Stealing the Mystic Lamb

by Noah Charney

  Despite Eisenhower’s words of support, from the start, the MFAA was sidelined and often dismissed by the commanders of the Allied armies. It was a well-meaning but undersupported and incompletely conceived effort that frustrated its officers. The MFAA generally followed the policies that Wheeler and Ward-Perkins had improvised back at Leptis Magna in 1943. When a Monuments Man reached a new site, his duty was first to survey previously identified monuments and artworks to assess the damage. He was then to organize on-site repairs as best he could, often by recruiting the locals to help when military personnel could not be spared. He was finally to secure the sites and objects if at all possible. But Monuments Men often had no equipment to aid them, frequently having to bum rides off of fellow soldiers, while others assigned to the MFAA were left for months at base camps, all but forgotten, before they were finally deployed.

  At a practical level, the main weapon in their arsenal was a sign that read “Off Limits to All Military Personnel; Historic Monument: Trespassing on or Removal of Any Materials or Articles from These Premises Is Strictly Forbidden by Command of the Commanding Officer.” This was meant to keep their own soldiers away from sensitive sites, for fear of souvenir-hunters and postfighting vandalism. When they ran out of “Off Limits” signs, Monuments Men would occasionally improvise, erecting instead signs that read “Danger: Mines!” a perhaps even more effective means of keeping people clear of a protected area. The MFAA’s strength was its person-to-person intelligence operation. Monuments Men interviewed locals (in the local languages) in the wake of the fighting, in an attempt to learn the location of missing treasures.

  It was only when the Allies finally captured Paris that the MFAA found a wealth of documents relating to Göring’s personal activities and the ERR cache at the Jeu de Paume Museum. Most of this valuable information came from one source: a mousy clerk at the Jeu de Paume named Rose Valland, who, unbeknownst to the Nazis, understood German and worked as a spy for the French Resistance during the occupation of Paris, reporting directly to Jacques Jaujard. Thanks to her passion for art, her ingenuity, and her bravery, when the Allies rolled into Paris, she had a trove of information, including copies of receipts, photographs, and inventories, to pass on to the Monuments Man stationed in Paris, Second Lieutenant James J. Rorimer. They began to understand the extent of the Nazi looting, though the overall plan, to sweep all of Europe to fill the Linz museum, would not become clear for another six months.

  In November 1944 the MFAA was aided by the newly established U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by General “Wild Bill” Donovan. The OSS was an intelligence service, the direct predecessor of the CIA. Along with its British counterpart, the OSS launched several programs aimed at Nazi economic destabilization by severing the stolen art assets. A subdivision of the OSS was formed, called the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU). This group embarked in August 1944 on the Safehaven Programme, an Allied operation to seek out and seize Nazi assets hidden in neutral countries, particularly Switzerland, where it was known that Nazis had been selling stolen art to raise funds.

  Intelligence rolled in not only about theft but also about the wanton destruction of art by Nazis. Art as a financial asset was one worry. Now rumors were slowly fed by evidence that Nazis were destroying art and monuments. One repository of French national museum collections, at the chateau Valencay, was torched by the Second Das Reich SS Panzer Division in the summer of 1944. Chateau Rastignac, in the Dordogne, was burned by SS troops on 30 March 1942, after a presumably failed search for thirty-one Impressionist masterpieces that had been hidden in a false-bottomed trunk in the castle attic. Whether the art was discovered and removed before the burning is unknown, but none of the works have resurfaced. The number of such stories increased and, with them, the Allied fears for the survival of Europe’s art treasures.

  On 2 November 1944 Sir Leonard Woolley wrote to Lord Macmillan of a discovery that confirmed these fears:Our informant reports that he was in Munich in October 1943 and there learnt from a Bavarian state functionary to whom it had been officially circulated that Hitler had issued a secret order to all responsible authorities to the effect that in the last resort all historic buildings and works of art in Germany, whether of German or of foreign origin, whether legally or illegally acquired, should be destroyed rather than allowed to fall in the hands of Germany’s enemies. . . . Literal obedience to Hitler’s orders will result not only in the destruction of the artistic treasures of Germany itself, but of a great deal of the artistic heritage of many of our Allies. In view of this threat, therefore, it seems essential that His Majesty’s Government be now recommended to take some anticipatory action.

  This letter prompted the organization of a secret counter-mission involving several Austrian double agents. Their remarkable adventure, known as Operation Ebensburg, is integral to the story of the rescue of The Ghent Altarpiece by Allied Monuments Men. It should be noted that mutually contradictory accounts of the race to save Europe’s artistic treasures emerged from the chaos of the war. The rest of this chapter will explore the various versions of the story and discuss the reasons why the accounts differ, in order to identify the most probable among the many “truths” that have been preserved in primary source documents.

  The future leader of Operation Ebensburg was an Austrian Luftwaffe fighter named Albrecht Gaiswinkler. Born in 1905 in the town of Bad Aussee to a salt miner, Gaiswinkler grew into a dynamic, charismatic man, with a dark goatee, intense narrow eyes, and a hairline that receded into a tonsure. He worked in various industrial jobs before joining in 1929 the Social Security Office in Graz, capital of the alpine Austrian province of Styria. Gaiswinkler was an active union supporter and a member of the Social Democratic Party. Most importantly, he was a steadfast anti-Nazi, serving some months in prison for his political dissension in 1934. He joined the regional underground Resistance in 1938, and eventually his activities drew the attention of the Gestapo. In order to avoid imprisonment, Gaiswinkler enlisted in the Luftwaffe on 20 March 1943. He served in Belgium and France, where he witnessed the execution of members of the French Resistance—a sight that prompted him to decide to desert. During this time his family wrote letters to him regularly, several of which mentioned truckloads of artworks in wooden crates arriving by night at the salt mine at Alt Aussee, near his home, some hundred miles from Linz.

  In the spring of 1944 Gaiswinkler’s unit moved to Paris. There he made contact with the Maquis, France’s underground guerrilla Resistance movement. He managed to vanish from his German division by trading identities with a bomb victim who had been disfigured beyond recognition. He joined the Maquis with a stolen haul that included half a million francs and four trucks full of arms and ammunition. In September of that year he and sixteen other German prisoners surrendered themselves to American soldiers of the U.S. Third Army at Dinan, in Alsace. In his first postcapture interrogation, he convincingly expressed his strong anti-Nazi inclinations. More importantly, he mentioned his knowledge of an art depot at Alt Aussee.

  The Austrian Resistance provided some information about Alt Aussee, to supplement Gaiswinkler’s personal knowledge from having grown up in the region. The area had been mined for salt for over 3,000 years. It was mined not with picks but with water, which dissolved the salt crystals in the rock. The brine was piped through the mine and out to the surface, where the water was later evaporated, leaving the salt behind. Since a royal grant was declared in 1300, a small group of families had been in charge of mining the area. The families had remained isolated from other communities, not permitting outsiders to mine their territory. The result was a cluster of families blighted by physical deformities resulting from 650 years of inbreeding and working conditions in stooped darkness inside the mines. The community of roughly 125 miners and their families spoke a strange dialect that was a closer relation to medieval German than to the contemporary language. Even their uniforms were of a different era: white linen suits and peaked caps of the sort that may be seen
worn by miners in woodcuts from the sixteenth century.

  The salt mine honeycombed through a mountain, full of caverns of varying sizes, all interconnected. In 1935 the miners had even consecrated a chapel in one of the vaulted caverns dedicated to Saint Barbara, patron saint of miners. Nazi art historians who examined the mine saw the excellent state of preservation of the painted altarpiece in this Chapel of Saint Barbara, and determined that the atmospheric conditions were ideal for the storage of art. The humidity inside was consistently at 65 percent. In the summer the mine naturally maintained an ambient temperature of 40º Fahrenheit. Strangely enough, in the winter the ambient temperature was always 47º. At first, the mine was used for the storage of the collection of the Kunsthistorichesmuseum in Vienna. The mine was later chosen, in 1943, by Dr. Hermann Michel, chief of the Viennese Service for the Protection of Historical Monuments and a mineralogist, as the perfect collection point for all of the Nazi looted art that was destined for Hitler’s supermuseum at Linz.

  From 1942 to 1943, engineers created within the salt mines a state-of-the-art storage facility. The caves inside the mine, some spacious and lofty like underground rock cathedrals, were lined with waterproofed wood and wired for electricity. Metal gallery racks were installed, the sort used for museum storage. Paintings were hung from hooks on vertical mesh racks, which were stacked side by side and mounted on sliders; the art could be accessed by sliding the rack out from the stack. Some of the caves were tall enough to contain three tiers of racks, reached by pulley elevator. Special boxes were constructed to protect works on paper. There were thousands of meters of bookshelves. A staff of 125 was maintained at all times at the facility. Engineers checked daily for temperature, humidity, and potential signs of geological collapse. Art restorers and art historians made regular rounds, repairing objects that had been damaged in transit or in the process of having been looted. There were even offices and spaces in which workers could sleep in the converted mine.

  Most of the treasures were moved to Alt Aussee beginning in May 1944, with the remainder arriving by April 1945, when Allied bombings made precarious the existing storage points, which included six German castles and one monastery. More than 1,680 paintings arrived from Hitler’s Munich office, the Führerbau, which was an assembly point for the führer’s Linz collection. Much more would come from other sources. Just how high-tech a treasure house it was, and what prizes would be found within, were questions that Gaiswinkler’s team had to wait just a bit longer to answer.

  The Americans contacted the London-based Special Operations Executive (SOE), thinking that Gaiswinkler might be a valuable asset if he could be convinced, as seemed feasible, to work for the Allies. He was flown to London and offered the chance to be trained as a secret agent to fight the Nazis and free his native Austria.

  Gaiswinkler eagerly accepted and was sent to a training facility in the English countryside. At Wandsborough Manor in Surrey he was taught sabotage, demolitions, camouflage, cartography, outdoor survival, marksmanship, and deception during interrogation—the tricks of the trade for undercover field agents. He learned how to parachute over the Ringway Airfield near Manchester. In Surrey Gaiswinkler was introduced to a group of fellow Austrians who had joined the Allies as double or undercover agents. Many more who had volunteered ultimately had been deemed unsuitable. Psychologically, ideologically, and physically, these were the cream of the recruits.

  The Special Operations Executive had great success throughout the war in training double agents and, through them, securing priceless intelligence for the war effort. An assignment was constructed for Gaiswinkler to lead: Operation Ebensburg. He and three other Austrian agents, Karl Standhartinger, Karl Schmidt, and Josef Grafl, would be entrusted with a twofold secret mission, half of which would provide the Allied answer to the call for action in Sir Leonard Woolley’s letter to Lord Macmillan.

  Their mission was to rescue Europe’s kidnapped art treasures from Alt Aussee. Though they did not yet know it, the magnum opus among the countless masterpieces stored in the hidden salt mine was Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

  There was another element to their mission—the assassination of Josef Goebbels.

  Attempts on the lives of Nazi leaders had been as frequent as they were unsuccessful. Hitler seemed to many of the Nazis to be a blessed man, perhaps supernaturally protected; he had survived at least twelve assassination attempts. In the first, a bomb narrowly missed him at the Burgerbrau beer hall in Munich on 8 November 1939. Hitler was giving a speech, which he ended abruptly, before his scheduled finish, at 9:12 PM. The bomb went off at 9:20, caving in the roof of the beer hall, killing eight and wounding sixty-five, including the father of Hitler’s lover, Eva Braun. Surviving a dozen plots on his life only strengthened Hitler’s conviction that he was a Chosen One, who would cleanse the world and lead his people to victory. The Third Reich was driven by its dynamic leaders, Hitler most of all. If the key figures could be eliminated, the war might be brought to a hasty end. And while multiple attempts on the heavily guarded führer had failed, perhaps the members of his inner circle, such as Goebbels, could be reached. British intelligence had heard that Goebbels was planning a holiday in the resort town of Grundlsee, Austria, near Alt Aussee. It could be a chance to eliminate one of the most powerful heads of the Nazi hydra.

  Beyond Gaiswinkler, the only Operation Ebensburg team member about whom much is known is the radio operator, Josef Grafl. Grafl was born in 1921 in Schattendorf, Austria—a community with a strong social democratic bent, situated along the Hungarian border. He worked as a bricklayer in Vienna and, from 1934, was a member of the Communist Party of Austria. Working with the Socialist Worker Youth organization, he trained as a radio operator. For his Communist activities, Grafl was imprisoned for three months in Wöllendorf. After release, he trained as a master mason, but his education was cut short when he was drafted for military service on 17 October 1940. Once his Communist background was rediscovered he was classified as “unfit for military service” and was sent to Aurich for further training in radio operations.

  In 1941 Grafl was deployed in the Ukraine, as part of the Nazi army’s radio news department. That same year, while on duty in Bulgaria, Grafl sabotaged his own army by sending secret radio messages to the Russians. Caught in the act, Grafl was brought to Varna, Bulgaria, where he was sentenced to death. With the help of two friends, he managed to escape Varna, boarding a ship in the Black Sea. But the ship was halted at the Romanian port of Constanta. Grafl, fearful of recapture, set out on foot with the hope of reaching Athens and joining the Andart, the Greek partisan force. He got as far as Kilkis, when he was caught and arrested as a deserter.

  Once again, Grafl outmaneuvered his captors. He escaped with the help of two Bulgarian partisans, who brought him to their Greek counterparts in the mountains separating the two nations. But there was confusion and miscommunication—the Greek partisans thought that he was a Nazi enemy, and Grafl was forcibly detained for the third time. Unable to communicate that he was on their side, Grafl managed to seize his captors’ guns and march the partisans to Athens. In the process of the march he managed to convince his one-time captors that they were all against the Nazis, and Grafl ultimately joined the Greek partisans in the Dourgouti district of Athens. The British provided arms and supplies to the partisans, who regularly did battle with local Nazi forces in the streets and the woods nearby. Taking advantage of these contacts with the British, Grafl accepted an offer to work for them in the SOE, which was actively recruiting German and Austrian deserters who might be trained as double agents.

  Grafl joined the Allies earlier than Gaiswinkler, but he was initially accepted by the Royal Air Force, not the SOE. In early 1942 he was driven by submarine from Greece to Alexandria, Egypt, for basic training, after which he received further pilot training in Haifa. Grafl was deployed against the Japanese and worked as crew member on a fighter plane in China and Burma, escorting bombers. After dozens of missions, Grafl bega
n to feel that he was too far from where his heart was; he wanted to be fighting for the freedom of his native Austria. He requested a transfer, and it was then that he was interviewed for the SOE. In 1944 he was given the pseudonym Joseph Green and received the majority of his training in sabotage and parachuting in Hong Kong. He participated in thirty-four sabotage missions before he joined Operation Ebensburg.

  The team’s training was complete by late January 1945. The agents were given aliases—false papers and identities. Drilled in the memorization of their fraudulent biographies, and transferred to Bari in southern Italy, they received their assignments. The primary task was to investigate the Alt Aussee mine depot and to organize a local resistance movement. The secondary agenda, should their primary task be successful, was to lead the local Resistance, gathering intelligence on enemy units and activity in the area. They were to disrupt enemy operations through sabotage and guerrilla tactics, and attempt to secure the mine until the arrival of an Allied army division. And finally, when he arrived for his planned stay in Grundslee, they were to attempt the assassination of Josef Goebbels. They would liaise with the SOE branch based in Bari by radio transmitter, which they would carry with them when dropped by parachute into the Austrian Alps. The codeword communications with HQ in Bari was “Maryland.”

  After delays due to inclement weather, the team set out on 8 April. Their equipment, including machine guns, grenades, explosives, detonators, and the radio transmitter, would be dropped in crates with automatic parachutes. They carried with them only handguns and survival knives. They would be met on the ground by members of the Austrian Resistance.

  The pilot of the Halifax aircraft that would deliver the special agents, Bill Leckie of the Scottish Saltire Branch of the 148th Royal Air Force Special Duties Squadron, recalled the assignment:At this time we had absolutely no previous idea of our role in this situation concerning the German threat to destroy Nazi loot. Security at that time was 100% efficient, with no indication of what was about to take place, other than fulfilling our own particular task to the best of our ability. As pilot and captain of a Halifax aircraft about to embark on an SD operation, I was fully briefed with the exception of . . . learning any details about the four persons we had been instructed to drop over our specific dropping zone. To ensure maximum security in line with Special Duties practice, there was no communication between aircrew and the SOE agents, other than the dispatcher making them familiar with dropping procedures.