Slowly, the Monuments Men began to realize just how much was hidden in the Merkers mines. Crated sculpture, hastily packed, with photographs clipped from museum catalogues to show what was inside. Ancient Egyptian papyri in metal cases, which the salt in the mine had reduced to the consistency of wet cardboard. There was no time to examine the priceless antiquities inside, for in other rooms there were ancient Greek and Roman decorative works, Byzantine mosaics, Islamic rugs, leather and buckram portfolio boxes. Hidden in an inconspicuous side room, they found the original woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer’s famous Apocalypse series of 1498. And then more crates of paintings—a Rubens, a Goya, a Cranach packed together with minor works.
“There’s no order,” Kirstein said. “Time periods and styles mixed together, masterpieces alongside novelties, boxes from different museums. What happened here?”
“They were packed by size,” Posey said, pointing out the uniformity of the paintings in one of the crates.
They left the mine in the evening and drove back to Frankfurt to report their findings. With them was Major Perera, an officer sent by Third Army to examine the gold and currency. Perera reported an initial count of 8,198 gold bars, 711 bags of American twenty-dollar gold pieces, over 1,300 bags of other gold coins, hundreds of bags of foreign currency, and $2.76 billion in Reichsmarks, along with various foreign currencies, silver and platinum, and the stamping plates the German government used to print money. 2 A bank official found in the mine, Herr Veick, had confirmed that it represented most of the reserves of Germany’s national treasury.
Posey reported that, from preliminary evaluation, the artwork had also come from Berlin. The packing was sloppy, hurried, probably a case of simply grabbing what was portable. Nonetheless, the mine held thousands of works of art. None of it appeared to have been looted from other countries.
The next morning, Robert Posey called George Stout. MFAA commanding officer Geoffrey Webb, the British scholar, happened to be in Verdun meeting with Stout, and Posey suggested they both come down immediately. Then he and Kirstein left for the nearby town of Hungen, which had been recently overrun by Third Army. A few hours later, in Schloss Braunfels, a castle erected in 1246 as a fortress, they discovered enough incunabula, ancient manuscripts, and sacred Jewish texts to fill a museum. The looted material had been destined for ERR mastermind Alfred Rosenberg’s Racial Institutes, whose purpose was to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race.
“I presume it is better to write a short dull letter than to not write,” Posey wrote his wife, Alice, that night. “The situation is that I am so busy that my work drives me each day until I am exhausted and too tired to exercise a few thoughts in a letter. About sixteen hours a day seven days a week doesn’t leave one much spare time.” 3
The closer the Monuments Men got to the end of the war, and the more important their work became, the less time or freedom they had to tell their loved ones back home of their experiences.
George Stout arrived at Merkers on April 11, 1945. Fresh from his tour of the repository at Siegen, where he had prevailed upon the Eighth Infantry Division to post a sufficient guard, he expected to find a half-forgotten mine. Instead, Merkers was crawling with Western Allied officers, German guides, and experts from all branches of Civil Affairs. The guards now totaled almost four battalions (more than 2,000 men), including an infantry battalion called back from the front, and still it seemed the soldiers were outnumbered by the war correspondents. As Kirstein wrote, “Due to the fact that the works of art… were discovered as an adjunct to the uncovering of the Reich’s gold-reserve, the story was given unusual press treatment.” 4 In other words, the reporters didn’t care much about Germany’s great works of art—in fact, they kept getting the information wrong, such as referring to a famous sculpture of the head of Queen Nefertiti as a mummy—but a mine full of Nazi gold was an irresistible headline. Patton was so furious that word of the find had leaked to the press, he fired the responsible censor, even though he had no authority to do so. But the damage was done. Stars and Stripes ran a story on Merkers every day for a week, and newspapers around the world followed suit. Three days later, an even larger, more spectacular discovery made international headlines, at least until someone realized the new “Mercedes” mine was actually a misspelling of Merkers.
Stout had been told to arrive at 1500 hours, without the higher-ranking (but British) Geoffrey Webb. Webb had been denied permission to enter by the financial branch of Civil Affairs. Stout arrived at 1445 in a jeep provided by Third Army and was immediately ushered into the presence of a lieutenant colonel, who assigned him to a billet and told him he couldn’t leave until further notice. The billet was filled with financial staff. At 2115, Colonel Bernstein, Ike’s financial advisor for civil affairs and military government, arrived to inform Stout he had been designated the MFAA officer for this operation. When Stout complained about the exclusion of his boss Geoffrey Webb, Bernstein showed him a letter from Patton stating that Bernstein was in charge of the mine area. No arguments, and no mistaking the message: This was an American operation—with apologies to Webb, no British officers allowed. And it was an American financial operation as well. The artwork was secondary. A glum Stout, having dispatched Lincoln Kirstein to give Webb the bad news that Patton wanted “no damn limeys” in the mine, 5 spent the rest of the evening interviewing Dr. Schawe, a German librarian he found “clumsy and unnecessarily vindictive.” 6
The next morning, Stout met Dr. Paul Ortwin Rave, a German art expert who had been living on the premises since April 3 with his family, his personal library, and his prized collection of rugs. The press had reported that Rave was the assistant director of the Prussian state museums; in fact, he was the assistant to the director. But he was no mere underling. A dedicated and professional museum man, his career had been stymied by his refusal to join the Nazi Party.
At the beginning of the war, Rave explained, the treasures of the German state museums had been removed from their galleries and placed in bank vaults and anti-aircraft towers in and around Berlin. In 1943, Rave suggested evacuating the collections from the Berlin area, which was beginning to come under Allied aerial bombardment. He was told this was dangerously defeatist thinking… perhaps fatally so. Nonetheless, he tried again the next year; he was again dismissed, and his life once again threatened. It wasn’t until Soviet long-range ground artillery started battering the city that authorization was obtained to remove the artwork to Merkers. Four hundred of the largest paintings—including works by Caravaggio and Rubens—were to be left in the Berlin towers, along with numerous sculptures and various antiquities. Rave had estimated it would take eight weeks to move everything else; he was given two. The final shipment arrived on March 31, 1945. Five days later, Third Army overran the area.
“Two weeks to move this massive amount of art,” Stout commented at the end of Rave’s tale. “What a luxury. We’ve been given six days.”
The generals—Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander in the European theater; Omar Bradley, commander of U.S. Twelfth Army Group; Manton Eddy, commander of XII Corps; and George Patton, the irrepressible titan of Third Army—flew to Merkers late in the morning of April 12. Brigadier General Otto Weyland, commander of XIX Tactical Air Command for Ninth Army, met the other generals there. Together with a few staff members and a German elevator operator, the generals rode the ancient elevator down twenty-one hundred feet into the main Merkers mine. The slow trip, undertaken in complete darkness, lasted several minutes. Halfway down, with only the groaning of the solitary elevator cable for company, Patton joked, “If that clothesline should part, promotions in the United States Army would be greatly stimulated.” 7
“OK, George, that’s enough,” came Eisenhower’s voice out of the darkness. “No more cracks until we are above ground again.”
Going into a potassium mine—or a copper mine, or a salt mine, or any other type of German mine—was an uncomfortable experience. These were working mines, not tourist sites, and the
passageways were rough, narrow, and cramped. Much of the equipment was old and, because the war had drawn away men and materials, poorly maintained. The Germans had chosen the safety of deep mines for their repositories, so the soldiers often traveled a quarter mile into the ground, and another quarter mile laterally at the bottom. To exist in perpetual darkness, far below the earth, without a map of the mine or assurance the next passageway wasn’t booby-trapped or the next holding bay not full of dynamite, was a nerve-jangling experience. Even worse, most of the mines were in areas that had been bombed or shelled, knocking out their power supplies. They were dark, cold, and damp.
Understandably, the generals moved quickly. In Room #8, now evacuated of all but essential personnel, they looked over rows and rows of gold bars and banknotes worth hundred of millions of dollars. In the next room, they flipped through the paintings. Patton thought they were “worth about $2.50 and best suited for saloons”; 8 in actuality, he was looking at pieces from the collection of the world-famous Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Other rooms, reserved for the SS, were crammed with gold and silver platters and vases, all flattened with hammer blows to make them easier to store. Entire trunks were filled with jewelry, watches, silverware, clothing, eyeglasses, and gold cigarette cases, the last vestiges of an enormous hoard the SS had not yet been able to smelt. There were eight bags of gold rings, many of them wedding bands. A soldier opened another bag and lifted out a handful of gold fillings. They had been pulled from the teeth of Holocaust victims.
“What would you do with all that loot?” Eisenhower asked over lunch, referring to Germany’s bullion and paper currency.
Patton replied, in his usual gruff fashion, that he’d spend it on weapons or a gold medallion “for every son of a bitch in Third Army.” 9 The generals laughed, but the question was far from academic. Much to the dismay of Stout and the Monuments Men, Bernstein was proceeding under the assumption that everything in the mine, including the artwork, was captured enemy loot. It would be months before he was disavowed of that notion.
The lightheartedness stopped for good that afternoon when the generals visited Ohrdruf, the first Nazi work camp liberated by American troops. Ohrdruf was not a death camp, like Auschwitz, where “undesirables” were sent for extermination, but a place where human beings were systematically worked to death. In silence, the generals and their staff officers walked the camp. “The smell of death overwhelmed us,” General Bradley wrote, “even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung in shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. Lice crawled over the yellow skin of their sharp, bony frames. A[n Allied] guard showed us how the blood had congealed in coarse black scabs where the starving prisoners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food…. I was too revolted to speak. For here death had been so fouled by degradation that it both stunned and numbed us.” 10
Several survivors, shrunken to mere skeletons, pulled themselves up on shriveled legs and saluted the generals as they passed. The generals walked on in stony silence, their lips drawn tight. Several members of their staff, all of them hardened by war, openly wept. The hard-nosed Patton, “Old Blood and Guts,” ducked behind a building and threw up.
Every American soldier, Eisenhower insisted, every man and woman not on the front lines, must see this. “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” 11
Patton put it more bluntly: “You’ll never believe how bastardly these Krauts can be, until you’ve seen this pesthole yourself.” 12
It wasn’t until midnight that Patton, exhausted from two of the most remarkable and terrible tours in history, lay down to sleep. Before turning off the light, he noticed that his watch had stopped. Tuning in to BBC radio for the correct time, he heard one last bit of news: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died.
While the generals toured the main chambers of Merkers, Stout toured the nearby mines. The Merkers complex included more than thirty-five miles of tunnels and a dozen entrances. 13 There was no inventory of the works in the mines, but Dr. Rave had a list of the museums and collections from which they had come. The Berlin museum collections were the first to arrive and had been stored in the Ransbach mine. Rave had found the mine unsatisfactory and subsequent shipments had gone to Merkers. This worried Stout since the damp, salty Merkers was a less than ideal place for art, but the elevator was out of service at Ransbach so he couldn’t inspect its contents.
No matter, there was plenty to do. Descending into the Philippstal mine, he found reference books and maps. Lincoln Kirstein descended into the Menzengraben mine, only to have the power fail, leaving him trapped in complete darkness and silence thousands of feet under the earth. “Rather than walk up to the height of two Empire State buildings,” he wrote home, “I explored a vast Luftwaffe uniform depot and chose a parachute knife as a souvenir.” 14
On the morning of April 13, George Stout worked out the materials needed to pack all the artwork for shipment: boxes, crates, files, tape, thousands of feet of packing materials. His conclusion: “No chance of getting them.” 15
With the elevator back in service, he descended into the Ransbach mine with the disagreeable Dr. Schawe. The mine was almost twice as deep as the main shaft at Merkers, and significantly more cramped. The books alone took up most of the space. Stout estimated a million volumes, maybe two. The forty-five cases of artwork from the Berlin museum sat where Rave had left them. Seven had been rifled, but major pieces by Dürer and Holbein had not been touched. The collection of costumes from the State Opera had been ransacked. “Russian and Polish laborers,” one of his German guides grunted. Stout knew he meant forced laborers, and found it hard to blame them for their thievery.
Back at Merkers, Stout learned from Bernstein the plans had changed. Instead of evacuating on April 17, they would be leaving on April 15. “A rash procedure,” Stout noted in his diary, “and ascribed to military necessity.” 16
Military necessity was too strong. Military convenience, the thing Eisenhower warned against in his initial orders on cultural preservation, was probably more apt. General Patton was charging ahead, and he didn’t want to leave four battalions behind to guard a gold mine. Bernstein, meanwhile, had his own reasons for haste. At the Yalta Conference in late February, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had partitioned the German state into zones of control. Merkers, and all its treasures, were in the Russian zone. If Russian troops arrived before the mine was evacuated—and there were persistent rumors of contact between American and Russian advanced patrols in the “no-man’s land” of central Germany—its contents would disappear into the hands of the Red Army. The Soviets were in no mood for equanimity, and understandably so. They had suffered millions of casualties in the Nazis’ brutal and devastating invasion of their country, including more than 1.5 million dead in the siege of Stalingrad alone. Their forces, currently hacking and slashing their way into German territory, included Trophy Brigades: art and finance officials whose job it was to find and seize enemy assets, looted or otherwise. Stalin expected to be restituted in kind in gold, silver, carved marble, and works of art for what his people had lost.
Thirty minutes after midnight on April 15, George Stout finished his plans for the evacuation of Merkers. Unable to secure packing materials, he had requisitioned from the Luftwaffe uniform depot Kirstein found in the Menzengraben mine a thousand sheepskin coats, the kind German officers used on the Russian front. Most of the forty tons of artwork would be wrapped in the coats, recrated with similar works, then organized into appropriate collections. He met with Colonel Bernstein. The gold was too heavy to be loaded to the tops of the trucks, so crates of paintings would be mixed in to maximize the load. Loading would start in an hour, at 0200, thirty-six hours ahead of the original schedule. By 0430 the artwork already in crates or boxes was brought to the surface and loaded. “No time to sleep,” Stout wrote. 17 He had to prepare invoi
ces and detailed instructions for the unloading and storage of the artwork in Frankfurt.
At 0800, an hour before the first convoy left, Stout started on the uncrated paintings. He planned to move them to a building above ground for temporary storage, but even with twenty-five men, the work proved impossible. By noon, the crew had reached fifty, and Stout had decided to crate the paintings underground. Unfortunately, the large crates were awkward to handle, especially in the confusion of the mineshafts. Jeeps had been brought down to help transport the gold, blocking some passages. Their exhaust fouled the air, and the occasional backfire of an engine echoed ominously in the rocky corridors. The gold was being sprayed with water to remove the corrosive salt of the mine, and the main shaft to the elevator was ankle-deep with the runoff. Soldiers were scurrying in all directions, carrying stacks of money, bags of gold, and ancient art, and it was all Stout could do to keep his men from wandering off in the confusion and not returning to work.
At 0005, five minutes past midnight on April 16, Stout reported “all paintings on ground level, in 3 places. All print boxes on ground level in 2 places. Cased works below ground somewhat rearranged and piled in part ready to load at elevator shaft.” 18 The loading at Ransbach started at 0830; the loading at Merkers a half hour later with seventy-five men and five officers. At 1300, prisoners of war were brought in to assist the operation. By 2100 all the paintings were loaded. Stout went to the Dietlas mine, reached by an underground passage from the main shaft at Merkers, and found photographic equipment, modern paintings, and racks of archives. One set from Weimar was marked 933–1931, a thousand years of municipal history. “Inspection finished 2300,” he wrote. “Returned Merkers, ate supper, reported.” 19
The art convoy—thirty-two ten-ton trucks with a motorized infantry escort and air cover—left for Frankfurt at 0830. It arrived at 1400. Stout noted only “complicated unloading. L. Kirstein a great help. All handled by 105 PWs [prisoners of war] in poor health. Storage in temporary arrangement 8 rooms basement level, one large room underground.” Stout’s inventory listed 393 paintings (uncrated), 2,091 print boxes, 1,214 cases, and 140 textiles, representing most of the Prussian state art collection. “Job finished and area secured 2330.” 20
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