Stealing the Mystic Lamb

by Noah Charney

  Sepp Plieseis mentions Gaiswinkler in his book only once, describing him as the leader of the “best group” among the resistance fighters. However, he later changed his statement, saying, “We freedom fighters at that time had no connection with the parachutists [Gaiswinkler and his team], and they had no idea of the art that lay in the mine shafts. They parachuted in only a few days earlier, and sought shelter for themselves.”

  Most likely these are all variations on fact. The core events took place, but they were much more of a collective effort, the combined forces of many smaller heroes, rather than the genius of one. Various members of those left standing at the war’s end claimed shares of the glory that may have been disproportionate to the reality—but we may never know the whole truth of the mine’s salvation.

  The greatest measure of credit should go to the unsung miners. It was almost certainly the miner Alois Raudaschl, or Gaiswinkler with the help of Raudaschl, who contacted Kaltenbrunner in order to convince him to intervene with Eigruber to prevent the mine’s destruction. It is also probable that the eighty miners in the Resistance were responsible for the slow and steady placement of the palsy charges, whether at their own impetus or under orders from a group leader. Pöchmüller claimed to have been the man to order the removal of the bombs hidden in the crates disguised as marble; again, it might have been him, but in truth the miners were the ones who took the greatest risk in planting the palsy charges and removing the bombs from the crates. In a 1948 report to the Austrian government, signed collectively and anonymously as the “Freedom Fighters of Alt Aussee,” the miners claimed to have acted at their own discretion, having discovered the bombs inside the marble crates accidentally, then moving the bombs into the woods and out of harm’s way. Yet the same report claims that they planted the palsy charges, when logic tells us that such an enterprise would require a knowledge of engineering and demolitions that the miners alone might not have possessed.

  Thus it remains a mystery whom we have to thank for the preservation of The Ghent Altarpiece among more than 7,000 masterpieces that were so nearly lost forever. Lincoln Kirstein himself wrote in Town and Country magazine in the autumn of 1945 that “so many witnesses told so many stories that the more information we accumulated, the less truth it seemed to contain.” There is a tendency to want to raise one person on the plinth because history and memory is easier to sort out if we can account for individual heroes. Often the badge of hero is pinned on the man who gives the order, not the nameless workers who carry those orders out, at greatest personal risk. In the end, it was certainly a collective effort, with bold and prominent heroes among Austrians and Allies. Particular credit should go to those unable or unwilling to vaunt their roles in the salvation of the mine treasures—the local miners who worked with the Resistance, whether at their own discretion or under orders from Pöchmüller, Michel, or the man with the most dramatic story to tell, the swashbuckling Albrecht Gaiswinkler.

  Whatever myriad of brave men helped to preserve Europe’s treasures, it should suffice that we thank them, be they Austrian or Ally, whoever they were, and in whatever capacity they served.

  On 21 August 1945 Robert Posey was the only passenger in a chartered cargo plane bound for Brussels. Trussed beside him in the cold, gaping cargo bay were wooden crates containing The Ghent Altarpiece. He would see them home, on Eisenhower’s orders. But the trip would not be a smooth one.

  During the flight back to Brussels, a sudden and violent storm struck. The chartered plane and its precious cargo were rocked by relentless turbulence, high winds, and bullets of rain. The pilot told Posey that he couldn’t land safely in Brussels: The city was locked in with clouds. After they flew another hour, the storm had cleared slightly but was still heavy over Brussels itself. The pilot located a small military airfield about an hour outside of Brussels. The landing was treacherous, the plane tossing in gusts of wind. It was 2 AM when they landed. There was no one on hand at the airfield to welcome them, least of all to help with their most precious cargo.

  Through the curtain of rain, Posey ran from the plane to the airfield office. He called the operator and asked her to patch in an emergency call to the U.S. embassy in Brussels. There was no answer. Desperate, Posey convinced the operator to call around to different residences in the Brussels area in which American soldiers were billeted. Finally, she reached an American officer. Posey recalled:I told him to get everybody he could and come to the airport. I had a treasure on my hands and I wanted to guard it the right way. He shanghaied a couple of trucks, went to some bars and rounded up some enlisted men. I also asked him to try to find someone who knew something about moving works of art, and he turned up a mess sergeant who had some experience. They backed the trucks right up to the plane. It was still dark and raining and thundering.

  This motley convoy brought The Lamb to the Royal Palace in Brussels, after a hair-raising forty-five-minute drive through the torrential rain. It was now 3:30 AM. After a moment of confusion, the night staff let them into the palace, realizing that this soaked group of GIs had the van Eyck that had been expected to land hours ago. They laid out the panels on the long table in the dining room of the palace.

  Posey needed nothing more than a soft, dry bed, but he wasn’t going to leave his charge until he got a written receipt. The Lamb had slipped through too many fingers too often. Posey wrote, “I needed a receipt so that if someone asked me what happened to the panels, I would have it on paper.” A Belgian official on night duty provided. A suite was offered to Captain Posey, one normally reserved for visiting royalty. He collapsed into bed. Posey returned the next day to join his Third Army, stationed in Paris.

  After the war, Robert Posey resumed life with his wife, Alice, and son, Woogie. As an architect with the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, he worked on such prominent buildings as the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Lever House in New York. Lincoln Kirstein returned to the New York arts scene of which he was already a prominent member and fell in love with ballet. He cofounded and ran the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine and cofounded with him the School of American Ballet. He went on to direct the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and published over five hundred books, articles, and monographs. Today he is considered one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American arts.

  Days after its dramatic flight to Brussels, the U.S. ambassador officially presented the rescued Lamb to the Prince Regent of Belgium, on behalf of General Eisenhower. There was rejoicing throughout the country. This painting symbolized much more than a merely marvelous work of art. It represented the defeat of Hitler’s plan to steal the world’s art—it signified the defeat of Hitler himself.

  The Belgians remembered the last time The Lamb came home from exile, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Then, as now, speeches were made, and parades were held. Belgium welcomed home its greatest treasure, like a kidnapped and rescued prince. Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb was displayed for one month at the Royal Museum in Brussels, as it had been in 1919. In November 1945, The Lamb was returned to Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent.

  Beginning in late March 1945, the various Allied armies began to discover repositories of art. The largest was Alt Aussee. But in Germany alone, Allied soldiers uncovered approximately 1,500 caches of stolen art. It is likely that countless others remain still buried and hidden throughout Germany and Europe. A few other examples of hidden depots of stolen art, found at the end of the war, offer a glimpse of the extent of the Nazi thefts.

  In a jail in the northern Italian town of San Leonardo, Monuments Men discovered much of the contents of the Uffizi Museum, which had been hurriedly stashed by Nazi soldiers during their retreat from Florence.

  Castle Neuschwanstein was still brimming with treasures at the war’s end. The most significant of these was not an artwork but the complete files of the ERR. It was an exceptional discovery to find the documents of this important department almost completely intact.

  With the help
of Hermann Bunjes during the last weeks of his life, and with support from OSS intelligence, other salt mines were identified and secured by Allied armies. On 28 April 1945, at a munitions factory depot called Bernterode in the German region of Thuringia, 40,000 tons of ammunition were found. Inside the mine, investigating American officers noticed what looked like a brick wall painted over to match the color of the mineshaft. The wall turned out to be five feet thick, the mortar between the bricks not yet fully hardened. Breaking through with pickaxes and hammers, the officers uncovered several vaults containing a wealth of Nazi regalia, including a long hall hung with Nazi banners and filled with uniforms, as well as hundreds of stolen artworks: tapestries, books, paintings, and decorative arts, most of it looted from the nearby Hohenzollern Museum. In a separate chamber, they came upon a ghoulish spectacle: three monumental coffins, containing the skeletons of the seventeenth-century Prussian king Frederick the Great, Field Marshall von Hindenburg, and his wife. The Nazis had also seized human relics of deceased Teutonic warlords.

  At Siegen near the city of Aachen, a mine contained paintings by van Gogh, Gauguin, van Dyck, Renoir, Cranach, Rembrandt, and Rubens (who had been born in Siegen), as well as the treasures of Aachen Cathedral, including the silver and gold reliquary bust of Charlemagne, which contained a fragment of his skull.

  Two hundred miles southwest of Berlin, the Kaiseroda mine might have escaped Allied attention. But as fate would have it, in April 1945 Allied military police picked up two French women who had been driving illegally, at a time when civilian movement was restricted. As they passed the mine in the police jeep, the women mentioned that a large amount of gold was buried there. The military police radioed in the report, and soldiers were sent to investigate. After descending 2,100 feet in a rusty elevator, they were confronted with the shock of their lives.

  Five hundred wooden crates, containing a total of 1 billion reichsmarks, was just the start. After dynamiting open a locked steel door, they found 8,527 gold ingots, thousands of gold coins, currency, and further crates full of gold and silver bars. Artworks and rare books were found as well, including Botticelli’s Virgin with a Choir of Angels. They would later learn that this was the largest part of the reserve of the Reichsbank, the official bank of the Third Reich. The officers then made a horrifying discovery: countless containers full of precious stones and gold dental fillings, all taken from concentration camp victims.

  The mine that attained the greatest notoriety was at Merkers, and it was Posey and Kirstein who oversaw inventory, on 8 April 1945—the same day that Gaiswinkler and his team parachuted onto snowbound Hell Mountain. The mineshaft ran 2,100 feet into the earth and included a steel bank vault door that the Nazis had installed that had to be dynamited open—a risky business when an explosion takes place a half mile underground. Room Eight alone was 150 feet long by 75 feet across and at least 20 feet high. It contained thousands of what looked like brown paper bag lunches, laid out in neat rows. In actuality these were filled with gold: approximately 8,198 gold bars, 1,300 bags of mixed gold coins, 711 bags of American twenty-dollar gold pieces, printing plates used by the Reich to stamp its currency, and $2.76 billion reichsmarks—most of the reserve of Germany’s national treasury. It also contained art and antiquities, including Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcuts, paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, Byzantine mosaics, Islamic carpets, and between 1 and 2 million books. Most of the contents of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, in forty-five cases, was stored at Merkers. The museum had not been looted, but its contents were sent there from Berlin for safekeeping. The final MFAA inventory listed 393 uncrated paintings, 1,214 cases of art, 140 textiles, and 2,091 boxes of prints.

  There was so much gold that soldiers were pocketing souvenirs that could help them to an early retirement. Posey wrote to his wife on 20 April: “At the gold mine they filled my helmet with twenty dollar American gold pieces and said I could have it. I couldn’t lift it off the ground—it contained $35,000—so we poured it back in the sacks and left it. I seem to have absolutely no greed for money for I felt no thrill at seeing so much of the stuff. Your poem means more to me.” Kirstein was similarly uninterested in claiming souvenirs. In all his time as an MFAA officer, he only permitted himself to take one keepsake of his adventures: a single Nazi paratrooper’s knife.

  With its combination of stolen art and buried gold, Merkers was the first stolen art story to attract international media attention, although the gold was of greater popular interest than the artworks. It is interesting to note that the U.S. government considered Merkers a financial operation, not one reserved for the MFAA. Eisenhower, Patton, and an assortment of other generals paid an official visit to the mine, further elevating the profile of the discovery. George Patton cracked a joke as the generals slowly descended in the service elevator into the earth: “If that clothesline should part, promotions in the United States Army would be greatly stimulated.” Eisenhower didn’t find it funny.

  And what of Hermann Göring’s personal hoard of stolen art? The Allied 101st “Screaming Eagles” Airborne Division found more than 1,000 paintings and sculptures that had composed part of Göring’s collection. They had been evacuated from Carinhall on 20 April 1945 and moved to a series of other residences, in a continued attempt to keep them out of the hands of the Russian army, whose art looting rivaled that of the Germans. Göring left eight days later, ordering Carinhall blown up after his departure. He escaped with only a few small paintings, including six works by Hans Memling, a generation younger than van Eyck and a fellow resident of Bruges; one van der Weyden; and Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, which Göring was convinced had been painted by Vermeer, when in fact it had been painted by Dutch forger Han van Meegeren only a few years before. Göring was arrested on 5 May 1945. He was tried at Nuremberg but poisoned himself before he could be officially executed.

  Justice found its way to Gauleiter August Eigruber, as well. He was arrested by the Third Army mere days after they had reached the mine. He was brought as a witness to the Nuremberg Trials and was put on trial himself in the Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials. He was sentenced to death by hanging in March 1946 by the Dachau International Military Tribunal and was executed on 28 May 1947.

  At the Nuremberg Trials, the counsel prosecuting Nazi war criminals presented slides of a selection of the confiscated material that had been rescued from Alt Aussee. As the slide show ended and statistics on the stolen objects were read, the counsel said, “Never in the history of the world was so great a collection assembled with so little scruple.”

  Back with the Third Army in Paris, Captain Robert K. Posey was summoned to meet his commanding officer. He had been awarded the highest honor of the Belgian government, the Order of Leopold—an equivalent to being knighted. It was the duty of the commanding officer to bestow the Order upon Captain Posey, war hero and one among the saviors of the greatest treasure stolen by the Nazis. Posey’s commander enacted the ritual of the Order of Leopold in the traditional fashion: by kissing Captain Posey on both cheeks.

  Art is a symbolic magnet for nationalism, more so than any flag. Artworks resemble lambs in an open field by night. The nations are the shepherds. Their ability or failure to defend the lambs, not only from midnight wolves but also from other thieving shepherds, is a sign of their country’s strength. These artworks are imbued with more value than any other inanimate objects. Their preservation has long been considered more important, in times of war, than any quantity of human lives. Should art be displaced from its home nation, that nation loses a piece of its civilization. Should art be altogether destroyed, the civilized world is rendered less civilized.

  Through six centuries and countless crimes, Jan van Eyck’s first masterpiece, one of the world’s most important paintings, has survived. In the end, the most desired artwork in history has outlasted its assailants and remains what all great art should be—a treasure cherished by humankind, outliving its hunters and protectors alike, eternally proclaiming the greatest capab
ility of human creation.

  Safely back in Belgium at the end of the Second World War, the restless Ghent Altarpiece had at last come to the end of its long journey.

  Or had it?

  EPILOGUE

  Hidden in Plain Sight?

  Conservator and Surrealist painter Jos Trotteyn could not stop staring at the panel. It had been his honor to clean The Ghent Altarpiece every Easter for the last twenty years. But on this day in March 1974, something was different. He took a step back. The eleven other panels had the tone of old oils and spider web craquelure on the paint’s surface that could only come naturally, with age. But this one had it too: the Righteous Judges.

  He knew that the Righteous Judges panel had been painted during the Second World War by another conservator, the now-deceased Jef van der Veken. He had signed it on the back and inscribed it with his enigmatic poem: “I did it for love/And for duty/And to avenge myself/I borrowed/ From the dark side.” There were also the elements van der Veken added, to make the work his own: the profile portrait of the Belgian king, Leopold III; one of the judges no longer hidden behind a fur hat; a ring removed from one finger. These were all elements that distinguished his work from the original.

  But scholars and conservators, with an intrinsic knowledge of the art they love, an almost supersensory connoisseurship that defies science, can feel authenticity, like a bell that sounds when they see an original artwork. And for Jos Trotteyn, for the first time in twenty years of cleaning the Righteous Judges, alarms were ringing. Suddenly, this forty-year-old panel copy felt like it was the five-hundred-year-old original.