The Military Government Detachment had its headquarters in a gray stone building behind the Opera House. It was one of the few in the city that had suffered relatively little damage. I reported to the Executive Officer, a white-haired major named James Franklin. After I had explained the nature of the work I was expected to do, he took me around to the office of Lieutenant Julius Buchman, the Education and Religious Affairs Officer, who had also the local MFA&A problems as part of his duties. Buchman couldn’t have been more pleasant, and said he’d do everything he could to help. There was an air of quiet good humor about him that I liked at once. I learned that he was an architect by profession and had studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau before the war. He spoke fluent German. I told him that first of all I’d like to get settled, so he guided me to Captain Wyman Ooley, the Billeting Officer.

Ooley was a happy-go-lucky fellow, the only Billeting Officer I ever met who was always cheerful. He had been a schoolteacher in Arkansas. Together we drove out to the residential section where a group of houses had been set aside for the Military Government officers. This part of the city had not been heavily bombed and each one of the houses had a pretty garden.

“I’ll tell you, I’ve got a real nice room in that house over there,” he said, pointing to a gray stucco house partly screened by a row of trees. “But it’s for lieutenant colonels. It’s empty right now, but I might have to throw you out later.” Thinking that lieutenant colonels would be very likely to have ideas about good plumbing, I quickly said I’d take the chance.

The front door was locked. Ooley called, “Lucienne!” One of the upper windows was instantly flung open and a woman, dust-cloth in hand, leaned out, waved and disappeared. A moment later she reappeared at the front door. Lucienne, all smiles, was as French as the tricolor. Ooley explained in pidgin French, with gestures, that I was to have a room on the second floor, wished me luck and departed. Lucienne bustled up to the second floor chattering away at a great rate, expressing surprise and delight that I was “officier de la Marine” and also taking considerable satisfaction in having recognized my branch of the service.

She threw open a door and then dashed off to the floor above, still chattering and gesticulating. I was left alone to contemplate the splendor before me—an enormous, airy bedroom looking out on a garden filled with scarlet roses. This couldn’t be true. Even lieutenant colonels didn’t deserve this. The room had cream-colored walls, paneled and decorated with chinoiserie designs. A large chest of drawers and a low table were decorated in the same manner. In one corner was an inviting chaise longue, covered in rose brocade. Along the end wall stood the bed—complete with sheets and a pillow. The built-in wardrobe had full-length mirrors which reflected the tall French windows and the garden beyond.

As I stood there trying to take it all in, Lucienne appeared again. With her was a dapper little fellow whom she introduced as her husband, René. He acknowledged the introduction and then solemnly introduced Lucienne. After this bit of mock formality, he explained that he and Lucienne had charge of all the houses in the block. If anything was not to my liking I was to let them know and it would be righted at once.

Further conversation revealed that the two of them had been deported from Paris early in 1941 and been obliged to remain in Frankfurt, working for the Germans, ever since. All through the bombings, I asked? But of course, and they had been too terrible. During one of the worst raids they had been imprisoned in the bomb shelter. The falling stones had blocked the exit. They had had to remain under the ground for forty-eight hours. They had been made deaf by the noise, yes, for two months. And the concussion had made them bleed from the nose and the ears. I asked if they expected to go back to Paris. Yes, of course, but they were in no hurry. It was very nice in Germany, now that the Americans were there. With that they left me to unpack and get settled.

When I had finished, I decided to explore a bit. There were two other bedrooms on the second floor. Neat labels on the doors indicated that they were occupied by lieutenant colonels. There were two other doors at the end of the hall. Neither one was labeled, so I peered in. They were the bathrooms. And what bathrooms! Marble floors, tiled walls, double washbasins and built-in tubs. Although it was only the middle of the morning, I had to sample one of those magnificent tubs. And as a kind of tribute to all this elegance, I felt constrained to discard my khakis and put on blues.

Captain La Farge had stressed the urgency of setting up an art depot, so the next ten days were given over to that project. Buchman generously shelved his own work to help me with it. Together we inspected the University of Frankfurt. The newest of the German universities, it had opened its doors at the outbreak of the first World War. The main administration building, an imposing structure of red sandstone, had been badly damaged by incendiaries but could be repaired. It would be a big job, but we could worry about that later. The first step was to have it allocated for our use. That had to be done through the proper Army “channels.” Buchman steered me through. Then we had to obtain an estimate of the repairs. It took three days to get one from the university architect. It was thorough but impractical and had to be completely revised. We took the revised estimate to the Army Engineers and asked them to make an inspection of the building and check the architect’s figures. They were swamped with work. It would be a week before they could do anything. I said it was a high priority job, hoping to speed things along. But the Engineers had heard that one before. We’d have to be patient.

Charlie Kuhn and Colonel Webb had moved up to Frankfurt and were established at SHAEF headquarters in the I. G. Farben building. Their office was only a few blocks from mine, and during my negotiations for the use of the university building I was in daily communication with them.

While waiting for the Engineers to make the promised inspection, I made a couple of field trips with Buchman. The first was a visit to Schloss Kronberg, a few kilometers from Frankfurt. It was a picturesque medieval castle, unoccupied since the first part of the seventeenth century. Valuable archives were stored there. We wanted to see if they were in good condition, and also to make sure that the place had been posted with the official “Off Limits” signs.

A flock of geese scattered before us as we drove up to the entrance at the end of a narrow, winding road. We knocked on the door of the caretaker’s cottage and explained the purpose of our visit to the old fellow who timidly appeared with a large bunch of keys. He limped ahead of us across the cobbled courtyard, and we waited while he fitted one of the keys into the lock.

A wave of heavy perfume issued from the dark room as the door swung open. When our eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, we saw that we were in the original Waffenraum of the castle. But, in addition to the clustered weapons affixed to the walls, there were five sarcophagi in the center of the vaulted room. Around them stood vases filled with spring flowers. On the central sarcophagus rested a spiked helmet of the first World War. The others were unadorned.

The old caretaker explained that the central tomb was that of the Landgraf of Hesse who had died thirty years ago. Those on either side contained the remains of his two sons who had likewise died in the first World War. The other two coffins were those of the elder son’s wife and of a princess of Baden who had been killed in one of the air raids on Frankfurt in 1944. All five sarcophagi had originally stood in the little chapel across the courtyard. It had been destroyed by an incendiary bomb the winter before.

We left this funerary chamber with a feeling of relief and continued our inspection of the castle. A winding ramp in one of the towers led to the floors above. From the top story we had a superb view of the broad Frankfurt plain spread out below. The caretaker told us he had watched the bombings from that vantage point. The great banqueting hall, with a musicians’ gallery at one end, had been emptied of its original furnishings and was now a jumble of papers stacked in piles of varying heights. These were part of the Frankfurt archives. Others were stored in two rooms on the ground floor. All of the rooms were dry and weatherproof, so there was nothing further to be done about them for the present. There was no place in Frankfurt as yet to which they could be moved. “Off Limits” signs had been posted. They would discourage souvenir hunters from unauthorized delving.

On our way back to the car the caretaker told us that the castle still belonged to Margarethe, Landgräfin of Hesse, the youngest sister of the last Kaiser. Although she was now in her seventies, she came every day to put fresh flowers beside the tombs of her husband and her two sons. She lived at a newer castle, Schloss Friedrichshof, only a few kilometers away. He apparently didn’t know that Schloss Friedrichshof had been taken over by the Army and was being used as an officers’ country club. The old Landgräfin was living modestly in one of the small houses on the property. Her scapegrace son, Prince Philip, as I learned later, had played an active role in the artistic depredations of the Nazi ringleaders. I was to hear more of the Hesse family before the end of the year.

A second excursion took us still farther afield. On an overcast morning two days later, Buchman, Charlie Kuhn, Captain Rudolph Vassalle (who was the Public Safety Officer of the detachment) and I set out in the little Opel sedan which had been assigned the MFA&A office. We struck out to the east of Frankfurt on the road to Gelnhausen. We stopped at this pleasant little town with its lovely, early Gothic church and went through the formality of obtaining clearance from the local Military Government Detachment to make an inspection in that area.

From there we continued by a winding secondary road which led us through increasingly hilly country to Bad Brückenau. Our mission there was twofold: Captain Vassalle wanted to track down a young Nazi officer, reportedly a member of the SS, and to find a warehouse said to contain valuable works of art. I had gathered from Buchman that many such reports petered out on investigation. Still, there was always the chance that the one you dismissed as of no importance would turn out to be something worth while.

After making several inquiries, we eventually located a small house on the edge of town. In response to our insistent hammering, the door of the house was finally opened by a pallid young man probably in his late twenties. If he was the object of the captain’s search he had certainly undergone a remarkable metamorphosis, for he bore little resemblance to the dapper officer of whom Captain Vassalle carried a photograph for identification. The captain seemed satisfied that he was the man. So leaving them in conversation, the three of us followed up the business of the reported works of art. The other two occupants of the house—an old man and a young woman who may have been the wife of the man who had opened the door—responded to our questions with alacrity and took us to the cellar. There we were shown a cache of pictures, all of them unframed and none of them of any value. They appeared to be what the old man claimed—their own property, brought to Bad Brückenau when they had left Frankfurt to escape the bombings. In any case, we made a listing of the canvases, identifying them as best we could and making notations of the sizes, and also admonishing the couple not to remove them from the premises.

After that the old man took us across the back yard to a large modern barn which was heavily padlocked. Once inside he unshuttered a row of windows along one side of the main, ground-floor room. It was jammed to the ceiling with every conceivable item of household furnishings: chairs, tables, beds, bedding, kitchen utensils and porcelain. But no pictures. We poked around enough to satisfy ourselves that first appearances were not deceiving. They weren’t, so, having made certain that the old fellow, who claimed to be merely the custodian of these things, understood the regulations forbidding their removal, we picked up Captain Vassalle. He had completed his interrogation of the alleged SS officer and placed him under house arrest.

Our next objective was an old Schloss which, according to our map, was still a good hour’s drive to the northeast. As it was nearly noon and we were all hungry, we decided to investigate the possibilities of food in the neighborhood. On our way back through Bad Brückenau we stopped at the office of a small detachment of troops and asked where we could get some lunch. The hospitable second lieutenant on duty in the little stucco building, which had once been part of the Kurhaus establishment, gave us directions to the sprawling country hotel, high up above the town, where his outfit was quartered. He said that he would telephone ahead to warn the mess sergeant of our arrival.

For a little way we followed along the Sinn, which flows through the grassy valley in which Bad Brückenau nestles. Then we began to mount sharply and, for the next fifteen minutes, executed a series of hairpin turns and ended abruptly beside a rambling structure which commanded a wonderful view of the valley and the wooded hills on the other side. Our hosts were a group of friendly young fellows who seemed delighted to have the monotony of their rural routine interrupted by our visit. They asked Charlie and me the usual question—what was the Navy doing in the middle of Germany—and got our stock reply: we are planning to dig a canal from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.

We had a heavy downpour during lunch, and we waited for the rain to let up before starting out again. Then we took the winding road down into town, crossed the river and drove up into the hills on the other side of the valley. An hour’s drive brought us to upland meadow country and a grove of handsome lindens. At the end of a long double row of these fine trees stood Schloss Rossbach. “Castle” was a rather pompous name for the big seventeenth century country house with whitewashed walls and heavily barred ground-floor windows.

We were received by the owners, a Baron Thüngen and his wife, and explained that we had come to examine the condition of the works of art, which, according to our information, had been placed there for safekeeping. They ushered us up to a comfortable sitting room on the second floor where we settled down to wait while the baroness went off to get the keys. In the meantime we had a few words with her husband. His manner was that of the haughty landed proprietor, and he looked the part. He was a big, burly man in his sixties. He was dressed in rough tweeds and wore a matching hat, adorned with a bushy “shaving brush,” which he hadn’t bothered to remove indoors. That may have been unintentional, but I idly wondered if it weren’t deliberate discourtesy and rather wished that I had kept my own cap on. I wished also that I could have matched his insolent expression, but thought it unlikely because I was frankly enjoying the obvious distaste which our visit was causing the old codger.

However, his attitude was almost genial compared with that of his waspish wife, who reappeared about that time, armed with a huge hoop from which a great lot of keys jangled. The baroness, who was much younger than her husband, had very black hair and discontented dark eyes. She spoke excellent English, without a trace of accent. I felt reasonably sure that she was not German but couldn’t guess her nationality. It turned out that she was from the Argentine. She was a sullen piece and made no effort to conceal her irritation at our intrusion. She explained that neither she nor her husband had anything to do with the things stored there; that, in fact, it was a great inconvenience having to put up with them. She had asked the young woman who knew all about them to join us.

The young woman in question arrived and was completely charming. She took no apparent notice of the baroness’ indifference, which was that of a mistress toward a servant whom she scarcely knew. Her fresh, open manner cleared the atmosphere instantly. She introduced herself as Frau Holzinger, wife of the director of Frankfurt’s most famous museum, the Staedelsches Kunstinstitut. Because of conditions in Frankfurt, and more particularly because their house had been requisitioned by the American military authorities, she had come to Schloss Rossbach with her two young children. Country life, she continued, was better for the youngsters and, besides, her husband had thought that she might help with the things stored at the castle. I had met Dr. Holzinger when I went one day to have a look at what remained of the museum, so his wife and I hit it off at once. I was interested to learn that she was Swiss and a licensed physician. She smilingly suggested that we make a tour of the castle and she would show us what was there.

The first room to be inspected was a library adjoining the sitting room in which we had been waiting. Here we found a quantity of excellent French Impressionist paintings, all from the permanent collection of the Staedel, and a considerable number of fine Old Master drawings. Most of these were likewise the property of the museum, but a few—I remember one superb Rembrandt sketch—appeared to have come from Switzerland. Those would, of course, have to be looked into later, to determine their exact origin and how they came to be on loan at the museum. But for the moment we were concerned primarily with storage conditions and the problem of security. In another room we found an enormous collection of books, the library of one of the Frankfurt museums. In a third we encountered an array of medieval sculpture—saints of all sizes and description, some of carved wood, others of stone, plain or polychromed. These too were of museum origin.

The last storage room was below ground, a vast, cavernous chamber beneath the house. Here was row upon row of pictures, stacked in two tiers down the center of the room and also along two sides. From what we could make of them in the poor light, they were not of high quality. During the summer months they would be all right in this underground room, but we thought that the place would be very damp in the winter. Frau Holzinger assured us that this was so and that the pictures should be removed before the bad weather set in.

The baroness chipped in at this point and affably agreed with that idea, undoubtedly happy to further any scheme which involved getting rid of these unwelcome objects. She also warned us that the castle was far from safe as it was, what with roving bands of Poles all over the countryside. As we indicated that we were about to take our leave, she elaborated upon this theme, declaring that their very lives were in danger, that every night she and her husband could hear prowlers in the park. Since they—as Germans—were not allowed to have firearms, they would be at the mercy of these foreign ruffians if they should succeed in breaking into the castle. By this time we were all pretty fed up with the whining baroness. As we turned to go, Charlie Kuhn, eyeing her coldly, asked, “Who brought those Poles here in the first place, madam? We didn’t.”

To our delight, the weather had cleared and the sun was shining. Ahead of us on the roadway, the foliage of the lindens made a gaily moving pattern. Our work for the day was done and we still had half the afternoon. I got out the map and, after making some quick calculations, proposed that we could take in Würzburg and still get back to Frankfurt at a reasonable hour. We figured out that, with the extra jerry can of gas we had with us, we could just about make it. We would be able to fill up at Würzburg for the return trip. So, instead of continuing on the road back to Bad Brückenau, we turned south in the direction of Karlstadt.

It was pleasant to be traveling a good secondary road instead of the broad, characterless Autobahn, on which there were no unexpected turns, no picturesque villages. There was little traffic, so we made very good time. In half an hour we had threaded our way through Karlstadt-on-the-Main. In this part of Franconia the Main is a capricious river, winding casually in and out of the gently undulating hills. A little later we passed the village of Veitschöchheim where the Prince-Bishops of Würzburg had an elaborate country house during the eighteenth century. The house still stands, and its gardens, with a tiny lake and grottoes in the Franco-Italian manner, remain one of the finest examples of garden planning of that day. As we drove by we were glad that this inviting spot had not attracted the attention of our bombers.

Alas, such was not the case with Würzburg, as we realized the minute we reached its outskirts! The once-gracious city, surely one of the most beautiful in all Germany, was an appalling sight. Its broad avenues were now lined with nothing but the gaping, ruined remnants of the stately eighteenth century buildings which had lent the city an air of unparalleled distinction and consistency of design. High on its hilltop above the Main, the mellow walls of the medieval fortress of Marienberg caught the rays of the late afternoon sun. From the distance, the silhouette of that vast structure appeared unchanged, but the proud city of the Prince-Bishops which it overlooked was laid low.

We drove slowly along streets not yet cleared of rubble, until we came to the Residenz, the great palace of the Prince-Bishops, those lavish patrons of the arts to whom the city owed so much of its former grandeur. This magnificent building, erected in the first half of the eighteenth century by the celebrated baroque architect, Johann Balthasar Neumann, for two Prince-Bishops of the Schönborn family, was now a ghost palace, its staring glassless windows and blackened walls pathetic vestiges of its pristine splendor.

We walked up to the main entrance wondering if it could really be true that the crowning glory of the Residenz—the glorious ceiling by Tiepolo, representing Olympus and the Four Continents—was, as we had been told, still intact. With misgivings we turned left across the entrance hall to the Treppenhaus and mounted the grand staircase. We looked up and there it was—as dazzling and majestically beautiful as ever—that incomparable fresco, the masterpiece of the last great Italian painter. Someone with a far greater gift for words than I may be able to convey the exaltation one experiences on seeing that ceiling, not just for the first time but at any time. I can’t. It leaves artist and layman alike absolutely speechless. I think that, if I had to choose one great work of art, it would be this ceiling in the Residenz. You can have even the Sistine ceiling. I’ll take the Tiepolo.

For the next half hour we examined every corner of it. Aside from a few minor discolorations, the result of water having seeped through the lower side of the vault just above the cornice, the fresco was undamaged. Considering the destruction throughout the rest of the building, I could not understand how this portion of the palace could be in such a remarkable state of preservation. The explanation was an interesting example of how good can sometimes come out of evil. Some forty years ago, as I remember the story, there was a fire in the Residenz. The wooden roof over a large portion, if not all, of the building was burned away. When it came to replacing the roof, the city fathers decided it would be a prudent idea to cover the part above the Tiepolo with steel and concrete. This was done, and consequently, when the terrible conflagration of March 1945 swept Würzburg—following the single raid of twenty minutes which destroyed the city—the fresco was spared. As we wandered through other rooms of the Residenz—the Weisser Saal with its elaborate stucco ornamentation and the sumptuous Kaiser Saal facing the garden, once classic examples of the Rococo—I wished that those city fathers had gone a little farther with their steel and concrete.

We stopped briefly to examine the chapel in the south wing. Here, miraculously enough, there had been relatively little damage, but the caretaker expressed concern over the condition of the roof and said that if it weren’t repaired before the heavy rains the ceiling would be lost. Knowing how hard it was to obtain building materials for even the most historic monuments when people didn’t have a roof over their heads, we couldn’t reassure him with much conviction.

The spectacle of ruined Würzburg had a depressing effect upon us, so we weren’t very talkative on our way back to Frankfurt. We passed through only one town of any size, Aschaffenburg, which, like Würzburg, had suffered severe damage. Although I had not been long in Germany and had seen but few of her cities, I was beginning to realize that the reports of the Allied air attacks had not been exaggerated. I was ready to believe that there were only small towns and villages left in this ravaged country.

One morning Charlie Kuhn rang up to say that I should meet him at the Reichsbank early that afternoon. This was something I had been looking forward to for some time, the chance to look at the wonderful things from the Merkers mine which were temporarily stored there. With Charlie came two members of the MFA&A organization whom I had not seen since Versailles and then only briefly. They had been stationed at Barbizon, as part of the Allied Group Control Council for Germany (usually referred to simply as “Group CC”) the top level policy-making body as opposed to SHAEF, which dealt with the operational end of things. These two gentlemen were John Nicholas Brown, who had come over to Germany with the assimilated rank of colonel as General Eisenhower’s adviser on cultural affairs, and Major Mason Hammond, in civilian life professor of the Classics at Harvard.

It had been decided, now that we were about to acquire a permanent depot in which to store the treasures, to make one Monuments officer responsible for the entire collection. By this transfer of custody, the Property Control Officer in whose charge the things were at present, could be relieved of that responsibility. Major Hammond had with him a paper designating me as custodian. Knowing in a general way what was stored in the bank, I felt that I was on the point of being made a sort of director, pro tem, of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

The genial Property Control Officer, Captain William Dunn, was all smiles at the prospect of turning his burden over to someone else. But before this transfer could be made, a complete check of every item was necessary. Major Hammond knew just how he wanted this done. I was to have two assistants, who could come over the next morning from his office in Hoechst, twenty minutes from Frankfurt. The three of us, in company with Captain Dunn, would make the inventory.

We wandered through the series of rooms in which the things were stored. In the first room were something like four hundred pictures lined up against the wall in a series of rows. In two adjoining rooms were great wooden cases piled one above another. In a fourth were leather-bound boxes containing the priceless etchings, engravings and woodcuts from the Berlin Print Room. Still another room was filled with cases containing the renowned Egyptian collections. It was rumored that one of them held the world-famous head of Queen Nefertete, probably the best known and certainly the most beloved single piece of all Egyptian sculpture. It had occupied a place of special honor in the Berlin Museum, in a gallery all to itself.

Still other rooms were jammed with cases of paintings and sculpture of the various European schools. In a series of smaller alcoves were heaped huge piles of Oriental rugs and rare fabrics. And last, one enormous room with bookshelves was filled from floor to ceiling with some thirty thousand volumes from the Berlin Patent Office. Quite separate and apart from all these things was a unique collection of ecclesiastical vessels of gold and silver, the greater part of them looted from Poland. These extremely precious objects were kept in a special vault on the floor above.

Captain Dunn brought out a thick stack of papers. It was the complete inventory. Major Hammond said that the two officers who would help with the checking were a Captain Edwin Rae and a WAC lieutenant named Standen. Aside from having heard that Rae had been a student of Charlie Kuhn’s at Harvard, I knew nothing about him. But the name Standen rang a bell: was she, by any chance, Edith Standen who had been curator of the Widener Collection? Major Hammond smilingly replied, “The same.” I had known her years ago in Cambridge where we had taken Professor Sachs’ course in Museum Administration at the same time. I remembered her as a tall, dark, distinguished-looking English girl. To be exact, she was half English: her father had been a British Army officer, her mother a Bostonian. Recalling her very reserved manner and her scholarly tastes, I found it difficult to imagine her in uniform.

Early the following morning, I met my cohorts at the entrance to the Reichsbank. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Captain Rae was an old acquaintance if not an old friend. He also had been around the Fogg Museum in my time. Edith looked very smart in her uniform. She had a brisk, almost jovial manner which was not to be reconciled with her aloof and dignified bearing in the marble halls of the Widener house at Elkins Park. We hunted up Captain Dunn and set to work. Our first task was to count and check off the paintings stacked in the main room. We got through them with reasonable speed, refraining with some difficulty from pausing to admire certain pictures we particularly fancied. Then we tackled the Oriental rugs, and that proved to be a thoroughly thankless and arduous task. We had a crew of eight PWs—prisoners of war—to help us spread the musty carpets out on the floor. Owing to the fact that the smaller carpets—in some cases they were hardly more than fragments—had been rolled up inside larger ones, we ended with nearly a hundred more items than the inventory called for. That troubled Captain Dunn a bit, but I told him that it didn’t matter so long as we were over. We’d have to start worrying only if we came out short. By five o’clock we were tired and dirty and barely a third of the way through with the job.

The next day we started in on the patent records. There had been a fire in the mine where the records were originally stored. Many of them were slightly charred, and all of them had been impregnated with smoke. When we had finished counting the whole thirty thousand, we smelled just the way they did. As a matter of fact we hadn’t wanted to assume responsibility for these records in the first place. Certainly they had nothing to do with art. But Major Hammond had felt that they properly fell to us as archives. And of course they were archives of a sort.

On the morning of the third day, as I was about to leave my office for the Reichsbank, I had a phone call from Charlie Kuhn. He asked me how the work was coming along and then, in a guarded voice, said that something unexpected had turned up and that he might have to send me away for a few days. He told me he couldn’t talk about it on the telephone, and anyway, it wasn’t definite. He’d probably know by afternoon. I was to call him later. This was hardly the kind of conversation to prepare one for a humdrum day of taking inventory, even if one were counting real treasure. And for a person with my curiosity, the morning’s work was torture.

When I called Charlie after lunch he was out but had left word that I was to come to his office at two o’clock. When I got there he was sitting at his desk. He looked up from the dispatch he was reading and said with a rueful smile, “Tom, I am going to send you out on a job I’d give my eyeteeth to have for myself.” Then he explained that certain developments had suddenly made it necessary to step up the work of evacuating art repositories down in Bavaria and in even more distant areas. For the first time in my life I knew what was meant by the expression “my heart jumped a beat”—for that was exactly what happened to mine! No wonder Charlie was envious. This sounded like the real thing.

Charlie told me that I was to fly down to Munich the next morning and that I would probably be gone about ten days. To save time he had already had my orders cut. All I had to do was to pick them up at the AG office. I was to report to Third Army Headquarters and get in touch with George Stout as soon as possible. Charlie didn’t know just where I’d find George. He was out in the wilds somewhere. As a matter of fact he wasn’t too sure about the exact location of Third Army Headquarters. A new headquarters was being established and the only information he had was that it would be somewhere in or near Munich. The name, he said, would be “Lucky Rear” and I would simply have to make inquiries and be guided by signs posted along the streets.

I asked Charlie what I should do about the completion of the inventory at the Reichsbank, and also about the impending report from the Corps of Engineers on the University of Frankfurt building. He suggested that I leave the former in Captain Rae’s hands and the latter with Lieutenant Buchman. Upon my return I could take up where I had left off.

That evening I threw my things together, packing only enough clothes to see me through the next ten days. Not knowing where I would be billeted I took the precaution of including my blankets. Even at that my luggage was compact and light, which was desirable as I was traveling by air.