The Rape of Europa

  Both the French liaison officer and the chief curator of Versailles, who had been approached by Todd, were unaware of the official military lists which put Versailles and its collections off limits. They wanted “to be helpful.” Rorimer heard of all this at 7:30 a.m. on September 16. A lieutenant does not normally remove the Supreme Commander’s furniture, but despite this discrepancy in rank the items taken from Versailles were on their way back within twenty-four hours. Over Rorimer’s protests the Mobilier National objects stayed behind in the house, which was still full of workmen; its director, M. Fontaine, saw nothing wrong with lending things to such a distinguished visiting dignitary, as he had done many times in the past. His goodwill turned out badly: the furniture disappeared, and five years later, charges were brought against him for its loss. Appalled, Rorimer, back at the Met, wrote in his defense, as did General Eisenhower.48

  At Fontainebleau the problems were not limited to the gardens and surrounding houses. Eleven hundred troops bivouacked in the elegant park had to be removed to the forest and discouraged from using the ornamental canals to practice simulated Rhine crossings. It was harder to dislodge some of their officers from inside. A certain Colonel Potter had adamantly refused to vacate the Louis XV wing. When he was again asked to move, both by the Commanding General of the entire region and the French Beaux-Arts, he went over their heads and got approval to stay from the Deputy Theater Commander, which he did until his unit moved on.

  French hospitality often made enforcement of the off limits policies more difficult. At the Château of Grosbois the grounds and stables had been approved for requisition, but not the house proper. The son of the owner, Prince Godfrey Tour d’Argent, had invited fifteen officers to stay in the château as his “contribution to the war effort and the comfort of the officers.” They had accepted without written permission from their superiors, who, nervous at the irregular situation, called in the MFAA. Roomer’s attempt to reason with one of the very comfortable officers was not a success:

  Captain Beasley was very unpleasant about “historic buildings” when I explained to him the reason for my visit. He was still in his bath at 1130. Two electric heaters were going in one room and another was in his bedroom. There were three bottles of Cognac on his dresser and a box with about a dozen wine bottles on the floor. When I explained the situation of the famous building and magnificent collections … and that it might happen that the General would not want the Château used by our forces in view of existing directives—which I placed in evidence, Captain Beasley told Captain Smyth to be sure to get my name and said that if the General ordered him to move out he would “move out and then in.” … Neither the Prince nor the officers knew who was paying for the additional current consumed by our units.49

  The gentry were not shy. As soon as it was known that Rorimer’s office was the one which dealt with “damages done to the palaces and castles of France, my office was besieged with broken-down countesses, German sympathizers, compassion-seeking victims of German brutality, all as difficult to deal with as the exacting American officers who also had complaints to register. It soon developed that the enlisted men in the outer office were no match for the exasperated art collectors and château owners whose wild gesticulating and deafening presence gave my office all the aspects of a madhouse.”50 To deal with this onslaught he hired a tough upper-class French secretary and sent the soldiers away.

  The problems were serious. In the fall of 1944 coping with the billeting of troops and the damage they caused would consume much of the time of the MFAA men responsible for the vast areas inhabited by Allied troops. The lists so carefully prepared beforehand did not include hundreds of less famous châteaux in the countryside; the most responsible billeting officer therefore felt free to requisition them and objected to troops, once installed, being moved. Units passed through in series and each one would have to be newly informed of what was off limits. As the winter, which would set records for low temperatures, came on, more and more shelter was required. This increased tenfold during the Battle of the Bulge, as continual reinforcements were poured into the theater. Soon the complaints were so numerous that the situation was described in one report as “explosive.” Directives on the subject, issued at regular intervals, had little effect on the cold and exhausted combat troops. As one normally gentle soul explained to Walker Hancock, “If right after the battle you came into a beautiful room in a château, you had to shoot the chandeliers.”51

  Fortunately the two to three thousand U.S. Infantry troops who had first taken and then had to defend the château of Haute Koenigsbourg north of Colmar, where the Germans had stored some of the greatest treasures of Alsace, had been relatively restrained. They had trashed the former bedroom of Kaiser Wilhelm II, stolen some banners, and used tapestries from the Château de Rohan as rugs and blackout curtains. But a series of rooms filled with the greatest profusion of medieval and Renaissance paintings and sculpture were untouched, and this “astounding array,” Monuments officer Marvin Ross reported, “paled in contrast” to the multiple panels of Grünewald’s great Isenheim altar, which he found in a dry and airy cellar “well placed in the center of the room, heavily braced by large timbers” and guarded by a M. Pauli, who had “slept in the room at all times.”52

  The MFAA men determinedly travelled about in response to reports of damage by both sides, and kept track of the many incidences of wholesale looting by the enemy. From the Château of Chamerolles the Germans had carted off 1,700 paintings and drawings, 150 rugs and tapestries, and a carload of silver. The floors were littered with wine bottles and broken furniture. No two places were alike. Human frailties and strengths were everywhere revealed: at Gien, GIs had taken objects from the château and bestowed them on the more available ladies in the village. Another house, its magnificent collections in perfect condition as its owners had collaborated with the Nazis, was endangered not by Allied troops, but by the locals who, after the noble lords had been sent off to jail, became “excited by conditions” there. The proprietor of Vaux-le-Vicomte refused to put his château off limits and wrote that “our deep desire to welcome our allies will cause us to use this restriction only in case of true necessity. On the contrary, we look forward to many visits ‘très sympathiques’ after these years of another occupation.”53 There was a certain amount of keeping up with the Joneses. The American-born Countess Gourgaud, a recent widow, told Monuments officers that she would like to have “a few rooms used by visiting officers as her contribution to the war effort. All the neighbors have troops, and she is anxious to have some too.”54

  Certain cases were not so straightforward. At the unfortunate Château of Dampierre, the Germans not only had built a bar right in the salon in front of a large Ingres but had used a collection of manuscript letters of the seventeenth-century prelate Bossuet for toilet paper. A truly devoted retainer had salvaged these, purified them, and returned them to the library. No sooner had the Nazis left than a boisterous, if less imaginative, group of GIs appeared and began driving nails into the boiseries and building fires indiscriminately. Monuments officers were puzzled when, after all this, the owner, the Duc de Luynes, still wanted to have “a group of senior officers or some exclusive Allied unit” in the house. His Grace, it seems, wished to protect his domain from “the seething communism in the neighborhood.”

  All this soon became routine, but there was nothing routine about the frantic calls which came into Rorimer’s office in November. It appeared that the villa of a M. Robert de Galea, located on the Seine near Paris, had been requisitioned. Both the owner and Paris museum officials were distressed, as the house apparently contained a large number of works from the former collection of the famous dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had left half his estate to Mme de Galea. Vollard had died in 1939, just before the war started, since which time there had been no news of the collection; nor did anyone know just what it had contained. (The confiscation of more than six hundred items from it which Martin Fabiani had tried to ship t
o the United States [see pages 92—93] was still a secret.) Rorimer went off to investigate, expecting an impressive number of works, but he was not prepared for what he found: on the walls of the freezing villa more than a hundred unframed paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, and other masters were tacked up in overlapping layers. Many more were stacked up around the house.

  Rorimer could not reverse the requisition order, as the villa itself was not a historic building, and all procedures had been properly followed. He offered to take all the paintings to proper storage in Paris, but M. de Galea, for reasons known only to himself, refused. When Rorimer came back a few days later, everything had disappeared. Nothing more was heard until late March, when M. de Galea appeared once again, this time in a terrible state. He had, it seems, hidden his collection in a small and carefully camouflaged lodge used for duck shooting on an island in a lake surrounded by swamps near Chantilly. This wild place was now about to be used for bombing practice by the U.S. Air Force. Rorimer was able to divert the bombers with an emergency call. The documents do not relate exactly where the pictures went next; but, despite all, they did survive.55

  The SHAEF planners in their long winter of preparation for D-Day had expected to find Paris a starving city riven with social unrest and threatened with disease. They were quite amazed, therefore, to find the inhabitants of the City of Light orderly, healthy, chic as ever, and sitting in their usual cafés. The food, scanty to be sure, was still tasty, and gas and coal were lacking, but Paris, statueless, bullet-pocked, and festooned with German street signs though it might be, was just fine. It was also very expensive. In order to prevent inflation, Allied forces had been given an extremely low exchange rate of fifty francs to the dollar and could not compete with the heavy spending in public places, such as nightclubs, by French civilians. On the black market, which flourished, the dollar brought anywhere from 125 to 225 francs.

  The GIs were not the only ones to be shocked by the prices. Kenneth Clark and John Rothenstein, imagining French collectors and dealers would be impoverished and anxious to sell their pictures, rushed to Paris soon after its liberation to look for bargains for the National Gallery and the Tate, respectively. They found instead “a sense of prosperity and social gaiety, which made London seem very drab. The only difficulty was a shortage of fuel. This meant that the skies were clear of smoke and that the streets were empty of traffic, except for a few Army jeeps. Never again will Paris look so beautiful.”56

  The art market, of course, they found to be booming. “The Germans were the best customers the dealers had ever had. When I visited the dealers I knew, including Jews, I was laughed at,” Clark wrote.57 The trip was not entirely casual. The two museum directors had been sent over in an RAF bomber with the approval of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Ambassador Duff Cooper, who felt that the Americans were trying to keep British subjects out. Rothenstein, undoubtedly referring to the visit of Francis Henry Taylor and influenced by German propaganda, had heard “persistent rumors that the Americans were taking unfair advantage of the presence of their forces in Paris and that large numbers of their officials and businessmen, including art officials and dealers, were actively pursuing their national or personal interests.” He too found little he could afford at the dealers’.

  At Martin Fabiani’s gallery Rothenstein greatly admired an edition of the works of Buffon illustrated by Picasso which the dealer had published. Alas, it had long since been sold out, but Fabiani generously promised to find Rothenstein a copy.58 Not long after this visit opportunist Fabiani, making a quick shift, put on a show to benefit British war wounded, which featured a number of high-grade works lent by M. de Galea, a fancy catalogue by Louis Aragon, and, piece de résistance, a painting by Winston Churchill.59

  Liberators in the know, beginning with Hemingway, who left a box of live grenades at Picasso’s studio, sought out their icons and found them safe. Picasso was mobbed. Kenneth Clark wrote that his studio was “stratified. … On the ground floor there were GI.s and American journalists; then came communist deputies and prominent party members who showed signs of impatience; then came old acquaintances; and finally one came to Picasso.”60 Others went to Gertrude Stein’s fabled apartment. She was not yet there, though she had indeed been liberated by the Allied armies coming up from Marseilles. She, Miss Toklas, and their dog, Basket, did not return to Paris until December, again with the portrait by Picasso in the car, which served as a passport when they were stopped by armed Resistance members. Only a few things were missing from the apartment, taken at the last minute by roving SS troopers who had intended to destroy the “degenerate” Picassos there but, clearly no longer the supermen they once were, had been chased off by gendarmes called by the neighbors.61

  Despite the meagerness of their collections the museums soon reopened. The Carnavalet was first again with a show in September. The Louvre put on a special exhibition of the Bayeux tapestry with the part showing the defeat of the British tactfully folded behind more palatable scenes. The galleries containing its unevacuated sculptures were opened too, but just in case the bombs came again, all the statues were carefully placed with their backs to the windows. The most precious things could not yet come home, for there was no coal to heat the vast museum spaces. But there was a Salon d’Automne at the Tokyo, and here Tate director Rothenstein finally saw convincing evidence of the rigors of the occupation in the “lassitude and frustration” expressed in many works. To him it even showed in many of the paintings by Picasso, who had been specially honored by a sort of retrospective of seventy-four pictures within the Salon. Picasso’s extreme modernism, plus his controversial and much-publicized membership in the Communist party, aroused so many from this lassitude that there were riots in the galleries, during which his canvases were ripped from the walls. Twenty gendarmes had to be posted in the rooms for the duration of the show. When Rothenstein described the changing of the guard in the galleries, Picasso was delighted and said, “Just like Buckingham Palace, isn’t it?”62

  Hanging Picassos for the Salon d’Automne, 1944

  In their peregrinations around the châteaux in the countryside and the houses, palaces, and museums of Paris, the Monuments men had also been collecting information on the millions of things which had disappeared, presumably to the Reich. It was nearly impossible to be precise. Objects hidden or misplaced by collectors, Jewish and otherwise, appeared unexpectedly in closets, armoires, and barns, near and far from their proper locations. Boiseries from one château were found a few miles off in a neighboring one. Some things had not been hidden or stolen at all. Guy de Rothschild found a missing Boudin in his stables. In Robert de Rothschild’s Paris house, inhabited by a German general throughout the war, all was impeccably in place.

  The owners themselves, who had left objects in the hands of retainers, friends, lawyers, and bankers, often had no idea where to start looking. Some things were entirely forgotten. Although German troops had been billeted in the château of the jeweler Henri Vever and had taken a collection of gold coins, they had not found his magnificent Islamic miniatures, though it was assumed that they had. Vever died peacefully during the occupation, and the miniatures, left to his family, were packed away and would not reappear until 1988. Inventories, if they existed at all, could be maddeningly vague. One officer wrote, “It is still not possible to ascertain what was hidden by … collectors before and during the German occupation, what the Germans destroyed in contradistinction to what they carried away … what was moved from one house to another by the Germans and what has just been mislaid during a period of disorder.”63

  Little was as yet known of the details of the art trade and the operations of the ERR, and for a very long time the single best source on this subject, Rose Valland, trusting no one, kept her carefully collected data to herself, though she did hint at her knowledge. After a time no one was certain if she really knew anything or not. She did know enough about bureaucracy to be sure that if she turned over her precious lists and p
hotographs to SHAEF they might disappear without trace.

  In her dealings with James Rorimer over the installation of the post office at the Jeu de Paume she felt she had found an American who did not “give the unfortunate impression of having arrived in a nation whose inhabitants were not important.” Rorimer was first impressed by the accuracy of her knowledge when they went together to inspect the famous train liberated by Alexandre Rosenberg, but it was not until December that Mlle Valland finally agreed to take him to the former haunts of the ERR. The tour began with a garage at 104, rue Richelieu, where they found thousands of confiscated books divided according to subject and destination and stacked up, ready for shipment to Germany. They went on to Lohse’s apartment and various ERR offices where Rorimer picked up numbers of German documents which gave the MFAA men their first detailed insights into Nazi confiscation activity.

  In his diary Rorimer noted that Mlle Valland, though recently appointed Secretary of a newly created French committee for recuperation of art, “has not yet given the French authorities all of her information about the destination and location of works of art sent to Germany.” This, according to a later book by Rorimer, she confided to him alone over a candlelit supper, with champagne, chez elle. Mlle Valland’s own book omits the romantic details, but her trust in Rorimer is clear, and she duly presented her lists both to her French colleagues and to the MFAA officer, whom she urged to go to Germany as soon as possible to make sure that the Allied vanguards would be aware of the ERR repositories. But Rorimer could do no more than send this information on to the forward echelons. He himself would not be sent to Germany until March 1945, by which time a number of things were no longer where Mlle Valland thought they were.