Toward the end of the afternoon we were waited on by a delegation of three officers from the 101st Airborne Division. They had come to inquire if we would consider turning over to them the gold sword which Mussolini had given to Göring. They wanted it as a trophy for a club of 101st Airborne officers which they were organizing. They planned to set up a clubroom when they got back home and have annual reunions. The sword, they said, would be such an appropriate souvenir. I told them that I had been directed to ship everything to Munich and did not have authority to make any other disposition of objects in the collection. But, since the sword could not be regarded as a “cultural object”—a fact which I called to their attention—I suggested that they take the matter up with Third Army Headquarters in Munich. I refrained from informing them that, for all of me, they could have their pick of the modern objects in the “Gold Room.”

We made an interesting discovery that afternoon. Rummaging in a closet off the “Gold Room” we found a stack of photograph albums. At the bottom of the heap lay an enormous portfolio. It contained architect’s drawings for the proposed expansion of Karinhall. The estate, greatly enlarged, was to have become a public museum. We had heard that Göring intended to present his art collection to the Reich on his sixtieth birthday. Here was concrete proof of those intentions. Each drawing bore the date “January 1945.”

Steve returned in triumph at noon the next day. With him in the command car was Kress, looking more timid than ever. Steve said that Kress had had a bad time after we left Alt Aussee; the boys at House 71 had clapped him in jail and left him there for two days before interrogating him. Steve had been “burned up” about it and had given them a piece of his mind. He said contemptuously that he had known all along they didn’t have anything on Kress. But he was content to let bygones be bygones. Steve had his man Friday back again.

He pointed happily to the six-by-six which had pulled up behind the command car. All of Kress’ photographic equipment was packed up inside it. There was a tremendous lot of stuff: three large cameras, a metal table for drying prints, reflectors, a sink, pipes of various sizes, boxes of film and paper, and a couple of large cabinets. Steve planned to get everything installed at once. Kress was to sleep in one of the rooms of the rest house. An adjoining room was to be set up as a darkroom.

We showed Steve our new quarters and suggested that Kress take over our old room. The one next door would make a good darkroom. I asked Steve how he was going to get all the stuff installed. He’d have to have a plumber. That didn’t bother Steve. He asked me to tell the mess sergeant that Kress was to have his meals with the civilian help in the kitchen. He’d take care of everything else. Steve was as good as his word. He found a plumber and by the end of the day Kress was ready to start work.

Notwithstanding these interruptions, Lamont and I managed to load and dispatch a convoy of three trucks. This third convoy contained two hundred paintings, thirty tapestries, fifteen more pieces of large sculpture and a dozen pieces of Italian Renaissance furniture.

At odd moments during our first days at Berchtesgaden, we had worried about the sculpture. In the first three convoys we had disposed of only thirty of the two hundred and fifty pieces. Most of those remaining were just under life size. We had no materials with which to build crates. And even if we had had the lumber, the labor of building them would have greatly delayed the evacuation. That evening we found the solution of the problem. The three of us were standing on the open porch outside our room after supper. Two of the trucks were parked by the loading platform directly below. Why not make a checkerboard pattern of ropes, strung waist high across the truck bed? The floor of the truck could be padded with excelsior. We could set a statue in each of the squares. The ropes would hold each piece in place. If we stuffed quantities of excelsior between the statues, they wouldn’t rub. Perhaps it was a crazy idea. On the other hand, it might work.

The following morning Steve and two of the men prepared the truck while Lamont and I selected the statues for the trial load. We chose thirty of the largest pieces. We figured on seven or eight rows, with four statues in each row. Kress set up his camera on the porch and photographed the progress of the operation. One by one the long row of madonnas, saints and angels was set in place. We hadn’t been far off in our calculations. There were twenty-nine in all. The truck looked like a tumbrel of the French Revolution filled with victims for the guillotine. It was a new technique in the packing of sculpture. Steve said we’d have to send George Stout a photograph. “And we’ll have to send for more excelsior, too,” Lamont said. He was quite right. We had used up the last shred.

That afternoon Steve combed the countryside for a fresh supply of excelsior, returning just before supper with three new bales. In the meantime, Lamont went over, with Kress, the paintings to be photographed. Sergeant Peck and I completed numbering the last of the pictures.

The next day we loaded three more trucks. With Steve on hand to crack the whip over the men, the loading went fast, so fast in fact that Sergeant Peck had a hard time checking off the paintings as they were hoisted onto the trucks. We packed four hundred pictures, the cases containing the gold and silver objects which Lamont and I had finished the day before, and another dozen pieces of furniture. The convoy—our fourth—got off in the early afternoon. We placed a special guard on the truck with the sculpture to make sure that the driver didn’t smoke on the way.

We finished one more truck and stopped for a cigarette. It was a hot day and we didn’t feel like doing any more work. Steve had gone up to the darkroom to see Kress. Lamont said, “Let’s go up to Munich.”

“That suits me, but what excuse have we got?” I asked.

“If we must have an excuse, I can think of at least four,” he said thoughtfully. “We’re out of cigarettes and candy. We ought to be on hand when they unpack the sculpture at the Collecting Point. We’ve worked for a week without taking a day off. And perhaps there’ll be some mail for us at Posey’s office.”

“What about the little brown bear? Do you think he’ll mind our taking off?” I asked. This was Lamont’s name for Steve, but it was never used when he was within earshot.

“Steve’s had his trip for this week,” said Lamont, meaning Steve’s trip to Alt Aussee.

Sergeant Peck, who had overheard part of our conversation, asked if he might join us. We told him to be ready in ten minutes and went off to notify Steve of our plans and to pack up our musette bags. Steve was so busy helping Kress with his developing that he scarcely paid any attention to us. After leaving him a final injunction to have at least three trucks loaded before we got back the next evening, we called for the command car. The driver, a restless redhead named Freedberg, who hated the monotonous routine at Berchtesgaden, was delighted with the idea of going to Munich. Sergeant Peck appeared and we set off.

We chose the shorter road through the mountains and overtook the convoy on the Autobahn, halfway to Munich. The front escort jeep was holding the speed down to thirty-five miles an hour, in accordance with my instructions. The driver waved envyingly as we passed them doing fifty. Twenty miles from Munich, Freedberg turned west off the Autobahn and took the back road from Bad Tölz, a short cut which brought us directly to Third Army Headquarters.

We arrived at Captain Posey’s office just as Lincoln Kirstein was leaving for chow. He told us that the captain had gone to Pilsen the middle of the week but was due back that evening. “There’s quite a lot of mail for both of you,” Lincoln said. He handed us each a thick batch of letters. It was the first mail I had received from home in six weeks. There were forty-two letters!

“I told you there’d be mail for us,” said Lamont with a satisfied smile.

We had supper with Craig Smyth and Ham Coulter at the Detachment that evening. Craig said that the convoy had not arrived before he left the Collecting Point, but two of his German workmen were to be on duty the next morning, even though it was Sunday. We arranged to meet him at his office and supervise the unloading. Lincoln had said that Posey would not be back before ten, so we spent the evening with Craig and Ham at their apartment.

Just before we returned to Third Army Headquarters, Ham gave us a small paper-bound volume. It was entitled The Ludwigs of Bavaria. The author was Henry Channon.

“This is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read,” Ham said. “You might take it along with you.”

I thanked him, and stuck it in my musette bag. Before our operations in Bavaria ended two months later, that little book had come to mean a great deal to the members of the evacuation team. We called it our “Bavarian bible.” So alluring were Channon’s descriptions of the “Seven Wonders of Bavaria” that whenever we had a free day—or even a few hours to ourselves—we made excursions to these architectural fantasies: the swirling, baroque churches of Wies, Weltenburg, Ottobeuren and Vierzehnheiligen; the Amalienburg and the palace of Herrenchiemsee. The Residenz at Würzburg, which we had seen, was one of the seven. Unofficially we added an eighth to the list: Schloss Linderhof, Ludwig II’s opulent little palace near Oberammergau—ornate and vulgar, yet fascinating in its lonely mountain setting. But these were extracurricular activities, falling outside the orbit of our official work.

We found Captain Posey at his office when we got there a few minutes before ten that evening. He asked us for a complete account of our operations at Berchtesgaden. We reported that we had sent a total of fourteen truckloads up to Munich the first week; that we had cleaned out half the pictures, but that we had just begun on the sculpture. We estimated that it would take us another ten days to finish; we would probably fill seventeen or eighteen more trucks.

We asked him what plans he would have for us when we completed the job. He said he might send us to the Castle of Neuschwanstein. The place was full of things looted from Paris. In fact, it was one of the major repositories of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg. The French were clamoring to have it evacuated. Then there was another big repository in a Carthusian monastery at Buxheim. That too contained loot from Paris. Perhaps we could take a run down to both places and size up the jobs after we had finished with the Göring things. The captain was tired after his long trip, so we didn’t go into details about either of the two prospective assignments. He offered us a billet for the night and the three of us turned in shortly after eleven. It was none too soon for me: I still had forty-two unopened letters from home in the pocket of my jacket.

When we arrived at the Collecting Point the next morning, the two German workmen who had been with me at Hohenfurth were starting to unpack the truck with the sculpture. Lamont and I examined each statue as it was lifted from its nest of excelsior. All twenty-nine had come through without a scratch. Our experiment was a success. We would be able to use the same technique with the rest of the sculpture. I instructed the workmen to leave all of the excelsior in the truck, as we had none to spare.

I persuaded Craig to drive back to Berchtesgaden with us for the night. He looked tired and I thought the change would do him good. His responsibilities at the Collecting Point—the “Bau,” as we called it (our abbreviation for Verwaltungsbau)—were heavy; and he never took a day off.

On the return trip he told us his latest troubles. Only three days ago a small bomb had exploded in the basement of the “Bau.” It had blown one of the young German workmen to bits. Craig gave all the grisly details, which included discovering one of the poor fellow’s arms in a heap of debris fifty feet from the scene of the explosion. The tragedy had had one beneficial result. For weeks Craig had been harping on the subject of additional guards for the Collecting Point. His words had fallen on deaf ears—until the bomb episode. He said that a general and three colonels arrived at the building within half an hour. Since then everyone had been so “security-conscious” that he had had no further difficulty in obtaining the desired number of guards. The Bomb Disposal Unit inspected the premises and some pointed comments were made about the thoroughness of the original survey.

In our absence Steve had loaded three trucks. As a reward for his labors, I suggested that he take Craig up to the Eagle’s Nest the following morning. While they were gone, Lamont and I finished three more loads. We had the convoy of six lined up by noon. Craig returned to Munich in one of the escort jeeps. This fifth convoy contained one hundred and sixty-seven paintings, one hundred and six pieces of sculpture, twenty-five tapestries, sixty-eight cases filled with bibelots, and fifty-three pieces of furniture. It was our largest convoy out of Berchtesgaden thus far.

It was also the first one to break down. Late in the afternoon, the rear escort jeep arrived at the rest house with word that two of the trucks had broken down fifteen miles out of Berchtesgaden. Steve and I drove to Berchtesgaden to arrange to have them towed in for reloading. I also wanted to do a little investigating. There could be little excuse for breakdowns on the Munich road if the trucks had been in good mechanical condition when they started out.

On the way into town, Steve said, “Tom, I think I know what caused the trouble. I didn’t think of it till just now. But the other day on the road back from Alt Aussee, two six-by-sixes passed me at a hell of a clip. I thought I recognized the drivers as two of ours.”

I questioned the lieutenant in charge of the drivers. He professed ignorance of any unauthorized junkets back to Alt Aussee.

“I am going to have a word with Tiny,” said Steve as we left the lieutenant’s room. Tiny was the head mechanic and the only one of the entire crew who was always on the job. Steve wanted to talk to him alone, so I waited in the car.

A few minutes later he came back with a satisfied grin on his face. “I got the whole story,” he said. “The drivers have been racing back and forth to Alt Aussee all the time we’ve been here. They were crazy about it up at the mine. Tiny says they hate it here at Berchtesgaden.”

“Well, we’ll fix that,” I said. I went back to see the lieutenant. “How many drivers have you got and how many trucks?” I asked.

“Sixteen drivers and thirteen trucks,” he said.

“Send eight of the drivers and five of the trucks up to Munich first thing in the morning and have them report to the trucking company. We can finish the job here without them.”

Steve always sang when he was in a particularly happy frame of mind. That evening, on the way back to the rest house, he was in exceptionally good voice.

Five days later we completed the evacuation of the Göring collection. The last two convoys, of four and seven trucks respectively, contained the larger pictures, one hundred and seventy-seven of them; sixty pieces of sculpture, twenty miscellaneous cases, sixty-seven pieces of furniture and two hundred empty picture frames. We had heavy rain that last week and the mud was ankle-deep around the loading platform. Although it was early August, the nights were cold and the rest house, emptied of its treasures, was a cheerless place. We were glad to see the last of the trucks pull out of the drive. It had been a strenuous operation—thirty-one truckloads in thirteen days. In the early afternoon we would collect our personal belongings and return to Munich.