by Noah Charney
The first item transferred to the underground chapel was The Ghent Altarpiece, which had been stored in a room referred to as the Mineral Kabinett.
On 28 April Pöchmüller sent the following message to the foreman, Högler: “You are hereby instructed to remove all 8 crates of marble recently stored within the mines in agreement with Bergungsbeauftragter Dr. Seiber and to deposit these in a shed which to you appears suitable as a temporary storage depot. You are further instructed to prepare the agreed palsy as soon as possible. The point in time when the palsy is supposed to take place will only be presented to you by myself personally.” Pöchmüller was risking his life in sending this message. While it reached Högler without event, on 30 April Eigruber’s assistant, District Inspector Glinz, overheard Högler discussing the arrangement of trucks to cart off the bomb crates with one of the miners. Though Glinz didn’t know of Pöchmüller’s involvement, nor of the palsy charges, the plan to remove the bombs was blown. From that day on, six SS guards were stationed at the entrance to the mine twenty-four hours a day.
By this time, Gaiswinkler had received word that the American Third Army was approaching. But he had no idea when they would arrive and if it might be too late. It is not clear whether Gaiswinkler and Pöchmüller were working together in their mutual goal of preserving the mine’s contents. When each wrote of his efforts after the war, the other was conspicuously excluded, as both men tried to vie for the greatest measure of heroism. Therefore it is unclear whether Gaiswinkler knew of Pöchmüller’s actions at the mine, although it seems likely that he would have, as both men worked with the miners in the Resistance. Whatever the extent of their cooperation, Gaiswinkler thought that time was running out and decided to take what action he could.
He began with a tactical bluff. His team seized the region’s principal radio transmitter, Vienna II, which had been stored in Bad Aussee, in order to broadcast misleading reports that the Yugoslav Partizan Army was approaching over the mountains to the south, out of Slovenia. To reinforce this subterfuge, the Resistance lit fires along the mountainside, to give the impression of a vast encampment.
The Resistance next captured two armored personnel carriers and SS uniforms. Disguised as SS, they managed a daring operation during which they successfully kidnapped three important local Nazi leaders: the heads of the regional Gestapo unit and Franz Blaha, Eigruber’s deputy who had been placed in charge of the destruction of the salt mine.
Blaha reiterated to the Resistance that August Eigruber was determined to destroy the mine. By this time all lines of Nazi communication had been cut by the Allies, so each remaining local officer was acting of his own accord. Neither von Hummel nor Martin Bormann could be reached to clarify their order and save the mine’s contents. Eigruber’s SS unit was still too strong to overthrow with a direct attack. Something else had to be done.
In a move of stunning courage, the leader of the miners, Alois Raudaschl, volunteered to reach out to the most powerful Nazi official in the area and one of the most powerful of all—SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s number two, entrenched at the nearby Villa Castiglione. The Austrian Kaltenbrunner, a lawyer by training, had the face of a classic, sinisterly handsome Hollywood villain: scarred and pockmarked skin from childhood acne, offset crystalline eyes, blond hair, and an upturned lip. He held an array of titles: chief of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), chief of the Gestapo, and SS Obergruppenführer , among the unit’s elite leaders. For one year, from 1943, he even held the post of president of the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC), the organization that would become Interpol. Kaltenbrunner’s power increased steadily throughout the war, particularly after the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt made against Hitler. From that point Hitler entrusted Kaltenbrunner with hunting down the conspirators, and Kaltenbrunner enjoyed direct access to the führer. He reached the pinnacle of his power on 18 April 1945, when Himmler made him commander in chief of the remaining German forces in southern Europe—albeit at a time when the end was in sight. Many have considered this elevation to a position of high power at so late a date the equivalent to throwing Kaltenbrunner under an approaching train, but his Nazi bona fides were sterling. If anyone had the power to overturn Eigruber, it was he.
Alois Raudaschl and Kaltenbrunner had a mutual friend who lived near the Villa Castiglione. At 2 PM on 3 May 1945, Raudaschl met with Kaltenbrunner at this friend’s home. He told Kaltenbrunner about Eigruber’s renegade behavior, the secret bombs in the marble crates, and the direct disregard for von Hummel’s orders. Moved by a sense of nationalism and the desire to preserve the irreplaceable cultural icons stored inside the mine, Kaltenbrunner granted his permission that the bombs be removed, despite Eigruber’s insistence. The miners would try again, this time with Kaltenbrunner’s blessing.
In other accounts it was Gaiswinkler, not Raudaschl, who met with Kaltenbrunner and convinced him to intervene to save the art. And Michel would later claim that the removal was his initiative.
The miners spent four hours removing the bombs and their crates. At midnight, as the bomb removal was nearly complete, another of Eigruber’s henchmen, Tank Staff Sergeant Haider, arrived at the mine. Seeing what was afoot, he threatened that, if the bombs were removed, Eigruber would “come himself to Alt Aussee . . . and hang each and every one of you himself.”
Fearful of the repercussions, Raudaschl contacted Kaltenbrunner, who personally phoned Eigruber at 1:30 AM on 4 May, hours after Sergeant Haider’s threat, ordering Eigruber to allow the bomb removal. Eigruber relented and said that no repercussions would be taken. The SS guards were instructed by Eigruber to allow the miners into the mine, and Haider could only watch.
But Eigruber had other plans. He would not be bossed around, not now, when it was his duty to fulfill the führer’s final command—for Hitler had taken his own life five days earlier. Eigruber planned to send a detachment of soldiers to the mine, where they would destroy the art inside by hand, with flamethrowers, if necessary. The destruction of the world’s art treasures would be Eigruber’s final legacy.
The American Third Army was past Salzburg now, closing fast on Alt Aussee. The SS soldiers who had been guarding the mine’s entrance fled their posts in anticipation of the coming Allies.
Aware of this threat and what the intransigent Eigruber might do, Högler and Pöchmüller followed through with the planned destruction of the mine’s entrance. At dawn on 5 May, as soon as the charges were ready, the miners who had spent the past two weeks laying the palsy charge threw the detonator switch. Six tons of explosives linked to 502 timing switches and 386 detonators sealed 137 tunnels into the Alt Aussee salt mine, the world’s greatest museum of stolen art. There was nothing now that Eigruber could do to harm what lay locked inside.
Eigruber learned of the explosion and gave his orders for a troop of his men to rush to the mine.
Meanwhile, Gaiswinkler and his men stalked through the dense forest to the mine’s entrance and then set up a defensive perimeter around the area, in anticipation of the arrival of Eigruber’s detachment. Even if they could no longer enter the mine itself, Eigruber could still carry out reprisal executions of the miners and the resistors. And if the Allies were delayed long enough, Eigruber might try to blast his way back into the mine. The resistors and the mine itself had to be defended.
By nightfall, Eigruber’s men still had not arrived. Had they been recalled? Gaiswinkler was worried, as his men waited, rifles at the ready, for some sound beyond the wind in the trees.
CHAPTER NINE
Raising the Buried Treasure
The sun rose upon Gaiswinkler and the Resistance fighters the next morning, 5 May, with still no sign of Eigruber’s SS squad. Perhaps they were summoning reinforcements? The unexpected inactivity concerned Gaiswinkler more than a frontal assault. They dug into defensive positions at the mine’s entrance and continued to wait. They would protect the mine with their lives until the American army arrived.
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bsp; The sound of the detonating mine shaft had alerted a patrol from the German Sixth Army, the remnants of which was encamped nearby. The patrol stealthily surveyed the mine and reported to the army’s remaining leader, General Fabianku, that they had seen entrenched Resistance fighters and no SS. Fabianku immediately sent a mobile attack force to retake the mine.
A mêlée took place at the mine’s entrance on 6 May—the same day that, 513 years earlier, The Ghent Altarpiece was presented to the public for the first time. During the fight, Gaiswinkler sent two scouts to try to contact the American army to warn them, should the defense of the mine fail.
Gaiswinkler’s actions were unknown to the Third Army until his scouts made contact. The scouts reached the Americans beyond the Pötschen Pass, several hundred kilometers away. Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein followed just behind the army’s front line. Kirstein described the advance into Austria: “Austria breathed a different atmosphere. In Germany you saw no flags but white pillowcases. In Austria, as soon as we crossed the Danube, from every house flew the long red-white-red banner of the resistance movement. The Germans, superficially at least, did not seem to have had much effect on the country.”
Kirstein and Posey had to wait in the town of Alt Aussee, a few kilometers from the mine itself, while the army secured the area. They were frustratingly close to the mine yet had no idea whether its contents had been destroyed. Word from the scouts would not reach the Monuments Men for one more agonizing day of waiting.
By the spring of 1945 the liberation of concentration camps revealed the horrors of Nazi atrocities. After U.S. forces liberated Buchenwald in Germany on 11 April 1945, many GIs had visited the camp. Emaciated bodies were still strewn around the camp, unburied and fly-swarmed. Posey had gone to see the camp, returning with the aforementioned chilling photograph he’d found in an abandoned office there, of a bright young Nazi camp officer smiling with pride as he held a noose in his hand. Kirstein did not visit the camp, feeling that it would be too upsetting. He had every reason to stay away—when tough-as-nails General George Patton toured Buchenwald with Eisenhower and other generals, he vomited in the midst of the horrors and couldn’t sleep for days afterwards.
Despite his hatred for Nazism, Kirstein still loved Germanic culture and its artistic legacy. That had nothing to do with the current, crumbling, diabolical regime. He wrote:The horrid desolation of the German cities should, I suppose, fill us with fierce pride. If ever the mosaic revenge was exacted, lo, here it is. The eyes and the teeth, winking and grinning in hypnotic catastrophe. But the builders of the Kurfürstliches Palais, of the Zwinger, of Schinkel’s great houses, and of the Market Places of the great German cities were not the executioners of Buchenwald or Dachau. No epoch in history has produced such precious ruins. To be sure, they are rather filigraine, and delicate in comparison to antiquity, but what they lack in romance and scale is made up by the extension of the area they cover. . . .
To make a loose summation: Probably the State and private collections of portable objects have not suffered irreparably. But the fact that the Nazis always intended to win the war, counting neither on retaliation nor defeat, is responsible for the destruction of the monumental face of urban Germany. Less grand than Italy, less noble than France, I would personally compare it to the loss of Wren’s London City churches, and that’s too much elegance to remove from the face of the earth.
The destruction in Germany was not at the hand of the Allies alone. Hitler’s Nero Decree had debilitated his own people’s livelihood. Boats were sunk in rivers to make passage impossible. Bridges and tunnels were destroyed, roads mined, factories dynamited. Destruction surged across the German landscape. In view of all that had been lost, it was that much more critical to save what could still be saved.
Gaiswinkler’s Resistance fought on. In the end, no reinforcement was needed. Fabianku had not anticipated the strength and determination of the Resistance defenders, and they held strong. The German attack force was sent into retreat.
The next day, 7 May, the Germans surrendered unconditionally at Reims. The war was over, and the Allies had won.
On 8 May, the first American troops crested the mountainside and arrived at the mine. The Eightieth U.S. Infantry, under the command of Major Ralph Pearson, took over the protection of the mine. Gaiswinkler and the Resistance had protected the mine and its precious contents, and Eigruber had never made good on his promise to destroy its treasures forever.
Despite Posey and Kirstein’s efforts to inform the forward-most Allied units, which would be certain to reach the mine before them, Major Pearson had been unaware of the treasures at Alt Aussee until he received a message. It remains a mystery as to who sent this message. According to Michel’s own report, it was he who notified Major Pearson. Michel also claimed responsibility for having ordered the removal of the bombs from the marble crates. His statements were backed up by some, but he may have coerced support from them. At the war’s end, collaborating with the Allies, and sometimes inventing stories of resistance to one’s Nazi colleagues, was a good strategy to avoid imprisonment or execution. Therefore the statements made by Nazi staff are suspect.
Michel’s version of the Alt Aussee story was the first to be heard by an American, as Michel greeted Major Pearson upon his arrival at the mine. He even gave the major a guided tour, pointing out the demolished mine entrance. At the time, there was no reason to doubt Michel’s story, with no contradictory versions forthcoming. And, after all, Michel was the only man present who spoke English.
Gaiswinkler was not present at the mine when the Americans arrived. According to his own account, although not seconded by other sources, he and his team spearheaded a stealth counterattack that very night. They crept through the snow-hung pine forest and sprung on General Fabianku’s headquarters. The raid caught the general and his bodyguard completely by surprise, and, quite miraculously, Gaiswinkler’s hard-nosed Resistance fighters actually captured General Fabianku himself.
While waiting on tenterhooks to learn the fate of the mine’s contents, Posey and Kirstein sat at the window of an inn, mere kilometers away from the salt mine. From out the window came a surprising sight. An armed SS unit approached, only to turn themselves in. Kirstein described the scene: “Now from our window at the inn in Alt Aussee we watched the stupefying spectacle of the surrender of an SS unit. The trimly uniformed professional murderers wished to volunteer to fight the Russians, from whom they were sure the Americans would protect them. They wanted to keep their weapons until they could get into the safety of the POW cage, since they thought their own men might shoot them.”
As Kirstein and Posey watched, a cheer came from upstairs at the inn. They ran up to learn the cause. A cluster of officers listened to the radio, celebrating and cheering. Over the wire came the news: Austrian mountaineers had guided U.S. soldiers on an all-night manhunt. As 12 May dawned on the horizon, they caught their quarry. They had arrested Karl Kaltenbrunner. He had thrown his uniform and identification into a lake and assumed a civilian disguise as a doctor. It was only when his mistress saw him marching with a cluster of German prisoners and called out his name that he was recognized and captured. He would be the highest-ranking SS leader to face trial at Nuremberg, for which he was executed on 16 October 1946.
Then word reached Posey and Kirstein that the mine had been secured by the Allies and the Resistance. They rushed to the scene, arriving hours after Gaiswinkler had left to chase down and capture General Fabianku. They would never meet their Austrian counterpart.
Only when they reached the mine’s entrance did Posey and Kirstein learn that six dynamite charges had been set off at the main entrance to the storerooms deep inside the mine shaft. The result was a wall of stone and earth blocking access to the art. At first, they thought they had arrived too late. Had explosives gone off inside the mine as well?
Did this destruction extend beyond the entrance shaft? The contents of Hitler’s looted museum waited on the other side of a wall of ru
bble, if there was another side to it. What if the entire mine had been demolished, the roof caved in, the passages flooded?
They finally found an interpreter who explained the situation. The shaft was demolished as a defensive measure, to prevent the destruction of the mine’s contents. But it would take time to clear the debris that blocked the tunnel, as the Austrian miners were unsure as to how much rubble blocked the tunnel. At first the miners said it might take seven to fifteen days to clear it away. Posey and Kirstein hoped it could be done in two or three days. The miners set to work, and the debris was cleared the next day. Posey and Kirstein would be the first to set foot inside.
With one of the miners as their guide, Posey and Kirstein moved through the darkness of the shaft, the dim light of their acetylene lamps revealing the red rock glittering with salt crystals.
A half mile into the shaft beyond the rubble, Posey and Kirstein reached an iron door. Beyond it was a shocking expanse and the stolen jewels of the Nazi art theft program.
As they explored cavern after cavern, the extent of the hoard came quickly to light. Three-quarters of a mile into the mine, a cavern referred to as the Kammergraf housed multiple galleries of art storage, each one three stories tall. Another of the caverns, known as the Springerwerke, was only fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, yet contained 2,000 paintings stashed in two-story storage racks along three walls and in a column down the center of the chamber. The lamplight seemed dim against the vast darkness inside the caverns. Blades of light exposed gilded frames, marble arms, the weft of canvas, painted faces in the dark.
Then they came upon the Chapel of Saint Barbara, where Michel had hidden a few of the most treasured pieces.
