by Aaron Elkins
Leaving our rented Saab in the lot we went first to the museum, in hopes that there might be old records we could look over, but found it shut tight. Then to the administrative office in one of the outbuildings. Ditto, nobody home. The only staff we could find were a couple of youngsters in the ticket office, where you paid to go on the tour, who said they knew nothing at all about the workings of the mine, past or present, and suggested that our best bet would be to take the eleven a.m. educational tour, on which a knowledgeable guide would be able to answer all our questions.
So with two dozen other people we went into a dressing room to put on coveralls over our clothes, then followed the lantern-toting guide into the mountain and down through the rock-cut tunnels and galleries. We slid down a hundred-foot-long miner's slide, we watched an entertainingly spooky sound-and-light show at an underground lake, and we broke off pieces of the gleaming, rust-colored walls around us to taste them and see that they were indeed salty; we learned that salt had been mined in these caverns since Roman times and that the process was still going on only a few hundred yards away; we learned that the salt had to be washed out of the rock with water, and that the annual output of brine produced in this manner was 2.3 million tons, from which 460,000 tons of salt resulted. We learned that almost all of this output was for industrial purposes such as porcelain manufacture and metallurgy, with only seven percent purified into cooking salt. We learned the pros and cons of solar evaporation, bore-hole brine procedure, and multiple-effect vacuum evaporators.
Of the mine's role as the greatest repository of looted art in the history of the world we heard nothing.
I mean nothing, not a word. Zero. And when we'd put questions to our guide—Could he tell us which particular caverns had housed the paintings? Could he tell us how they'd been protected against the underground moisture?—he had shaken his head and said he didn't know anything about any paintings. And probably he hadn't; he was about twenty-five years old.
Yet in these caverns had been well over 10,000 major works of art. They had formed the core of what was going to be Hitler's pan-Germanic Führermuseum at Linz, the future cultural heart of the thousand-year Reich. Among them had been some of the world's most revered masterpieces. The fabulous Ghent altarpiece known as The Adoration of the Lamb, painted by Jan and Hubert van Eyck (or maybe only by Jan; nobody's sure) in 1432 and long venerated as Belgium's most precious art treasure, was there in a room constructed especially for it. The famous Portrait of the Artist in His Studio by Vermeer was there, as was the entire art collection from the Naples Museum—paintings by Titian, Rembrandt, Raphael, Claude Lorrain, Breughel, Palma Vecchio—and the equally great personal collections of the Rothschild, Gutman, and Mannheimer families, alongside of which Stetten's collection was small potatoes. Michelangelo's masterpiece, the lovely marble Madonna from the Church of the Annunciation in Bruges, was there too, having been carried off by the Germans in 1944 to "save" it from the "Allied barbarians" approaching the city. At Altaussee it had lain on a filthy mattress with a sheet of asphalt paper over it until the first MFA&A team had come tramping up the mountain in May of 1945, to be amazed at what they saw.
Only in a brochure that I'd bought at the bookshop near the entrance was there a single passing reference to any of this: "In the subterranean treasure vaults of the Altaussee salt mine, a large part of the European cultural heritage was protected against the turbulence of World War II." Otherwise known as Old Reliable, the Elgin argument.
"Talk about spin control," Alex said, handing it back to me. We were sitting at a picnic table in the sunny little park near the entrance, trying to get warm after the damp chill of the mountain's interior. "You'd think, after all this time, they could be a little more honest than that."
"Well, as far as it goes, it's true enough, I suppose," I said.
"What, that they were protecting all those things, that that's why they put them there? Protecting them for whom, for what? Tell me, what were they going to do with them after they finished 'protecting' them? And what did the people who they took them from think about it?"
"Whoa, don't get excited, I'm only saying that what it says there is true . . . as far as it goes. The paintings were saved weren't they?"
"Sure, because we saved them."
"Partly, yes."
"Partly!"
"Yes, partly. The Austrian Resistance had something to do with it too, as you'd know if you'd ever looked into it." For whatever reason, the tour had put both of us on a short fuse. "The Nazis were going to blow up everything in the mine before the Allies reached it, did you know that?"
"Yes, I knew that."
"And do you know why they didn't, do you know who stopped it?"
"No, but something tells me I'm about to find out."
I ignored this. "Alex, what happened here at this mine was one of the great stories of the war. The bombs to do the job had already been delivered, ready to be detonated—eight 500-pounders—only the Austrian mine workers themselves kept throwing one monkey wrench after another into the works to prevent it from happening. If not for them, everything in the mine would have been destroyed, and there's no doubt about their risking their lives to do it either. It was sabotage, pure and simple. If the Nazis had caught on to them, they would have been executed for treason—or defeatism, which was just as bad."
"Well, good for them," Alex said tartly. "I guess I must have gotten it wrong when I read that the Austrians and Germans were on the same side."
"No, you did not get it wrong. They were on the same side, all right. Not only that, but the most rabid Nazi officials at the mine weren't Germans at all, but Austrians. And when it came down to the wire, the man who got the bombs out of there at the last minute and then sealed the mine entrance so they couldn't get back in wasn't some brave Austrian Resistance fighter, he was the German SS commander, of all people. Go figure."
"Go figure? What's that supposed to mean?"
Why are we arguing? I wanted to say, but I was fired up. "It means that it's not always so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, especially when you weren't there yourself and you don't know what they went through. There were a lot of sides to what went on at Altaussee."
And what was true of Altaussee was just as true of wartime Austria as a whole, I pointed out with heat. Depending on who was telling the story, you got a lot of different versions. Either Hitler had brutally annexed Austria after first engineering the killing of his opponents in the government . . . or he had peacefully entered Austria in his open Mercedes-Benz to the enthusiastic applause of huge crowds lining the roads all the way to Vienna. Either the Austrian population had vigorously embraced the loathsome Nazi racial laws . . . or they had resisted in every way they could, taking awful risks to hide Jewish friends and neighbors in their attics and basements. Either Austria had been a willing part of Greater Germany and its near-equal partner . . . or it had been a subject nation, ground down and oppressed by jackbooted invaders. Either they had endorsed Hitler's bizarre schemes of Germanic exaltation . . . or they had stubbornly resisted, taking to guns, bombs, and knives of their own. Either—
I caught myself and stopped. Somewhere along the line I'd slipped into professorial gear, not usually an indicator of good things to follow.
"All right, I buy all that," Alex said. "So the question is: which is it, the 'either' or the 'or'? Were they good guys or were they bad guys? You tell me."
"But that's the problem. It's all true. At the end of the war the Allies themselves couldn't agree which side Austria was on. Were they occupying the country or liberating it? It made a huge difference in the way it was going to be treated. In the end they decided—not without reservations—on liberation: officially speaking, Austria had been a friend, not an enemy."
"Officially speaking—!" She stopped abruptly, her head cocked. "Are we having a fight?"
"I think so."
"What about?"
"Exactly what I've been wondering."
"Well, I d
on't like it. Would you mind very much if we called it quits?"
"I would love to call it quits," I said. "I would pay good money to call it quits."
A business-suited woman who'd been standing nearby waiting for a break in our conversation came up to the table. "I'm Mrs. Hirsch, the tour manager," she said in cultivated German. "You are the people who were asking about the Altaussee treasure?"
At last, a living Austrian who'd heard of it. "That's right. We're trying to find out what we can about a number of paintings that were stored here during the war."
"Ah. Well, I'm afraid I know very little about it. It's Dr. Haftmann you should speak with. He was employed at the mine during that time."
"Do you know where we could find him?" I asked.
"I do. In the village, at the Hotel Am See's restaurant, on the lakeside terrace, farthest table on the left. Dr. Haftmann is a man of habit. It is where he lunched every day except Sunday in 1944, and it is where he lunches every day except Sunday now. On trout from the lake. He comes early, at noon, so he'll be there now."
"Haftmann, Haftmann . . ." I said, trying to dredge up whatever dim association the name had for me. "Haftmann . . ." When it came, I sat bolt upright. "The MFA&A report!" I blurted in English. "The interview . . ." I switched excitedly to German. "You can't be talking about Erhard Haftmann?"
"That's right, Dr. Erhard Haftmann. You know him?"
"I know of him. He wasn't just an employee, he was the registrar."
"Yes, I believe that's correct. We don't pay much attention to all that here at the salt works any more."
"And he lives here in Altaussee?" I said. "I'd assumed he was German, not Austrian." I'd also assumed he had to be dead by now.
"Yes, you're correct, he's from Kassel, I believe. But after he retired—he was a university professor, you know—he came and settled here. That was twenty years ago. We still see him at the mine sometimes, although he rarely goes inside any more." Mrs. Hirsch gave us a thin-lipped smile. "I believe the old fellow likes the idea being near what was his great creation."
"Do you really want to go and talk with him? Alex asked as we drove down the mountain.
"You bet."
"Why? What could he tell us that would be helpful? He never even saw any of the paintings. The Lost Truck never made it to the mine, remember?"
"Naturally, I remember. That is why we call it 'lost.'"
"Well, why then? Or is this just intellectual curiosity?"
"Oh, I'm not sure how intellectual it is, but, sure, it's partly curiosity. How can we be right here and not bother to see him? How often do you get to talk to somebody who was actually part of the ERR operation?"
"How often do you want to?"
"And then, aside from plain curiosity, there are some symbols on the backs of the paintings that I'm hoping he'll be able to explain."
"Oh?" said Alex without much interest.
I had in mind two markings in particular: the sr-4 on the back of the Conde in Simeon's shop and the ne-2 on the back of the Condesa that Kraus brought to Vienna. I was certain that they'd been put there by the Nazis and I'd been wondering what they signified. Maybe, if I knew what they meant, they'd suggest some kind of lead. With everything else petering out, I was running out of possibilities.
The Hotel am See was a rambling, picturesque old place not far from the Seevilla. As we entered Alex wisely suggested that Haftmann might be afraid to talk about his role during the old days if he knew that we had an interest in the restitution of the loot he'd been responsible for, so I came up with a story about our being researchers who were compiling a comparative study of art storage and cataloguing methods, nothing more.
"You'd better do most of the talking," she said. "He'll spot me as a fake the minute I open my mouth."
"Mm," I said, not paying attention in my turn. To my knowledge I had never met an actual Nazi before, and I was trying to figure out how I felt about it.
Chapter 28
Say what you will about stereotypes, one thing you have to admit is that they turn out to be right on the money a lot of the time. Which can either be sweetly reassuring or damned irritating, depending on how you look at things.
In this case it was reassuring. Picture in your mind's eye a Nazi functionary. I don't mean Gestapo or SS, but a diligent and loyal civilian, one of the army of mid-level officials industriously engaged in administering the meticulously organized bureaucracy necessary to the grand designs of the Führer and the Third Reich.
What do you see? A pinched, cold, arid face with thin lips and expressionless gray eyes, perhaps distorted by thick, round lenses, am I right? Not particularly sinister, not really very interesting-looking; the kind of man you'd pass in the street and never remember that you'd seen him at all. Thinning gray hair, gray suit, and pallid gray skin. A gray man altogether.
That was Erhard Haftmann to a T, except that his hair was now white, not gray. I would have picked him out even without the advance information from Mrs. Hirsch. He was sitting by himself when we first saw him, dabbing at a spot of grease on the lapel of his brown Loden jacket, using a linen napkin dipped in mineral water. His lunch had been finished, with the remains pushed to one side. By Austrian standards it had been frugal: a small, whole fish—no doubt the lake trout that Mrs. Hirsch had predicted—-now surgically dissected down to its perfect little skeleton, along with string beans, boiled, parslied potatoes, an untouched roll, and a glass of white wine, only half-consumed.
When it was obvious that we were headed to his table he glanced up with undisguised annoyance. Men of a certain age who are accustomed to eating alone at the same time, same restaurant, and same table every single weekday for decades on end generally don't like having their meals intruded upon. But once I gave him our cock-and-bull story about being interested in his cataloguing methods, he became guardedly civil, offering us cigarettes from a pack of Marboros and inviting us to join him for coffee.
"I speak English," he said once he'd heard my German. "I think that would be better." You'd be surprised how often I hear that when I'm traveling. "Now, what is it you wish to know?"
Given our catalogue-researcher-story it didn't seem sensible to begin with the ERR symbols, so I started off generally, asking him how many objects had been stored in the mine at the end of the war.
"At the end of the war?" he said. "That I can't tell you. At one time we had over 21,000 objects, but in the final weeks, all order broke down. There was no discipline. I can't begin to describe the horror. The only accurate figures I can give you are the results of a census a few weeks earlier, which was limited to the material earmarked for the Führer's personal collection. Are you interested in this?"
I nodded.
"So," Haftmann said and stared dimly at the prodigious wall of mountain on the far shore of the lake while he collected his thoughts. One of his eyes was inflamed and crusty, and he occasionally dabbed at it with a handkerchief. After a moment he drew a whistling breath through his nose and began abruptly to rattle off figures. "For the Führermuseum we safeguarded almost 7,000 paintings, of which more than 5,000 were Old Masters. There were also approximately 1,000 prints, 100 tapestries, 70 sculptures, 130 articles of armor, 250 crates of rare books, 80 baskets and 40 cases of smaller art objects, and 30 or 35 cases of ancient coins. In addition there were more than 700 paintings destined for the Führer's private collections at Berchtesgaden and Posen, as well as some sculptures and tapestries, the number of which I no longer remember.
Midway through, Alex looked at me and muttered out of the side of her mouth: "Is he reading, or what?"
I glanced at the table myself to see if he had some notes there, but of course he didn't, and anyway he had never stopped staring through his thick glasses across the quiet lake. Had this deluge of specifics been dumped on us by someone currently engaged in administering the operation it would have been impressive. Coming from this aged man more than fifty years after the fact, it was astounding.
He sipped from
his coffee cup, frowning. "Did I mention the 230 drawings and watercolors?"
Beats me, I thought.
"I don't believe so," Alex said diplomatically.
"For the Linz collection: 230 drawings and watercolors. And all of them, every single one of these precious objects, was perfectly preserved, duly recorded, and in its assigned place when the Americans arrived on May 8. No museum could have cared for them better. And all this was accomplished, I remind you, in the face of severe budget and manpower restrictions—at times we had to resort to unwilling labor—and even in the face of overt opposition from certain highly placed officers."
It was as Mrs. Hirsch had said: Altaussee had been the towering achievement of his life. Behind the bottle-bottom glasses the gray eyes glinted as he waited for a response from us. But although Alex murmured something or other, I couldn't think of anything to say. I was in a sort of daze, stunned not just by the cascade of figures, but by the magnitude of the wretchedness they represented. Stetten's father had been tortured and killed over his 73 paintings. How many more stories like that had gone into "collecting" the thousands upon thousands of things that Haftmann had just enumerated with such icy pride? How many people, for example, did you have to threaten, or torture, or murder to "collect" 80 baskets and 40 cases of small art objects?
Not to mention the "unwilling labor" that had gone into storing it.
And here was this cool, unprepossessing, ancient little man swelling even now with self-regard over his part in it.
"And what was my reward for sacrificing my health, my marriage, to accomplish this?" he asked, clamping his invisible lips with remembered resentment. "I will tell you: when the Americans came, and I went voluntarily to meet them, to give them my assistance, I was arrested." He glared at us, the nearest Americans to hand. "Arrested! For three days I was held like a criminal, questioned every day from morning till night. I ask you frankly, was this justice?"