The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  Brown thought Newton (whom he described as a “California church architect”) and the others were doing a fine job; he was so impressed by Newton’s ability to circumvent Army red tape that he recommended that efforts continue to put him in charge of “all our MFAA officers.” MFAA, he confided privately, “ranks in the Army very low.” Brown took all this in good humor, but he was not without resources. When McCloy came to London, Brown “got to see him, to the amazement of the Army.” McCloy told him to talk to “Major Gen. Clay, the new head of the Control Council.” This proved not to be so easy, as Clay was in Paris. Brown, not as brazen as Francis Henry Taylor when it came to unauthorized travel, settled down in London and quietly immersed himself in his new subject, hoping to be useful in the diplomatic end of things presently being handled by Sumner Crosby, and eventually at SHAEF headquarters when he should be called there. Sir Leonard Woolley he found “agreeable and not difficult.” But after suffering through a dinner seated next to Lady W., the other half of the team, he could only comment that she was “a combination of tactlessness and snobbery.”

  Brown had no trouble working with both Woolley and Newton on restitution policy. (Finley was thrilled with this rare report of harmony at headquarters.) By early April further principles of restitution were taking shape in London. Ecclesiastical property from German churches, they all strongly felt, should be exempted from use for replacement in kind. The British, Brown reported back to Washington, were against using any works of art, including German-owned ones, for reparations, and he suggested that the United States announce a similar policy which would stipulate that “cultural objects in German public or private collections may not be included in an estimate of German capital assets to be seized or held for the purpose of ultimate reparations.”88 This principle he considered “vitally necessary,” and he suggested that the Treasury Department be consulted on the matter.

  A few days after making these recommendations Brown was finally moved across to France and the little town of Barbizon. Newton thought it a good time to take him on an inspection trip to Italy, and arranged yet another Papal Audience and a tour through the newly liberated north, where they were briefed on the discovery of the repositories at San Leonardo. This junket, organized in considerable style by Newton, was perhaps the final straw for his Army enemies, who angrily cabled that he was in Italy “without prior clearance” and was signing communications “Special Advisor, War Department.” Brown’s status was even less clear. “Requested is extent to which he may be considered to represent War Department views,” one officer inquired. Hilldring at Civil Affairs replied unhelpfully to these cables from Italy that “the War Department has no knowledge as to how Newton and Brown got to your theater or why they are there,” but said that “it would be appreciated if you will listen to Mr. Brown’s views. Of course you are at liberty to do what you please regarding his recommendations.”89 Little did Brown know how very “low” the MFAA mission did rank in the eyes of the Army brass.

  XI

  ASHES AND DARKNESS

  Treasure Hunts in the Ruined Reich, 1945

  In the first months of 1945 the small group of Monuments men in the forward echelons moved into the thin strip of newly conquered German territory immediately behind the front lines. It was shockingly different from what they had encountered thus far. The previous October, Aachen had given them a glimpse of the destructiveness of total war, but the constant saturation bombing and fierce resistance of the German armies since that time had further reduced the “skeleton” cities to flat wastelands of rocky rubble sometimes relieved by pockmarked cathedrals, spared thanks to the maps provided by the Roberts Commission.

  The remaining inhabitants of these moonscapes lived marginally in cellars, while newly liberated groups of half-starved forced laborers and displaced persons roamed about looking for food and anything of value that might be exchanged for it. In such conditions the protection and repair of historic buildings was, for the most part, a ludicrous impossibility. Nevertheless, the MFAA officers continued to do what they could to salvage chance finds of sculpture or movable works from the smoldering heaps of stone and gather them in more protected places which could be put under guard. It was discouraging and dangerous work: on March 10 British Major Ronald Balfour was killed by artillery-shell fragments while trying to save sculptures from a fourteenth-century church in Cleve.

  To George Stout, waiting impatiently for the liberation of the constantly growing list of repositories which Intelligence sources were reporting, this tragic event made the magnitude of the task set for the tiny number of MFAA officers more ominous than ever. There were now only five of them in the forward area. At fleeting meetings with the policy makers at headquarters, or by telephone, Stout tried to organize the forward placement of his colleagues and prepare procedures for dealing with the large deposits of works of art which he knew they would soon encounter. He circulated a list of German museum personnel who might reveal the locations of their repositories and thereby prevent their destruction. At the top was Count Metternich, who had returned to his post as Provincial Curator in Westphalia after being fired by Goering. But he was not to be found in Bonn when it was taken. Nor were there any museum officials in Cologne to tell Stout where their holdings had been hidden. It was not a place in which he wanted to linger. To his wife he wrote that he felt “bitterness, hatred—the way you feel a raw north gale.”1 This was hardly surprising, considering the fact that heavy bombing of the cities to the east was still going on, and that the German radio continually broadcast bulletins such as the following:

  Like hyenas the Anglo-American barbarians in the occupied western territories are falling upon German works of art and beginning a systematic looting campaign. Under flimsy pretexts all private houses and public buildings in the whole area are searched by art experts, most of them Jews, who “confiscate” all works of art whose owners cannot prove beyond doubt their property rights…. These works of art, stolen in true Jewish style, are transferred to Aachen, where they are sorted and packed and then dispatched to the U.S.A.2

  Meanwhile, at every step the Army bureaucracy, impatient with the irritating demands of the Monuments officers in the midst of battle, made the efficient use of the few specialists nearly impossible. Stout was refused clearance to go from one headquarters to another. SHAEF would not print Off Limits notices. Patton’s Third Army, headed directly for southern Germany and the greatest concentration of repositories, even suggested that MFAA officer Robert Posey’s presence was unnecessary, and that he be relieved. Stout and his colleagues did not give an inch, and by constant badgering of headquarters staffs and wide distribution of the above propaganda, managed to maintain their presence, which in a short time would be recognized at all levels as very necessary indeed.

  They had known about Siegen since October. In December Mlle Valland’s revelations had added the ERR treasure castle of Neuschwanstein and four others to the list. From liberated Metz came news that the stained glass windows of the Strasbourg Cathedral and other Alsatian treasures were in a mine at Heilbronn. By the end of March, Walker Hancock had followed Stout to Cologne and on to Bonn and found Metternich’s assistant, who added 109 depositories to the list. Rushing from one headquarters to another, Hancock pinpointed them on the operations maps of the three Army Corps within Third Army.3

  Of the Berlin evacuations and the dramas in the Salzkammergut they as yet knew nothing. Stout felt that Siegen, which he knew contained Charlemagne’s relics, might be the most important repository of all, and the tactical troops approaching the city were sent special cables with details of its possible contents. Well before the town had been taken, Stout had asked permission to go in, setting a tentative date of April 2.

  On the same Easter Sunday which had so frustrated Goebbels, he and Walker Hancock set out for this objective, picking up the Vicar of Aachen Cathedral on the way. There was only one road, covered with rubble and bloodstains, which was not under fire. American patrols were still r
ounding up pockets of Germans, while from across the river Sieg the main German body fired sporadically. The warnings sent ahead had been heeded; indeed, the mayor of Siegen had been amazed that one of the first questions the American commander who took the city asked was, “Where are the paintings?”4 The Monuments men found the mine heavily guarded by members of the Eighth Infantry Division. With the Vicar they searched for the proper entrance. Up to now there had not been anything unusual about the shattered town; they had seen many in the last weeks. But once they entered the mine, Stout wrote,

  what followed was not commonplace…. The tunnel… was about six feet wide and eight high, arched and rough. Once away from the entrance the passage was thick with vapor and our flashlights made only faint spots in the gloom. There were people inside. I thought that we must soon pass them and that they were a few stragglers sheltered there for safety. But we did not pass them…. We walked more than a quarter of a mile … other shafts branched from it…. Throughout we walked in a path not more than a foot and a half wide. The rest was compressed humanity. They stood, they sat on benches or on stones. They lay on cots or stretchers. This was the population of the city, all that could not get away. There was a stench in the humid air—babies cried fretfully. We were the first Americans they had seen. They had no doubt been told we were savages. The pale grimy faces caught in our flashlights were full of fear and hate … and ahead of us went the fearful word, halfway between sound and whisper, “Amerikaner.” That was the strange part of this occurrence, the impact of hate and fear in hundreds of hearts close about us and we were the targets of it all.

  It took a child to relieve the tension. Stout felt something touch his hand; turning his light in that direction, he saw a small boy:

  He smiled and took hold of my hand and walked along with me. I should not have let him do it, but I did and was glad. What could have made him know that I was not a monster?5

  This was not the shaft which contained the repository. The proper one was not much less crowded, but its occupants were Allied prisoners of war and forced laborers clamoring to know when they could go home. In a locked room measuring about two hundred by thirty feet, with vaulted bricked walls and concrete floors, were nearly six hundred high-quality paintings from the Rhineland museums, a hundred sculptures, and stacks of packed cases. Here were the manuscript of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and the great oaken doors of St. Maria in Kapitoll of Cologne. Mold covered many of the pictures. The ecstatic vicar found six cases containing the gold and silver shrines with the relics of Charlemagne, the robe of the Virgin, and the rest of the cathedral treasure. The conditions were so bad that immediate evacuation was called for, but there was as yet no place to take the fragile objects. All Stout and Hancock could do for the moment was post guards and convince their commanders of the importance of this room. As they left, a demented old man followed them, screaming of Nazi atrocities. In the darkness they drove slowly back to their billets on roads jammed with muddy tank retrievers.

  The hiding places were not all so hellish; a few days later Stout and Hancock would find another major part of the Rhineland collections in two serene and idyllic refuges utterly undisturbed deep in the country on the river Lahn.6 Their colleagues were finding other things. The unlikely team of Robert Posey (a bluff architect definitely not part of the museum crowd) and Private Lincoln Kirstein (who had been instrumental in the founding of the Museum of Modern Art) had quite by chance discovered the hiding place of the Ghent altarpiece.

  Art and Man sheltered at Siegen

  Captain Posey had been stricken with a toothache while in Trier and consulted a German dentist, who revealed that his son-in-law had been involved in Kunstschutz activities in Paris. The dentist guided Posey and Kirstein to his daughter’s house, where they found Dr. Hermann Bunjes, once so helpful to Goering. The house was decorated with photographs of French monuments, undoubtedly from the documentation project undertaken by the German Institute in Paris. Bunjes, who in a very short time poured forth volumes of information—including the existence of Alt Aussee—did not fail to mention that he had once studied at Harvard and, now that the war was over, would like to work for the Americans. It also soon appeared that he would even more like to have a safe-conduct for himself and his family to Paris so that he could finish his research on the twelfth-century sculpture of the Ile de France. In the course of these outpourings he confided that he had been in the SS and now feared retribution from other Germans. Posey and Kirstein, who as yet knew little of the machinations of the ERR, found him rather charming, but could offer him nothing, and left. Charm had masked desperation: after a subsequent interrogation, Bunjes shot his wife, his child, and himself.7

  While their fellow officers were thus engaged, another team, consisting of Captain Walter Huchthausen and Sergeant Sheldon Keck, a conservator in civilian life, had set out in response to an inspection request from a forward unit of the American Ninth Army, somewhere north of Essen. Finding their chosen route impassable, they tried to detour around, and soon found themselves on an autobahn heading east. After a time Sergeant Keck noticed that there were suddenly no other American vehicles in sight, but Huchthausen, who felt sure that they were safe, pressed on. Finally they saw American soldiers peering over the highway embankment, but when they stopped to ask directions their jeep was raked with machine-gun fire. Keck dove into a foxhole, but Huchthausen was hit. From the foxhole Keck could not see him. Another GI reported that the captain “was bleeding from the ear, that his face was snow white.” While Keck was making his way to the nearest command post, Huchthausen’s body was taken away by medics. For thirty-six hours Keck searched one medical unit after another before he was told of Huchthausen’s death.8

  This second loss occurred just as Patton’s Third Army, racing across Germany, arrived in the Werra region of Thuringia and took the small town of Merkers. On April 6 an MP patrol stopped two women walking on the outskirts of town in violation of the curfew. After questioning them the MPs offered to drive the ladies on into Merkers. As they were passing the entrance to the Kaiseroda mine, the women told the soldiers that it was “where the gold bullion was kept.” Their story was soon confirmed by other DPs and prisoners of war who had been forced to unload the gold when it arrived, and who indicated that the mine probably contained a large part of Germany’s gold reserves. This was not just a bunch of old pictures which could be protected by a couple of guards. After a few soldiers were caught with helmets full of gold coins, Patton sent an entire tank battalion and seven hundred men to guard every possible access to the mine, and ordered reports of the discovery to be censored.

  Responsibility for securing this mine’s contents went not to the MFAA but to the Financial Section of SHAEF, whose deputy chief was Col. Bernard Bernstein, a trusted insider from Morgenthau’s Treasury Department, where heated discussions on the future of Germany were still in progress. In the absence of any firm Allied policy Bernstein acted on the basis of the latest draft “Financial Directive,” proposed on March 20, which called for the impounding of “all gold, silver, currencies, securities … valuable papers, and all other assets” of various categories including “works of art or cultural material of value or importance, regardless of the ownership thereof.”9

  To deal with the estimated four hundred tons of art from Berlin’s museums in the mine, Bernstein called in Robert Posey, who had so recently been considered superfluous by Third Army. Posey informed MFAA chief Geoffrey Webb of the find, and requested the services of technical expert Stout. By the time they arrived, the story of the gold had leaked to the world. Furious, Patton fired the responsible censor. Stout and Webb were surprised to find that Colonel Bernstein had taken custody of the entire contents of the mine and that, not being Third Army, they needed his permission to inspect the works of art. To back up his authority, Bernstein produced a letter from Patton himself. After some hours permission was granted to Stout, but not to the British Webb. Stout was told that he was to stay at the site until further
notice, and was billeted with a large contingent of financial staff.

  Before anything could be moved the mine was inspected by Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, who later joked over dinner about what they could have done with the trove “if these were the old free-booting days when a soldier kept his loot.” A bit of levity was badly needed. The mine visit was bracketed by their first view of a different sort of repository, the Nazi death camp at Ohrdruf—where thirty-two hundred emaciated bodies, naked and covered with lice, had lain strewn about where their captors had shot them before they fled—and the news of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, which came in the night.

  Generals Bradley, Patton, and Eisenhower examine paintings found alongside the tons of bullion hidden at Merkers.

  Stout by now had found Dr. Rave, who told him of the forty-five Kaiser Friedrich Museum cases at Ransbach, which they could not inspect as the mine elevator was out of order. At Merkers itself, in addition to the crated items, there were approximately four hundred paintings from the Nationalgalerie without any protection at all. After calculating what materials he would need for normal packing, Stout noted that there was “no chance of getting them.” On Friday the thirteenth he returned to Ransbach and found that seven of the Kaiser Friedrich cases had been rifled and left in disorder: “Domenico Veneziano profile Portrait of a Young Woman lying out on box with about a dozen other works. Case #10 very important—Dürer, Holbein, Dom. Venez. and others.” But no paintings seemed to be missing. Stored along with the pictures were more than 1.5 million books and the costumes and properties of the Berlin State Theater and Opera. These too had been ransacked, according to mine guardians, by Russian and Polish forced laborers. Rave thought that the Russian DPs, who, he noticed, always crossed themselves when they saw pictures of the Madonna, had not dared touch the mostly religious works in the Kaiser Friedrich cases, and had limited themselves to taking the more useful costumes.