The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The Army’s first report—an unofficial one, since no Monuments men had yet been invited in to have a peek—said that the Merkers art treasures were not masterpieces. Actually, the Merkers art was so masterly that it was worth at least twice as much as the Merkers gold. Two hundred and two of its German pictures, once the pride of Berlin’s now wrecked Kaiser Friedrich Museum and at present cached in the Washington National Gallery, were alone valued at $80,000,000. The lovely polychrome head of the Egyptian Queen Nofretete, found in a wooden box labelled “Dic Bunte Königin” (“The Multicolored Queen”), was only one extremely valuable item in the Merkers trove of art from fifteen Berlin state museums. On the sixth day after the discovery came the distinguished visitors—Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, Eddy, and Patton. All fourteen stars, representing the top brains and valor of our Army in Europe, descended into the mine in the same elevator, operated by a grim German. Soon after that, the gold was removed—rapidly. Protected by fighter planes, ack-ack guns, and anti-tank guns, the gold was trucked to Frankfurt and its rather less bombed Reichsbank vaults, where, at last official reports, it remains, the most heavily guarded cache in Europe. For nine months before the Merkers find, Monuments men had been disparagingly known in the Army as “those guys with their goddam art.” The Merkers gold and Patton’s personality had made art itself important. An art cache was thereafter known as an “art target,” and all Patton’s rivals itched to strike one too. Clearly, art finds meant publicity to any outfit’s Public Relations officer. Capturing towns was valorous and still the aim of the war, but capturing art was a glamorous new idea.

  Patton’s lucky Third made the next strike, too, with the discovery, in May, just before the European war’s end, of the art cache in the salt mine of Alt Aussee, up in the mountains near Salzburg. Among its sixty-seven hundred paintings was the great Hitler Collection for the museum he planned to set up in memory of his mother at Linz, in Austria, plus the art stolen in Italy by the Hermann Göring Division as a present for its chief’s 1944 birthday. To two of the Third’s Monuments men, Captain Posey and Pfc. Kirstein, Alt Aussee’s cache was far from a surprise. Months before, in Trier, they had squeezed a tip about it from a German who had been connected with the French headquarters of E.R.R., der Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete, or the Reich Leader Rosenberg Task Force for Occupied Territories, the official German art-looting organization. The two Monuments men had been impatiently waiting ever since for their outfit to fight its way to the mine. Once the Allies entered Germany, there was a steady trickle of tips about art in the Allied Intelligence reports. These were assembled in England by British and American Monuments officers and passed back to the proper authorities on the Continent. German prisoners also added tidbits of news, and from interrogations of the German population, then anxious to please, came an incoherent but informative mass of facts, clues, and rumors about hundreds of German art hideouts. There had been, to start with, a list, filched from the E.R.R. offices in Paris, of the six German aboveground hideouts, at Neuschwanstein, Chiemsee, Kögl, Seisenegg, Nickolsburg, and Kloster Buxheim. This list had been stolen by the French in 1942, when our Monuments men were still miles and years away from their goal. The major art, however, had been moved by the time the Monuments men caught up, in 1945. The terrible success of the Allied bombing had driven art, considered by the Nazis more valuable than their people, to safety in new hideouts, often unknown to the Allies, underground.

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  The fourth big German cache was discovered by the United States First Army in the twenty-four kilometres of underground passages of a salt mine at Bernterode, in the Thuringia Forest. At first view, it was perhaps the most startling of all. It featured the caskets of Feldmarschall von Hindenburg and his wife; of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm I, his bier decorated by a wreath and red ribbon bearing the name of his admirer, Adolf Hitler; and of Prussia’s most revered king, Frederick the Great. Using Scotch tape, the methodical Germans had attached to each coffin lid a paper label bearing the name of the occupant scribbled in red crayon. The effect of this morbid scene was enhanced by an array of two hundred and twenty-five German battle banners, the relics of centuries of Prussian campaigns. Around Frederick the Great’s coffin lay those of his Sans Souci Palace treasures that he had loved most—dozens of his paintings by Watteau, Chardin, Lancret, and Boucher, and boxes containing his library, most of the books in French and all of them bound in scarlet leather. Mixed in with swastika-marked flags were the sparkling insignia of earlier German greatness—the Hohenzollern crowns fabricated for Friedrich Wilhelm I and Sophia Dorothea in 1713 (with the jewels missing, these having been “removed for honorable sale,” as an accompanying German note stated); a gold Totenhelm, or death helmet, dated 1688, for dead kings lying in state; a blue enamel royal orb, or Reichsapfel; two magnificent royal swords, dated 1460 and 1540; and an 1801 Hohenzollern sword and scabbard, the latter a terrific, yard-long, tawdry blaze of diamonds and rubies.

  The French, Italian, and Russian slave laborers milling about the neighborhood when the liberating troops arrived said that the caskets had been hauled in a few weeks before under the supervision of the highest German military men and had been walled up in such secrecy and so quickly that they hadn’t known what was being hidden away. It was the presence of fresh mortar in the main mine corridor that had led four sergeants and two corporals of the 330th Ordnance Depot Company, an art target hopefully in mind, to start digging through five feet of still damp masonry. What they had discovered was the sacred elements of Germanic revivalism—in readiness if and when Hitler failed. Bernterode was the most important political repository in all the Reich. By coincidence, our Monuments men brought the caskets out of the mine on V-E Day, while their radio was dialled to the Armed Forces’ network, over which London’s celebration of the great event was being broadcast. To the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Frederick the Great, in a bronze coffin so vast that there was only a half inch to spare, rose majestically on the mine elevator, and just as he reached the free air, there sounded the monarchial strains of “God Save the King.”

  In a brick kiln in the town of Hungen was the most insultingly housed cache of all. Here were hidden the most precious Jewish archives, tomes, and synagogue vessels from all over Europe, including the Rosenthalian collection from Amsterdam and that of the Frankfurt Rothschilds. In the kiln, the repository for the Jewish material Rosenberg planned to use in his projected postwar academy, where anti-Semitism was to be taught as an exact science, priceless illuminated parchment torahs were found cut into covers for Nazi stenographers’ typewriters or made up into shoes. Here, too, were thousands of Jewish identity cards, marked with a yellow “J,” all that remained of Jews who had perished in Nazi crematories.

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  Having found thousands of items of looted art, far from home, and of German-owned art, displaced from its bombed-out museum habitat, the Monuments men, after V-E Day, were faced with the final two problems of their arduous war-and-peace job. The first was the physical act of removing this art—either heaving it up, sometimes heavy and sometimes light, but always valuable and breakable, from the bowels of the earth or from the castles in which it had been stored and transporting it along ruined roads and across streams without bridges. The second problem was to find safe places to put the art in. The first was the harder. The terrible technical difficulties were made quite clear in a rhetorical question one Monuments officer put to a friend: “How would you go about hauling up a close-to-life-size Michelangelo marble statue of the Virgin and Child from the bottom of a salt mine, in a foreign country, with the mine machinery kaput from our bombs, with nearly no help from our Army, since it was authorized to give nearly none, without proper tools, without trained handlers, and without even the tattered bed coverlets of the moving man’s trade to use as padding?” Monuments men used what they found in German military stores for padding. Gasproof Nazi boots were cut into wedges to use as buffers between paintings
; gasproof capes made ideal waterproofings; the full-length German sheepskin coats, tailored for the disastrous Russian campaign, were perfect to wrap around sculpture. For labor, the Monuments men, in their desperation, used any willing human being they could find—Polish, French, Russian, Belgian, Dutch, and Baltic slave workers, male and female, all grimly delighted to help pry loose Germany’s loot, and minor German jailbirds, in the jug for stealing our Army rations and lent by petty German officials eager to curry favor with the conquerors. Some of the newer Monuments men were young curators from rich American museums who had never moved anything heavier than a Degas pastel. During the first summer, autumn, and winter following the peace, the Monuments men—under the supervision of Lieutenant Stout, the Fogg Art Museum expert, as Monuments chief for all the evacuations in the 12th Army Group area, which comprised the German-Austrian mountains and took in six hundred big and little depositories—spent months in red-tape-bound, wearying, exciting, maddening, and often incoherent work, and by the time they were through they had removed a large percentage of the Nazi-hidden art, much of it with their own hands.

  After viewing Germany’s ruins in their search for dependable receptacles, the Monuments men chose the Verwaltungsbau, in Munich, for the central collecting point for looted E.R.R. art, for the Hitler and Göring thefts and purchases, and for any other art from the occupied countries. This had been the Nazi Party’s administration building for South Germany, one of a solid, tasteless, white-stone pair of Party edifices—the other being Hitler’s headquarters building, the Führerbau, next door—which oddly escaped destruction in the ruination of Munich and which, in all their dual, matching ugliness, now dominate the Königsplatz, of whose earlier architectural charm little but the battered façade of the Glyptothek Museum remains. The central collecting point, soon known as the Bau to the Monuments men, was set up and run by Lieutenant Craig Smythe, U.S. N.R., of the National Gallery; Lieutenant Commander Hamilton Coulter, U.S. N.R., a New York architect; and Captain Edwin Rae, art instructor, University of Illinois. The Verwaltungsbau had been partially gutted, and its tons of secret, sacred Nazi documents—including lists of Party members as well as of anti-Nazis scheduled to be shot—had been scattered by post–V-E Day German mobs. The huge building had to be repaired, cleaned, lighted, staffed, and guarded at a time when a broom was a rarity, when coal was lacking, and glass for smashed windows and skylights had to be scrounged. Then, anti-Nazis had to be discovered among the German curators to aid in the colossal task. Finally, the Army, with the war over, with half a country to patrol, and with the art-target game only a memory, was naturally indifferent about lending good, strong G.I. guards to sit up night and day eying pretty pictures.

  The Verwaltungsbau actually served not only as a collecting point but as a repatriation point; Allied art arrived in bulk and was then carefully parcelled out, on signed receipt, to the Allied countries to whom it had belonged before the Germans got hold of it. To facilitate the work, representatives of the Allied governments also functioned at the Bau. As art items were tentatively identified, through catalogues or often by the Nazis’ own tags, they were placed in storerooms—each nation had its own—for further checking of ownership. When the identification was verified, the art was trucked off home, at the concerned nation’s expense, after a receipt had been signed releasing the Allied authorities from further responsibility. Art that had actually been bought by the Nazis from private owners was, as a rule, simply put into government custody, when it got home, on the principle that unless the former owner could prove that the property had been sold under duress, it should become the property of the state. The wrangling over ownership is still going on.

  To complete their knowledge of the Nazi looting, it was necessary for the Monuments men to do considerable detective work, establishing—by interrogation and by locating and studying Nazi, collaborationist, and other documents all over occupied Europe—exactly how, by whom, and for which Nazi bigwigs this massive spoliation of art had been organized. On this complicated information was based one phase of the “crimes against civilization” with which some of the Nazi war criminals—especially Göring, Rosenberg, and Frank—were charged at the Nuremberg trials. Lieutenants Theodore Rousseau, of the National Gallery, and James Plaut, of Boston’s Institute of Modern Art, both of the Navy and both speaking fluent German and French, and Navy Lieutenant S. L. Faison, art professor of Williams College, made up a roving secret service for the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the Office of Strategic Services, which worked with the Monuments men. The only full-time Monuments detective was Lieutenant Walter Horn, a Hamburg-born anti-Nazi who for years had been art professor at the University of California. By the repeated use of his most effective phrase, in German, “If you are not telling me the truth, you will pay for it with your head,” he got Germans to tell him the truth. It was by this method that he obtained from a Nuremberg city councillor information as to the whereabouts of five of the greatest insignia of the Holy Roman Empire, including the real eleventh-century crown of Charlemagne, pipped with raw sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and amethysts and tipped with a jewelled cross, and the St. Mauritius thirteenth-century sword. Nazi propaganda had carefully spread the rumor, after V-E Day, that a certain S.S. officer had sunk these relics in the Zell-am-See. Actually, on highest Nazi Party orders, the insignia had been secreted in an aperture in a false wall, eight stories underground, in the bottom basement of an apartment house built on the rocky slope of the Nuremberg Paniersplatz. Today, the interested visitor walks down (and later up) eight flights of stairs, accompanied by a slovenly janitor, to see the visible evidence of this ingenuous-looking, completely unsuspected hideaway—a jagged hole, such as any plumber might have made, leading into what appears to be a flue, such as any furnace might possess, just large enough to contain the five sacred relics, each fitted into its own beautiful locked, sealed, engraved, rustproof copper box. This cache of Holy Roman Empire relics was second in national sentimental and political value only to the royal and martial caskets at Bernterode. Ideologically, these two were the most important of all the German caches, laid by in a desperate hour against the Germanic comeback.

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  While the Bau was functioning as the collecting point for looted art, a collecting point for the E.R.R. loot from Jewish libraries, synagogues, and private documentary collections was set up at Offenbach in an unbombed I.G. Farben building. Some German-owned art, mainly from the Rhineland, was installed in still another collecting point, at Marburg, in the Staatsarchiv building. The major collecting point for German-owned art, including that from the great Berlin museums, was settled at Wiesbaden, in the old Landesmuseum. Captain Walter Farmer, of the M.F.A. & A., took over the building, considerably the worse for wear, from the Army service troops, who had been using it as a joint clothing and D.P. center. Here, after he had overcome the customary difficulties of getting brooms, soap, and window glass, seventy-five rooms were filled with Germany’s most valuable art, usually still packed in the carefully labelled boxes in which the Germans had embarked it toward safety and hiding. There were hundreds of boxes, containing pictures by Cimabue, Mantegna, Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Bellini, and all the other great artists of Europe for centuries back. The Landesmuseum also housed hundreds of neat, sliding-panelled, annotated cases containing the German museums’ fine print and engraving collections—all packed as carefully as if they were food, awaiting the great day when the Reich would be victorious and could once again savor its art publicly, in its huge museums. The Landesmuseum’s so-called Treasure Room, kept under special guard, looked like the delirious dream of a private collector. Crowded into it was every kind of particularly precious art, piled in corners from floor to ceiling, spread on tables, ranged from the locked doors to the barred windows—objects in gold, in silver, studded with diamonds, festooned with pearls, bloody with rubies; objects once held by kings, worn or collected by dukes, or revered by bishops, and all finally become the public property of the wealthy
, powerful German State, under its Kaisers. An important part of the Landesmuseum job was to demonstrate to the Germans the Monuments–War Department idea that art has nothing to do with war or race; that it belongs first to everybody and second to the people who legally owned it; and that German art was simply being held by the Monuments unit in trust until responsible German authority could offer the guards and the housing such treasures required. As illustration of this theory, the Landesmuseum staged two exhibitions for the Germans of their own magnificent property—a superb painting show of early gems, including some by van der Goes and Bouts; and a fine engraving show, with the catalogues in both German and English.

  Unfortunately, it was also at the Landesmuseum that the Monuments ideal was, in the opinion of the Monuments men themselves, betrayed. The two hundred and two German-owned pictures now cached in our National Gallery came from the Landesmuseum collection. In December, 1945, the Monuments officers, acting on orders received in November from Berlin to select—which they conscientiously did—a representative collection of German art, finished the job of packing it for transportation and sent a Monuments officer to accompany it on its hegira to our national capital. All this was unanimously disapproved of by Major LaFarge, then chief of M.F.A. & A. in the U.S. Military Government for Germany, the section’s other officers, and its men, as well as by most museum officials in the United States. Ironically enough, some of the pictures selected—paintings by Botticelli, Rubens, Rembrandt, and van Eyck—had, in June, 1941, been reproduced in an article in the Nazi Paris propaganda magazine Signal contemptuously denying an alleged Allied report that fourteen of Germany’s museum masterpieces had gone out to the vulgarian United States in exchange for millions of dollars in cash to aid in financing the Nazi war. The facts about what the Monuments men bitterly called the Westward Ho Plan for sending this collection of German art to the States are still obscure. What is known, however, is that, as far as Europe was concerned, the idea was first heard of in Berlin in July of that year, when President Truman was attending the Big Three Potsdam Conference. In a private meeting with certain chiefs of our American Military Government, in Potsdam, the suggestion to send the art was made, reputedly by General Clay, Deputy Military Governor of the United States Zone. It is further reported that President Truman, perhaps thinking he was doing art a good turn, agreed to the suggestion. On the other hand, it has also been reported that the idea originated in the minds of non-museum men back in Washington, who decided not to identify themselves when the plan was bitterly criticized by the American press and museum people everywhere.