by Noah Charney
It was early April 1945. Posey and Kirstein contacted the Austrian Resistance movement. They were a few days away from Alt Aussee. It was only then that they learned of the parallel mission, Operation Ebensburg.
At this point the reports from Resistance members vary as to what happened at Alt Aussee before the arrival of the Third Army. The historical account of Operation Ebensburg is based on three documents: Gaiswinkler’s memoir, Grafl’s memoir, and a book about the Resistance published by the Austrian government in 1947. Other primary source accounts tell different versions of the story; even Grafl’s rendition of the story differs from that of his teammate, Gaiswinkler. Hermann Michel, the mine’s technical director; Emmerich Pöchmüller, the civilian director of the mine; and Sepp Plieseis, another Resistance leader, penned accounts that were often contradictory. It is only with the arrival of the Third Army at Alt Aussee that the waters clear.
The Austrian Resistance confirmed all Bunjes had said. The salt mine at Alt Aussee was guarded by SS and indeed contained a huge amount of stolen art. Still more worrisome, scouts confirmed that the mine was wired with explosives, dynamite charges, and detonators.
While Posey and Kirstein had warned General Patton of what Bunjes had told them, the division of the army that was nearest to Alt Aussee, led by a Major Ralph E. Pearson, was incommunicado and unaware of the Alt Aussee salt mine, its contents, or the danger to it. When Pearson finally received a message about the mine, in May 1945, it was from a non-Allied source, which has never been identified. Hermann Michel, technical director of the mine, claimed to have been the one who sent the warning, but its author is unknown. Pearson got the message and directed his forces straight for the mine. He would be the first Ally to reach it.
Meanwhile in Bad Aussee, Gaiswinkler and his team learned about the local Resistance from his brother Max. The Resistance was led by a Communist and member of the local gendarmerie called Valentin Tarra and consisted of a relatively inactive but well-meaning and brave group of mountain rescue service personnel and local police. Gaiswinkler had first met Tarra, along with a clerk at the Alt Aussee salt mine, Hans Moser, on 13 February 1940, before Gaiswinkler had been drafted into the Wehrmacht. Tarra and Moser had led the local Resistance together, but Moser had been killed in an air raid in the fall of 1944 along with several other resistance fighters, shortly after a Ukrainian informer had notified the local Gestapo of Moser’s activities. Tarra was one of the few Resistance fighters who escaped capture and remained active.
Gaiswinkler renewed contact with Tarra and established a base of operations with him. Within days of Gaiswinkler’s arrival, Tarra was able to rally about 360 Resistance volunteers through his network of local contacts, primarily with the gendarmerie, who could provide guns when necessary. He was able to provide Gaiswinkler’s team with weapons and, most importantly, a new radio transmitter so that Grafl could contact the headquarters in Bari for the first time since their landing. Tarra put them in touch with sympathetic miners from Alt Aussee and a contact working with Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s second in command of the SS, who had set up a headquarters at the nearby Villa Castiglione. Finally, the Resistance linked Gaiswinkler with the two German officers in charge of the art at the Alt Aussee mine depot, Professor Herman Michel and an art conservator, Karl Sieber.
Michel, a secret Communist, was the man who had recommended that the Alt Aussee salt mine be used as an art depot. Before the war, Michel had been the director of the Natural History Museum in Vienna; he was an expert in mineralogy. He resembled a caricature of a mad scientist, with his green Austrian hunting jacket and shock of white hair that bounced of its own volition and seemed to defy gravity. At the war’s end, Michel would claim to have been instrumental in the effort to save the Alt Aussee treasures, and he may well have been. But like many in the service of the Nazis, his activities during the Third Reich did not reflect his stated objections to Nazism once the Reich had fallen.
In 1938 Michel had been fired from his role as director of the Natural History Museum because of the institution’s new agenda of propagating the Nazi Aryan concepts of racial superiority. A new director was installed, handpicked to lead a new propagandistic era for the museum. This was one of Goebbels’s strokes of genius as minister of propaganda: If the premiere natural history museum in central Europe began to run exhibits on Aryan superiority and the derogation of “inferior” races, then these theories would be believed. Michel, of no standing in the Nazi Party, was bumped down the hierarchy and became the director of the museum’s Mineralogy Department. Throughout this time he did his best to endear himself to the Nazi leaders around him, even to the point of supporting anti-Semitic and racist exhibits and pseudoscholarly material. He even became the head of public relations for the local branch of the Nazi Party in an effort to ingratiate himself.
Was Herman Michel indeed a secret Communist, as he claimed to be when the Allies arrived? His shifts in ideology to match the prevailing winds of victory—a Nazi when the Nazis were in power, a Communist when the Nazis fell—suggest that he was an opportunist more than a resistor. The Second World War provides scores of stories of Germans who would not normally have supported the Nazis but did so out of necessity, weakness, wile, or fear. Over time, retrospect and opportunity made “heroes” out of some who claimed a greater role in the victory against the Axis than they may have deserved. Michel seems to have been one such figure.
Karl Sieber, chief conservator in charge of maintaining the mine’s treasures, had been a quiet but respected art restorer in Berlin before the war. He saw himself as an honest craftsman, without grand aspirations and with no inclination towards Nazism. In fact, he had a number of Jewish friends. It was one of his Jewish friends who suggested that he join the Nazi Party, as it seemed the best way to advance oneself in the late 1930s. A steady flow of art had been entering Berlin since the Nazis took power, which meant, whether the art was stolen or not, that it needed the attention of good conservators. Sieber had spent the war years with his wife and daughter in relative seclusion from the fighting that raged around him, in the company of hundreds of famous works—a conservator’s dream, albeit one woven tight with moral dilemma. There was no question that masterpieces must be conserved for the ages, and to be fair, there were few options, even for Germans who did not support the Nazis, other than to cooperate. Conserving art was perhaps the least of all Nazi evils in which one might be complicit, and Sieber dedicated himself to binding the wounds of the masterpieces that came his way. He was particularly proud of his work on The Ghent Altarpiece, which had been damaged in transit from Pau to Neuschwanstein, where it was first stored, leaving Sieber to repair a split in the wood of one of the panels.
Michel and Sieber oversaw all operations at the mine, though they had no authority beyond supervision of the mine’s functionality and content. The acting director of the Alt Aussee mine was Emmerich Pöchmüller. He was more of an administrator, whereas Michel and Sieber were in contact with the art on a daily basis. They were passionate lovers of the art in their charge and would do everything in their power to preserve it. But the SS were their superiors, and they answered to the regional SS commander Gauleiter Eigruber. When Michel and Sieber began to suspect that Eigruber was willing to destroy the art rather than let it fall to the Allies, they made covert contact with the local Resistance.
Gaiswinkler, Tarra, and the local Resistance achieved a series of small successes through covert and guerrilla actions, before the larger (and, by some historians, disputed) heroism that would ultimately decide the future of the Alt Aussee treasures. They stole police files from the local Gestapo office, as well as Gestapo forms, stamps, and passes with which forged papers were made. These allowed two of their men to slip through checkpoints in order to make contact with the Allied army near Vöcklabruck. There the Resistance detailed the position and layout of German forces in a region between Bad Aussee and Goisern known as the Pötschen Pass, which permitted a devastating Allied air attack. At a later dat
e, as the German Sixth Army was retreating, the Resistance was able to pick off straggling units with quick, sharp surprise attacks in the alpine forests, capturing heavier armaments and even two German tanks.
Then an ominous event sprung the Resistance into sudden action.
During the nights of 10 and 13 April SS soldiers, led by a man called Glinz, Eigruber’s henchman and the local gauinspektor (district inspector), drove into the mine with six heavy wooden crates. Stamped on the side of the crates were the words Vorsicht! Marmor: Nicht Sturzen (“Attention! Marble: Do Not Drop”). One crate was placed in each of the six main storage rooms. But the crates, the size of refrigerators, did not contain marble. They contained five-hundred-kilogram aircraft bombs. On instruction from Eigruber they were placed at select points in the mine. If detonated, they would cause complete collapse and water damage, totally destroying all of the art inside.
Eigruber was determined that the art should never surface from the belly of the mine. But had Hitler ever intended to destroy all of the art that had been so painstakingly stolen? Historians have debated the question. Hitler had at times wantonly permitted the destruction of art, as in the case of the most beautiful bridge in Florence, Ponte Santa Trinita by Bartolomeo Ammanati. He had ordered the demolition of Paris when it was clear that the city would be lost to the Allies. He also issued his infamous Nero Decree, as it became known, to all commanding officers on 19 March 1945:The struggle for the very existence of our people forces us to seize any means which can weaken the combat preparedness of our opponents and prevent them from advancing. Every opportunity, whether direct or indirect, to inflict the most resonant possible damage on the enemy’s ability to strike us, must be used to its utmost. It is a mistake to believe that when we win back lost territories we will be able to retrieve and reuse our old transportation, communications, production, and supply facilities that have not been destroyed or crippled; when the enemy withdraws he will leave us only scorched earth and will show no consideration for the welfare of the population.
Therefore, I order: 1) All military, transportation, communications, industrial, and food supplying facilities, as well as all resources within the Reich which the enemy might use either immediately or in the near future to continue the war, must be destroyed. 2) Those responsible for these measures are: the military commands for all military objects, including the transportation and communications installations; the gauleiters and defense commissioners for all industrial and supply facilities, as well as other resources. When necessary, the troops are to assist the gauleiters and the defense commissioners in carrying out their duties. 3) These orders are to be communicated at once to all troop commanders; contrary instructions are invalid.
Adolf Hitler
It was feared that the order to destroy anything that the Allies might use would include looted artworks. From its phrasing, it is not clear—artworks could be useful to the war effort, in terms of resale value, but the types of things Hitler focused on were industrial and supply-related. The result was that this decree was variously interpreted by those who received it. For a gauleiter like August Eigruber, with thousands of priceless artworks under his control, the Nero Decree was unambiguous.
But it is highly unlikely that Hitler ever intended for the art at Alt Aussee to be destroyed. While he supported the burning of books and degenerate art, examples of the führer’s command that art and monuments be preserved abound. While Hitler permitted the destruction of Ponte Santa Trinita to impede the Allied advance from the south side of the city while the Nazis escaped from the north bank of the river Arno, he famously demanded that the bridge only a few hundred meters further upriver, the Ponte Vecchio, be spared. Indeed, Florence’s Ponte Vecchio was Hitler’s single favorite monument. It was the first item on his list of artworks and monuments that under no circumstances were to be damaged. Number two was the entire city of Venice. In the Nazi retreat from Florence, all of the bridges across the Arno were destroyed except for the Ponte Vecchio. But in order to stall the Allied advance, the Nazis blew up a large neighborhood at the end of the Ponte Vecchio, to create a barrier of debris while sparing the bridge from destruction. In his will, which Hitler dictated to his secretary on 29 April 1945, just after having married his lover, Eva Braun, and mere hours before their suicide, he underscored that the pictures he had collected (as he euphemistically put it) for the Linz museum should be given to the German state. Had he intended that the art should be destroyed, he would not have bequeathed it to the German state upon his death.
But by this time, it was Eigruber’s decision that mattered. And he was determined to fulfill the death sentence.
During the day of 13 April 1945 the Alt Aussee mine was visited by Martin Bormann’s secretary, Dr. Helmut von Hummel, along with the officer Glinz, who had brought in the bombs, and a number of other German officials. Though Eigruber was unaware of it, Albert Speer, Hitler’s confidant and minister of armaments and war production, had convinced the führer to temper the infamous Nero Decree’s call for the complete destruction of nonindustrial sites that the Allies might use to their benefit, instead issuing a new order that the sites be incapacitated, so that they would be of no immediate use. In large part this change was aimed at preserving the stolen art treasures, and Martin Bormann had dispatched von Hummel to pass these orders on to Eigruber: “the artwork was by no means to fall into enemy hands, but in no event should it be destroyed.” Only Glinz and Eigruber knew that two of the “marble” crates containing bombs had already been moved into place. More would be rolled in on 30 April.
Emmerich Pöchmüller, the unprepossessing civilian director of the mine, learned of the new order on 14 April, when he was contacted by von Hummel. But von Hummel deferred his role as emissary, instead instructing the acting director of the mine to explain the new situation to Eigruber. The hapless Pöchmüller, who had no authority within the Nazi Party, stood no chance of convincing Eigruber that the destruction decree from the führer had been changed.
Eigruber would not accept Pöchmüller’s phone call, so the desperate director traveled to the gauleiter’s headquarters in Linz to speak with him in person. On 17 April, Pöchmüller arrived and met Eigruber in his office. He informed the gauleiter that he had received instructions that the mine’s treasures were under no circumstances to be allowed to fall into enemy hands and that this meant that the mine shaft should be demolished, sealing the mine but preserving the art within. According to Pöchmüller’s own account of the meeting, Eigruber said that he did not believe these new secret orders, which came directly from Bormann through von Hummel, orders that the lowly Pöchmüller had heard but Eigruber had not. “The main point is total destruction,” he said. “On this point we will remain bull-headed.” He added that he would “personally come and throw grenades into the mine” if he had to.
Pöchmüller was dismayed, but he had an inclination that this might be Eigruber’s response. He had a backup plan. Along with the mine’s foreman, Otto Högler, and its technical director, Eberhard Mayerhoffer, Pöchmüller planned to line the entrance to the mine with what are known as “palsy charges,” or paralysis charges—bombs intended to prevent entry to the mine without damaging it and its contents irrevocably. Whether the sealing of the mine’s entrance was to keep out the Allies, as von Hummel expected, or to keep out Eigruber and his men was of little concern to Pöchmüller. There were two reasons to block the mine’s entrance.
Because it would have been nearly impossible to lay the palsy charges in secret, Pöchmüller managed to convince Eigruber that a series of strategically placed smaller charges could destroy the mine, causing it to collapse on the art inside. Eigruber agreed to the laying of these other charges, but he expected them to be placed in the mine itself, not only in the entrance shafts. The foreman Högler estimated that it could take nearly two weeks. That was too long to wait, if Eigruber was as eager as he seemed to destroy the artworks.
Gaiswinkler, too, had learned of the marble crates. He, like
Pöchmüller, needed to know how much time he had. Was the threatened destruction imminent? Was immediate action needed?
Two brave miners volunteered to infiltrate the mine by night to check the contents of the crates in secrecy. Salt mining had continued throughout the time that Alt Aussee was being used as an art depot, so the comings and goings of miners carrying equipment appeared normal to the SS guards. It is not clear whether it was Gaiswinkler or Pöchmüller who gave the order for the miners to enter under cover of darkness—each later claimed to have done so. One of the two miners was most likely Alois Raudaschl, the leader of the miners working with the Resistance. The miners, whose families had worked the mine for centuries, knew its beehive of caves and passages inside out. By navigating secret passages, the two miners avoided the SS guards. As quietly as possible they pried open one of the crates that supposedly contained marble.
It was full of hay.
Did marble lie beneath, after all? They pushed aside the hay and found a bomb nestled inside. The detonators, however, were not affixed and were nowhere to be found.
Gaiswinkler and Pöchmüller now knew about the bombs, but the Resistance did not have the manpower to attack the mine, nor was either man confident that the bombs would not be set off if the mine came under attack. Gaiswinkler contacted Michel to warn him of the threat, while Pöchmüller ordered foreman Högler to remove the bombs from the crates, but to keep the crates in place, to avert suspicion that their cargo had been ferreted away.
The next night Michel, the two miners, and an assistant followed the mountain passages into the mine, circumventing the guards at the entrance. Inside, they secretly moved the most valuable of the artworks stored in the mine to a separate location—the subterranean Chapel of Saint Barbara. The chapel, with its raw stone walls, was filled with wooden pews, a holy water font, candles, and even its own painted altarpiece. It was the sturdiest space in the mine, least likely to be damaged by bombs set off in the storage chambers nearby.
