We had our share of troubles during those last ten days at Alt Aussee. They began that first day of my investiture as head of the team. Lamont and I were sorting pictures in the room at the mine entrance. It was early in the afternoon and we were about to start loading our third truck. I had just said to Lamont that I thought the morning’s convoy had probably passed Salzburg, when a jeep pulled up to the door. The driver called out to us that one of our trucks had broken down at Goisern. That was an hour’s drive from the mine. Why hadn’t we been notified earlier? I asked. He didn’t know. Perhaps there hadn’t been anybody around to bring back word. Maybe the driver had thought he could repair the truck.

We got hold of Steve and the three of us started for Goisern in the messenger’s jeep. We’d have to transfer the load, so an empty truck followed us. We were thankful that the breakdown hadn’t happened while the convoy was going over the Pötschen Pass. It would have been a tough job to shift the pictures from one truck to another on that steep and dangerous part of the road. It was bad enough as it was, because it looked as though we’d have rain. One of the trucks had a lot of very large pictures. We hoped that it wasn’t the one that had broken down.

It was a little after three when we reached Goisern. The truck had been parked by the headquarters of a small detachment of troops on the edge of town. There were several houses near by but plenty of room for us to maneuver the empty truck alongside. The Negro driver of the stranded truck said that it had “thrown a rod” and would have to be taken to Ordnance for repairs. That meant that the vehicle would be laid up for two or three weeks. We’d have to see about a replacement. The main thing was to get on with the unloading before it began to rain. And it was the truck with the big pictures.

With the two trucks lined up alongside, and only a few inches apart, we could hoist the pictures over the sideboards. In this way each row of paintings was kept in the same order. Lamont and Steve boarded the empty truck, while one of the gnomes from the mine and I started unlashing the first stack of loaded pictures. Before long a crowd of women and children had collected to watch this unusual operation. There were excited “oh’s” and “ah’s” as we began to transfer one masterpiece after another—two large Van Dycks, a Veronese, a pair of colossal decorative canvases by Hubert Robert, a Rubens, and so on. The spectators were quiet and well behaved, whispering among themselves. They didn’t pester us with questions. We rather enjoyed having an audience. We finished the job in an hour and a half.

It wasn’t too soon, for as we were securing the tarpaulin at the rear of the newly loaded truck, it began to pour. We parked the truck, arranged for an overnight guard, then climbed into our jeep and started back to the mine. In a few minutes the rain turned to hail. The stones were so large that we were afraid they’d break the windshield of the jeep. We pulled over to the side of the road and waited for the storm to let up. While we waited, the gnome told us that sometimes the hailstones were large enough to kill sheep grazing in the high meadows. Only the summer before he had lost two of his own lambs during one of the heavy summer storms. He swore that the stones were the size of tennis balls.

We were thoroughly soaked and half frozen when we got back to the mine. But we had won our race with the weather, and the truck would proceed to Munich with the next convoy.

During the next three days we were beset by a series of minor difficulties. Two of the trucks broke down on the way up to the mine to be loaded. It took half a day to get replacements, so the convoy was delayed. One night the guard on duty at the mine entrance developed an unwarranted interest in art and poked around among the pictures which Lamont and I had carefully stacked according to size for loading the next morning. No harm was done, but it caused a delay. He was under strict orders to let no one into the temporary storage room and was not to go in there himself. It was partly our fault; we shouldn’t have trusted him with the key. The captain of the guard was notified and appropriate disciplinary action taken. The gnomes developed a tendency to prolong their regular rest periods beyond a point Steve considered reasonable, and we had to come to an understanding about that. On the whole, however, the work went fairly well.

Even the great chambers of the Kammergrafen were beginning to thin out. They were far from empty, but we had cleared them of a substantial part of the external loot, that is, the loot which had come from countries outside Germany. There were still quantities of things taken from Austrian collections, but they had not been our primary concern. The time had come to make a final check, to make sure that we had not overlooked anything important in the category of external loot.

Together with Sieber, we started this last inspection. We checked off the pictures first. Our work there had been pretty thorough. After that the sculpture. This also seemed to be well weeded out. And the furniture too.

Sieber was ahead of us with his flashlight. The light fell on two cartons standing in a dark corner behind a group of Renaissance bronzes. I asked what was in them. Sieber shrugged his shoulders. They had never been opened. He had forgotten that they were there. We dragged them out and looked for an identifying label. Sieber recalled that one of the former custodians at the mine had said the things inside were “sehr wertvoll”—very valuable, but he knew nothing more.

We carried the boxes to a table where there was better light. They were the same size, square, and about two feet high. They were not heavy. We pried open the lid of one of them with great care. It might be Roman glass, and that stuff breaks almost when you look at it. But it wasn’t Roman glass. Inside was a row of small cardboard boxes. I lifted the lid and removed a layer of cotton. On the cotton beneath lay a magnificent golden pendant studded with rubies, emeralds and pearls. The central motif, a mermaid exquisitely modeled and wrought in iridescent enamel, proclaimed the piece the work of an Italian goldsmith of the Renaissance. The surrounding framework of intricate scrolls, shells and columns blazed with jewels.

There were forty boxes filled with jewels—necklaces, pendants and brooches—all of equal splendor. The collection was worth a fortune. Each piece bore a minute tag on which appeared an identifying letter and a number. These were Rothschild jewels. And we had stumbled on them quite by accident.

Lamont and I agreed that they should be taken to Munich without delay. There they could be stored in a vault. Furthermore we decided to deliver them ourselves. It wouldn’t do to risk such precious objects with the regular convoy. We admonished Sieber to say nothing about our find. In the meantime we would keep the two boxes under lock and key in our room.

That night we told Steve we had a special surprise for him. After barring the door against unexpected visitors, we emptied the boxes onto one of the beds. We told him not to look until we were ready. We arranged each piece with the greatest care, straightening out the links of the necklaces, adjusting the great baroque pearls of the pendants, balancing one piece with another, until the whole glittering collection was spread out on the white counterpane. Then we signaled to Steve to turn around.

“God Almighty, where did you find those?” he asked.

While we were telling him how we had happened onto the two cartons that afternoon, he kept shaking his head, and when we had finished, said solemnly, “They’re beyond my apprehension.” The expression stuck and from that time on we invoked it whenever we were confronted with an unexpected problem.

Early the following morning we stowed the jewels in the back seat of our command car and set out for Munich. Halfway to Salzburg we encountered Captain Posey, headed in the opposite direction. He was surprised to see us, and still more surprised when we told him what we had in the car. He was on his way to the mine. There were some things he wanted to tell us about our next job—at Berchtesgaden—but if we would come to his office the next day that would be time enough. He wasn’t going to stay at the mine more than a couple of hours. He should be back in Munich before midnight. He said there was one thing we could do when we reached Salzburg—call on the Property Control Officer and arrange for clearance on the removal of the Vienna Museum pictures to the Munich depot. This was an important part of the plan which George had outlined, so we said that we’d see what we could do.

We had some difficulty finding the right office. There were two Military Government Detachments in Salzburg—one for the city, and the other for the region. They were on opposite sides of the river. We caught Lieutenant Colonel Homer K. Heller, the Property Control Officer, as he was leaving for lunch. I explained that it was our intention to call for the paintings and tapestries on our way to Berchtesgaden the following week. He said he could not authorize the removal; that we would have to see Colonel W. B. Featherstone at the headquarters across the river. If the colonel gave his O.K., it would be all right with him. He didn’t think that the colonel would take kindly to the idea. This was a surprise. Who would have the temerity to question the authority of Third Army? Lamont was amused. He told me I could have the pleasure of tackling Colonel Featherstone alone.

It was after two o’clock before the colonel was free. Nothing doing on the Vienna pictures. That would require an O.K. from Verona. Why Verona, I asked? “General Clark’s headquarters,” was the answer. Didn’t I know that the Fifth Army was taking over the area very shortly? Then the colonel, in accents tinged with sarcasm, expressed his satisfaction at finally meeting one of the Monuments officers of the Third Army. He had heard such a lot about them and the wide territory they had covered. He had been told that a group of them was working at the Alt Aussee mine, but I was the first one he had laid eyes on.

I gathered that he was mildly nettled by Third Army in general and by me in particular. As a matter of fact, the colonel’s attitude about the Vienna pictures was logical: why move them out of Austria? If, as he supposed, they were to be returned to Vienna eventually, why take them all the way to Munich? I had no answer to that and took refuge in the old “I only work here” excuse. He found it rather droll that the Navy should be mixed up in this high-class van and storage business. I had too, once, but the novelty had worn off. I rejoined Lamont and the jewels. I wondered what Captain Posey would have to say to all this.

We reached Munich too late that afternoon to see Craig at the depot, so we took the jewels with us to his quarters. I had not seen him since my departure for Alt Aussee some weeks before. In the interim, there had been a tightening up on billeting facilities. As a result he and Ham Coulter were now sharing a single apartment. I was the only one adversely affected by this arrangement. Craig no longer had a spare couch for chance guests.

When Lamont and I walked in, we found them talking with a newly arrived naval lieutenant. He was Lane Faison, who had been around Harvard in my day. In recent years he had been teaching at Williams and was at present in OSS. After we had been there a little while, Lamont asked very casually, “Would you boys care to see the Rothschild jewels?”

Ham wanted to know what the hell he was talking about. “Well, we have two boxes filled with them here in the hall,” Lamont said.

For the second time we displayed the treasures. Craig’s enthusiasm was tempered with concern for their safety. He was relieved when we said we had come purposely to put them in one of the steel vaults at the depot. We went with him to the Königsplatz forthwith and stowed them safely for the night.

Lamont and I continued on our way to Third Army Headquarters. Lincoln was working late. When we walked in he looked up from his typewriter and said “Hello” in a flat voice. Lincoln was in one of his uncommunicative moods. We left him alone and busied ourselves with letters from home which we found on Posey’s desk. Lincoln went on with his typing. Presently he stopped and said, “George’s orders came through. He’s gone to the Pacific.”

“It ought to be interesting work,” said Lamont.

“Oh, you knew about his orders?” asked Lincoln.

“No,” said Lamont.

That broke the mood. We had a lively session for the next hour. Lincoln was always a reservoir of information, a lot of it in the realm of rumor, but all of it fascinating. That evening he was unusually full of news. He had a perfect audience in Lamont and me because we had been completely out of touch with things while at the mine.

After exhausting his stock of fact and fiction, he produced his latest box of food from home. There were brandied peaches, tins of lobster and caviar, several kinds of cheese, dried fruits and crackers. It was a combination you’d never risk at home, if you were in your right mind.

“You do very well for yourself,” I said when he had the refreshments spread out on his desk.

“My wife knows the enlisted men’s motto: ‘Nothing is too good for our boys, and nothing is what they get.’”

We finished the box and Lincoln showed us an article he had written on Nazi sculpture. We were reading it when Captain Posey came in. He asked if we had stopped in Salzburg to see Colonel Heller. I told him what had happened there. If he was annoyed, he gave no sign of it. He rummaged in his desk and brought out a list of instructions for us in connection with the operation at Berchtesgaden. He suggested that we stop there on the way back to Alt Aussee; it wouldn’t be very much out of our way. He gave us the names of the officers we should see about billeting, and so on. It would be well to have all these things settled in advance. Then he gave us some special orders for Lieutenant Shrady, who was to be transferred to Heidelberg, now that the evacuation of the mine was ending.

Captain Posey said that I was to take over the Mercedes-Benz. It had been obtained originally for the evacuation team. We were to take it with us to Berchtesgaden. I could make good use of the car, transportation facilities being what they were, but I didn’t relish the prospect of taking it from Shrady. He had spent money of his own fixing it up and looked on it as his personal property. I told Captain Posey how I felt. He said he had a letter for me which would take care of the matter. It was a letter directing me to deliver Lieutenant Shrady’s orders and to appropriate the car.

When we saw Faison at the depot the next morning, he asked if he might drive back with us. He was joining Plaut and Rousseau at House 71 to work with them on the investigation of Nazi art looting. I said we’d be glad to have him. The three of us started off after early lunch. We were looking forward to the Berchtesgaden detour. None of us had been there during the Nazi regime and I, for one, was curious to see what changes had taken place in the picturesque resort town since I had last seen it fifteen years before.

We took the Salzburg Autobahn past Chiemsee almost to Traunstein, and then turned off to the southwest. This was the finest secondary road I ever traveled. It led into the mountains and the scenery was worthy of Switzerland. Thanks to perfectly banked turns, we made the ninety-mile run in two hours.

The little town was as peaceful and quiet as I remembered it. In fact it was so quiet that Lamont and I had difficulty locating an Army outfit to give us directions. We learned that the 44th AAA Brigade had just moved in and that the last remnants of the famous 101st Airborne Division were pulling out. There was no love lost between the two, as we found out later. Consequently, when I asked an officer of the AAA Brigade where I would find Major Anderson of the 101st Airborne, he informed me curtly that that outfit was no longer at Berchtesgaden. Then I asked if he knew where the Göring collection was. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, so I rephrased my question, inquiring about the captured pictures which had been on exhibition a short time ago. Yes, he knew vaguely that there had been some kind of a show. He thought it had been over in Unterstein, not in Berchtesgaden. Well, where was Unterstein? He said it was about four kilometers to the south, on the road to the Königssee.

His directions weren’t too explicit, but eventually we found the little back road which landed us in Unterstein ten minutes later. In a clearing on the left side of the road stood the building we were looking for. It was a low rambling structure of whitewashed stucco in the familiar Bavarian farmhouse style. It had been a rest house for the Luftwaffe. The center section, three stories high, had a gabled roof with widely overhanging eaves. On either side were long wings two stories high, similarly roofed. The casement windows were shuttered throughout.

We found Major Harry Anderson on the entrance steps. He was a husky fellow with red hair and a shy, boyish manner. He was not altogether surprised to see us because George had stopped by on his last trip to Munich and told him we’d be arriving before long. How soon could we start to work on the collection? In four or five days’ time, we thought. Could he make some preliminary arrangements for us? We would need billets for three officers, that is, the two of us—and Lieutenant Kovalyak. No, there would be four, we had forgotten to include the Negro lieutenant in charge of the truck drivers. Then there would be twenty drivers. Could we say definitely what day we’d arrive? Lamont and I made some rapid calculations. It was a Tuesday. How about Friday evening? That was fine. The sooner the better as far as the major was concerned. He was slated to pull out the minute the job was done, so we couldn’t start too soon to suit him.

He asked if we’d care to take a preliminary look around but we declined. It was getting late and we still had a hard three-hour drive ahead of us. As we turned to go, Jim Plaut and Ted Rousseau came out of the building. They had been expecting Faison but were surprised to find him with us. Wouldn’t we all have dinner with them that night at House 71? They had come over from Bad Aussee that afternoon, bringing Hofer with them. They had been quizzing him about certain pictures in the collection and he had wanted to refresh his memory by having a look at them. They pointed to a stocky German dressed in gray tweeds who stood a little distance away talking with a tall, angular woman. We recognized him as the man we had seen pacing the garden at House 71 weeks before—the evening Lamont and I first reported to George at the mine. That was his wife, they said. Would we mind taking Hofer back with us? If we could manage that, they’d take Faison with them. There were some urgent matters they’d like to talk over with him in connection with their work. We agreed and Ted brought Hofer to the car.

As we left he called out, “Wiederschauen, liebe Mutti,” and kept waving and throwing kisses to his tall wife. I was struck by the stoical expression on her face. She watched us go but made no effort to return his salutations. I wondered if she gave a damn.

Hofer was a loquacious passenger. All the way to Bad Aussee he kept up a line of incessant chatter, half in English, half in German, on all sorts of subjects. He gesticulated constantly with both hands, notwithstanding the fact that one of them was heavily bandaged. He explained that he had scalded it. The bandage had been smeared with evil-smelling ointment which had soaked through. As he gestured the air was filled with a disagreeable odor of medication. Did we know Salzburg? Ah, such a lovely city, so musical! Did we know Stokowski? He knew him well. “Then you’ll probably be interested to know that he has just married one of the Vanderbilt heiresses, a girl of nineteen,” I said. But I must be joking. Was it really so?

I was getting bored with this chatterbox when he suddenly began to talk about Göring and his pictures. We asked him the obvious question: What did Göring really like when it came to paintings? Well, he was fond of Cranach. Yes, we knew that. And Rubens; he had greatly admired Rubens. And many of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. But according to Hofer it was he who had directed the Reichsmarschall’s taste. Then, to my surprise, he mentioned Vermeer. Did we know about the Vermeer which Göring had bought? After that he went into a lengthy account of the purchase, leading up to it with an involved story of the secrecy surrounding the transaction, which had many confusing details. When we pulled up before House 71, Hofer was still going strong. Lamont and I were worn out.

Shrady departed the following morning in compliance with the orders I had brought him. He left the Mercedes-Benz behind. If I could have foreseen the trouble that car was going to cause us, nothing could have tempted me to add it to our equipment. Even then Lamont eyed it with suspicion, but we were both talked out of our misgivings by Steve, who rubbed his hands with satisfaction at the prospect of the éclat it would lend our future operations.

With Shrady’s going, we fell heir to his duties. During our last three days at the mine they complicated our lives considerably. There were records to be put in order, reports to be finished, pay accounts to be adjusted, ration books to be extended for the skeleton crew which would remain at the mine. In addition, I had to see Colonel Davitt about the reduction and reorganization of the guard, and make provision for different billeting and messing facilities.

In the midst of these preparations, Ted Rousseau telephoned from House 71. Were we planning to take Kress, the photographer, with us to Berchtesgaden? We certainly were. Steve would sooner have parted with his right eye. Well, they wanted to interrogate him before we left. How long would they need him? A few days. I suggested they start right away. We’d be needing him too. Steve was wild when he heard about it. I agreed that it was a nuisance but that we’d have to oblige. The OSS boys came for Kress that afternoon. Steve watched them, balefully, as they drove off down the mountain. Then he resumed the work he had been doing on his big Steyr truck. This was a cumbersome vehicle which he and Kress had been putting in order. It had belonged originally to the Einsatzstab Rosenberg and was part of Kress’ photographic unit. He and Steve were refitting it to serve our purposes in a similar capacity. It was a fine idea, but so far they hadn’t been able to get it in running order. Steve had had it painted. When he had nothing better to do, he tinkered with the dead motor. Next to Kress, the truck was his most prized possession.

I returned to Shrady’s old office where I found Lamont in conversation with Dr. Hermann Michel. Michel was a shadowy figure who had been working at the mine with Sieber and Eder throughout our stay. When Posey and Lincoln Kirstein had arrived at Alt Aussee in May, he had identified himself as one of the ringleaders of the Austrian resistance movement and vociferously claimed the credit of saving the mine. Since then he had been working in the mine office. Captain Posey had given him permission to make a routine check of the books and archives stored there. He was such a talkative fellow that we kept out of his way as much as possible. And we didn’t like his habit of praising himself at the expense of others. He was forever running to Plaut and Rousseau at House 71 with written and oral reports, warning them to beware of this or that man in the mine organization.

Lamont looked decidedly harassed when I walked in. Michel was protesting our demands for a complete set of the records. We were to leave them in Colonel Davitt’s care when we closed the mine. Michel had taken the opportunity to say a few unpleasant things about Sieber. We finally made it clear to him that there would be no nonsense about the records, and also that what we did about Sieber was our business. We finally packed him off still protesting and shaking his head.

The afternoon before our departure Lamont and I had to go over to St. Agatha. The little village lay in the valley on the other side of the Pötschen Pass. We were to verify the report that a small but important group of paintings was stored in an old inn there. A fine Hubert Robert Landscape, given to Hitler by Mussolini, was said to be among them.

We went first to the Bürgermeister who had the key. He drove with us to the inn. It was an attractive Gasthaus, built in the early eighteenth century. The walls were frescoed and a wrought-iron sign hung over the doorway. When we arrived the proprietress was washing clothes in the arched passageway through the center of the building.

She took us to a large corner room on the second floor. There were some fifty pictures, all of them enormous and unframed. The Bürgermeister helped us shift the unwieldy canvases about, so that we could properly examine them. They were, for the most part, of indifferent quality—sentimental landscapes by obscure German painters of the nineteenth century.

But we did find five that were fine: the mammoth landscape with classical ruins by Hubert Robert, the eighteenth century French master—this was the one Mussolini had given the Führer; an excellent panel by Pannini—it too a landscape; a Van Dyck portrait; a large figure composition by Jan Siberechts, the seventeenth century Flemish painter; and a painting by Ribera, the seventeenth century Spanish artist. We set them aside and said we’d return for them in a few days.

We had hoped to leave for Berchtesgaden by midmorning the next day, but we didn’t get off until three in the afternoon. At the last minute I received word from Colonel Davitt’s office that the Mercedes-Benz was to be left at the mine. I said that since we had no escort vehicle, it was an indispensable part of our convoy. That being the case, the colonel’s adjutant said we could take the car, but on condition that we return it within twenty-four hours. I said I’d see what I could do about that.

Steve fumed while I talked. When I hung up the receiver he said, “Don’t be a damn fool. Once the car’s out of his area, the colonel hasn’t got a thing to say about it. Let’s get going.”

Sieber and Eder, together with a dozen of the gnomes, were waiting in front of the mine building when we came down the stairs. Lamont was already in the car. I gave final instructions to the captain of the guard, said good-bys all around, and got in the car myself. Everybody smiled and waved as we drove off.

The evacuation had been a success. Ninety truckloads of paintings, sculpture and furniture had been removed from the mine during the past five weeks. Although it was by no means empty, the most important treasures had been taken out. Third Army was withdrawing from the area. From now on the mine would be the responsibility of General Clark’s forces.

We were a lengthy cavalcade. Lamont and I took the lead. Steve followed in the Steyr truck, in running order at last. Behind him trailed five trucks. We were to pick up eight more at Alt Aussee. It wasn’t going to be easy to keep such a long convoy in line. If we could only stay together until we got over the pass, the rest of the trip wouldn’t be too difficult.

We made it over the pass without mishap. From time to time Lamont looked back to make sure the trucks were still following. He couldn’t count them all, they were so strung out and the road was so winding. But we had instructed the Negro lieutenant to give orders to his men to signal the truck ahead in case of trouble, so we felt reasonably sure that everything was in order. When we reached Fuschl See we stopped along the lake shore to take count. One after another eight trucks pulled up. Five were missing. Fifteen minutes passed and still no sign of the laggards. Steve said not to worry, to give them another quarter of an hour.

The blue waters of the lake were inviting. Schiller might have composed the opening lines of Wilhelm Tell on this very spot. “Es lächelt der See, er ladet zum Bade.” Steve and Lamont decided to have a swim. I dipped my hand in the water; it was icy. While they swam I kept an eye out for the missing vehicles. Presently two officers drove by in a jeep. I hailed them and ask if they had seen our trucks. They had—about ten miles back two trucks had gone off the road. They thought there had been two or three others at the scene of the accident. Lamont and Steve dressed quickly. Steve said he’d go on with the eight trucks and meet us in Salzburg. Then Lamont and I started back toward Bad Ischl.

We hadn’t gone more than five miles when we came upon three of our vehicles. We signaled them to pull over to the side of the road. At first we couldn’t make out what the drivers were saying—all three talked at once. We finally got the story. A driver had taken a curve too fast and had lost control of his truck. The one behind had been following too closely and had also crashed over the side. The first driver had got pinned under his truck and they had had to amputate a finger before he could be extricated. The lieutenant in charge had stayed behind to take care of things. He had told them to try to catch up with the rest of the convoy. By the time they had given us all the details, we realized that they had been drinking. And we guessed that alcohol had also had something to do with the truck going off the road. We would have something to say to the lieutenant when he reached Berchtesgaden. He was new on the job, having replaced Lieutenant Barboza only two days ago. We were thankful that our precious packing materials had been put in two of the trucks up ahead.

Steve was waiting for us in the Mozart Platz when we reached Salzburg an hour and a half later with our three trucks in tow. He told the drivers where they could get chow. The three of us went across the river to the Gablerbräu, the small hotel for transients, for our own supper. The Berchtesgaden operation hadn’t begun auspiciously.

Our troubles weren’t over. When we pulled into Berchtesgaden at eight o’clock, we couldn’t find Major Anderson, so we had to fend for ourselves. We managed to put the drivers up for the one night in a barracks by the railway station before going on to Unterstein ourselves. The lieutenant in charge of the drivers hadn’t turned up when we were ready to go, so I left word that he was to report to me first thing the next morning. While we three felt unhappy over the lack of billeting arrangements for us, we were too tired to think much about it that night. Bed was all that mattered. The officer on duty at the Unterstein rest house said there was an empty room over the entrance hall which we could use until we got permanent quarters. There were three bunks, so we moved in.

By contrast, everything started off beautifully the following morning. Major Anderson appeared as we were finishing breakfast.

His apologies were profuse and he did everything he could to make amends. We declined his offer to obtain rooms for us at the elegant Berchtesgadener Hof in town. We wanted to be on the spot. There was plenty of room in the rest house where we would be working; and we could mess with the half-dozen officers billeted in the adjacent barracks. The major introduced us to Edward Peck, the sergeant, who had been working on an inventory of the collection.

Together we made a tour of the premises. The paintings alone filled forty rooms. Four rooms and a wide corridor at the end of the ground-floor hall were jammed with sculpture. Still another room was piled high with tapestries. Rugs filled two rooms adjoining the one with the tapestries. Two more rooms were given over to empty frames, hundreds of them. There was the “Gold Room” where the objects of great intrinsic value were kept under lock and key. And there were three more rooms crammed with barrels, boxes and trunks full of porcelain. One very large room was a sea of books and magazines, eleven thousand altogether. A small chapel on the premises was overflowing with fine Italian Renaissance furniture.

The preliminary survey was discouraging. Although the objects were infinitely more accessible than those at the mine had been, this advantage was largely offset by the fact that they were all loose and would have to be packed individually. Even the porcelain in barrels would have to be repacked.

Our first request was for a work party of twelve men—GIs, not PWs. We suggested to the young C.O., Major Paul Miller, that he call for volunteers. If possible, we wanted men who might prefer this kind of job to guard duty or other routine work. They could start in on the books while we mapped out our plan of attack on the rest of the things. Steve went off with Major Miller to select the crew, and Lamont and I settled down to discuss other problems with Major Anderson and Sergeant Peck.

It was the sergeant’s idea that the collection could be packed up one room at a time. He had compiled his inventory with that thought in mind. Unfortunately we couldn’t carry out the evacuation in that order. We explained why his system wouldn’t work: paintings, for example, had to be arranged according to size. Otherwise we couldn’t build loads that would travel safely. Even if we could have packed the pictures as he suggested—one room at a time—it would have meant the loss of valuable truck space. We assured him that, in the long run, our plan was the practical one. It did, however, involve considerable preliminary work. The first job would be to assemble all of the pictures—and there were a thousand of them—in a series of rooms on one floor of the building. As the sergeant had not quite finished his lists, we agreed to devote our energies to the books for the rest of the day. By morning he would have his inventory completed. Then the pictures could be shifted.

Lamont and I wanted to know more about the collection. How did it get to Berchtesgaden in the first place? Major Anderson was the man who could answer our questions.

As the war ended, the French reached the town ahead of the Americans. They had it to themselves for about three days and had raised hell generally. Göring’s special train bearing the collection had reached Berchtesgaden just ahead of the French. The collection, having been removed from the Reichsmarschall’s place, Karinhall, outside Berlin, was to have been stored in an enormous bunker by his hunting lodge up the road. But there hadn’t been time. The men in charge of the train got only a part of the things unloaded. Some of them were put in the bunker, others in a villa near by. Most of the collection was left in the nine cars of the train. The men had been more interested in unloading a stock of champagne and whisky which had been brought along in two of the compartments.

When the French entered the town, the train was standing on a siding not far from the bunker. They may have made off with a few of the things, but there were no apparent depredations. They peppered it along one side with machine-gun fire. However, the damage had been relatively slight.

Then the French had cleared out and the train was, so to speak, dumped in Major Anderson’s lap, since he was the Military Government Officer with the 101st Airborne Division. Under his supervision, the collection had been transferred from the train, from the bunker and from the villa, to the rest house. Later he had been instrumental in having it set up as an exhibition. The exhibition had been a great success—perhaps too great a success. He meant that it had attracted so much attention that some of the higher-ups began to worry about the security of the things. Finally he had received orders that the show was to close and of course he had complied at once.

He said that General Arnold had come to see the exhibition the day after that. We asked if he had let him in. Well, what did we think? But he had turned down a three-star general who had come along after hearing that General Arnold had been admitted. The general, he said, was hopping mad.

The major’s most interesting experience in connection with the collection was his visit with Frau Göring. He heard that some of the best pictures were in her possession, so he took a run down to Zell am See where she was staying in a Schloss belonging to a South American. He found the castle; he found Emmy; and he found the pictures. There were indeed some of the best pictures—fifteen priceless gems of the fifteenth century Flemish school, from the celebrated Renders collection of Brussels. Göring had bought the entire collection of about thirty paintings. We knew that M. Renders was already pressing for the return of his treasures, claiming that he had been forced to sell them to the Reichsmarschall. But that was another story.

Frau Göring wept bitterly when the major took the pictures, protesting that they were her personal property and not that of her husband. On the same visit he had recovered another painting in the collection. Frau Göring’s nurse handed over a canvas measuring about thirty inches square. She said Göring had given it to her the last time she saw him. As he placed the package in her hands he had said, “Guard this carefully. It is of great value. If you should ever be in need, you can sell it, and you will not want for anything the rest of your life.” The package contained Göring’s Vermeer.

Major Anderson stayed for lunch. As we walked back from the mess, a command car pulled up in front of the rest house. Bancel La Farge and a man in civilian clothes climbed out. I hadn’t seen Bancel for two months. He was a major now. The civilian with him was an old friend of mine, John Walker, Chief Curator of the National Gallery at Washington and a special adviser to the Roberts Commission. John had flown over to make a brief inspection tour of MFA&A activities. Bancel was serving as his guide. They were on their way to Salzburg and Alt Aussee.

Major Anderson proposed a trip to the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain hide-out, suggesting that the visitors could look at the Göring pictures that evening. Lamont and I said we had work to do, but we were easily talked out of that.

You could see the Eagle’s Nest from the rest house. It was perched on top of the highest peak of the great mountain range which rose sharply from the pine forests across the valley. We crossed to the western side and began a steep ascent. About a thousand feet above the floor of the valley we came to Obersalzberg, once a select community of houses belonging to the most exalted members of the Nazi hierarchy. In addition to the Berghof, Hitler’s massive chalet, it included a luxurious hotel—the Platter Hof—SS barracks, and week-end “cottages” for Göring and Martin Bormann. The British bombed Obersalzberg in April 1945. The place was now in ruins. The Berghof was still standing but gutted by fire and stripped of all removable ornamentation by souvenir hunters.

We continued up the winding road carved from the solid rock, through three tunnels, at length emerging onto a terraced turnaround, around, five thousand feet above Berchtesgaden. The major told us that the road had been built by slave labor. Three thousand men had worked on it for almost three years.

The Eagle’s Nest was still four hundred feet above. From the turnaround there were two means of access: an elevator and a footpath. The elevator shaft, hewn out of the mountain itself, was another feat of engineering skill. A broad archway of carved stone marked the entrance. Beside the elevator stood a sign which read, “For Field Grade Officers Only”—that is, majors and above.

“A sentiment worthy of the builder,” Lamont observed as we took to the footpath.

On our steep climb we wondered what Steve would say to such discrimination. We hadn’t long to wait. He made a trip to the Eagle’s Nest a few days later. When stopped by the guard, he looked at him defiantly and asked, “What do you take me for, a Nazi?” Steve rode up in the elevator.

The Eagle’s Nest was devoid of architectural distinction. Built of cut stone, it resembled a small fort, two stories high. From the huge, octagonal room on the second floor—a room forty feet across, with windows on five sides—one could look eastward into Austria, southward to Italy. A mile below lay the green valleys and blue lakes of Bavaria. They used to say that every time Hitler opened a window a cloud blew in. The severity of the furnishings matched the bleakness of the exterior. An enormous conference table occupied the center of the room. Before the stone fireplace stood a mammoth sofa and two chairs. A smaller room adjoined the main octagon at a lower level. The heavy carpet was frayed along one side. The caretaker, pointing to the damage, said that in his frequent frenzies Hitler used to gnaw the carpet, a habit which had earned him the nickname of “Der Teppich-Beisser,” the rug-biter. Considering the labor expended on this mountain eyrie, the place had been little used. The same caretaker told us that Hitler had never stayed there overnight. Daytime conferences had been held there occasionally, but that was all.

It was late when we got back to the rest house, so our guests postponed their inspection of the Göring collection until the following morning. That evening Lamont and I made a second and more thorough survey of the rooms in which the paintings were stacked. We began with a room which contained works of the Dutch, Flemish, German and French schools. The inventory listed five Rembrandt portraits. One was the Artist’s Sister; another was his son Titus; the third was his wife, Saskia; the fourth was the portrait of a Bearded Old Man; and the fifth was the likeness of a Man with a Turban.

We examined the backs of the pictures for markings which might give us clues to previous ownership. Two of the portraits—those of Saskia and of the artist’s sister—had belonged to Katz, one of the best known Dutch dealers. I had been surprised to learn in Paris that Katz, a Jew, had done business with the Nazis. But I was also told that only through acceding to their demands for pictures had he been able to obtain permits for his relatives to leave Holland. According to the information I received, he had succeeded thereby in smuggling twenty-seven members of his family into Switzerland. A revealing commentary on the extent and quality of his paintings.

The portrait of Titus had been in the Van Pannwitz collection. Mme. Catalina van Pannwitz, South American born, but a resident of the Netherlands, I believe, had sold a large part of her collection to Göring. Whether it had been a bona fide or a forced sale was said to be a moot question.

Another important Dutch private collection, that of Ten Cate at Almelo, had “contributed” the Man with a Turban. And the Bearded Old Man had been bought from the Swiss dealer, Wendland, who had agents in Paris. He had allegedly discovered the painting in Marseilles.

These five pictures posed an interesting problem in restitution. To whom should they be returned? Who were the rightful owners—as of the summer of 1945?

At the time we were beginning our work on the Göring collection, definite plans for the restitution of works of art were being formulated by the American Military Government. They were an important part of the general restitution program then being planned by the Reparations, Deliveries and Restitution Division of the U. S. Group Control Council. Pending the implementation of the program, the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section of U. S. Forces, European Theater, was the technical custodian of all art works eventually to be restituted.

Bancel La Farge, who became Chief of the Section when SHAEF dissolved, had outlined the plans to us on our way back from the Eagle’s Nest that afternoon. There were two main categories of works of art slated for prompt restitution to the overrun countries from which they had been taken. The first included all art objects easily identifiable as loot—the great Jewish collections and the property of other “enemies of the state” which had been seized by the Nazis. The second embraced all art works not readily identifiable as loot, but for which some compensation was known or believed to have been paid by the Nazis.

The actual restitution was to be made on a wholesale scale. Works of art were to be returned en bloc to the claimant nations, not to individual claimants of those nations. To expedite this “mass evacuation” country by country, properly qualified art representatives would be invited to the American Occupied Zone, specifically to the Central Collecting Point at Munich, where they could present their claims. Once their claims were substantiated—either by documents in their possession or by records at the Collecting Point—the representatives would be responsible for the actual removal.

We asked Bancel how the various representatives were to be selected. He explained that several of the overrun countries had set up special Fine Arts Commissions. The one in France was called the Commission de Récupération Artistique. The one in Holland had an unpronounceable name, so it was known simply as “C.G.R.”—the initials stood for the name translated into French, Commission de Récupération Générale. And the one in Belgium had such a long name that he couldn’t remember it offhand. Czechoslovakia, Poland and Greece would probably establish similar committees before long. Each commission would choose a representative and submit his name to the MFA&A Section for approval. Once the names were approved and the necessary military clearances obtained, the representatives could enter the American Zone, proceed to Munich and start to work.

Bancel said that each representative would have to sign a receipt in the name of his country before he could remove any works of art from the Collecting Point. The receipt would release our government from all further responsibility for the objects concerned—as of the time they left the Collecting Point. Furthermore, it would contain a clause binding the receiving nation to rectify any mistakes in restitution. For example, if the Dutch representative inadvertently included a painting which later turned out to be the property of a Belgian, then, by the provisions of the receipt, Holland would be obligated to return that painting to Belgium. The chief merit of this system of fine arts restitution lay in the fact that it relieved American personnel of the heavy burden of settling individual claims. From the point of view of our government, this was an extremely important consideration because of the limited number of men available for so formidable an undertaking. And from the point of view of the receiving nations, the system had the advantage of accelerating the recovery of their looted treasures.

In the room where Lamont and I had seen the Rembrandts, we found a pair of panels by Boucher, the great French master of the eighteenth century. Each represented an ardent youth making amorous advances to a coy and but half-protesting maiden in a rustic setting. They were appropriately entitled Seduction and were said to have been painted for the boudoir of Madame de Pompadour. According to the inventory, the panels had been bought from Wendland, the dealer of Paris and Lucerne.

These slightly prurient canvases flanked one of the most beautiful fifteenth century Flemish paintings I had ever seen, The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine by Gerard David. The Madonna with the Child on her lap was portrayed against a landscape background, St. Catherine kneeling at her right, dressed in russet velvet. Round about were grouped five other female saints, each richly gowned in a different color. It was not a large composition, measuring only about twenty-five inches square, but it possessed the dignity and monumentality of a great altarpiece. The authenticity of its sentiment put to shame the facile virtuosity of the two Bouchers which stood on either side.

The second room we visited that evening contained an equally miscellaneous assortment of pictures. Here the canvases were even more varied in size. A Dutch Interior by Pieter de Hooch, a View of the Piazza San Marco by Canaletto, and two Courbet landscapes were lined up along one wall. The de Hooch, an exceptionally fine example of the work of this seventeenth century master, was listed in the inventory as having belonged to Baron Édouard de Rothschild of Paris. The Courbets were something of a rarity, as Göring had few French paintings of the nineteenth century. One of the landscapes, a winter scene, was an important work, signed and dated 1869. The inventory did not indicate from whom it had been acquired. In one corner stood a full-length portrait of the Duke of Richmond by Van Dyck. Our list stated that it had come from the Katz collection. Beside it was a brilliant landscape by Rubens. There were perhaps ten other pictures in the room, among them several nondescript panels which appeared to be by an artist of the fifteenth century Florentine school, a portrait by the sixteenth century German master, Bernhard Strigel, a “fête champêtre” by Lancret, and two or three seascapes of the seventeenth century Dutch school.

Lamont and I had been looking at this assemblage for some little time before we noticed an unframed canvas standing on the washbasin by the window. The upper edge of the picture leaned against the wall mirror at an angle which made it difficult to get a good look at the composition from where we stood. Closer inspection revealed the subject to be Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. I studied it for a few minutes and was still puzzled. Turning to Lamont I asked, “What do you make of this? I can’t even place it as to school, let alone guess the artist.”

“Unless I am very much mistaken,” he said slowly, “that is the famous Göring ‘Vermeer.’”

“You’re crazy,” I said. “Why, I could paint something which would look more like a Vermeer than that.”

We consulted the inventory. Lamont was right. A few lines below the listing of the Rubens landscape—a picture I had just been admiring in another part of the room—appeared the entry “Vermeer, Jan ... ‘The Adulteress’ ... Canvas, 90 cm. × 96 cm.” The subject coincided with that of the picture on the washbasin. The measurements were identical.

I tried to visualize the picture properly framed, properly lighted and hanging in a richly furnished room. But still I couldn’t conceive how such trappings could blind one to the flat greens and blues, the lack of subtlety in the modeling of the flesh tones, the absence of that convincing rendering of the “total visual effect” which Vermeer had so completely mastered.

“Who attributed this painting to Vermeer?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Lamont, “but it is related stylistically to the ‘Vermeer,’ in the Boymans Museum at Rotterdam, the Christ at Emmaus.”

So this was the painting Hofer was talking about; this was the painting Göring had given the nurse. One of the notorious Van Meegeren fakes.

Lamont’s reference to the Boymans’ “Vermeer” called to mind the great furor in the art world nearly a decade ago when that picture had turned up in the art market.

Dr. Bredius, the famous connoisseur of Dutch painting, discovered the picture in Paris in 1936. He was convinced that it was a hitherto unknown work by Vermeer, the rarest of all Dutch masters. The subject matter was of special interest to Dr. Bredius, for the only other Vermeer which dealt with a religious theme was the one in the National Gallery at Edinburgh.

The past history of the picture was as reassuring as that of many another accepted “old master.” Dr. Bredius learned that it had belonged to a Dutch family. One of the daughters had married a Frenchman in the middle eighties. The picture had been a wedding present and she had taken it with her to Paris. But their house had been too small for such a large painting—it was four feet high and nearly square—so the canvas had been relegated to the attic. According to the story, they hadn’t known that it was particularly valuable or they might have sold it. In any case, the picture remained in the attic until the couple died. It had come to light again when the house was being dismantled.

Through Dr. Bredius, the Boymans Museum had become interested in the picture. Other experts were called in. A few questioned it, but the majority accepted it as a Vermeer. In 1937, the directors of the Boymans Museum purchased the Christ at Emmaus for the staggering price of three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.

Unknown to the outside world, several more Vermeers were “discovered” during the war years. All were of religious subjects. One was bought at a fantastic price by Van Beuningen, the great private collector of Rotterdam; another by the Nazi-controlled Dutch Government for an exorbitant sum; and a third by Hermann Göring. Though the Reichsmarschall did not pay cash for his Vermeer, the price was high; he traded one hundred and thirty-seven pictures from his collection. According to Hofer, his adviser and agent, the paintings he gave in exchange were all of high quality.

The final chapter in the story of these newly found Vermeers is one of the most interesting in the annals of the art world. At the close of the war, Dr. van Gelder, the director of the Mauritshuis—the museum at The Hague—and other Dutch art authorities began an official investigation. It was curious that so many lost Vermeers had come to light in such a short space of time. It was recalled that in 1942 an artist named Van Meegeren had delivered a million guilders to a Dutch bank for credit to his account. The money was in thousand-guilder notes, which the Germans had ordered withdrawn from circulation at that time. The artist was not known to be a man of means and his mediocre talents as a painter could not have enabled him to amass such a fortune.

Van Meegeren was questioned and finally admitted that he had painted the Christ at Emmaus and the other lately discovered “Vermeers.” Even after he had made a full confession, there were certain Dutch critics who doubted the truth of his statements. This nettled Van Meegeren, and he promptly offered to demonstrate his prowess. His choice of a subject might have been symbolic: Jesus Confounding the Doctors. It took him two months to finish the picture. The work was done in the presence of several witnesses. He painted entirely from memory, using no models.

In the course of the demonstration, he explained the ingenious methods he had used to defraud the experts. In the first place his compositions were original but painted in the style of Vermeer. In the second, he used old canvas and only the pigments known to the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. It had not been difficult to pick up at auctions old paintings of little value. It was not always necessary to remove the existing pictures. He frequently adapted portions of them to his own compositions, or, conversely, rearranged his to take advantage of part of an old picture. He was scrupulously careful to avoid modern zinc white and used only lead white which had been employed by the artists of the seventeenth century. He took equal precautions with his other colors, using ground lapis lazuli and cochineal for his blues and reds. He had obtained these, at great expense, from abroad.

At the time I was evacuating the Göring pictures, the Dutch government was completing its investigation of Van Meegeren’s activities. Subsequently, the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sciences publicly announced its findings, confirming the fact that Henrik van Meegeren was the author of the celebrated picture in the Boymans Museum and also of “other forgeries done so marvelously that the best art experts pronounced them genuine.”

Bancel La Farge and John Walker returned the following morning. Although it was Sunday, our crew of GIs had reported for work at seven-thirty and, under Steve’s supervision, continued to pack books. Some eight thousand volumes remained to be placed in cases before they could be loaded onto the trucks. While this work was in progress Lamont and I made a tour of the pictures with our guests. We looked again at the rooms we had visited the night before, singling out the paintings we thought would be of greatest interest to them, such as the best of the Dutch and Flemish masters, the Cranachs, the eighteenth century French pictures and the finest sculptures. We concluded the tour at noon. Our visitors had to get started on their way to the mine at Alt Aussee.

After lunch Lamont joined the crew at work on the books, while I went in search of Sergeant Peck. We had explained to him that all of the paintings would have to be numbered before we could prepare them for loading. The sergeant had agreed, but I was not certain that he altogether understood why we were so insistent on this point. I found Peck in his room at the end of the south wing of the rest house. As usual, he was working on the inventory. He was a serious, scholarly fellow. Before entering the Army, he had been an art teacher at an Ohio college, so his present assignment was very much to his liking. He had done a remarkably fine job on the inventory. It was a detailed seventy-page document giving the title of each picture, the name of the artist, the dimensions of the canvas and, where known, the name of the collection from which it had been acquired.

I told him that we hoped to get started on the pictures the next morning. We would arrange them in rooms on the second floor of the center section of the building. Those rooms were the ones most accessible to the door leading to our loading platform. We would want him to be responsible for checking off each picture as it was carried onto the truck. Since there were more than a thousand paintings in the inventory, there was only one practical way this checking could be done: by going through all the rooms and numbering each picture, setting down the corresponding number on the correct entry in the inventory.

I asked if he could spare the time to help me with the numbering that afternoon. He agreed; so, armed with the inventory and some chalk, we began with the rooms on the second floor. By midafternoon we had finished marking two hundred pictures. Lamont could start with these the next forenoon. They would keep him busy until we had numbered an additional batch.

At three Steve and I drove over to Brigade Headquarters to make arrangements for escort vehicles. We expected to have our first convoy ready to leave for Munich the following afternoon. It was only a ninety-mile run, Autobahn all the way, so two jeeps would suffice.

The 44th AAA Brigade was established in General Keitel’s old headquarters, about two miles northwest of Berchtesgaden. With its smooth gravel driveways and well-tended lawns, the place had the air of a luxurious country club. The administrative offices were located in an L-shaped building, a modern adaptation of the familiar Bavarian provincial style. The surrounding buildings—barracks and small houses—had been designed in the same style.

We were received by Captain Putman, the Chief of Staff’s adjutant, a brisk young man, who promised to provide us with the necessary escort vehicles.

“Cocky fellow, wasn’t he?” said Steve as we left the office.

“Yes, but I have a feeling we’ll get our jeeps on schedule,” I said.

My hunch was right. Only once during the entire Berchtesgaden operation did the escort vehicles fail to report for duty at the appointed hour. That one time was when Captain Putman had a day off.

By noon the next day our first convoy of four trucks was ready for the road. Two of the trucks were filled with books, twenty-seven cases of them. The other two contained twenty-five cases, but not cases of books: four were filled with glassware (308 pieces); seven contained porcelain (1135 pieces); eight contained gold and silver plate (415 pieces); and the remaining six were packed with rugs. These were from Karinhall, near Berlin, the largest of Göring’s seven households.

As soon as we had dispatched the convoy, Lamont and four members of the work party resumed the sorting and stacking of the numbered paintings. Sergeant Peck and I, with two helpers to shift the larger canvases, proceeded with the numbering. Steve took off for Alt Aussee to pick up Kress, the photographer, and his paraphernalia.

That night Lamont decided we should improve our quarters. This involved moving from the room we occupied at the front of the building to a much larger one at the back. The new room had several advantages which the old one lacked. It had been the reading room of the rest house in the days of the Luftwaffe occupancy and was attractively paneled in natural oak with built-in bookshelves. It was thirty feet long and fifteen wide, nearly twice the size of our former room, and opened onto a broad porch. There were French doors and two large windows which afforded a spectacular view of the mountain range to the east. The Eagle’s Nest crowned the highest of the peaks. At one end of the room was an alcove, with a built-in desk and couch. With a little fixing up, it could be turned into a comfortable sitting room.

Before we could transfer our belongings to this spacious apartment, we had to clear out a few of the Reichsmarschall’s—half a dozen pieces of sculpture and three large altarpieces. The outstanding piece of sculpture was a life-size statue of the Magdalene which Göring had acquired from the Louvre. Similarly, the most important of the three altarpieces was a big triptych which also had come from the Louvre. Göring did not remove these objects by force. He obtained them by exchange after prolonged negotiations with the officials of the museum. According to the information given me, both parties were well pleased with the trade. As I recall, the Louvre received six objects from the Reichsmarschall’s collection in return for the triptych and the statue. I was told that one of the six pieces was a painting by Coypel, the eighteenth century French artist, which had belonged to one of the Paris Rothschilds. It was because they were of German workmanship that Göring particularly coveted the pieces which he obtained from the Louvre. It is presumed that this did not prejudice the Louvre in their favor.

The statue, portraying the Magdalene clothed only in her long blonde tresses, was known as “la belle allemande,” the beautiful German. It was an exceptionally fine example, in polychromed wood, of the work of Gregor Erhardt, a Swabian sculptor of the first quarter of the sixteenth century. I fancied that Göring detected a resemblance between the statue and his wife. Lamont and I carried the statue down to the first floor of the rest house and placed it at the foot of the stairs.

It was one of the last objects we packed for shipment and, during our stay at Berchtesgaden, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I had caught Frau Göring on her way to the bath. I was not the only one with that idea. One evening I found the GI guard draping a raincoat about the Magdalene’s shoulders. I had given strict orders that the guards were to touch nothing in the collection, so I stopped to have a word with him on the subject. He said with a sheepish look, “I didn’t mean to break the rules, sir, but I thought Emmy looked cold.”

The altarpiece which Göring acquired from the Louvre was a sumptuous affair consisting of three panels painted with nearly life-size figures against a gold background. It was by the Master of the Holy Kinship, an artist of the Cologne School of the fifteenth century. The large center panel represented the Presentation in the Temple; the right-hand panel, the Adoration of the Magi; the left-hand panel, Christ Appearing to Mary. During its recent peregrinations the central panel had cracked from top to bottom. But fortunately the cleavage, which ran through the center of the middle panel, fell in an area devoid of figures. An adroit restorer could easily repair the damage. We shifted the altarpiece to an adjoining room.

The two remaining altarpieces were works of the fifteenth century French school. One represented the Crucifixion; the other, the Passion of Christ. The Crucifixion had belonged to the Paris dealer Seligmann, whose collection had been confiscated by the Nazis. The inventory did not show the name of the former owner of the other panel. A highly imaginative composition with nocturnal illumination, it was attributed to the rare French master, Jean Bellegambe. As we carried the altarpieces into the room in which we had placed the one from the Louvre, I remarked to Lamont that for a godless fellow Göring seemed to have had a nice taste for religious subjects. The pieces of sculpture, which we added to the collection in the lower hallway, were also of devotional character: two Gothic statues of St. George and the Dragon, one of St. Barbara, and two of the Madonna and Child.

We brought three large wardrobes from our old room, placed two of them at right angles to the walls to form a partition, and set the third in a corner of the new room. The beds came next. In another hour we had the furniture arranged to our satisfaction. By the time we had added a silver lamp, borrowed temporarily from the Göring collection, and tacked up a few of our photographs, the place looked as though we had been living there for weeks.

Without Steve the loading went more slowly, but we managed to finish three trucks by two o’clock the next day. The driver of one of the escort jeeps had brought us a message from Munich that it would simplify the work at the Central Collecting Point if we dispatched the trucks in groups of three or four instead of waiting until we had six loaded. At the Alt Aussee mine we hadn’t been able to work on such a schedule because we lacked sufficient escort vehicles. We didn’t have that problem at Berchtesgaden because the shorter distance made possible a one day turnaround. The jeeps could easily make the round trip in half a day. Accordingly, we sent off our second convoy that afternoon. The trucks contained the rest of the books—forty-three cases in all—sixty-five paintings and fifteen of the larger pieces of sculpture.

In anticipation of Kress’ arrival, we spent the next morning assembling all the paintings that appeared to have suffered recent damage of any kind. His first job would be to make a photographic record which we would include in our final report on the evacuation of the collection. We found thirty-four pictures in this category. Only two had sustained serious injury. These were the side panels of a large triptych by the sixteenth century Italian artist, Raffaellino del Garbo. They had been badly splintered by machine-gun fire while the collection was still aboard the special train which had brought it to Berchtesgaden. Three other panels bore the marks of stray bullets, but the harm done was relatively slight. In general, the damage consisted of minor nicks and scratches and water spots. Considering the hazards to which the collection had been exposed, the pictures had come through remarkably well. I was reminded of what George Stout had said, “There’s a lot of nonsense talked about the fragility of the ‘old masters.’ By and large, they are a hardy lot. Otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted this long.”

We had worked our crew all day Sunday, so we told them to knock off as soon as we had finished selecting and segregating the damaged pictures. With the afternoon to ourselves, we turned our attention to the miscellaneous assortment of objects in the “Gold Room.” This was the name given the small room on the ground floor in which Sergeant Peck had stored the things of great intrinsic value. There were seventy-five pieces in all: gold chalices studded with precious stones; silver tankards; reliquaries of gold and enamel work; boxes of jade and malachite; candelabra, clocks and lamps of marble and gold; precious plaques of carved ivory; and sets of gold table ornaments. They presented a specialized packing job which Lamont and I could handle better alone than with inexperienced helpers.

Our first problem was to find some small packing cases. We searched the rest house without success. Then Lamont remembered seeing a pile of individual wooden file cabinets in the little chapel where most of the furniture was stored. These were admirably suited to our purpose. They were rectangular boxes about six feet long and two feet high. Each was divided into three compartments. There were thirty of them—more than enough for the job. We had a supply of flannel cloths which we had borrowed from a packing firm in Munich. After wrapping each piece, we placed it in one of the compartments of the file cabinet. We stuffed the compartments with excelsior so that the objects could not move about.

A few of the items were equipped with special leather cases. Among these were two swords: one, with a beautifully etched blade of Toledo steel, had been presented to Göring by the Spanish air force; the other, with a jewel-studded gold handle, had been a gift from Mussolini. There was also a gold baton encrusted with precious stones, a present from the Reichsmarschall’s own air force.

Of all these objects, perhaps twenty were of modern workmanship. In contrast to the older things, they were ornate without being beautiful. Ugliest of the lot was a standing lamp. The stalk, eight inches in diameter, was a shaft of beaten gold. The shade, with a filigree design, was also of gold, as were the pull cords. Rivaling it in costly vulgarity was a set of gold table ornaments. The large centerpiece consisted of an elliptical framework. At each end and in the center of the two sides stood Egyptian maidens, fashioned of gold, four feet high. The German slang word for such stuff is “kitsch.” I think the closest English equivalent is “corny.”