long benches they resembled a kind of Alpine “husking bee.”
Once the paper, felt and “sausages” were in place, the pictures could be brought to the truck. One after another they were placed in a stack leading from the sideboards of the truck to the center. Pads and small blankets were inserted between them to prevent rubbing. To ensure safe packing, all the pictures in a given row had to be carefully selected as to size, ranging from large to medium in one, and from medium to small in another. That was the most tedious part of the entire operation. As soon as a row had been “built,” it required only a few minutes to bring first the felt and then the green paper over the top of the row, tuck both down along the sides, and then lash the whole stack firmly to the side of the truck. By this method it was possible to load as many as a hundred and fifty medium-sized canvases on a single truck, for three rows of twenty-five each could be built up on either side of our big two-and-a-half-ton trucks. A truck loaded in this way could often accommodate several pieces of sculpture as well. Carefully padded and swathed in blankets, these could be placed down the center. The final step was to adjust the tarpaulin over the bows and to close the tailboard. A truck of the size we used could normally be loaded in two hours.
We were at the mercy of the weather, as far as loading was concerned. On rainy days we could work on only one truck at a time, because there was but one doorway with a protective stoop under which a single truck could park. Taking advantage of the sunny mornings, we would divide up into two teams—George and Steve on one truck, Lamont and I on another. As soon as a truck was filled and the tarpaulin securely fastened down, it was driven to one side of the narrow terrace in front of the building. The average convoy consisted of six trucks.
We had a crew of eighteen Negro drivers. Barboza, the C.O., was a very starchy lieutenant, Jamaica born. He and his men were billeted down in the little town of Bad Aussee. They were magnificent drivers but a bit reckless. Their occasional disregard for their vehicles was a worry to George. It would have been so with any drivers, I guess. A breakdown on the steep mountain roads could be a serious matter. It meant the complete disruption of the convoy schedule, involving reloading en route. To provide for this contingency, we made a practice of loading the trucks to three-quarters of their capacity. The contents of a single truck could thus be absorbed by the others.
When a convoy was ready to start, either George or I would lead off in a jeep and escort the six trucks down the precipitous road to Alt Aussee. Two half-tracks from the 11th Armored Division, as front and rear guards, would be waiting to accompany the convoy to Munich.
At breakfast one morning George said, “This looks like a good day to load the gold-seal products.” He meant the Michelangelo Madonna and the Ghent altarpiece. This was an important event, for they were unquestionably the two most precious things still at the mine. Every possible precaution would have to be taken to make this operation a success. It must go off without a hitch. If anything happened to either of these masterpieces, the repercussions would be catastrophic. They would overshadow all the accomplishments of our MFA&A officers.
For the past several days, George and Steve had been working on the Madonna. She was now heavily padded and trussed up like a ham, ready to be brought out of the mine. We all went down to the Kaiser Josef chamber where we had first seen her. George made a final inspection of the ropes and pulleys which had been set up to hoist her onto the waiting train. Then, with a satisfied smile, he said, “I think we could bounce her from Alp to Alp, all the way to Munich, without doing her any harm.”
Once the statue was gently loaded on the little flat car, the train pulled slowly out of the mine chamber and switched back onto the track of the main tunnel. From there it chugged slowly—George walking alongside—to the mine entrance where the truck stood waiting. This truck and the one which was to carry the altarpiece had been put in perfect condition. And George had put the fear of God into the two drivers, both of whom he had personally chosen from our crew. A dozen of the gnomes were waiting to lift the marble onto the truck. We slid it cautiously to the fore part where boards had been laid parallel and nailed to the floor. These would prevent shifting. On either side of the statue, small packing cases about two feet square were arranged in even rows and lashed firmly to the sides of the truck. These cases had been stored in a chamber of the mine called the Kapelle. They contained the coin collection intended for the Linz Museum and were accordingly marked “Münz Kabinett” or Coin Room. Blankets were wedged in between the cases and the statue. The large case containing the Greek sarcophagus from Salonika was set in place behind the statue and similarly secured to the floor and at the sides. That done, the truck was ready to go.
As George was putting the finishing touches on the packing, he said, “Tom, will you go down and get the ‘Lamb’?” To be entrusted with the removal of the great altarpiece was an exciting assignment. I wanted to share it with someone who would also get a kick out of telling his grandchildren that he had actually brought the famous panels out of their underground hiding place. I called Lamont, and the two of us, followed by eight of the gnomes, hitched four of the “dogs” to the little engine and proceeded to the Mineral Kabinett. One of the “dogs,” especially designed to carry pictures of unusual height, had a lower bed than the others. We would use this one for the big central panel of the altarpiece. Otherwise it would not clear a portion of the mine tunnel where the jagged rocks hung low over the track.
The panels were now in their cases, and it was a relatively simple matter to carry them from the storage room to the train. We had to make two trips down and back in order to get all ten cases up to the mine entrance. They were much lighter than the statue, but the loading was a more exacting undertaking. Lashing them upright in parallel rows, in the truck, and stowing cases on either side for ballast, took time. We didn’t finish until well after six. It had taken most of the day to load the “gold-seal products.”