“But don’t mention me,” added Freiherr von Breine. “I can do much more for you that way.”
IV
The first outfit of the art seekers arrived, and there was a great scurrying round to get billets, an eating place, and a headquarters big enough to hold all the treasures which would be brought in. They were allotted the Verwaltungsbau, the Nazi administration building, one of those immense massive structures which the world’s greatest architect had erected for his Thousand-Year Reich. Everything was built of stone, solid, square, plain, useful, and ugly. It was three stories high and occupied nearly a whole block facing the Königsplatz. Inside were two large central courts, from each of which a marble stairway led to the floor above. The building had not been hit by bombs but had been badly shaken; the skylights had been smashed, and rain had poured in; but very quickly they were boarded up. The doors wouldn’t lock, but they too would be repaired, and the smashed windows covered with translucent plastic.
There was a second building, a duplicate of the Verwaltungsbau, the Führerbau, where Hitler’s own Munich offices had been; it was only a block away, and the two buildings were connected by underground passages. It was in the Führerbau that Chamberlain had signed the Munich Pact, which was supposed to guarantee peace for our time; the table on which the signing had been done was now to be used as a conference table by these art experts from the Fogg Museum in Cambridge and other museums of America. Less than seven years had passed, and the Lord had put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree!
The plan was to engage a staff of German museum technicians and clerks to carry on the enormous work which lay ahead, and here as everywhere was the difficult task of excluding Nazis, in a land where everybody had been compelled to be a Nazi in order to survive. The Monuments were working under pressure; they had already learned about the train full of Göring’s paintings and realized that this was probably the most valuable collection ever assembled in the world. Something had to be done about it without delay, and they were relieved to learn that Lanny had already discussed the matter with headquarters of Seventh and had procured the necessary permits and arranged for a T-force to lead the way. There wasn’t supposed to be any more fighting, but there were bands of Nazi fanatics holding out in the forests and mountains, and nobody could tell where they might make a raid. That treasure would call for a night-and-day guard, and a train of trucks to bring it in.
V
Lanny had a claim to go with the first outfit, and it was granted. They were exceptionally nice fellows, informed about all the subjects which he loved best. Two jeeps and a command car sped rapidly over the Autobahn toward Salzburg; already the shellholes had been filled up, smashed Panzers thrown into ditches, and temporary bridges built; the engineers with hairy ears did such things overnight. It was almost mid-May, and the sun was warm, the fruit trees in blossom, and the snow-clad mountains a glorious background to every scene. From this far-off perpetual snow flowed torrents of water, running clear green in the many streams, except for the creamy foam. When you got off the Munich plain there were rolling hills, and then the rise into the Austrian Alps.
At this southeastern corner of Germany a lumpy peninsula-shaped piece of land juts into Austria, so that at once place you can go west into a land that lies east of you, and at another you can go north into a land that lies south of you. Adi Schicklgruber, onetime wastrel of the Vienna slums, had chosen this region for his mountain retreat and had purchased a property looking out over the land of his birth. He had expanded a modest villa into an establishment suitable for the occupancy of a future ruler of the world.
They passed the wide blue Chiemsee, and soon after passing Traunstein they left the Autobahn and turned southward. The road sign said “Berchtesgaden, 30 Kilometers.” The road followed a winding stream and was beautifully balanced, so that you could drive fast even on the curves, and the forests sped by as if in a motion-picture film. Lanny did not tell anyone how familiar this road was to him; how many times he had come here, by day and by night, in sunshine, rain, and snow. In the first place they would not have believed him, and if anyone did, that one would never have ceased to wonder what sort of man was this, and which side had he really been on.
They came into the pleasant little summer-resort town, with many hotels and some baths. Up to three days ago it had been swarming with Nazis, and now it was swarming with “Amis,” as the Nazis called their principal foes. These particular Amis wore a shoulder patch consisting of a blue triangle with a yellow triangle inside and a red triangle inside that, and this meant they were of the Seventh; their unit was the 101st Airborne Division, very cocky and proud of themselves. They would tell you that the reason the SS were coming down out of those snow-clad Alps so fast was that they wanted the honor of surrendering to so renowned an outfit.
The Monuments hunted up the CP and asked about the Göring train. It developed that somebody had waked up to the importance of a possible billion dollars’ worth of paintings, and the stuff was now being unloaded and taken by a back road to a little place called Unterstein, where there was a rest house until recently used by German officers. This had some fifty rooms, all that could be needed to sort and catalogue nine freighter-car loads of art treasures.
So there was no longer an emergency, and the Monuments man in charge of the T-force decided that the thing to do was to go on to Alt Aussee, some seventy miles farther east, inspect the salt mine, and make sure the thousands of paintings there hidden were not in danger from either pillagers or dampness and mold. The CP wasn’t sure whether their men had got there or not, but they or others from the Third would, surely do so in course of the day; anyhow, it didn’t matter so much, for word had just come that in Berlin the three German commanders—of Army (Keitel), Navy (Friedeburg), and Air Force. (Stumpff)—had that morning signed a formal surrender of all German Armed Forces, to be effective at one minute past eleven o’clock that night. Lanny asked the officer who gave them the news, “Why that extra minute?” The officer, who came from the Bronx in New York, answered, “Dunt esk!”
So this was VE Day, so long desired, so long postponed! There was wild rejoicing at home, but not much in the Army; people were too tired. War was no fun, and don’t let anybody tell you different—so said the doughs, the Joes, the sad sacks. Here and there the officers shook hands, and a few of them took too many drinks. The enlisted men repeated their old question, “When do we get to go home?” Don’t talk to any of them about picturesque and historic buildings, without plumbing or central heating or other comforts! Let the Frenchies and the Heinies have their art and culture, and give us the corner drugstore with the soda fountain, and the movie palace with a new program twice a week—in the American language!
VI
The Monuments studied their maps, and meantime Lanny thought it over; then he said, “I don’t suppose it will make any difference to you if I stay here. There are some people I can talk to, and maybe get information of importance.” They knew what he had already got and wished him luck.
For eight years Lanny Budd’s thoughts had been swinging, pendulum-like, between the White House in Washington and Hitler’s Berghof, up on the heights to the east of this little town. He had seen the Führer in many other places, but this was the place of his own choice, the place that revealed his soul. Berchtesgaden had been named for a wild witch, and Adi loved all the imaginings of the Urgermane who had worn bearskins and lived in the dark forests of this land. Deep in his soul he believed in all these creatures, the witches, elves, giants, ogres, gnomes, dragons, Lorelei, Valkyrie, and even gods; he took the Nibelungenlied for history and the Ring for the whole of music and poetry. The old bloody legends had worked in his subconsciousness, and made him willing to exterminate some ten or twenty million people for the crime of not being German. Almost in sight of his retreat was the village of Braunau, in the Austrian Innviertel, where he had been born, and beyond it was the town of Linz where his mother had been born, and where he had meant to erect in he
r memory a temple of art that would cast Karinhall into the shade.
Now he was dead, it appeared, and his Thousand-Year Reich and all his other dreams. His Berghof was a burned-out ruin, and Lanny had seen enough of these. But up on the Obersalzberg was a living woman—or so he hoped. A year and a half had passed since he had called upon her and she had given him food and a guide to help him escape into Italy. He hadn’t been able to write her a bread-and-butter letter, but now he could pay a visit and see how she was. As a source of underground whispers she was even better than Freiherr von Breine. She had had her summer chalet here ever since she had married, unhappily, the Fürst Donnerstein much older than herself; that meant some thirty years, and she knew all the grosse Welt which had sought refuge in these mountains, and her servants knew their servants.
It was a pleasant afternoon’s walk from the town, and Lanny proposed to enjoy it on a delightful bright day. But Major Jennings of G-2, to whom he broached the project, said that it was out of the question. The war wasn’t even over yet, and any German soldier had the legal right to shoot any American in uniform. In these woods were hiding not merely Nazi fanatics but displaced persons and escaped prisoners from a dozen nations and plain bandits on the rampage. Mr. Budd’s OSS credentials were of the best, and if he had business that called him to the Obersalzberg the Army would provide him with an escort; it wouldn’t let him go strolling off as if this were the Adirondacks.
VII
So the ex-P.A. rode in state in a Mercedes car, with an armed chauffeur and a tommy gunner in front, and nobody took a shot at them. There was the familiar chalet, intact, and there was Hilde, Fürstin Donnerstein, out in her garden, picking caterpillars off her cabbages like any peasant woman. In the old days she would have had a wide basket and been cutting roses for her dinner table; she had loved roses, and now she loved cabbages. She had been beautiful and gay, and now her hair was gray and her face lined and the skin of her hands freckled and toughened by outdoor work. She was sad, for her mother had died in the bombing of their Berlin palace and her sister was ill in the house. There was no doctor to be had—they were all tending wounded and dying men.
She was delighted to see this vision from the free world. “I knew that you would come, Lanny. But you are in uniform!”
He explained that he was a noncombatant, and she said it was all right with her either way—all the decent people of Germany were sick of the Nazis and their works. She took him out to the summerhouse built on a point of rock where they had sat in happier times. From there you could see where the Berghof had been, and she offered to get her opera glasses and let him inspect the ruins. He said no, it saddened him to think of the house being bombed, for it had been a beautiful place; but it would have been a Nazi shrine, of course, and the Americans didn’t want to leave any monuments to that evil creed. They would be careful not to make any martyrs either; nobody would be punished until he had had a public trial and been proved a criminal.
“That will include your neighbor, Der Dicke,” he said with a smile, and she told him the amazing story of what had been happening to Göring in the last week or two. He had gone to Berlin and tried to convince Hitler that the war was lost, but Hitler would not be convinced and had flown into one of his rages; Göring had come away and told his friends that the Führer was insane. Later he had telephoned Hitler, proposing to take over Germany and carry out the surrender; Hitler in return had called him a traitor and scoundrel and had ordered the SS to seize him and shoot him at once. The SS had obeyed the first half of the order, but they had hesitated about the second half, for the Reichsmarschall with his jeweled baton was a majestic person in their eyes. In the confusion of defeat there had been a conflict of authority, and a group of Göring’s paratroopers had dashed in and rescued him and carried him off somewhere into the mountains.
“What a story!” he exclaimed. “What a world we are living in!”
“I have a hard time making up my mind that I want to go on living in it,” said Hilde. “But I see you looking well and happy. Tell me how you got away.”
He told the story of his walking and hitchhiking southward, and how by the combined magic of Italian Partisans and American secret agents he had been carried out into the Adriatic on a fishing boat and picked up by a seaplane. Now he was looking for art works hidden by the Nazi plunderers, and she was the one who was going to collect information for him in this neighborhood; he had some secret funds which he was authorized to pay out for such services, and there was no reason in the world why she shouldn’t have some. “Moreover,” he said with one of his cheerful grins, “I’ll get you some insecticide from the PX, and you’ll be able to spray your cabbages instead of picking off the bugs with your aristocratic fingers.”
“There won’t be anything aristocratic in Germany any more,” she mourned; and he said he wished he could believe that, but feared it wasn’t so.
“Hold onto your stocks and bonds,” he told her; “especially industrials. Roosevelt is dead, and my guess is that America is going to uphold what it calls the private enterprise system all over the world. When the factories start up again you will once more he able to live in luxury on the toil of the German workers.”
“Lanny, how horrid!” she exclaimed in English, for her speech was cosmopolitan, like her taste and acquaintanceship. “I thought you got over all that Socialism long ago!”
“I was only posing, old dear,” he told her. “I am still as Pink as the roses that you used to grow.”
“Some roses are Red,” she warned. “And, lieber Gott, those awful Russians! Are you going to let them get hold of us?” He promised to use his best influence in Washington, provided that she would tell him all that she could about the hiding places of art treasures in the Bavarian Alps.
VIII
That suited her, and she went to work without delay. She told him about several places on the Obersalzberg where Göring would be apt to have such works hidden. “You know his hunting lodge here?” she asked; and he reminded her how he had sat before an enormous log fire in that sumptuous place and heard Der Dicke discourse upon the joys of sticking a spear into a wild pig. “You should have a search made in those forests,” she said; “undoubtedly he has hiding places there. Emmy went to Berchtesgaden when he was arrested and has fled to the mountains with him. She will be pretty sure to come back to Zell, and there is where she would have her paintings—unless they are in the trunk of her car. I don’t need to tell you that a single Rembrandt might be enough to keep a woman in comfort the rest of her life.”
Also, there was Ribbentrop; he fancied himself as an esthete, in art as in every other way, and would undoubtedly have hidden old masters. Goebbels had a place here, and Rosenberg, for whom the Einsatzstab had been named; there had been the bitterest rivalry between him and Göring as to who should get the first choice of prizes, and if those two men were caught they would no doubt tell on each other. Adolf Wagner, lame Nazi boss of Munich, was a great plunderer too, but Hilde didn’t know what had become of him. Hofer, Göring’s so-called curator, was in Berchtesgaden, a red-headed rascal who cheated everybody, including his master.
Lanny said, “I met him at Karinhall; he is a great talker.”
“They say he has a remarkable memory and knows the owner and price of every objet d’art that ever passed through his hands. All he will want is a promise of immunity for himself.”
That went on for an hour or so; Lanny didn’t trust to his memory, but made quick notes. He didn’t linger in her house, for he knew that she was a woman with an empty heart, and she had once propositioned him, to use the New York phrase. He gave her a box of delicacies from the Army PX, and he promised to come again and not forget the insecticide. This was a product unobtainable in Germany, because the materials had gone into the making of poison gases for war. The Nazis had prepared enormous quantities but had never used them, because they knew that the Amis had them too.
IX
The investigator went back to Berchtesgaden
and talked with Major Jennings, the top Intelligence officer of the outfit stationed here. He told this man what information he had got; and now that the fighting was to end in a few hours, G-2 had more time to think about Monuments and their problems. “Mightn’t it be a good thing to raid that hunting lodge?” Lanny asked, and Major Jennings replied, “I’ll suggest it, and I’m sure it will be done. Any of these people you want brought in for questioning, just say the word.”
Lanny answered, “Thanks, but it will be better to approach them first as an art expert. They realize that their game is played out, and they want to make friends with their new masters.”
“They make me sick to my stomach,” was the other’s comment. “Here in this vulture’s nest you can’t find a single one that ever wore so much as a vulture’s feather.”
The officer went off and talked to his commander, and when he came back he had an important item of news. “A report has just come in—Göring has surrendered. Sent out a white flag, and we went into the mountains and got him. He was more afraid of the Russians than he was of us.”
“Where is he?” and when Lanny heard “Kitzbühel,” he added, “I believe I could get more out of him than anybody else in the Army. He has counted me as a friend for more than a dozen years and has told me many secrets.”
“Won’t he hate your guts?”
“I have a perfect cover story—that Himmler tried to get me to turn against the Führer. I was afraid it would sound fishy, but Himmler has made it true by actually doing just that.”
“We have been alerted to look out for that bird; he may have come this way, looking for his Redoubt.”
“Nothing he says can do me any harm, for no one is believing any Nazis now. I think I ought to go to Kitzbühel right away, Major. I may be able to get Göring to talk, not merely about paintings but about all the gangsters he hates, and where his confidential papers are, and a lot of other things. Can you spare me a car again?”
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 29
