The Monuments Men

by Robert M. Edsel

  Frank’s reign in Poland had been brutal and bloody. “We must not be squeamish when we learn that a total of 17,000 have been shot [in Poland],” he said in a speech to the party faithful in 1943. “We are now duty bound to hold together; we who are gathered together here figure on Mr. Roosevelt’s list of war criminals. I have the honor of being Number One.” 1 Once, while visiting another territory, he noticed a sign proclaiming seven partisans had been executed; he would have to fell a whole forest, he boasted to his retinue, if he posted a sign every time he killed seven Poles.

  So quick to condemn others, Frank proved too weak to face his own crimes. Powerless, and with no alternatives, the weak-willed Frank turned over forty-three volumes of his personal diaries to his captors. On his first night in captivity, he tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrists and throat. He failed even at that. Scouring his house, the soldiers found nine world-famous paintings, including two of the three masterpieces stolen from the Czartoryski Collection in Cracow: Rembrandt’s Landscape with the Good Samaritan and Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine. The third, Portrait of a Young Man by Raphael, was officially listed as missing.

  In a prison cell near Trier, Hermann Bunjes fell into despondence as he contemplated his life. Monuments Men Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein had not returned to accept his offer of assistance; instead, Posey had sent an army interrogator to his small scholar’s hideaway outside Trier. Shortly thereafter, Bunjes was arrested by Allied forces. 2 He had helped Göring pillage France; he had bullied Rose Valland at the Jeu de Paume; he had sold out every cultural, scholarly, and personal virtue in pursuit of Nazi power, and yet he had convinced himself he might somehow go free. Perhaps he imagined he could slip away in the confusion of the Allied advance, or that he could buy his freedom by telling Posey and Kirstein the location of Hitler’s treasure room at Altaussee. But he had sold his soul, and that is something you can never repurchase at any price. Hermann Bunjes had craved Nazi power, wealth, and prestige, but they had been nothing but a cruel illusion for a foolish man.

  In Bavaria, Hermann Göring rode, with all the tassels and regalia of his exalted rank (officially stripped from him by Hitler a few days before), in an open car and in the custody of SS guards. The guards had been ordered to kill the Reichsmarschall and his family, but even the SS knew Germany had entered a leaderless void, and they ignored the order. The convoy was headed to Mauterndorf, one of Göring’s many estates; the Reichsmarschall was planning to wait there until he received an audience with Eisenhower. He was sure the two would meet and talk together, one military man to another.

  His artwork, meanwhile, was in transit to the town of Unterstein, six miles from Berchtesgaden. In the last two weeks, it had traveled a hazardous journey over the bombed-out rail lines of Germany. First it had gone to Berchtesgaden, where three cars had been decoupled despite the fact that the bomb shelters were damp and proved too small to hold the entire collection. The remaining cars had gone to Unterstein, but once they arrived the Reichsmarschall rethought his decision and decided to deposit the collection back in the bomb shelters outside Berchtesgaden. The paintings were covered with tapestries for protection, then the doors to the bomb shelters were sealed with a foot-thick wall of concrete and disguised with timbers that looked like ceiling beams. The bulk of the artwork still wouldn’t fit, of course, so while bombs fell on Germany, Allied troops rushed across the rubble of what had once been its great cities, and Nazi fanatics worked to blow up every railroad, factory, and bridgehead in the Fatherland, the Reichsmarschall sent the overflow of his massive collection of stolen paintings, sculpture, tapestries and other cultural treasures back to Unterstein. He kept in the possession of himself and his wife only the ten small masterpieces they had been holding since evacuating Carinhall, which were valuable enough for the two of them to live like royalty for the rest of their lives.

  Across the Austrian border in the Alpine Redoubt, the defenders of Altaussee were in disarray. Eigruber had sent a demolition team to arm and detonate the bombs. A reliable source—the husband of a friend of a sympathetic miner—had seen the demo experts in a valley only a few miles away, awaiting a Gestapo escort. Pöchmüller and Högler had discussed a few days before sending someone down the mountain to Salzburg to inform Western Allied forces of the situation. They had decided it was too risky. The idea of rebellion against the armed guards seemed foolish, especially if the Gestapo was arriving with the demolition experts. And there was no time or means to move the heavy bombs out of the mine.

  At this pivotal moment, one of the miners, Alois Raudaschl, came forward with an idea. Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of Hitler’s security police and the second-highest-ranking member of the SS, had fled Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and was on his way to the area to visit his mistress. Raudaschl, a Nazi Party member, knew how to contact him. Might Kaltenbrunner help?

  The scenario was appealing. As the Nazi security chief, Kaltenbrunner outranked Eigruber. He had been in the bunker and knew Hitler’s mind. And he had many personal traits the gauleiter would doubtlessly admire. A native Austrian, he was well known for his violent adherence to Hitler’s most vile practices: the establishment of concentration camps, the execution of prisoners of war, and the disappearance of thousands of “undesirables” from German-occupied territories. In short, he was a ruthless, heartless bastard: exactly the type of man who would command the respect of August Eigruber.

  But would such a man really go out of his way to save art?

  CHAPTER 46

  The Race

  Berchtesgaden, Germany, and Neuschwanstein, Germany

  May 4, 1945

  The Third Infantry Division of U.S. Seventh Army, “the Rock of the Marne,” had fought its way from North Africa, through Sicily, Anzio, France, southern Germany, and finally into the Bavarian Alps. It had taken part in the capture of Munich in late April, and toured the nearby Dachau death camp. On May 2, 1945, its Seventh Infantry Regiment, known as the “Cottonbalers,” advanced on Salzburg, Austria’s gateway to the Alpine Redoubt. They expected a fight, but in the last few days resistance had suddenly disappeared, and they took the city without firing a shot. This left them in perfect position to push on to the last jewel in the war: the Nazi stronghold at Berchtesgaden, the heart of the Alpine Redoubt.

  On the morning of May 4, the commander of Third Infantry Division, Major General John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, visited Colonel John A. Heintges, the commander of Seventh Infantry Regiment. “Do you think we can make it to Berchtesgaden?” he asked.

  “Yes sir,” Heintges replied. “I’ve got a plan already prepared.” Heintges had ordered his engineers to work all night to strengthen a local bridge in case the division received the order to advance.

  Within an hour, the First and Third battalions were moving in a pincer formation toward Berchtesgaden. While First Battalion crawled apprehensively through the mountain passes, Third Battalion swung wide and rolled down the autobahn untouched. First Battalion entered Berchtesgaden at 3:58 p.m. on May 3, 1945, followed two minutes later by the Third Battalion. The two forces found the streets lined with German officers standing at attention in their gray longcoats. One of them stepped forward, took off his pistol and dagger, and presented them to Colonel Heintges. He was Fritz Göring, the Reichsmarschall’s nephew. Heintges accepted the surrender, then invited the young man to a local Gasthaus for a bottle of wine. The Reichsmarschall had recently left; Fritz had been left behind to turn over to the Allies the Luftwaffe archives.

  While Heintges chatted, other “Cottonbalers” ascended the hill to Hitler’s Berghof on Kehlstein Mountain. The house had been bombed by the British RAF, then set afire by the SS, but the pantries were still stuffed with food and the walls were lined with shelves of liquor. Isadore Valentini, a medic and former coal miner, sat in Hitler’s great room and drank the Führer’s wine with his friends. The Nazi flag flying over the Berghof was torn down, chopped into pieces, and distributed to the officers of the Third Infantry Divi
sion. In a nearby house, a soldier took the German Luger from the hand of Lieutenant General Gustav Kastner-Kirkdorf, who had committed suicide with it. Soon, the men of the Seventh Infantry Regiment were rolling giant wheels of cheese down the streets and helping themselves to Göring’s personal collection of liquor from his nearby house, which numbered 16,000 bottles. There was, clearly, no Alpine Redoubt, as Eisenhower and his advisors had feared. The last bastion of Nazi resistance had withered with barely a shot.

  Neuschwanstein lay at the end of a long, treacherous hairpin drive through the dense mountains of the German-Austrian border, a perfect reflection, James Rorimer thought, of the course his search had taken since meeting Rose Valland in Paris. He had gone to the City of Light hoping to save its great monuments and buildings; now he was driving a Red Cross truck through the German countryside, hoping to find stuffed into a remote castle one of the largest collections of masterpieces ever assembled. Had it been moved or, worse, destroyed? Were the ERR documents, which would be essential to unraveling what had been stolen and from whom, still there? Was he even heading to the right place?

  “Yes, there is art at Neuschwanstein,” Martha Klein, the restorer he had met at Buxheim, told him. “But the salt mine at Altaussee, that is the richest of the caches by far.”

  He had hesitated upon hearing that, but only for a moment. The Allies had not yet taken the region near Altaussee, a rural valley high in the mountains and far from any military objective, so there was really no choice. And he had been dreaming of Neuschwanstein for months. There was no way he could turn away now; not when he was so close, and not after the promises he had made to Rose Valland. With a little luck, there might be time to reach the salt mine, too.

  Any lingering doubts were wiped clear by the sight of the castle. “The fairy-like castle at Neuschwanstein near Füssen,” Rorimer wrote, “had been built in a fantastic pseudo-Gothic style by the Mad Ludwig of Bavaria. As we approached it from the north through an open valley, it looked in its mountain setting like a prototype of all story-book castles. It was a castle in the air come to life for egocentric and mad thirsters after power; a picturesque, romantic and remote setting for a gangster crowd to carry on its art looting activities.” 1

  The great iron doors were guarded by two cannons mounted on armored cars. Otherwise, the Germans had fled, leaving it completely defenseless. The American unit that had taken the castle reported no resistance, and the total arms confiscated from the Germans in residence amounted to a couple of shotguns. Thanks to Rose Valland’s information and Rorimer’s efforts, the unit had known the importance of the castle, and it had been sealed and placed off-limits immediately upon its capture. No one, of any rank, had entered the treasure rooms.

  With the castle’s long-serving custodian as his guide—the Nazis had retained the castle’s prewar staff, trusting these servants more than their own men—James Rorimer, his new assistant, Monuments Man John Skilton, and a small complement of guards entered the castle. The interior was a labyrinth of stairs, designed not by an architect but by a theatrical stage designer Mad Ludwig had admired. The stairs were steep and precarious, each topped by a door unlocked by a German watchman with a comically large set of keys, then locked again behind them. Behind most of the doors were claustrophobic rooms, with foot-thick walls and tiny aperture windows. Others led to magnificent hallways, sometimes a balcony overlooking a mountain vista, followed by another set of precarious stairwells, this one on the outside of the building. The castle went up and up at seemingly impossible angles, room after bizarre room, and in each one Rorimer saw boxes and crates, racks and platforms, all containing the patrimony of France which had been shipped directly from Paris. Whole rooms housed nothing but gold decorations; others had paintings crammed tightly onto shelves or piles of crates with the ERR initials stenciled over the symbols of Parisian collectors. Rorimer could see that many of the crates had never been opened.

  Other sections of the castle were stuffed with furniture. Some contained tapestries; others table services, goblets, candelabras, and various household goods. There were several rooms of books, with rare engravings and prints shoved haphazardly between them or dropped behind the shelves. Behind one steel door, locked with two keys, was the world-famous Rothschild jewelry collection and more than a thousand pieces of silver belonging to Pierre David-Weill. “I passed through the rooms as in a trance,” Rorimer wrote, “hoping that the Germans had lived up to their reputation for being methodical and had photographs, catalogues and records of all these things. Without them it would take twenty years to identify the agglomeration of loot.” 2

  In the Kemenate, a part of the castle containing the fireplace room and reached by a separate door, the Nazis had burned uniforms and documents. Rorimer saw Hitler’s signature, still visible on a curled corner of burned paper, and feared the archives destroyed. But the next room was lined with filing cabinets containing photographs, catalogues, and records. There was a catalogue card for every confiscation undertaken by the ERR in France—more than 21,000 confiscations in all, including shipments that had gone to other repositories. It was evidence of much of what the Nazis had stolen from Western Europe; and as Rose Valland had understood when she told him about the importance of Neuschwanstein, it was absolutely essential to identifying and getting it all back home.

  “No one comes in here,” Rorimer told the sergeant of the guard, who was trailing the inspection party. “Not even the guards. This building is off-limits.”

  There was a trapdoor in the floor. Rorimer had it nailed shut, then a steel trunk was placed over the top. The heavy doors of the Kemenate were pulled shut and locked. Then James Rorimer, with the flair of a showman, took an ancient Rothschild seal he had discovered in the looted treasures—SEMPER FIDELIS, “always faithful,” it read—and emblazoned the crack between the doors with sealing wax.

  CHAPTER 47

  Final Days

  Berlin, Germany, and Southern Germany

  May 5–6, 1945

  On May 2, Red Army troops entered the upper half of an area in the middle of Berlin that housed several famous German museums. German troops had fled the area, known as Museum Island, only hours before, after the curators responsible for the Pergamon altar had persuaded them not to use pieces of the famous ancient Greek altar as a protective barricade for the fighting.

  With the city’s museums secure, Red Army art experts turned to the enormous flaktowers (-anti-aircraft towers) that held many of the large paintings and other works of art that could not be evacuated to Merkers and other German repositories. The Zoo Flaktower, the largest of the three, was 135 feet high and went six stories underground. The concrete walls were eight feet thick, the windows covered with steel shutters. In addition to a hospital, military barracks, national radio station, ammunitions stores, and museum storage, it could shelter 30,000 people. 1

  On May 1, Soviet troops had overrun the Zoo Flaktower, looking for gold, Hitler’s body, and other high-ranking Nazis. They had found only wounded soldiers and civilians, laid out by desperate doctors atop crates that contained carved reliefs from the Pergamon Altar, the treasures of ancient Troy (known collectively as Priam’s Gold), and countless other masterpieces. By May 4, the wounded had been evacuated and the flaktower was under the control of Stalin’s Trophy Brigades, which were in charge of transporting anything of value (from art to food and machinery) to the Soviet Union as unofficial restitutions in kind for the devastation incurred at the hands of the Nazis. The Trophy Brigades immediately began organizing the contents for transport east; within a month, the tower was largely empty.

  The Friedrichshain Flaktower, which contained 434 large-scale and extremely important paintings, hundreds of sculptures, porcelain objects, and antiquities (treasures Rave had been unable to move to Merkers), met a different fate. Between May 3 and May 5 Soviet troops inspected the tower and noticed it had been broken into. There were 800,000 freed Eastern European slave laborers wandering throughout the city, and many more de
sperate Germans trying their best to survive in the void. Looting was rampant. The thieves at the flaktower had been drawn by the food stockpiled on the first floor; they hadn’t touched the valuable paintings stored nearby. But the treasures were by no means safe, for on the night of May 5 a fire broke out in the tower. The remaining foodstocks and artworks stored on the first floor were destroyed.

  Was the fire set by common thieves? Was it the result of the burning torches so many carried since the city had no electricity? Or were Nazi fanatics and SS officials so desperate to keep the treasures of the German state out of Soviet hands that they extended the Nero Decree to these works of art?

  The answer hardly mattered, at least not to those particular Soviet troops. They refused to post guards even though valuable artwork remained undamaged on the second and third floors. While the Trophy Brigades worked at the Zoo Flaktower, the Friedrichshain Flaktower was left to the usual assortment of desperate scavengers. It wasn’t long before a second fire broke out, more extensive than the first. The contents—sculpture, porcelain, books, and the 434 paintings, including one by Botticelli, one by van Dyck, three by Caravaggio, ten by Rubens, and five by Hermann Göring’s favorite artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder—were assumed destroyed, the latest victims of the void.

  In Unterstein, the frantic and hungry townspeople, whipped up by rumors that the railcars contained schnapps, descended on Hermann Göring’s personal train. Some left with bread and wine—the Reichsmarschall had added extra boxcars of supplies to his train to support himself in exile—while, as Allied investigator and Monuments Man Bernard Taper later discovered, “those who came later had to be satisfied with things like a school of Rogier van der Weyden painting, a thirteenth century Limoges reliquary, four late Gothic wood statues, and other such baubles—whatever they could grab. It was a real mob scene. Three women laid hands on the same Aubusson carpet, and a heated struggle ensued until along came a local dignitary, who said to them, ‘Women, be civilized, divide it among you.’ So they did. Two of the women used their portions as bedspreads, but the third cut hers up to make window curtains.” 2