The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  There had, of course, been plenty of preparing in Germany for the inevitable Allied incursion onto the Continent in the north. The storage places stuffed with confiscated works which awaited the Reich’s victory in order to be displayed not only would never be emptied into Hitler’s museums and government palaces; they were now in considerable danger from the aggressive bombing tactics of their former owners.

  The Berlin museums, like everyone else, had begun preparations to shelter their own collections from air attack in the thirties.64 During the Sudeten Crisis things were put in basements and a few very important ones in the vaults of the Reichsbank, but they were ordered back on display by the Nazi government so as to calm public opinion. Somewhat resentful, the curators intensified their in-house preparations. Rumors of the coming invasion of Poland reached them on August 25, 1939. By this hour the French and British collections were already on the road. Nothing in Berlin had been moved, nor were there instructions from the Nazi government. This time the Prussian Minister of Finance told the director of the Antiquities Division, Carl Weickert, to take charge of finding shelter for the Berlin collections and not worry about intervention. For the time being, though the collections were packed, they stayed in the city, stacked in fortified basements or in the vaults of the Mint and the Reichsbank. A protective structure was placed around the virtually immovable Pergamon altar.

  Other jurisdictions, less confident than Berlin of their cellars and defenses, had begun to send things to the country. Soon there was hardly a schloss in the Reich without stored treasures. The Vienna museums had established 108 repositories in Austria. Dresden occupied 60. The Rhineland museums, closest to an enemy after the fall of Poland, sent a great deal to the east of Germany, while the Bavarian collections were scattered south of Munich.

  A bombing raid on Berlin in December 1940, which blew away the Pergamon frieze protection like so much cardboard, led to reconsideration of matters. In early 1941 the altar was dismantled with great effort—it was necessary to take down the outer wall of the museum—and, each piece having been carefully marked, was moved to the Mint, which itself was reinforced with several layers of concrete. The fabulous Trojan gold treasure, thought to have been owned by King Priam of Iliad fame, was moved in three chests from the Prehistory Division to a vault at the Prussian State Bank.

  As the bombing increased it was soon clear that even this might not be adequate. Still, no one considered moving things out of town, but discussed using space in the huge antiaircraft towers, surmounted by guns, which were being built by Speer and were said to be able to withstand any known assault. Although many of the museum directors disliked the idea of being under military control, it was decided to place the best Berlin objects in these towers. Between September 1941 and September 1942 this operation was slowly accomplished. There were two towers: the one at Friedrichshain held the cream of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, or Gemäldegalerie, much of the print collections, the Islamic holdings, and the famous bust of Nefertiti; the other, near the Zoo, sheltered, among other things, the paintings of the purged Nationalgalerie, and the Trojan gold.

  In the year it had taken to accomplish this storage the military situation had totally changed. The war in Russia was not progressing as expected and bombing increased steadily. The previously unthinkable idea of fighting within Germany had crept into everyone’s mind, and although no one yet envisioned Berlin as a battlefield, evacuation of the collections from the city was once again discussed. But it was not until March 1943 that Weickert, reinforced by a directive from the Propaganda Ministry to find absolutely secure storage for all collections, was able to persuade his colleagues to consider sending them to the deep mines dotted around Thuringia, and nothing was actually moved until June 1944. The first items went to a mine at Grasleben, about thirty-five miles west of Magdeburg, on the busy day of June 6. Despite the news of the Normandy landings and the new horror of incendiary bombs, only the second-class items still left in the museum cellars were sent.

  In January 1945 the Wehrmacht suddenly ordered the museums to clear out of part of the Zoo tower. In the few hours a day in which there was no bombing, the precious objects were transferred to the Friedrichshain tower. But the Russians were now so close that it was all too clear that even this would not be safe. The terrible fire bombing of Dresden which began on February 13 intensified all fears. There were rumors that everyone would be evacuated from Berlin. Museums director Kümmel begged his Ministry for permission to move things to the West. The Ministry agreed, but even at this juncture some division directors, balking at the idea of moving things on the dangerous roads, withheld approval. Exasperated, Culture Minister Rust asked Hitler for a decision. The Führer, whose own collections, as we shall see, had long since been taken to safety, and who was by now aware of Allied plans made at Yalta for the partition of Germany, finally gave the order for evacuation on March 8, 1945.

  Control of the operation was given to Ministry official F. K. Thone, who had taken the earlier loads to Grasleben. Skipping over the turf-conscious directors, he worked directly with the curators of each division, who, while nervous at their defiance of their bosses, bitterly recognized that Berlin was finished. Paul Ortwin Rave of the Nationalgalerie was to escort the first convoy, containing forty-five cases of the top paintings from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, to a group of mines in the Werra district. It left on March 11. In the preceding night the Mint was badly hit, and a large section of it burned. Water from the fire fighting rose to knee level in some storage areas. It took days for the vaults to cool down enough so that curators could begin salvage operations.

  The remote Werra district, southwest of Erfurt, had been chosen because it was assumed it would be just inside the proposed United States Zone. The Berlin pictures had not been assigned to any particular mine. The convoy stopped first at Hattorf, a potash mine near Phillipsthal, which was already filled with the collections of the Prussian State Library. They, being a different jurisdiction, refused to take the paintings in. After much discussion the trucks moved on to the Ransbach shaft, a mile away, which was mostly reserved for SS archives and “cultural” material. But it was soon clear that the humidity levels in this mine were not suitable for long-term storage, and with the help of mine technicians the search for a better refuge continued, ending finally at the Kaiseroda mine near Merkers-on-the-Werra. Seven more convoys, containing objects from various divisions, were taken there. The last load arrived on March 30, after which the proximity of the front lines and continuous artillery fire prevented further work. Rave, with his family, stayed at Merkers to await his fate and that of his charges.

  There were other things far more tempting to human greed at Merkers. In the shadowy tunnels were stacked a hundred tons of gold bars, thousands of bags of currency, and the hideous gold trophies wrenched from the bodies of Jews and other “Untermenschen,” which had been given the highest priority for evacuation from Berlin and had gone straight to Merkers after the Reichsbank had been severely damaged in February. As the last works of art were moved in, the Reichsbank, now aware of Patton’s approach from the West, tried to take its holdings out. Moving the gold again proved hopeless, but they did manage to get 450 huge sacks of paper reichsmarks away before the entire operation was, incredibly, halted by the insistence of the German railroad workers on observing Easter Sunday. Goebbels could not believe it: “One could tear one’s hair when one thinks that the Reichsbahn is having an Easter Holiday while the enemy is looting our stores of gold,” he fumed in his diary.65

  The last two convoys to leave besieged Berlin went in considerable confusion to the more accessible Grasleben mine on April 6 and 7. They contained masterpieces of the Nationalgalerie which had never been packed in boxes and some 50 cases from the Museum of Prehistory, exact contents unknown due to the subsequent loss of inventory lists—but apparently not the Trojan gold. Dr. Unverzagt, director of the Prehistory Museum, had not, he later stated, at the last minute been able to find the key to the area o
f the Zoo tower containing the Trojan treasure, and, when he finally did, could not identify which were the cases containing the gold. This implausible inability to put his hand on the 3 cases containing the greatest treasure of his museum has led to suspicions of the motives of Unverzagt, who had been closely associated with the Ahnenerbe and whose former assistant, Alexander Langsdorff, was at the same moment holding the Uffizi collections in their mountain hideout. He had, however, earlier on managed to send 450 other cases from his collections off in river barges to another mine at Schönebeck on the Elbe, not far from Magdeburg. Back in Berlin the flak towers were far from empty. It had not been possible to move the Pergamon frieze, most of the sculpture, five hundred large paintings from the Gemäldegalerie, and many antiquities. King Priam’s ancient golden treasure also now remained behind in the path of the coming battle.

  The Linz project curators and their Führer were, by 1943, just as anxious as anyone to seek shelter for their collections. Things were stored all over the Reich. The Führerbau in Munich was chock-full, even though nearly eighteen hundred paintings had already been sent to Kremsmunster in Austria. The Dresden Museum, headquarters for Posse and later Voss, had held the Koenigs drawings and many later acquisitions for a time before transferring them to Schloss Weesentein, twelve miles east of the city. The Czech Monastery of Hohenfurth was filled mainly with furniture and ob-jets from the Mannheimer and Rothschild collections, and the Ghent altarpiece was at Neuschwanstein. The Linz second-in-command, Gottfried Riemer, began to search for a safe refuge in which to consolidate the dispersed collections, which were still growing.66

  Partial diagram of the complex of chambers at Alt Aussee

  He was not alone in this quest. By the summer of 1943 an Austrian official, Dr. Herbert Seiberl, had completed an investigation of the labyrinthine network of salt mines in the Salzkammergut, a chic summer resort area high in the mountains southeast of Salzburg. They were perfect: remote and constant in humidity and temperature. The most suitable was at Alt Aussee, where the main chambers lay more than a mile inside the mountain, reachable only by tiny special trains. There were few entrances and exits and the mines were worked by a close-knit group of mountain men who had been there for generations. Seiberl’s belief that the conditions would be ideal was supported by his discovery of a little chapel inside the mines in which oil paintings had been hanging since 1933 without ill effect. Access would be dangerous: the one rail line was nine miles away and the road up to the mine narrow and very steep. It would also be necessary, as the British had discovered, to construct accommodations for the art works inside the vast chambers.

  Seiberl was thinking of this place not for the Linz holdings, but for the Austrian collections, now for the first time within range of Allied bombers coming from Italy. But word of this perfect hideaway soon reached Riemer, and it was immediately claimed for the exclusive use of the Führer. No other organization was to bring anything to the mine, though an exception was made for Seiberl’s own Institute of Monuments Protection in Vienna.

  The arrangement met with Hitler’s approval. Workers were exempted from military service to build the needed structures; miles of cables and shelves were installed. The area was transformed. There were offices and restorers’ studios. The Gauleiter of Oberdonau, in whose domain Alt Aussee lay, came to inspect. Armed guards were posted. The Gauleiter of the Tirol, who controlled the art-loaded north of Italy, tried to get the mine area transferred to his jurisdiction and had to be reprimanded by Himmler. Dr. Pochmuller, director of the mines, described the scene as a madhouse. He knew works of art were coming, but was not quite prepared for the magnitude of what began to pour in as soon as the spaces were ready. Dr. Seiberl had taken full advantage of his special status, and load after load appeared not only from Viennese museums such as Schönbrunn but from small towns and churches all around the country. In the next year 1,687 paintings came from the Führerbau. They were joined in the fall by the Ghent altarpiece, which had a special room built for it, and 992 other cases from Neuschwanstein. In October, unharmed by her sea voyage, the Bruges Madonna arrived to join her compatriot. The Naples masterpieces from Monte Cassino were sent in March 1945 by Goering, who did not wish them to be found in his own collections. On the way up, blocked by snow, they spent two weeks in a little pension in the village of St. Agatha.67

  The owner of most of these treasures was, by mid-March 1945, living in much the same conditions as they. From deep underground in his bunker beneath the Reichschancellery the Führer managed to control what was left of his nation only by the fear his loyal followers could still inspire in their fellow citizens. But Hitler still hoped. The final architectural model for the rebuilding of Linz had been delivered to him on February 9, and he had taken it with him to this nether region, where he frequently sat gazing at the tiny representation of his vast dream museum arranged in a splendid allée of gleaming white buildings which rose up from the Danube. The contents of Alt Aussee, absolutely safe, now only awaited its completion.

  In quite another mood, in August 1944 Hitler had ordered all military installations, utilities, communications, archives, monuments, food stores, and transportation facilities destroyed as the German armies retreated, so that only a wasteland would await the Allies. In mid-March 1945 he broadened this policy to include industries and infrastructure and added an order for the complete evacuation of areas which were soon to be battle zones. This impossible responsibility was entrusted to the local Gauleiters. Albert Speer, who had proposed a more realistic program, was removed from office for a time, but eventually managed to compromise with the Führer and change the order for destruction to “disabling,” all the while working against Hitler’s orders.68

  In addition to the scorched-earth order, on every front soldiers and Gauleiters were commanded to fight to the last or face execution, Hitler’s theory being, as Wolff had found out in Italy, that if they held out long enough, the Western Allies would join with Germany to defeat Bolshevism. In this scenario Germany would remain intact, and the purloined treasures would be used. They must, therefore, be kept from the enemy as long as possible. Indeed, in his will, written the day before his suicide, Hitler stipulated that his collections should be given to the nation.

  Not all of Hitler’s followers understood the subtleties of what should and should not be saved. Gauleiter Eigruber of Oberdonau had taken Hitler’s scorched-earth decrees deeply to heart and was persuaded that the works of art at Alt Aussee should not fall into the hands of the Bolshevists or “International Jewry.” In addition, the valuable salt mines must be “disabled.” (The Gauleiters in general, as Speer had discovered, were not an art-oriented group. In Essen the Gauleiter had suggested to him that the partially bombed cathedral be torn down completely since it was “only a hindrance to the modernization of the city.” Speer was able to save the cathedral but many another historic building was demolished.69) The story of Eigruber’s fanatic desire for destruction, and the efforts to stop him, has become the legend of Alt Aussee. What actually happened is far from clear, for in the dying days of the Reich there was much maneuvering for self-salvation and all testimony by those involved at Alt Aussee must be viewed in this light.

  The basic legend tells us that Eigruber put bombs in the mines with the intention of blowing up everything, and that heroic Austrian Resistance workers removed them and thereby saved the priceless works for humanity. It was not quite so simple.70 All agree that Eigruber’s assistant, Inspector Glinz, visited the mine on April 10 and 13, 1945, with eight crates marked “Marble—Do Not Drop,” which he said were Eigruber’s personal property, and which were to be carefully stored within. On the thirteenth a top-level committee consisting of Bormann’s assistant von Hummel and all the principals responsible for the mine also arrived to discuss the “disabling” of the mine complex. Von Hummel, sworn to secrecy earlier by Eigruber, was well aware of the Gauleiter’s plan. He was also aware that Hitler had ordered this and other repositories sealed and the works of art
preserved at all costs, and that Eigruber must have received similar orders, which he, distrustful of everyone since the fall of Vienna, had simply chosen to ignore. Von Hummel now confided this to the mine officials, good Nazis all, still wary of the power of the Führer. Von Hummel was persuaded to call Bormann and ask for a Hitler order to stop the process. The order came immediately and von Hummel sent a colleague to inform Eigruber. But these verbal messages did not convince the Gauleiter, who refused to reconsider his decision.

  Those privy to the secret now carefully approached certain co-workers to enlist their help. In this extremely dangerous undertaking they knew they risked death as defeatists and traitors. Their next ploy was to try to persuade Eigruber that the bombs would not destroy everything inside unless the mine entrances were sealed. This would make the bombs inaccessible, but the engineers convinced the Gauleiter that they could be detonated by a long fuse to the exterior. The curators also secretly began to redistribute the most precious works to small, remote chambers in the hope of protecting them from the blast if it came. The Czernin Vermeer and fifteen top Rothschild paintings shared one chamber and other little groupings were scattered about. The Linz coin curator, Rupprecht, went rather further and took twenty-two hundred gold coins, worth $4 million, out of the mine and entrusted them to von Hummel, who was supposed to be preparing hideouts for high-level Nazis in the South Tirol. The St. Florian Altdorfers and thirty other Austrian treasures were also quietly removed to another mine at Lauffen.

  By now von Hummel had told his friends at the ERR of the situation. Aghast, Robert Scholz came to the mine, and somewhat impractically promised to send armed men to resist Eigruber and his guards when the mine custodian phoned him with a secret password. Feeling that no progress was being made, the mine chief, Pochmuller, decided the next day to order the bombs dismantled on his own responsibility. Unfortunately his telephoned orders were overheard by Eigruber’s assistant, Glinz, who threatened the engineer assigned to do the job and sent heavily armed reinforcements to protect his bombs.