On our return to Munich that evening, Craig told us that preparations were being made for the immediate restitution of several important masterpieces recovered in the American Zone. General Eisenhower had approved a proposal to return at once to each of the countries overrun by the Germans at least one outstanding work of art. This was to be done in his name, as a gesture of “token restitution” symbolizing American policy with regard to ultimate restitution of all stolen art treasures to the rightful owner nations. It was felt that the gracious gesture on the part of the Commanding General of United States Forces in Europe would serve to reaffirm our intentions to right the wrongs of Nazi oppression. In view of the vast amount of art which had thus far been recovered, it would be months before it could all be restored to the plundered countries. Meanwhile these “token restitutions” would be an earnest of American good will. They would be sent back from Germany at the expense of the United States Government. Thereafter, representatives of the various countries would be invited to come to our Collecting Points to select, assemble and, in transportation of their own providing, remove those objects which the Germans had stolen.

Belgium was to receive the first token restitution. The great van Eyck altarpiece—The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb—was the obvious choice among the stolen Belgian treasures.

The famous panels had been reposing in the Central Collecting Point at Munich since we had removed them from the salt mine at Alt Aussee. A special plane had been chartered to fly them to Brussels. The Belgian Government had signified approval of air transportation. Direct rail communication between Munich and Brussels had not been resumed, and the highways were not in the best of condition. By truck, it would be a rough two-day trip; by air, a matter of three hours.

Bancel La Farge had already flown from Frankfurt to Brussels, where plans had been made for an appropriate ceremony on the arrival of the altarpiece. The American Ambassador was to present the panels to the Prince Regent on behalf of General Eisenhower. It was to be an historic occasion.

I went out to the airport to confirm the arrangements for the C-54. It was only a fifteen-minute drive from the Königsplatz to the field. I was also to check on the condition of the streets: they were in good shape all the way.

The plane was to take off at noon. Lamont, Steve and I supervised the loading of the ten precious cases. We led off in a jeep. The truck followed with the panels. Four of the civilian packers went along to load the cases onto the plane. Captain Posey was to escort the altarpiece to Brussels.

When we got to the airport we learned that the plane had not arrived. There would be a two-hour delay. At the end of two hours, we were informed that there was bad weather south of Brussels. All flights had been canceled for the day. We drove back to the Collecting Point at the Königsplatz and had just finished unloading the panels when a message came from the field. The weather had cleared. The plane would be taking off in half an hour. I caught Captain Posey as he was leaving the building for his office at Third Army Headquarters. The cases were reloaded and we were on our way to the field in fifteen minutes.

The truck was driven onto the field where the big C-54 stood waiting. In another quarter of an hour the panels were aboard and lashed securely to metal supports in the forepart of the passenger compartment. Captain Posey, the only passenger, waved jauntily as the doors swung shut. Enviously we watched the giant plane roll down the field, lift waveringly from the airstrip and swing off to the northwest. The altarpiece was on the last lap of an extraordinary journey. We wished George Stout could have been in on this.

The plane reached Brussels without mishap. The return of the great national treasure was celebrated throughout the country. Encouraged by the success of this first “token restitution,” Major La Farge directed that a similar gesture be made to France. At the Collecting Point Craig selected seventy-one masterpieces looted from French private collections. The group included Fragonard, Chardin, Lancret, Rubens, Van Dyck, Hals, and a large number of seventeenth century Dutch masters. Only examples of the highest quality were chosen.

Ham Coulter, the naval officer who worked with Craig at the “Bau,” was the emissary appointed to accompany the paintings to Paris. It was decided to return them by truck, inasmuch as it would have been impracticable to attempt shipping uncrated pictures by air. The convoy consisted of two trucks—one for the pictures, the other for extra gasoline. It was a hard two-day trip from Munich to Paris. Ham got through safely, but reported on his return that the roads had been extremely rough a good part of the way. He had delivered the pictures in Paris to the Musée du Jeu de Paume, the little museum which the Germans had used during the Occupation as the clearinghouse for their methodical plundering of the Jewish collections. His expedition had been marred by only one minor incident. When the paintings were being unloaded at the museum, one of the women attendants watching the operation noticed that some of the canvases were unframed. She had asked, “And where are the frames?” This was too much for Coulter. In perfect French, the courteous lieutenant told her precisely what she could do about the frames.

Shortly after the return of the Ghent altarpiece, Captain Posey was demobilized. His duties as MFA&A Officer at Third Army Headquarters in Munich were assumed by Captain Edwin Rae. I had not seen Rae since the early summer when he and Lieutenant Edith Standen had been assigned to assist me in inventorying the collections of the Berlin museums in the vaults of the Reichsbank at Frankfurt. Edwin was a meticulous fellow, gentle but determined. Although by no means lacking in a sense of humor, he resented joking references to a fancied resemblance to Houdon’s well known portrait of Voltaire, and I didn’t blame him.

He took on his new responsibilities with quiet assurance and in a short time won the complete confidence of his superiors at Third Army Headquarters. Throughout his long tenure of office, he maintained an unruffled calm in the face of obstacles which would have exhausted a less patient man. He was responsible for all matters pertaining to the Fine Arts in the Eastern Military District of the American Zone—that is, Bavaria—an area more than twice the size of the two provinces Greater Hesse and Württemberg-Baden comprising the Western Military District of our Zone.

During the early days of Captain Rae’s regime, Charlie Kuhn paid a brief visit to Munich. He had just completed the transfer of the Berlin Museum collections from Frankfurt to the Landesmuseum at Wiesbaden. The university buildings in Frankfurt—which I had requisitioned for a Collecting Point—had proved unsuitable. The repairs, he said, would have taken months. On the other hand, the Wiesbaden Museum, though damaged, was ideal for the purpose. Of course there hadn’t been a glass left in any of the windows, and the roof had had to be repaired. But thanks to the energy and ingenuity of Walter Farmer, the building had been rehabilitated in two months. Captain Farmer was the director of the new Collecting Point. When I asked where Farmer had got the glass, Charlie was evasive. All he would say was that Captain Farmer was “wise in the ways of the Army.”

Charlie was headed for Vienna to confer with Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Dewald, Chief of the MFA&A Section at USFA Headquarters (United States Forces, Austria). Colonel Dewald wanted to complete the evacuation of the mine at Alt Aussee, which was now under his jurisdiction. For this project he hoped to obtain the services of the officers who had worked there when the mine had been Third Army’s responsibility. Captain Rae was reluctant to lend the Special Evacuation Team, because there was still so much work to be done in Bavaria. But he agreed, provided that Charlie could sell the idea to the Chief of Staff at Third Army. This Charlie succeeded in doing, and departed for Vienna a day later. Steve was crazy to see Vienna—I think his parents had been born there—so Charlie took him along.

After they had left, Captain Rae requested Lamont and me to make an inspection trip to northern Bavaria. Our first stop was Bamberg. There we examined the Neue Residenz, which Rae contemplated establishing as an auxiliary Collecting Point to house the contents of various repositories in Upper Franconia. Reports reaching his office indicated that storage conditions in that area were unsatisfactory. Either the repositories were not weatherproof, or they were not being adequately guarded.

It was also rumored that UNRRA was planning to fill the Neue Residenz with DPs—Displaced Persons. Captain Rae was determined to put a stop to that, because the building, a fine example of late seventeenth century architecture, was on the SHAEF List of Protected Monuments. This fact should have guaranteed its immunity from such a hazard. Even during combat, the SHAEF list had been a great protection to monuments of historic and artistic importance. Now that no “doctrine of military necessity” could be invoked to justify improper use of the building, Rae did not propose to countenance its occupancy by DPs.

The Neue Residenz contained dozens of empty, brocaded rooms—but no plumbing. We decided that it would do for a Collecting Point and agreed with Rae that the DPs should be housed elsewhere if possible. The officer from the local MG Detachment, who was showing us around, confirmed the report that UNRRA intended to move in. He didn’t think they would relinquish the building without a protest. The influx of refugees from the Russian Zone had doubled the town’s normal population of sixty thousand.

It was a disappointment to find that the superb sculpture in the cathedral across the square was still bricked up. The shelters had proved a needless precaution, for Bamberg had not been bombed. Only the bridge over the Regnitz had been blown up, and the Germans had done that themselves.

From Bamberg we drove north to Coburg, where we had a twofold mission. First we were to obtain specific information about ten cases which contained a collection of art objects belonging to a prince of Hesse. The cases were said to be stored in Feste Coburg, the walled castle above the town. If they were the property of Philip of Hesse, then they would probably be taken into custody by the American authorities. We had been told that he was in prison. His art dealings during the past few years were being reviewed by the OSS officers charged with the special investigation of Nazi art-looting activities. Philip was the son of the Landgräfin of Hesse. It was in the flower-filled Waffenraum of her castle near Frankfurt that I had seen the family tombs months before.

If, on the other hand, the cases belonged to a different prince of Hesse—one whose political record was clean—and storage conditions were satisfactory, we would simply leave them where they were for the time being.

Our second objective was Schloss Tambach, a few kilometers from Coburg. Paintings stolen by Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, from the palace at Warsaw were stored there. Schloss Tambach also contained pictures from the Stettin Museum. Stettin was now in the Russian Zone of Occupied Germany.

On our arrival in Coburg, Lamont and I drove to the headquarters of the local MG Detachment, which were located in the Palais Edinburgh. This unpretentious building was once the residence of Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Edinburgh. There we arranged with Lieutenant Milton A. Pelz, the Monuments officer of the Coburg Detachment, to inspect the storage rooms at the castle.

Pelz was a big fellow who spoke German fluently. He welcomed us hospitably and took us up to the castle where we met Dr. Grundmann, who had the keys to the storage rooms. This silent, sour-faced German was curator of the Prince’s collections. He said that his employer was Prince Ludwig of Hesse, a cousin of Philip. The cases contained paintings and objets d’art which had been in the possession of the family for years. Grundmann had personally removed them from Ludwig’s estate in Silesia the day before the Russians occupied the area.

Ludwig’s most important treasure was the world-famous painting by Holbein known as the Madonna of Bürgermeister Meyer. Painted in 1526, it had hung for years in the palace at Darmstadt. The Dresden Gallery owned a seventeenth century replica. Early in the war, Prince Ludwig had sent the original to his Silesian castle for safekeeping. Grundmann had brought it back to Bavaria along with the ten cases now at Coburg. From Coburg he had taken the Holbein to Schloss Banz, a castle not far from Bamberg.

He said that the Prince was living at Wolfsgarten, a small country place near Darmstadt. Ludwig was eager to regain possession of the painting. Did we think that could be arranged? We told him he would have to obtain an authorization from Captain Rae at Munich.

Schloss Tambach was a ten-minute drive from Coburg. This great country house, built around three sides of a courtyard, belonged to the Countess of Ortenburg. She occupied the center section. A detachment of troops was billeted in one wing. The other was filled with the Stettin and Warsaw pictures. There were over two hundred from the Stettin Museum. Nineteenth century German paintings predominated, but I noticed two fine Hals portraits and a Van Gogh landscape among them.

The civilian custodian, answerable to the MG authorities at Coburg, was Dr. Wilhelm Eggebrecht. He had been curator of the Stettin Museum until thrown out by the Nazis because his wife was one-quarter Jewish. He was a mousy little fellow with a bald head and gold-rimmed spectacles. He asked apprehensively if we intended to send the paintings back to Russian-held Stettin. We said that we had come only to check on the physical security of the present storage place. So far as we knew, the paintings would remain where they were for the present. This inconclusive piece of information seemed to reassure him.

The paintings looted from Warsaw were the pièces de résistance of the treasures at Schloss Tambach—especially the nine great canvases by Bellotto, the eighteenth century Venetian master. Governor Frank had ruthlessly removed the pictures from their stretchers and rolled them up for shipment. As a result of this rough handling, the paint had flaked off in places, but the damage was not serious. When we examined the pictures, they were spread out on the floor. They filled two rooms, forty feet square. Later they were taken to the Munich Collecting Point and mounted on new stretchers, in preparation for their return to Warsaw.

When we got back to Munich, Steve had returned from Vienna. He had news for us. Charlie Kuhn had already left for Frankfurt. Colonel Dewald was coming to Munich in a few days to talk to Colonel Roy Dalferes, Rae’s Chief of Staff at Third Army, about reopening the Alt Aussee mine. Either Charlie or Bancel would come down from USFET Headquarters when Dewald arrived. A new man had joined the MFA&A Section at USFA—Andrew Ritchie, director of the Buffalo Museum. He had come over as a civilian. Steve thought that Ritchie would be the USFA representative at Munich. There was a lot of stuff at the Collecting Point which would eventually go back to Austria. It would have to be checked with the records there. That would be Ritchie’s job. Steve told us also that Lincoln Kirstein had gone home. His mother was seriously ill and Lincoln had left on emergency orders.

The three of us went to Captain Rae’s office. Lamont and I had to make a report on our trip to Coburg. Rae had a new assignment for us. He had just received orders from USFET Headquarters to prepare the Cracow altarpiece for shipment. It was to be sent back to Poland as a token restitution. This was the colossal carved altarpiece by Veit Stoss which the Nazis had stolen from the Church of St. Mary at Cracow. Veit Stoss had been commissioned by the King of Poland in 1477 to carve the great work. It had taken him ten years. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis had carted it off, lock, stock and barrel, to Nürnberg. They contended that, since Veit Stoss had been a native of Nürnberg, it belonged in the city of his birth.

The missing altarpiece was the first of her looted treasures for which Poland had registered a claim with the American authorities at the close of the war. After months of diligent investigation, it was found by American officers in an underground bunker across the street from the Albrecht Dürer house in Nürnberg. In addition to the dismantled figures of the central panel—painted and gilded figures of hollow wood ten feet high—the twelve ornate side panels, together with the statues and pinnacles surmounting the framework, had been crowded into the bunker.

The same bunker contained another priceless looted treasure—the coronation regalia of the Holy Roman Empire. Among these venerable objects were the jeweled crown of the Emperor Conrad—commonly called the “Crown of Charlemagne”—dating from the eleventh century, a shield, two swords and the orb. Since 1804 they had been preserved in the Schatzkammer, the Imperial Treasure Room, at Vienna. In 1938, the Nazis removed them to Nürnberg, basing their claim to possession on a fifteenth century decree of the Emperor Sigismund that they were to be kept in that city.

On the eve of the German collapse, two high officials of the city had spirited away these five pieces. The credit for recovering the treasures goes to an American officer of German birth, Lieutenant Walter Horn, professor of art at the University of California. The two officials at first disclaimed any knowledge of their whereabouts. After hours of relentless grilling by Lieutenant Horn, the men finally admitted their guilt. They were promptly tried, heavily fined and sent to prison. Three months later, at the request of the Austrian Government, the imperial treasures were flown back to Vienna. This historic shipment contained other relics which the Nazis had taken from the Schatzkammer—relics of the greatest religious significance. They included an alleged fragment of the True Cross, a section of the tablecloth said to have been used at the Last Supper, a lance venerated as the one which had touched the wounds of Christ, and links from the chains traditionally believed to have bound St. Peter, St. Paul and St. John.

On Captain Rae’s instructions, Steve and I went to Nürnberg to pack the Stoss altarpiece. (At that time the coronation regalia was still in the bunker, where, on the afternoon of our arrival, we had an opportunity to examine it.) We found that the heavy framework which supported the altar panels was not stored in the bunker. Because of its size—the upright pieces were thirty feet high—it had been taken to Schloss Wiesenthau, an old castle outside Forchheim, thirty miles away.

Leaving Steve to start packing the smaller figures and pinnacles, I got hold of a semitrailer, the only vehicle long enough to accommodate a load of such length. It was an hour’s drive to the castle. With a crew of twenty PWs, I finished loading the framework in two hours and returned to Nürnberg in time for supper.

That evening Steve and I figured out the number of trucks we would need for the altarpiece. Lamont had remained in Munich to make tentative arrangements, pending word from us. He was going to ask for ten trucks and we came to the conclusion that this would be about the right number—in addition, of course, to the semitrailer for the supporting framework. We got out our maps and studied our probable route to Cracow. One road would take us through Dresden and Breslau; another by way of Pilsen and Prague. Perhaps we could go one way and return the other. In either case we would have to pass through Russian-occupied territory. It would probably take some time to obtain the necessary clearances. We figured on taking enough gas for the round trip, since we doubted if there would be any to spare in Poland. Altogether it promised to be a complicated expedition, but already we had visions of a triumphal entry into Cracow.

Our ambitious plans collapsed the following morning. While Steve and I were at breakfast, I was called to the telephone. The corporal in Captain Rae’s office was on the wire. I was to return to Munich at once. Major La Farge was arriving from Frankfurt and wanted to see me that night. Plans for the trip to Cracow were indefinitely postponed. Internal conditions in Poland were too unsettled to risk returning the altarpiece.

Our plans had miscarried before, but this was our first major disappointment. We had begun to look on the Polish venture as the fitting climax of our work as a Special Evacuation Team. On the way back to Munich, Steve said he had a feeling that the team was going to be split up.

Steve’s misgivings were prophetic. At Craig’s apartment after dinner, Bancel La Farge outlined the plans he had for us. Colonel Dalferes had acceded to Colonel Dewald’s request. Lamont, Steve and a third officer—new to MFA&A work—were to resume the evacuation of the salt mine at Alt Aussee. If the snows held off, it would be possible to carry on operations there for another month or six weeks.

I was to return to USFET Headquarters at Frankfurt as Deputy Chief of the MFA&A Section, replacing Charlie Kuhn who had just received his orders to go home. I knew that Charlie would soon be eligible for release from active duty, but had no idea that his departure was so imminent.

We didn’t have much to say to one another on the way to our quarters that night. Steve had already made up his mind that he wasn’t going to like the new man. Lamont said that he thought it was going to be an awful anticlimax to reopen the mine. And for me, the prospect of routine administrative work at USFET was uninviting. After three months of strenuous and exciting field work, it wouldn’t be easy to settle down in an office. All three of us felt that the great days were over.

During our last week together in Munich we had little time to feel sorry for ourselves. Everyone was preoccupied with the restitution program. We had our full share of the work. Another important shipment was to be made to Belgium. It was to include the Michelangelo Madonna, the eleven paintings stolen from the church in Bruges when the statue was taken, and the four panels by Dirk Bouts from the famous altarpiece in the church of St. Pierre at Louvain. These panels, which formed the wings of the altarpiece, had been removed by the Germans in August 1942. Before the first World War one wing had been in the Berlin Gallery, the other in the Alte Pinakothek at Munich. As in the case of the Ghent altarpiece, they had been restored—unjustly, according to the Germans—to Belgium by the Versailles Treaty.

This shipment to Belgium represented the first practical application of the “come and get it” theory of restitution, evolved by Major La Farge. Belgium had already received the Ghent altarpiece as token restitution. Now it was up to the Belgians to carry on at their own expense. The special representatives who came down from Brussels to supervise this initial shipment were Dr. Paul Coremans, a great technical expert, and Lieutenant Pierre Longuy of the Ministry of Fine Arts. They had their own truck but had been unable to bring suitable packing materials. We had an ample supply of pads and blankets which we had stored at the Collecting Point after our evacuation of the Göring collection. We placed them at the disposal of the Belgians. But it was Saturday and no civilian packers were available. Dr. Coremans gratefully accepted the offer of our services. Steve, Lamont and I loaded the truck. It was the last operation of the Special Evacuation Team.

The Belgians had no sooner departed than the French and Dutch representatives arrived. Captain Hubert de Brye for France looked more like a sportsman than a scholar; but he was a man of wide cultivation and had a sense of humor which endeared him to his associates in Munich. He and Ham Coulter were kindred spirits and became great friends.

Ham, who had been responsible for the rehabilitation of both the Collecting Point and the Führerbau, now had two assistants—Captain George Lacy and Dietrich Sattler, the latter a German architect. Through this division of the work, Ham found time for new duties: he took the foreign representatives in tow, arranged for their billets, their mess cards, their PX rations and so on. It was an irritating but not a thankless job, for the recipients of his attentions were devoted to their “wet nurse.”

The Dutch representative was Lieutenant Colonel Alphonse Vorenkamp. He was a little man with gray hair, shrewd gray eyes and steel-rimmed spectacles. An eminent authority on Dutch painting, he had been for several years a member of the faculty at Smith College. He enjoyed the unusual distinction of having served in both the American and Dutch Armies during the present war.

I had met him in San Francisco in 1944, shortly after his discharge from the service. He had been a buck private; and I gathered from the story of his experiences that our Army had released him in self-defense. He told me that he often had difficulty in understanding the drill sergeant. Once, without thinking he had stepped out of formation and asked politely, “Sergeant, would you mind repeating that last order!” Vorenkamp said that he had paid dearly for his indiscretion, so dearly in fact that he had seriously considered changing his name from Alphonse to Latrinus. Alphonse, he said, was a ridiculous name for a Dutchman anyway. He preferred to be called Phonse.

Released from the Army, he had gone back to his teaching. Then, only a few months ago, the Dutch Government had requested his services in connection with the restitution of looted art. They had offered him a lieutenant-colonelcy and he had accepted.

The Dutch, as well as the British and French, had made a practice of conferring upon qualified civilians ranks consistent with the responsibilities of given jobs. Our government’s failure to do likewise—so far as the art program was concerned—resulted in a disparity in rank which frequently placed American MFA&A personnel at a great disadvantage.

Of all the foreign representatives, none served his country more zealously than Phonse Vorenkamp. Throughout the fall and winter months, his convoys shuttled back and forth between Munich and Amsterdam. When I last heard from him—in the late spring—he had restored to Holland more than nine hundred paintings, upward of two thousand pieces of sculpture, porcelain and glass, along with truckloads of tapestries, rugs and furniture.

I left Munich on a rainy morning at the end of September. Lamont and Steve were planning to depart for Alt Aussee at the same time. The three of us had agreed to meet in front of the Collecting Point at eight-thirty. I was a few minutes late and when I got there the guard at the entrance said they had already gone. I hadn’t felt so forlorn since the day Craig and I had parted in Bad Homburg months before. As I started down the steps to the command car, Phonse Vorenkamp called from the doorway. He had come to work a little earlier than usual, just to see me off. He was full of waspish good humor, joked about the magnificence of my new job in Frankfurt, and promised to look me up when he came through with his first convoy. The driver stepped on the starter and, as we rounded the corner into the Brienner-Strasse, Phonse waved us on our way.