SALT MINES AND CASTLES

The Special Evacuation Team. Lieutenants Kovalyak, Moore and Howe, who removed the Göring Collection from Berchtesgaden to Munich, were photographed in the Luftwaffe Rest House at Unterstein.

Hermann Göring, his daughter Edda, Frau Göring and Adolf Hitler. This photograph was taken at Karinhall, the Reichmarschall’s estate near Berlin.

Salt Mines
and
Castles

The Discovery and Restitution of
Looted European Art

By
THOMAS CARR HOWE, JR.

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
INDIANAPOLIS · NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

First Edition

To My Mother

NOTE

From May 1945 until February 1946, I served as a Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Officer in Germany. During the first four months of this assignment, I was engaged in field work which included the recovery of looted works of art from such out-of-the-way places as a monastery in Czechoslovakia, a salt mine in Austria, and a castle in Bavaria. Later, as Deputy Chief of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section, Office of Military Government, U. S. Zone, I participated in the restitution of recovered art treasures to the countries of rightful ownership.

This book is primarily an account of my own experiences in connection with these absorbing tasks; but I have also chronicled the activities of a number of my fellow officers, hoping thereby to provide the reader with a more comprehensive estimate of the work as a whole than the resumé of my own duties could have afforded.

For many helpful suggestions, I am indebted to Captain Edith A. Standen, Lieutenant Lamont Moore and Mr. David Bramble; and for invaluable photographic material, I am particularly grateful to Captain Stephen Kovalyak, Captain P. J. Kelleher, Captain Edward E. Adams and Lieutenant Craig Smyth, USNR.

For permission to reproduce three International News Service photographs, I wish to thank Mr. Clarence Lindner of the San Francisco Examiner.

Thomas Carr Howe, Jr.

San Francisco
July 1946.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SALT MINES AND CASTLES

(1)
PARIS—LONDON—VERSAILLES

“Your name’s not on the passenger list,” said Craig when I walked into the waiting room of the Patuxent airport. “You’d better see what you can do about it.” It was a hot spring night and I had just flown down from Washington, expecting to board a transatlantic plane which was scheduled to take off at midnight.

“There must be some mistake,” I said. “I checked on that just before I left Washington.” Craig went with me to the counter where I asked the pretty WAVE on duty to look up my name. It wasn’t on her list.

“Let’s see what they know about this at the main office,” she said with an encouraging smile as she dialed Naval Air Transport in Washington. The next ten minutes were grim. The officer at the other end of the line wanted to know with whom I had checked. Had it been someone in his office? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I had to get on that plane. I had important papers which had to be delivered to our Paris office without delay. Was I a courier? Yes, I was—well, that is, almost, I faltered to the WAVE ensign who had been transmitting my replies. “Here, you talk to him,” she said, adding, as she handed me the receiver, “I think he can fix it up.”

After going through the same questions and getting the same answers a second time, the officer in Washington asked to speak to the yeoman who was supervising the loading of the plane. He was called in and I waited on tenterhooks until I heard him say, “Yes, sir, I can make room for the lieutenant and his gear.” Turning the phone over to the WAVE, he asked with a reassuring grin, “Feel better, Lieutenant?”

I was so limp with relief that I scarcely noticed the tall spare man in civilian clothes who had just come up to the counter. “That’s Lindbergh,” said Craig in a low voice. “Do you suppose he’s going over too?”

Half an hour later we trooped out across the faintly lighted field to the C-54 which stood waiting. Lindbergh, dressed now in the olive-drab uniform of a Naval Technician, preceded us up the steps. There were ten of us in all. With the exception of three leather-cushioned chairs, there were only bucket seats. Craig and I settled ourselves in two of these uninviting hollows and began fumbling clumsily with the seat belts. Seeing that we were having trouble, Lindbergh came over and with a friendly smile asked if he could give us a hand. After deftly adjusting our belts, he returned to one of the cushioned seats across the way.

Doors slammed, the engines began to roar and, a few seconds later, we were off. We mounted swiftly into the star-filled sky and, peering out, watched the dark Maryland hills drop away. We dozed despite the discomfort of our bent-over positions and didn’t come to again until the steward roused us several hours later with coffee and sandwiches. Afterward he brought out army cots and motioned to us to set them up if we wanted to stretch out. As soon as we got the cots unfolded and the pegs set in place, he turned out the lights.

Craig was dead to the world in a few minutes but I couldn’t get back to sleep. To the accompaniment of the humming motors, the events of the past weeks began to pass in review: that quiet April afternoon at Western Sea Frontier Headquarters in San Francisco when my overseas orders had come through—those orders I had been waiting for so long, more than a year. It was in March of 1944 that I first learned there was a chance of getting a European assignment, to join the group of officers working with our armies in the “protection and salvaging of artistic monuments in war areas.” That was the cumbersome way it was described. The President had appointed a commission with a long name, but it came to be known simply as the Roberts Commission. Justice Roberts of the Supreme Court was the head of it. It was the first time in history that a country had taken such precautions to safeguard cultural monuments lying in the paths of its invading armies.

It was the commission’s job to recommend to the War Department servicemen whose professional qualifications fitted them for this work. I had been in the Navy for two years. Before that I had been director of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, one of San Francisco’s two municipal museums of the fine arts. The commission had recommended me, but it was up to me to obtain my own release. I had been in luck on that score. My commanding officer had agreed to let me go. And more important, my wife had too. Only Francesca had wanted to know why Americans should be meddling with Europe’s art treasures. Weren’t there enough museum directors over there to take care of things? Of course there were in normal times. But now they needed men in uniform—to go in with the armies.

And after all that planning nothing had happened, until three weeks ago. Then everything had happened at once. The orders directed me to report to SHAEF for duty with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section, G-5, and additional duty with the Allied Control Council for Germany.

The papers had been full of stories about German salt mines—the big one at Merkers where our troops had found the Nazi gold and the treasures from the Berlin museums. I was going to Germany. Would I find anything like that?

I had flown to Washington to receive last-minute instructions. I was to make the trip across by air and was given an extra allowance of twenty-five pounds to enable me to take along a dozen Baedekers and a quantity of photographic paper for distribution among our officers in the field. I had been introduced to Craig Smyth while in the midst of these final preparations. Like me, he was a naval lieutenant and his orders were identical with mine. He was a grave young Princetonian, formerly on the staff of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

It was raining when we reached Stevensville, Newfoundland, early the next morning. After an hour’s stop we were on our way again. Shortly before noon we struck good weather and all day long sea and sky remained unvaryingly blue. Late in the afternoon we landed on the island of Terceira in the Azores. We had set our watches ahead two hours at Stevensville. Now we set them ahead again. We took off promptly at seven. This was the last lap of the journey—we’d be in Paris in the morning. Presently our fellow passengers settled down for the night. Two of the cushioned chairs were empty, so Craig and I took possession. They were more comfortable than the cots, and as soon as the steward turned out the lights I dropped off to sleep.

It was still dark when I awoke hours later, but there was enough light for me to distinguish two black masses of land rising from the sea. On one, the beacon of a lighthouse revolved with monotonous regularity. We had just passed over two of the Channel Islands. The dawn came rapidly and a pink light edged the eastern horizon. It was not long before we sighted the coast of France. We flew into rosy clouds and, as they billowed about the plane, we caught tantalizing glimpses of the shore line below. The steward pointed out one promontory and told us it was Brest. Soon we had a spectacular view of Mont St. Michel and the long causeway over which I had driven years before on a sketching tour in Normandy. I wondered what had become of Mère Poulard and her wonderful omelettes and lobster. Some people said they had brought more visitors to Mont St. Michel than the architecture. Very likely she was dead and the Germans had probably disposed of her fabulous cuisine.

We had lost two more hours in the course of the night, so it was only seven-thirty when we swooped down at Orly field, half an hour from Paris. It was a beautiful morning and the sun was so bright that it took us a few minutes to get accustomed to the glare. As we walked over to the airport office, we had our first glimpse of war damage at close range—bombed-out hangars and, scattered about the field, the wreckage of German planes. But the airport was being repaired rapidly. Trim new offices had been built and additional barracks were nearing completion. Craig and I booked places on the afternoon plane for London and then climbed onto the bus waiting to take us into Paris.

Thanks to various delays in getting out of Washington, we had missed the Paris celebration of VE-Day by a margin of three days. So we were about to see the wonderful old city at the beginning of a period of readjustment. But a peaceful Sunday morning is no time to judge any city—least of all Paris. Everything looked the same. The arcades along the right side of the Rue de Rivoli and the gardens at the left were empty, as one would expect them to be. We turned into the Rue Castiglione and came to a halt by the column in the Place Vendôme.

After we had checked our bags at the ATC office, we walked over to the Red Cross Club on the Place de la Concorde. We shaved, washed and then had doughnuts and coffee in the canteen.

Our next move was to call Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Webb, the British officer who was head of the MFA&A Section at SHAEF headquarters in Versailles. Before the war, Colonel Webb had been Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge. I explained to him that Smyth and I had arrived but that our orders directed us to report first to Naval Headquarters in London—ComNavEu—and that as soon as we had complied with them we would be back. That was all right with the colonel. He said that Lieutenant Kuhn, USNR, his deputy, was away on a three-day field trip and wouldn’t be returning before the middle of the week. And we were primarily Charlie Kuhn’s problem.

With that formality out of the way, we retrieved our luggage and wheedled the ATC into giving us transportation to the Royal Monceau, the Navy hotel out near the Étoile. It was time to relax and luxuriate in the thought that it was May and that we were in Paris—that climatic and geographic combination so long a favorite theme of song-writers. I thought about this as we drove along the Champs Élysées. The song writers had something, all right—Paris in May was a wonderful sight. But they had been mooning about a gala capital filled with carefree people, and the Paris of May 1945 wasn’t like that. Architecturally, the city was as elegant as ever, but the few people one saw along the streets looked anything but carefree. And there were no taxis. Taxis have always seemed to me as much a part of Paris as the buildings themselves. In spite of a superficial sameness, Paris had an air of empty magnificence that made one think of a beautiful woman struck dumb by shock. I wondered if my thoughts were running away with me, but found that Craig’s impressions were much the same.

These musings were cut short by our arrival at the hotel. The Navy had done all right for itself. The same efficient French staff that had presided over this de luxe establishment in prewar days was still in charge. I left the Baedekers and photographic paper for Charlie Kuhn, and then Craig and I walked to Naval Headquarters in the Rue Presbourg. There we attended to routine matters in connection with our orders. It was almost noon by the time we got squared away, so we retraced our steps to the Monceau. Lunch there was a demonstration of what a French chef could do with GI food.

Midafternoon found us headed back to Orly in a Navy jeep. Our plane was scheduled to leave at four. This was no bucket-seat job, but a luxurious C-47 equipped with chairs of the Pullman-car variety, complete with antimacassars. We landed at Bovingdon less than two hours later and from there took a bus up to London. Naval Headquarters was in Grosvenor Square. With the American Embassy on one side of it, the Navy on another, and the park in the center used by the Navy motor pool, the dignified old square was pretty thoroughly Americanized.

London was still crowded with our armed forces. The hotels were full, so we were assigned to lodgings in Wimpole Street. These were on the third floor of a pleasant, eighteenth century house, within a stone’s throw of No. 50, where Elizabeth Barrett had been wooed and won by Robert Browning. An inspection of our quarters revealed that the plumbing was of the Barrett-Browning period; but the place was clean and, anyway, it wasn’t likely that we’d be spending much time there. It had been a long day and we were too tired to think of anything beyond getting a bite to eat and hitting the sack.

For our two days in London we had “Queen’s weather”—brilliant sunshine and cloudless skies. Our first port of call early the next morning was the Medical Office, where we were given various inoculations. From there Craig and I went across the square to the American Embassy for a long session with Sumner Crosby, at that time acting as the liaison between the Roberts Commission and its British counterpart, the Macmillan Committee. Sumner provided us with a great deal of useful information. The latest reports from Germany indicated that caches of looted art were being uncovered from day to day. The number of these hiding places ran into the hundreds. The value of their contents was, of course, incalculable. Only a fraction of the finds had as yet been released to the press.

Craig and I began licking our chops at the prospect of what lay ahead. Had we made a mistake in planning to stay two days in London? Perhaps we could get a plane back to Paris that evening. Sumner thought not. There were several things for us to do on the spot, things that would be of use to us in our future activities. One was to call on Colonel Sir Leonard Woolley, the British archaeologist who, with his wife, was doing important work for the Macmillan Committee. Another was to see Jim Plaut, a naval lieutenant at the London office of OSS. He would probably have valuable information about German museum personnel. It would be helpful to know the whereabouts of certain German scholars, specifically those whose records were, from our point of view, “clean.”

Sumner made several appointments for us and then hurried off to keep one of his own. Craig and I stayed on at the office to study the reports. Sumner had already given us the glittering highlights. By noon our heads were filled with facts and figures that made E. Phillips Oppenheim seem positively unimaginative. And The Arabian Nights—that was just old stuff.

It was late afternoon when we finished calling on the various people Sumner had advised us to see, but plenty of time remained to do a little sightseeing before dinner. The cabbie took us past Buckingham Palace, along the Embankment, Birdcage Walk, the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and finally to St. Paul’s. What we saw was enough to give a cruel picture of the damage the Germans had inflicted on the fine old monuments of London.

Craig and I flew back to Orly the following evening, arriving too late to obtain transportation into Paris. We spent an uncomfortable night in the barracks at the airport and drove to the Royal Monceau early the next morning. It was stiflingly hot and I was in a bad humor in spite of the soothing effect of a short haircut—the kind Francesca said needed a couple of saber scars to make it look right. My spirits fell still lower when Craig and I were told that we could stay only two nights at the hotel. Since we were assigned to SHAEF, it was up to the Army to billet us. It seemed rather unfriendly of the Navy, but that’s the way it was and there wasn’t anything we could do about it.

After lunch we set out for Versailles in a Navy jeep. It was a glorious day despite the heat, and the lovely drive through the Bois and on past Longchamps made us forget our irritation at the Navy’s lack of hospitality. The office of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section was in two tiny “between-floor” rooms in the Grandes Écuries—the big stables which, together with their matching twin, the Petites Écuries, face the main palace.

When we arrived Colonel Webb was deep in conference with a lady war correspondent. The tall, rangy colonel, who reminded me of a humorous and grizzled giraffe, came out to welcome Craig and me. His cordiality was overwhelming at first, but we soon learned the reason. Miss Bonney, the correspondent, was giving the colonel a bad time and he needed moral support. She was firing a rapid barrage of searching questions, and in some cases the colonel didn’t want to answer. I was fascinated by his technique. He obviously didn’t wish to offend his inquisitor, but on the other hand he wasn’t going to be pressed for an expression of opinion on certain subjects. At times he would parry her query with one of his own. At others he would snort some vague reply which got lost in a hearty laugh. Before the interview was over, it was Miss Bonney who was answering the questions—often her own—not the colonel.

Neither Craig nor I could make much of what we heard, but after Miss Bonney’s departure the colonel took us into his confidence. Somewhere this indomitable lady had got hold of stray bits of information which, properly pieced together, made one of the most absorbing stories of the war, as far as Nazi looting of art treasures was concerned. The time was not yet ripe to break the story, according to the colonel, so it had been up to him to avoid giving answers which would have filled in the missing pieces of the puzzle.

Then the colonel proceeded to tell us about the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, the infamous “task force”—to translate the word literally—organized under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg, the “ideological and spiritual leader” of the Reich, for the methodical plundering of the great Jewish collections and the accumulated artistic wealth of other recognized “enemies of the state.” Rosenberg was officially responsible for cultural treasures confiscated in the occupied countries. He had virtually unlimited resources at his command. In the fall of 1940, not long after his appointment, Rosenberg received a congratulatory letter from Göring in which the Reichsmarschall promised to support energetically the work of his staff and to place at its disposal “means of transportation and guard personnel,” and specifically assured him the “utmost assistance” of the Luftwaffe. Even before the war, German agents had accumulated exhaustive information concerning collections which were later to be confiscated. The whereabouts of every object of artistic importance was known. Paintings, sculpture, tapestries, furniture, porcelain, enamels, jewels, gold and silver—all were a matter of record. When the Nazis occupied Paris, the Rosenberg Task Force was able to go into operation with clocklike precision. And so accurate was their information that in many instances they even knew the hiding places in which their more foresighted victims had concealed their valuables.

The headquarters of the E.R.R.[1] had been set up in the Musée du Jeu de Paume, the little museum in the corner of the Tuileries Gardens overlooking the Place de la Concorde. The large staff was composed mainly of Germans, but some of the members were French. Looted treasures poured into the building, to be checked, labeled and shipped off to Germany. But it was more than a clearing house. The choicest things were placed on exhibition and to these displays the top-flight Nazis were invited—to select whatever caught their fancy. Hitler had first choice, Göring second.

It did not occur to the members of the E.R.R. staff that their every move was watched. A courageous Frenchwoman named Rose Valland had ingratiated herself with the “right people” and had become a trusted member of the staff. During the months she worked at the museum, she had two main objectives. One was to sabotage the daily work as much as possible by making intentionally stupid mistakes and by encouraging the French laborers, engaged by the Germans, to do likewise. The other, and far and away the more important, was the compilation of a file, complete with biographical data and photographs, of the German personnel at the Jeu de Paume. How she ever accomplished this is a mystery. The colonel said that Mlle. Valland, now a captain in the French Army, was working with the official French committee for Fine Arts. She had already provided our Versailles office with a copy of her E.R.R. file. Later in the summer I met Captain Valland, a robust woman with gray hair and the most penetrating brown eyes I have ever seen. I asked her how she had ever had the courage to do what she had done. She said with a laugh, “I could never do it again. The Gestapo followed me home every night.”

After regaling us with this account of the E.R.R., Colonel Webb whetted our appetites still further with an outline of what his deputy, Charlie Kuhn, was up to. As the result of a “signal,” he had taken off by plane for Germany, and at the moment was either in the eastern part of Bavaria or over the Austrian border, trying to trace two truckloads of paintings and tapestries which two high-ranking Nazis had spirited away from the Laufen salt mine at the eleventh hour. Latest information indicated that the finest things from the Vienna Museum had been stored at Laufen, which was in the mountains east of Salzburg; and it was further believed that the “top cream” of the stuff—the Breughels, Titians and Velásquezes—was in those two trucks. These pictures were world-famous and consequently not marketable, so there was the appalling possibility that the highjackers had carried them off with the idea of destroying them—Hitler’s mad Götterdämmerung idea. There was also the possibility that they intended to hold the pictures as a bribe against their own safety.

Back at the hotel that night, Craig and I reviewed the events of the day. What we had learned from Colonel Webb was only an affirmation of the exciting things we had gleaned from the reports in the London office. We were desperately anxious to get into Germany where we could be a part of all these unbelievable adventures instead of hearing about them secondhand. Strict censorship was still in force, so we weren’t able to share our exuberance with our respective families in letters home. But we could at least exult together over the fantastic future shaping up before us.

We found Charlie Kuhn at the office the next morning. He was a tall quiet fellow with a keen sense of humor, whom I had first known when we had been fellow students at Harvard back in the twenties. During the intervening years we had met only at infrequent intervals. He had remained to teach and had become an outstanding member of the Fine Arts faculty in Cambridge, while I had gone to a museum. His special field of scholarship was German painting and it was this attribute which had led the Roberts Commission to nominate him for his present assignment as Deputy Chief of the MFA&A Section. He had already been in the Navy for two years when this billet was offered him. Notwithstanding his obvious qualifications for his present job, he had so distinguished himself in the earlier work upon which he had been engaged—special interrogation of German prisoners—that it had required White House intervention to “liberate” him for his new duties. No closeted scholar, Charlie chafed under the irritations of administrative and personnel problems which occupied most of his time.

That morning at Versailles he was fresh from his adventures in the field, and we buttonholed him for a firsthand account. Yes, the trucks had been located. They had been abandoned by the roadside, but everything had been found intact. The reports had not been exaggerated: the trucks had contained some of the finest of the Vienna pictures and also some of the best tapestries. They were now in a warehouse at Salzburg and would probably remain there until they could be returned to Vienna. As to their condition, the pictures were all right; the tapestries had mildewed a bit, but the damage wasn’t serious.

It was hard to settle down to the humdrum of office routine after his recital of these adventures. Charlie said he wanted to ship us off to Germany as soon as possible because there was so much to be done and so few officers were available.

It turned out that we weren’t destined for nearly so swift an invasion of Germany as we had hoped. Later that afternoon Charlie received a letter from the Medical Officer at Naval Headquarters in Paris informing him that Lieutenants Howe and Smyth had not completed their course of typhus shots, and that he would not recommend their being sent into Germany until thirty days after the second and final shot. Charlie wanted to know what this was all about, and we had to admit that we had not been given typhus injections before leaving the States, and had only received the first one in London. After deliberating about it most of the following morning, Colonel Webb and Charlie decided that, if we were willing to take the chance, they’d cut the waiting period to ten days. We were only too willing.

Craig and I made good use of the waiting period. We were put to work on the reports submitted at regular intervals by our officers in the field. These reports contained information concerning art repositories. It was our job to keep the card file on them up to date; to make a card for each new one; to sort out and place in a separate file those which had become obsolete; to check duplications. Each card bore the name of the place, a brief description of the contents, and a map reference consisting of two co-ordinates. In Germany there was much duplication in the names of small towns and villages, so these map references were of great importance.

There was also a file on outstanding works of art which were known to have been carried off by the Germans or hidden away for safekeeping, but the whereabouts of which were as yet unknown—such things, for example, as the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, the Michelangelo Madonna and Child from Bruges, the Ghent altarpiece, the treasure from the Cathedral of Metz, the stained glass from Strasbourg Cathedral, and the Veit Stoss altarpiece. The list read like an Almanach de Gotha of the art world.

So far as our creature comforts were concerned, they suffered a great decline when we moved out to Versailles. Our lodging there was a barren, four-story house at No. 1 Rue Berthier. Craig had a room on the ground floor, while I shared one under the eaves with Charlie Kuhn. Judging from the signs still tacked up in various parts of the house, it had been used as a German billet during the occupation; and judging by its meager comforts, only the humblest ranks had been quartered there. No spruce Prussian would have put up with such austerity. A couple of British soldiers also were living there. They were batmen for two officers quartered in a near-by hotel and, for a hundred francs a week, they agreed to do for us as well. They brought us hot water in the morning, polished our shoes each day and pressed our uniforms.

Outwardly our life was rather magnificent, for we usually had our meals at the Trianon Palace Hotel just inside the park grounds. It was a pleasant walk from the Rue Berthier, and an even pleasanter one from the office, involving a short cut behind the main palace and across the lovely gardens. On the whole the gardens had been well kept up and a stroll about the terraces or through the long allées was something to look forward to when the weather was fine. Craig and I got into the habit of retiring to a quiet corner of the gardens after work with our German books. There we would quiz each other for an hour or two a day. We made occasional trips into Paris but, more often than not, we followed a routine in which the bright lights—what few there were—played little part.

At the end of our ten-day “incubation” period, Charlie gave us our instructions. We were to go to Frankfurt by air and from there to Bad Homburg by car. At Bad Homburg we were to report to ECAD headquarters, that is, the European Civil Affairs Division, where we would be issued further orders. As members of a pool of officers attached to ECAD, we could be shifted about from one part of Germany to another.

Charlie told us that he and Colonel Webb would be moving to Frankfurt in a few days as SHAEF Headquarters was soon to be set up there. The MFA&A office would continue to function with a joint British and American staff until the dissolution of SHAEF later in the summer. But that would not take place, he said, until the four zones of occupation had been established.

We left for the airport at six-thirty in the morning. Our French driver asked us which airport we wanted. Craig and I looked at each other in surprise. What field was there besides Orly? The answer was Villacoublay. We had never heard of it, so we said Orly. We couldn’t have been more wrong. When we finally reached Villacoublay we found great confusion. We couldn’t even find out whether our plane had taken off.

After making three attempts to get a coherent answer from the second lieutenant who appeared to be quietly going mad behind the information counter, I gave up.

“This is where you take over, Craig,” I said. I had suddenly developed an evil headache and had lost all interest in going any place. I walked over to my luggage, which I had dumped in front of the building, and plunked myself down on top of it, put on dark glasses and went to sleep. An hour later, Craig shook me.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ve found a B-17 that’s going to Frankfurt.” We piled our gear onto a truck and rumbled out over the bumpy field for a distance of half a mile. One of the B-17’s crew was sitting unconcernedly in the grass.

“We’d like to go to Frankfurt,” said Craig.

“Okay,” he said, “we’ll be going along pretty soon.” He was disconcertingly casual. But the trip wasn’t. We ran into heavy fog and got lost, so it took us nearly three hours to make the run which shouldn’t have taken more than two.

We finally landed in a green meadow near Hanau. Craig said he’d look for transportation if I’d stand guard over our luggage. It was an agreeable assignment. The day was warm, the meadow soft and inviting. I took out my German book and a chocolate bar, curled up in the grass and hoped he’d be gone a long time.

Craig came back an hour and a half later with a jeep. We were about twenty miles outside Frankfurt. On the way in the driver said that the city had been eighty percent destroyed. He hadn’t exaggerated. As we turned into the Mainzer Landstrasse, we saw nothing but gutted buildings on either side. We continued up the Taunus Anlage and I recognized the Opera House ahead. At first I thought it was undamaged. Then I saw that the roof was gone, and only the outer walls remained. Most of the buildings were like that. This was just the shell of a city.

Our first stop was SHAEF headquarters, newly established in the vast I. G. Farben building which, either by accident or design, was completely undamaged. There we got another car to take us to Bad Homburg.

The little resort town where the fashionable world of Edward VII’s day had gone to drink the waters and enjoy the mineral baths consisted mostly of hotels. Some of them were occupied by our troops. Others were being used as hospitals for wounded German soldiers. The big Kurhaus had received a direct hit, but the rest of the buildings appeared to be undamaged.

At ECAD headquarters we were assigned a billet in the Grand Hotel Parc. That sounded pretty snappy to us—another Royal Monceau, maybe. The billeting officer must have guessed our thoughts, because he shook his head glumly and said, “’Tain’t anything special. Don’t get your hopes up.”

It was nice of him to have prepared us for the rat hole which was the Grand Hotel Parc. This shabby structure, built around three sides of a narrow courtyard, had an air of vanished refinement about it, but it could hardly have rated a star in Baedeker. Yet it must have had a certain cachet fifty years ago, for in the entrance hallway hung a white marble plaque. Its dim gold letters told us that Bismarck’s widow had spent her declining years “in peaceful happiness beneath this hospitable roof.”

Our room was on the fourth floor. The stairs, reminiscent of a lighthouse, might have been designed for a mountain goat. We thought we had struck the ultimate in drabness at the Rue Berthier, but this was worse. The room itself was worthy of its approach. When I opened the big wardrobe I half expected a body to fall out. Two sofas masquerading as beds occupied corners by the window. The window gave onto the dingy courtyard. We silently made up our beds with Army blankets and sprinkled them lavishly with DDT powder.

“Do you suppose there’s such a thing as a bathroom?” Craig asked.

“I’d sooner expect to find one in an igloo,” I said. “Maybe there’s a pump or a trough somewhere out in back. Why don’t you go and see?”

The Residenz at Würzburg. The palace of the Prince-Bishops was gutted by fire in March 1945. The magnificent ceiling by Tiepolo miraculously escaped serious damage.

Ruined Frankfurt. In the center, the cathedral. Only the tower and the walls of the nave remain standing.

International News Photo

The Central Collecting Point at Munich, formerly the Administration Building of the Nazi Party. The director of the Central Collecting Point was Lieutenant Craig Smyth, USNR.

A typical storage room in the Central Collecting Point at Munich. The racks for pictures were built by civilian carpenters under the direction of American Monuments officers.

When he returned fifteen minutes later he was in high spirits. “There’s a bathroom all right and it’s got hot water,” he said, “but you have to be a combination of Theseus and Daniel Boone to find it. Come along, I’ll show you the way.”

It was clever of him to find it a second time. I took a piece of red crayon with me and marked little arrows on the walls to show which turns to make. They were a timesaver to us during the next couple days.

After breakfast the next morning, we telephoned 12th Army Group Headquarters in Wiesbaden and talked with Lieutenant George Stout, USNR, who, with Captain Bancel La Farge, was in charge of the advance office of MFA&A in Germany. Stout suggested that we come on over. It was a pleasant drive along the Autobahn, with the blue Taunus mountains in the distance. Parts of Wiesbaden had been badly mauled, but the destruction was negligible compared with Frankfurt. Although many buildings along the main streets had been hit, the colonnaded Kurhaus, now a Red Cross Club, was intact. So was the Opera House.

We found George on the top floor of a dingy building in the center of the town. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years but he hadn’t changed. His face was a healthy brown, his eyes were as keen and his teeth as dazzlingly white as ever. George was in his middle forties. His oldest boy was in the Navy but George didn’t look a day over thirty. The Roberts Commission had played in luck when they had got him. Of course he was an obvious choice—tops in his field, the technical care and preservation of pictures. He was known and respected throughout the world for his brilliant research work at Harvard, where he presided over the laboratory of the Fogg Museum.

“Bancel’s got jobs lined up for you fellows, but I think he’d like to tell you about them himself,” George said. “He ought to be back tonight.”

“Can’t you tell us in a general way what they are?” I asked.

“I think one of them is going to be in Frankfurt and the other will probably be in Munich. You see, all the stuff from the Merkers mine is in the vaults of the Reichsbank at Frankfurt and it ought to be moved to a place where it can be permanently stored.”

The “stuff” he referred to was the enormous collection of paintings and sculpture—comprising the principal treasures of the Berlin museums—which George himself had brought out of the Merkers mine in Thuringia. He had carried out the operation virtually singlehanded and in the face of extraordinary difficulties just before the end of hostilities.

“As for Munich,” he continued, “repositories are springing up like mushrooms all through Bavaria. Most of it is loot and we’re going to have to set up some kind of depot where we can put the things until they can be returned to the countries from which the Nazis stole them.”

“What are your plans?” I asked.

“Well, if the trucks show up,” he said, “I want to get started for Siegen this afternoon. That’s in Westphalia. It’s another mine—copper, not salt—and it’s full of things from the Rhineland museums. I’ve got to take them up to Marburg. We have two good depots there.”

We lunched with George and then returned to Bad Homburg. There wasn’t anything for us to do but wait around until we heard from Captain La Farge. To fill in the time we took our German books and spent the afternoon studying in the Kurpark.

The telephone was ringing in the entrance lobby as we walked in at five. It was Captain La Farge. He had just returned and wanted to see us at once. I said I didn’t know whether we could get transportation. He chuckled and said, “Tell them a general wants to see you.” Craig and I dashed over to the Transportation Office and tried it out. It worked. So, for the second time that day, we found ourselves on the road to Wiesbaden.

Captain La Farge was waiting for us in the office where we had seen George that morning. He was a tall, slender man in his early forties. With a high-domed head and a long, rather narrow face, he was the classic New Englander. His eyes were hazel and, at that first meeting, very weary. But he had one of the most ingratiating smiles and one of the most pleasant voices I had ever heard. He reminded me of an early Copley portrait.

Without much preamble he launched into a detailed explanation of the plans he had for us.

“I want you to take over the Frankfurt job,” he said to me, “and I am sending you down to Munich, Smyth. As George probably told you, we’ve got to set up two big depots. The one in Frankfurt will be mainly for German-owned art which is now coming in from repositories all over this part of Germany. The one in Munich will be chiefly for loot, though there will be German-owned things down in Bavaria too. Both jobs are equally interesting, equally important and, above all, equally urgent.”

We were to get started without delay. Craig would be attached to the Regional Military Government office in Munich, I to the Military Government Detachment in Frankfurt. Captain La Farge suggested that I investigate the possibility of requisitioning the university buildings for a depot, and advised Craig to consider one of the large Nazi party buildings in Munich which he had been told was available.

On the way home that night Craig and I compared notes on our new assignments. I was frankly envious of Craig, not only because there was something alluring about all that loot, but because I loved Munich and the picturesque country around it. In turn, Craig thought I had drawn a fascinating job—one that involved handling the wonderful riches of Berlin’s “Kaiser Friedrich,” admittedly one of the world’s greatest museums.

The following morning we parted on the steps of the Grand Parc Hotel. Craig took off first, in a jeep with trailer attached, a crusty major for his companion. Half an hour later a jeep appeared for me. On the way over to Frankfurt I thought about the experiences of the past three weeks. It had been fun sharing them with Craig and I wished that we might have continued this odyssey together. I didn’t realize how soon our paths were to cross again.

(2)
ASSIGNED TO FRANKFURT

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.

The bronze coffin of Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was found in a mine near Bernterode.

Canova’s life-size marble statue of Napoleon’s sister was found at the monastery of Hohenfurth.

The administration buildings at the salt mine at Alt Aussee, Austria. Removal of stolen art treasures from the mine was carried out late in 1945.

Truck at entrance to the main building of the mine is being loaded with paintings, to be taken to Munich for dispersal to their owner nations.

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.

(3)
MUNICH AND THE BEGINNING OF FIELD WORK

The next morning I was up before six and had early breakfast. It was a wonderful day for the trip, brilliantly clear. The corporal in our office took me out to the airfield, the one near Hanau where Craig Smyth and I had landed weeks before. It was going to be fun to see Craig again and find out what he had been up to since we had parted that morning in Bad Homburg. The drive to the airfield took about forty-five minutes. There was a wait of half an hour at the field, and it was after ten when we took off in our big C-47. We flew over little villages with red roofs, occasionally a large town—but none that I could identify—and now and then a silvery lake.

Just before we reached Munich, someone said, “There’s Dachau.” Directly below us, on one side of a broad sweep of dark pine trees, we saw a group of low buildings and a series of fenced-in enclosures. On that sunny morning the place looked deserted and singularly peaceful. Yet only a few weeks before it had been filled with the miserable victims of Nazi brutality.

In another ten minutes we landed on the dusty field of the principal Munich airport. Most of the administration buildings had a slightly battered look but were in working order. It was a welcome relief to take refuge from the blazing sunshine in the cool hallway of the main building. The imposing yellow brick lobby was decorated with painted shields of the different German states or “Länder.” The arms of Bavaria, Saxony, Hesse-Nassau and the rest formed a colorful frieze around the walls.

A conveyance of some kind was scheduled to leave for town in a few minutes. Meanwhile there were sandwiches and coffee for the plane passengers. By the time we had finished, a weapons carrier had pulled up before the entrance. Several of us climbed into its dust-encrusted interior. It took me a little while to get my bearings as we drove toward Munich. I had spotted the familiar pepper-pot domes of the Frauenkirche from the air but had recognized no other landmark of the flat, sprawling city which I had known well before the war.

It was not until we turned into the broad Prinz Regenten-Strasse that I knew exactly where I was. As we drove down this handsome avenue, I got a good look at a long, colonnaded building of white stone. The roof was draped with what appeared to be an enormous, dark green fishnet. The billowing scallops of the net flapped about the gleaming cornice of the building. It was the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the huge exhibition gallery dedicated by Hitler in the middle thirties to the kind of art of which he approved—an art in which there was no place for untrammeled freedom of expression, only the pictorial and plastic representation of all the Nazi regime stood for. The dangling fishnet was part of the elaborate camouflage. I judged from the condition of the building that the net had admirably served its purpose.

In a moment we rounded the corner by the Prinz Karl Palais. Despite the disfiguring coat of ugly olive paint which covered its classic façade, it had not escaped the bombs. The little palace, where Mussolini had stayed, had a hollow, battered look and the formal garden behind it was a waste of furrowed ground and straggling weeds. We turned left into the wide Ludwig-Strasse and came to a grinding halt beside a bleak gray building whose walls were pockmarked with artillery fire. I asked our driver if this were Lucky Rear headquarters and was told curtly that it wasn’t, but that it was the end of the line. It was MP headquarters and I’d have to see if they’d give me a car to take me to my destination, which the driver said was “’way the hell” on the other side of town.

Before going inside I looked down the street to the left. The familiar old buildings were still standing, but they were no longer the trim, cream-colored structures which had once given that part of the city such a clean, orderly air. Most of them were burned out. Farther along on the right, the Theatinerkirche was masked with scaffolding. At the end of the street the Feldherren-Halle, Ludwig I’s copy of the Loggia dei Lanzi, divested of its statuary, reared its columns in the midst of the desolation.

It was gray and cool in the rooms of the MP building, but the place was crowded. Soldiers were everywhere and things seemed to be at sixes and sevens. After making several inquiries and being passed from one desk to another, I finally got hold of a brisk young sergeant to whom I explained my troubles. At first he said there wasn’t a chance of getting a ride out to Lucky Rear. Every jeep was tied up and would be for hours. They had just moved into Munich and hadn’t got things organized yet. Then all at once he relented and with a grin said, “Oh, you’re Navy, aren’t you? In that case I’ll have to fix you up somehow. We can’t have the Navy saying the Army doesn’t co-operate.”

He walked over to a window that looked down on the courtyard below, shouted instructions to someone and then told me I’d find a jeep and driver outside. “Think nothing of it, Lieutenant,” he said in answer to my thanks. “Maybe I’ll be wanting a ship to take me home one of these days before long. Have to keep on the good side of the Navy.”

In the Kaiser Josef chamber of the Alt Aussee mine Karl Sieber and Lieutenant Kern view Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, stolen from a church at Bruges.

Lieutenants Kovalyak, Stout and Howe pack the Michelangelo Madonna for return to Bruges. The statue was restored to the Church of Notre Dame in September of 1945.

The famous Ghent altarpiece by van Eyck was flown from the Alt Aussee mine to Belgium in the name of Eisenhower as a token restitution.

Karl Sieber, German restorer, Lieutenant Kern, American Monuments officer, and Max Eder, Austrian engineer, examine the panels of the Ghent altarpiece stored in the Alt Aussee mine.

On my way out I gathered up my luggage from the landing below and climbed into the waiting jeep. We turned the corner and followed the Prinz Regenten-Strasse to the river. I noticed for the first time that a temporary track had been laid along one side. This had been done, the driver said, in order to cart away the rubble which had accumulated in the downtown section. We turned right and followed the Isar for several blocks, crossed to the left over the Ludwig bridge, then drove out the Rosenheimer-Strasse to the east for a distance of about three miles. Our destination was the enormous complex of buildings called the Reichszeugmeisterei, or Quartermaster Corps buildings, in which the rear echelon of General Patton’s Third Army had just established its headquarters.

Even in the baking sunlight of that June day, the place had a cold, unfriendly appearance. We halted for identification at the entrance, and there I was introduced to Third Army discipline. One of the guards gave me a black look and growled, “Put your cap on.” Startled by this burly order, I hastily complied and then experienced a feeling of extreme irritation at having been so easily cowed. I could at least have asked him to say “sir.”

The driver, sensing my discomfiture, remarked good-naturedly, “You’ll get used to that sort of thing around here, sir. They’re very, very fussy now that the shooting’s over. Seems like they don’t have anything else to worry about, except enforcing a lot of regulations.” This was my first sample of what I learned to call by its popular name, “chicken”—a prudent abbreviation for the exasperating rules and regulations one finds at an Army headquarters. Third Army had its share of them—perhaps a little more than its share. But I didn’t find that out all at once. It took me all of two days.

My driver let me out in front of the main building, over the central doorway of which the emblem of the Third Army was proudly displayed—a bold “A” inside a circle. The private at the information desk had never heard of the “Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section,” but said that if it was a part of G-5 it would be on the fifth floor. I found the office of the Assistant Chief of Staff and was directed to a room at the end of a corridor at least two blocks long. I was told that the officer I should see was Captain Robert Posey. I knew that name from the reports I had studied at Versailles, as well as from a magazine article describing his discovery, months before, of some early frescoes in the little Romanesque church of Mont St. Martin which had been damaged by bombing. The article had been written by an old friend of mine, Lincoln Kirstein, who was connected with the MFA&A work in Europe.

When I opened the door of the MFA&A office, George Stout was standing in the middle of the room. The expression of surprise on his face changed to relief after he had read the letter I handed him from Charlie Kuhn.

“You couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time,” he said. “I came down from Alt Aussee today to see Posey, but I just missed him. He left this morning for a conference in Frankfurt. I wanted to find out what had happened to the armed escort he promised me for my convoys. We’re evacuating the mine and desperately shorthanded, so I’ve got to get back tonight. It’s a six-hour drive.”

“Charlie said you needed help. What do you want me to do?” I asked. I hoped he would take me along.

“I’d like to have you stay here until we get this escort problem straightened out. I was promised two half-tracks, but they didn’t show up this morning. I’ve got a call in about them right now. It’s three o’clock. I ought to make Salzburg by five-thirty. There’ll surely be some word about the escort by that time, and I’ll phone you from there.”

Before he left, George introduced me to Lieutenant Colonel William Hamilton, the Assistant Chief of Staff, and explained to him that I had come down on special orders from SHAEF to help with the evacuation work. George told the colonel that I would be joining him at the mine as soon as Captain Posey returned and provided me with the necessary clearance. After we had left Colonel Hamilton’s office, I asked George what he meant by “clearance.” He laughed and said that I would have to obtain a written permit from Posey before I could operate in Third Army territory. As Third Army’s Monuments Officer, Posey had absolute jurisdiction in all matters pertaining to the fine arts in the area occupied by his Army. At that time it included a portion of Austria which later came under General Mark Clark’s command.

“Don’t worry,” said George. “I’ll have you at the mine in a few days, and you’ll probably be sorry you ever laid eyes on the place.”

I went back to the MFA&A office and was about to settle down at Captain Posey’s vacant desk. I looked across to a corner of the room where a lanky enlisted man sat hunched up at a typewriter. It was Lincoln Kirstein, looking more than ever like a world-weary Rachmaninoff. Lincoln a private in the U. S. Army! What a far cry from the world of modern art and the ballet! He was thoroughly enjoying my astonishment.

“This is a surprise, but it explains a lot of things,” I said, dragging a chair over to his desk. “So you are the Svengali of the Fine Arts here at Third Army.”

“You mustn’t say things like that around this headquarters,” he said apprehensively.

During the next two hours we covered a lot of territory. First of all, I wanted to know why he was an enlisted man chained to a typewriter. With his extraordinary intelligence and wide knowledge of the Fine Arts, he could have been more useful as an officer. He said that he had applied for a commission and had been turned down. I was sorry I had brought up the subject, but knowing Lincoln’s fondness for the dramatic I thought it quite possible that he had wanted to be able to say in later years that he had gone through the war as an enlisted man. He agreed that he could have been of greater service to the Fine Arts project as an officer.

Then I asked him what his “boss”—he was to be mine too—was like. He said that Captain Posey, an architect in civilian life, had had a spectacular career during combat. In the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, such as lack of personnel and transportation and especially the lack of any real co-operation from the higher-ups, he had accomplished miracles. Now that the press was devoting more and more space to the work the Monuments officers were doing—the discovery of treasures in salt mines and so on—they were beginning to pay loving attention to Captain Posey around the headquarters.

I gathered from Lincoln that the present phase of our activities appealed to the captain less than the protection and repair of historic monuments under fire. If true, this was understandable enough. He was an architect. Why would he, except as a matter of general cultural interest, find work that lay essentially in the domain of a museum man particularly absorbing? It seemed reasonable to assume that Captain Posey would welcome museum men to shoulder a part of the burden. But I was to learn later that my assumption was not altogether correct.

Eventually I had to interrupt our conversation. It was getting late, and still no word about the escort vehicles. Lincoln told me where I would find the officer who was to have called George. He was Captain Blyth, a rough-and-ready kind of fellow, an ex-trooper from the state of Virginia. The outlook was not encouraging. No vehicles were as yet available. Finally, at six o’clock, he rang up to say that he wouldn’t know anything before morning.

Lincoln returned from chow, I gave him the message in case George called while I was out and went down to eat. It was after eight when George telephoned. The connection from Salzburg was bad, and so was his temper when I told him I had nothing to report.

Lincoln usually spent his evenings at the office. That night we stayed till after eleven. Here and there he had picked up some fascinating German art books and magazines, all of them Nazi publications lavishly illustrated. They bore eloquent testimony to Hitler’s patronage of the arts. The banality of the contemporary work in painting was stultifying—dozens of rosy-cheeked, buxom maidens and stalwart, brown-limbed youths reeking with “strength through joy,” and acres of idyllic landscapes. The sculpture was better, though too often the tendency toward the colossal was tiresomely in evidence. It was in recording the art of the past, notably in the monographs dealing with the great monuments of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, that admirable progress had been made. I asked Lincoln enviously how he had got hold of these things. He answered laconically that he had “liberated” them.

Captain Blyth had good news for me the next morning. Two armored vehicles had left Munich for the mine. I gave the message to George when he called just before noon.

“They’re a little late,” he said. “Thanks to the fine co-operation of the 11th Armored Division, I am being taken care of from this end of the line. I’ll try to catch your fellows in Salzburg and tell them to go back where they came from. I am sending you a letter by the next convoy. It’s about a repository which ought to be evacuated right away. I can’t give you any of the details over the phone without violating security regulations. As soon as Posey gets back, you ought to go to work on it. After that I want you to help me here.”

After George had hung up, I asked Lincoln if he had any idea what repository George had in mind. Lincoln said it might be the monastery at Hohenfurth. It was in Czechoslovakia, just over the border from Austria. While we were discussing this possibility, Craig Smyth walked in.

As soon as he had recovered from the surprise of finding me at Captain Posey’s desk, he explained the reason for his visit. Something had to be done right away about the building he was setting up as a collecting point. He had been promised a twenty-four-hour guard. He had been promised a barrier of barbed wire. So far, Third Army had failed to provide either one. A lot of valuable stuff had already been delivered to the building, and George was sending in more. He couldn’t wait any longer.

“Let’s have a talk with Colonel Hamilton,” I said. As we walked down to the Assistant Chief of Staff’s office, Craig told me that the buildings he had requisitioned were the ones Bancel La Farge had suggested when we saw him at Wiesbaden a month ago.

“Can’t this matter wait until Captain Posey returns?” the colonel asked.

“I am afraid it can’t, sir,” said Craig. “As you know, the two buildings were the headquarters of the Nazi party. The Nazis meant to destroy them before Munich fell. Having failed to do so, I think it quite possible that they may still attempt it. Both buildings are honeycombed with underground passageways. Only this morning we located the exit of one of them. It was half a block from the building. We hadn’t known of its existence before. The works of art stored in the building at present are worth millions of dollars. In the circumstances, I am not willing to accept the responsibility for what may happen to them. I must have guards or a barrier at once.”

The colonel reached for the telephone and gave orders that a cordon of guards was to be placed on the buildings immediately. He made a second call, this time about the barbed wire. When he had finished he told Craig that the guard detail would report that afternoon; the barbed wire would be strung around the building the next morning. We thanked the colonel and returned to Posey’s office.

We found two officers who had just come in from Dachau. They were waiting to see someone connected with Property Control. They had brought with them a flour sack filled with gold wedding rings; a large carton stuffed with gold teeth, bridgework, crowns and braces (in children’s sizes); a sack containing gold coins (for the most part Russian) and American greenbacks. As we looked at these mementos of the concentration camp, I thought of the atrocity film I had seen at Versailles and wondered how anyone could believe that those pictures had been an exaggeration.

I went back with Craig to his office at the Königsplatz. The damage to Munich was worse than I had realized. The great Deutsches Museum by the river was a hollow-eyed specter, but sufficiently intact to house DPs. Aside from its twin towers, little was left of the Frauenkirche. The buildings lining the Brienner-Strasse had been blasted and burned. Along the short block leading from the Carolinen Platz to the Königsplatz, the destruction was total: on the left stood the jagged remnants of the little villa Hitler had given D’Annunzio; on the right was a heap of rubble which had been the Braun Haus. But practically untouched were the two Ehrentempel—the memorials to the “martyrs” of the 1923 beer-hall “putsch.” The colonnades were draped with the same kind of green fishnet that had been used to camouflage the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. The classic façades of the museums on either side of the square—the Glyptothek and the Neue Staatsgalerie—were intact. The buildings themselves were a shambles.

I followed Craig up the broad flight of steps to the entrance of the Verwaltungsbau, or Administration Building. It was three stories high, built of stone, and occupied almost an entire block. True to the Nazi boast, it looked as though it had been built to “last a thousand years.” And it was so plain and massive that I didn’t see how it could change much in that time. There was nothing here that could “grow old gracefully.” The interior matched the exterior. There were two great central courts with marble stairs leading to the floor above.

Although the building had not been bombed, it had suffered severely from concussion. Craig said that when he had moved in two weeks ago the skylights over the courts had been open to the sky. On rainy days one could practically go boating on the first floor. There had been no glass in the windows. Now they had been boarded up or filled in with a translucent material as a substitute. All of the doors had been out of line and would not lock. But the repairs were already well under way and, according to Craig, the place would be shipshape in another month or six weeks. He said that his colleague, Hamilton Coulter, a former New York architect now a naval lieutenant, was directing the work and doing a magnificent job. Even under normal conditions it would have been a staggering task. With glass and lumber at a premium, to say nothing of the scarcity of skilled labor, a less resourceful man would have given up in despair.

Vermeer’s Portrait of the Artist in His Studio in the Alt Aussee mine was purchased by Hitler for his proposed museum. It has been returned to Vienna.

One of the picture storage rooms in the mine, constructed with wooden partitions and racks. The temperature was constant, averaging 40° Fahrenheit in summer, 47° in winter.

Panel from the Louvain altarpiece, Feast of the Passover, by Bouts, was stored at Alt Aussee.

Hitler acquired the Czernin Vermeer for an alleged price of 1,400,000 Reichsmarks.

Craig was rapidly building up a staff of German scholars and museum technicians to assist him in the administration of the establishment. It would soon rival a large American museum in complexity and scope. Storage rooms on the ground floor had been made weatherproof. Paintings and sculpture were already pouring in from the mine at Alt Aussee—six truckloads at a time. In accordance with standard museum practice, Craig had set up an efficient accessioning system. As each object came in, it was identified, marked and listed for future reference. Quarters had been set aside for a photographer. Racks were being built for pictures. A two-storied record room was being converted into a library.

Craig had also requisitioned the “twin” of this colossal building—the Führerbau, where Hitler had had his own offices. This was only a block away on the same street and also faced the Königsplatz. It was connected with the Verwaltungsbau by underground passageways. It was in the Führerbau that the Munich Pact of 1938—the pact that was to have guaranteed “peace in our time”—had been signed. Craig showed me the table at which Mr. Chamberlain had signed that document. Craig was using it now for a conference table.

Repairs were being concentrated on the Administration Building, since its “twin” was being held in reserve for later use. At the moment, however, a few of the rooms were occupied by a small guard detail. The truck drivers and armed guards who came each week with the convoys from the mine were also billeted there.

Just as Craig and I were finishing our inspection of the Führerbau, a convoy of six trucks, escorted by two half-tracks, pulled into the parking space behind the building. The convoy leader had a letter for me. It was the one George Stout had mentioned on the telephone. Lincoln was right. The repository George had in mind was the monastery at Hohenfurth. In his letter he stressed the fact that the evacuation should be undertaken at once. He suggested that I try to persuade Posey to send Lincoln along to help me.

Craig had a comfortable billet in the Kopernikus-Strasse, a four-room flat on the fourth floor of a modern apartment building. The back windows looked onto a garden. Over the tops of the poplar trees beyond, one could see the roof of the Prinz Regenten Theater where, back in the twenties, I had seen my first complete performance of Wagner’s Ring. Craig told me that the theater was undamaged except for the Speisesaal where, in prewar days, lavish refreshments were served during intermissions. That one room had caught a bomb.

I accepted Craig’s invitation to share the apartment with him while in Munich and made myself at home in the dining room. It had a couch, and there was a sideboard which I could use as a chest of drawers. The bathroom was across the hall and he said that the supply of hot water was inexhaustible. By comparison, the officers’ billets at Third Army Headquarters were tenements.

Ham Coulter had similar quarters on the ground floor. We stopped there for a drink on our way to supper at the Military Government Detachment. “Civilized” was the word that best described Ham. He was a tall, broad-shouldered fellow with sleek black hair, finely-chiseled features and keen, gray eyes. When he smiled, his mouth crinkled up at the corners, producing an agreeably sarcastic expression. Ham poured out the drinks with an elegance the ordinary German cognac didn’t deserve. They should have been dry martinis. I liked him at once that first evening, and when I came to know him better I found him the wittiest and most amiable of companions. He and Craig were a wonderful combination. They had the greatest admiration and respect for each other, and during the many months of their work together there was not the slightest disagreement between them.

The officers’ dining room that evening was a noisy place. The clatter of knives and forks and the babble of voices mingled with the rasping strains of popular American tunes pounded out by a Bavarian band. As we were about to sit down, the music stopped abruptly and a second later struck up the current favorite, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time.” Colonel Charles Keegan, the commanding officer, had entered the dining hall. I was puzzled by this until Ham told me that it happened every night. This particular piece was the colonel’s favorite tune and he had ordered it to be played whenever he came in to dinner. The colonel was a colorful character—short and florid, with a shock of white hair. He had figured prominently in New York politics and would again, it was said. He had already helped Craig over a couple of rough spots and if some of his antics amused the MFA&A boys, they seemed to be genuinely fond of him.

While we were at dinner, three officers came and took their places at a near-by table. Craig identified one of them as Captain Posey. I had been told that he was in his middle thirties, but he looked younger than that. He had a boyish face and I noticed that he laughed a great deal as he talked with his two companions. When he wasn’t smiling, there was a stubborn expression about his mouth, and I remembered that Lincoln had said something about his “deceptively gentle manner.” On our way out I introduced myself to him. He was very affable and seemed pleased at my arrival. But he was tired after the long drive from Frankfurt, so, as soon as I had arranged to meet him at his office the next day, I joined Ham and Craig back at the apartment.

I got out to Third Army Headquarters early the following morning and found Captain Posey already at his desk, going through the papers which had accumulated during his absence. We discussed George’s letter at considerable length, and I was disappointed to find that he did not intend to act on it at once. Somehow it had never occurred to me that anyone would question a proposal of George’s.

For one thing, Captain Posey said, he couldn’t spare Lincoln; and for another, there was a very pressing job much nearer Munich which he wanted me to handle. He then proceeded to tell me of a small village on the road to Salzburg where I would find a house in which were stored some eighty cases of paintings and sculpture from the Budapest Museum. He showed me the place on the map and explained how I was to go about locating the exact house upon arrival. I was to see a certain officer at Third Army Headquarters without delay and make arrangements for trucks. He thought I would need about five. It shouldn’t take more than half a day to do the job if all went well. After this preliminary briefing, I was on my own.

My first move was to get hold of the officer about the trucks. How many did I need? When did I want them and where should he tell them to report? I said I’d like to have five trucks at the Königsplatz the following morning at eight-thirty. The officer explained that the drivers would be French, as Third Army was using a number of foreign trucking companies to relieve the existing shortage in transportation.

Later in the day I had a talk with Lincoln about my plans and he gave me a piece of advice which proved exceedingly valuable—that I should go myself to the trucking company which was to provide the vehicles, and personally confirm the arrangements. So, after lunch I struck out in a jeep for the west side of Munich, a distance of some seven or eight miles.

I found a lieutenant, who had charge of the outfit, and explained the purpose of my visit. He had not been notified of the order for five trucks. There was no telephone communication between his office and headquarters, so all messages had to come by courier, and the courier hadn’t come in that day. He was afraid he couldn’t let me have any trucks before the following afternoon. I insisted that the matter was urgent and couldn’t wait, and, after much deliberating and consulting of charts, he relented. I told him a little something about the expedition for which I wanted the trucks and he showed real interest. He suggested that I ought to have extremely careful drivers. I replied that I should indeed, as we would be hauling stuff of incalculable value.

Thereupon he gave me a harrowing description of the group under his supervision. All of them had been members of the French Resistance Movement—ex-terrorists he called them—and they weren’t afraid of God, man or the Devil. Well, I thought, isn’t that comforting! “Oh, yes,” he said, “these Frenchies drive like crazy men. But,” he continued, “one of the fellows has got some sense. I’ll see if I can get him for you.” He went over to the window that looked out on a parking ground littered with vehicles of various kinds. Here and there I saw a mechanic bent over an open hood or sprawled out beneath a truck. The lieutenant bellowed, “Leclancher, come up here to my office!”

A few seconds later a wiry, sandy-haired Frenchman of about forty-five appeared in the doorway. Leclancher understood some English, for he reacted with alert nods of the head as the lieutenant gave a brief description of the job ahead, and then turned and asked me if I spoke French. I told him I did, if he had enough patience. This struck him as inordinately funny, but I was being quite serious. What really pleased him was the fact that I was in the Navy. He said that he had been in the Navy during the first World War. Then and there a lasting bond was formed, though I didn’t appreciate the value of it at the time.

Eight-thirty the next morning found me pacing the Königsplatz. Not a truck in sight. Nine o’clock and still no trucks. At nine thirty, one truck rolled up. Leclancher leaped out and with profuse apologies explained that the other four were having carburetor trouble. There had been water in the gas, too, and that hadn’t helped. For an hour Leclancher and I idled about, whiling away the time with conversation of no consequence, other than that it served to limber up my French. At eleven o’clock Leclancher looked at his watch and said that it would soon be time for lunch. It was obvious that he understood the Army’s conception of a day as a brief span of time, in the course of which one eats three meals. If it is not possible to finish a given job during the short pauses between those meals, well, there’s always the next day. I told him to go to his lunch and to come back as soon as he could round up the other trucks. In the meantime I would get something to eat near by.

When I returned shortly after eleven thirty—having eaten a K ration under the portico of the Verwaltungsbau in lieu of a more formal lunch—my five trucks were lined up ready to go. I appointed Leclancher “chef de convoi”—a rather high-sounding title for such a modest caravan—and he assigned positions to the other drivers, taking the end truck himself. Since my jeep failed to arrive, I climbed into the lead truck. The driver was an amiable youngster whose name was Roger Roget. During the next few weeks he was the lead driver in all of my expeditions, and I took to calling him “Double Roger,” which I think he never quite understood.

To add to my anxiety over our belated start, a light rain began to fall as we pulled out of the Königsplatz and turned into the Brienner-Strasse. We threaded our way cautiously through the slippery streets choked with military traffic, crossed the bridge over the Isar and swung into the broad Rosenheimer-Strasse leading to the east.

Once on the Autobahn, Roger speeded up. The speedometer needle quivered up to thirty-five, forty and finally forty-five miles an hour. I pointed to it, shaking my head. “We must not exceed thirty-five, Roger.”

He promptly slowed down, and as we rolled along, I forgot the worries of the morning. I dozed comfortably. Suddenly we struck an unexpected hole in the road and I woke up. We were doing fifty. This time I spoke sharply, reminding Roger that the speed limit was thirty-five and that we were to stay within it; if we didn’t we’d be arrested, because the road was well patrolled. With a tolerant grin Roger said, “Oh, no, we never get arrested. The MPs, they stop us and get very angry, but—” with a shrug of the shoulders—“we do not understand. They throw the hands up in the air and say ‘dumb Frenchies’ and we go ahead.”

“That may work with you,” I said crossly, “but what about me? I’m not a ‘dumb Frenchy.’”

For the next hour I pretended to doze and at the same time kept an eye on the speedometer. This worked pretty well. Now and again I would look up, and each time, Roger would modify his speed.

Presently we came to a bad detour, where a bridge was out. We had to make a sharp turn to the left, leave the Autobahn and descend a steep and tortuous side road into a deep ravine. That day the narrow road was slippery from the rain, so we had to crawl along. The drop into the valley was a matter of two or three hundred feet and, as we reached the bottom, we could see the monstrous wreckage of the bridge hanging drunkenly in mid-air. The ascent was even more precarious, but our five trucks got through.

We had now left the level country around Munich and were in a region of rolling hills. Along the horizon, gray clouds half concealed the distant peaks. Soon the rain stopped and the sun came out. The mountains changed to misty blue against an even bluer sky. The road rose sharply, and when we reached the crest, I caught a glimpse of shimmering water. It was Chiemsee, largest of the Bavarian lakes.

In another ten minutes the road flattened out again and we came to the turnoff marked “Prien.” There we left the Autobahn for a narrow side road which took us across green meadows. Nothing could have looked more peaceful than this lush, summer countryside. Reports of SS troops still hiding out in the near-by forests seemed preposterous in the pastoral tranquillity. Yet only a few days before, our troops had rounded up a small band of these die-hards in this neighborhood. The SS men had come down from the foothills on a foraging expedition and had been captured while attempting to raid a farmhouse. It was because of just such incidents, as well as the ever-present fire hazard, that I had been sent down to remove the museum treasures to a place of safety.

The road was dwindling away to a cow path and I was beginning to wonder how much farther we could go with our two-and-a-half-ton trucks, when we came to a small cluster of houses. This was Grassau. I had been told that a small detachment of troops was billeted there, so I singled out the largest of the little white houses grouped around the only crossroads in the village. It had clouded over and begun to rain again. As I entered the gate and was crossing the yard, the door of the house was opened by a corporal.

He didn’t seem surprised to see me. Someone at Munich had sent down word to Prien that I was coming, and the message had reached him from there. I asked if he knew where the things I had come for were stored. He motioned to the back of the house and said there were two rooms full of big packing cases. He explained that he and one other man had been detailed to live in the house because of the “stuff” stored there. They had been instructed to keep an eye on the old man who claimed to be responsible for it. That would be Dr. Csanky, director of the Budapest Museum, who, according to my information, would probably raise unqualified hell when I came to cart away his precious cases. The corporal told me that the old man and his son occupied rooms on the second floor.

I was relieved to hear that they were not at home. It would make things much simpler if I could get my trucks loaded and be on my way before they returned. It was already well after two and I wanted to start back by five at the latest. I asked rather tentatively about the chances of getting local talent to help with the loading, and the corporal promptly offered to corral a gang of PWs who were working under guard near by.

While he went off to see about that, I marshaled my trucks. There was enough room to back one truck at a time to the door of the house. A few minutes later the motley “work party” arrived. There were eight of them in all and they ranged from a young fellow of sixteen, wearing a faded German uniform, to a reedy old man of sixty. By and large, they looked husky enough for the job.

I knew enough not to ask my drivers to help, but knew that the work would go much faster if they would lend a hand. Leclancher must have read my thoughts, for he immediately offered his services. As soon as the other four saw what Leclancher was doing, they followed suit.

There were eighty-one cases in all. They varied greatly in size, because some of them contained sculpture and, consequently, were both bulky and heavy. Others, built for big canvases, were very large and flat but relatively light. We had to “design” our loads in such a way as to keep cases of approximately the same type together. This was necessary for two reasons: first, the cases would ride better that way, and second, we hadn’t any too much space. As I roughly figured it, we should be able to get them all in the five trucks, but we couldn’t afford to be prodigal in our loading.

The work went along smoothly for an hour and we were just finishing the second truck when I saw two men approaching. They were Dr. Csanky and his son. This was what I had hoped to avoid. The doctor was a dapper little fellow with a white mustache and very black eyes. He was wearing a corduroy jacket and a flowing bow tie. The artistic effect was topped off by a beret set at a jaunty angle. His son was a callow string bean with objectionably soulful eyes magnified by horn-rimmed spectacles. They came over to the truck and began to jabber and wave their arms. We paid no attention whatever—just kept on methodically lifting one case after another out of the storage room.

The dapper doctor got squarely in my path and I had to stop. I checked his flow of words with a none too civil “Do you speak English?” That drew a blank, so I asked if he spoke German. No luck there either. Feeling like an ad for the Berlitz School, I inquired whether he spoke French. He said “Yes,” but the stream of Hungarian-French which rolled out from that white mustache was unintelligible. It was hopeless. At last I simply had to take him by the shoulders and gently but firmly set him aside. This was the ultimate indignity, but it worked. At that juncture he and the string bean took off. I didn’t know what they were up to and I didn’t care, so long as they left us alone.

Our respite was short-lived. By the time we had the third truck ready to move away, they were back. And they had come with reinforcements: two women were with them. One was a rather handsome dowager who looked out of place in this rural setting. Her gray hair, piled high, was held in place by a scarlet bandanna, and she was wearing a shabby dress of green silk. Despite this getup, there was something rather commanding about her. She introduced herself as the wife of General Ellenlittay and explained in perfect English that Dr. Csanky had come to her in great distress. Would I be so kind as to tell her what was happening so that she could inform him?

“I am removing these cases on the authority of the Commanding General of the Third United States Army,” I said. If she were going to throw generals’ names around, I could produce one too—and a better one at that.

Her response to my pompous pronouncement was delivered charmingly and with calculated deflationary effect. “Dear sir, forgive me if I seemed to question your authority. That was not my intention. It is quite apparent that you are removing the pictures, but where are you taking them?”

“I am sorry, but I am not at liberty to say,” I replied. That too sounded rather lordly, but I consoled myself by recalling that Posey had admonished me not to answer questions like that.

She relayed this information to Dr. Csanky and the effect was startling. He covered his face with his hands and I thought he was going to cry. Finally he pulled himself together and let forth a flood of unintelligible consonants. His interpreter tackled me again.

“Dr. Csanky is frantic. He says that he is responsible to his government for the safety of these treasures and since you are taking them away, there is nothing left for him to do but to blow his brains out.”

My patience was exhausted. I said savagely, “Tell Dr. Csanky for me that he can blow his brains out if he chooses, but I think it would be silly. If you must know, Madame, I am a museum director myself and you can assure him that no harm is going to come to his precious pictures.”