The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  On the same Friday afternoon Stout was informed by Bernstein that the art convoy would leave on Monday morning, “a rash procedure, and ascribed to military necessity,” i.e., the huge Russian offensive which the visiting generals expected at any moment. Nearly a million Soviet soldiers were preparing to take Berlin and meet the strung-out British and American armies just about where the mines full of treasure lay. Behind the American front the conquered part of Germany, its armies still fighting, was in chaos, with no government, peopled by wandering millions of DPs, surrendering soldiers, and hungry citizens. Bernstein therefore felt the need to get the treasure to a secure place immediately.

  The gold operation was well under way by the next day. There were no transportation problems now. Jeeps with trailers had been lowered into the mine to bring the ingots to the elevators. Each load was carefully escorted and listed as it went into thirty-two ten-ton trucks sent from Frankfurt. The crews worked throughout the night. At midnight on Saturday the fourteenth Bernstein told the Monuments officers to prepare three truckloads of art which were to be mixed in with the gold to make the loads lighter. Stout, between 2:00 and 4:30 a.m., got the proper quantity of cased objects to the mine shaft, complete with inventory lists. The gold convoy departed at 8:45 Sunday morning, escorted by two machine-gun platoons, ten mobile antiaircraft units, continual air cover, and a large number of infantrymen.

  After the departure of the gold a crew of twenty-five exhausted soldiers began the delicate task of moving the four hundred unpacked pictures up from the mine chambers. To prevent the formation of salt crystals. Rave carefully washed each one as it came into the open air. At noon fifty men were added to the complement, but Stout noted that there were now “difficulties keeping men on job and with streams of salt water in main shaft.” Once the pictures were in the upper mine building, they had to be wrapped in something for their journey. In his inspections of neighboring mines Stout had come across more than a thousand long sheepskin coats which had never made it to the freezing Wehrmacht troops on the Eastern Front. They would do their duty in this move and many subsequent ones. On Monday, with the help of a crew of prisoners of war, the trucks were loaded, a task that took more than twelve hours. The art convoy left Merkers on April 17, 1945, again with a spectacular escort.

  Looted pictures discovered intact in the Heilbronn mine (Photo by Helga Glassner)

  The unloading, performed “by 105 prisoners of war in poor health” at the Reichsbank in Frankfurt, Stout described laconically as “complicated.” The facilities there were not good. Three hundred ninety-three uncrated paintings, 2,091 print boxes, 1,214 crates, and 140 bundles of textiles were jammed into nine dampish rooms. For the moment responsibility for the cream of the Kaiser Friedrich, Queen Nefertiti, and much more was in the hands of the Financial Section of SHAEF. This made some of the brass nervous, and Stout was ordered to return as soon as possible to make a complete inventory. The anxiety was justified. On every subsequent visit Stout, who was trying to keep the objects from each museum together, found that the cases and paintings had been carelessly moved about. Eventually he managed to get everything up to the ground floor, but upon reinspection found them “stored in promiscuous fashion.” And day by day the Reichsbank, the only official military depository, became more crowded as Colonel Bernstein’s teams continued to scour bank vaults and hiding places for gold and currency which they brought in by the ton.10 These deliveries would soon stop, but the flow of works of art had just begun.

  Thanks to the continuing efforts of LaFarge and his staff at SHAEF headquarters, still inconveniently located in France, the weary Stout was at least getting a little more help. Rorimer had arrived from Paris, as had Lamont Moore, a former National Gallery employee, who on April 4 reported “important repositories in combat lines near Magdeburg.” This was the Schönebeck-Grasleben complex, which, with gold on his mind, the local commander had immediately put under the same heavy guard as Merkers. The gold was not what he expected: Moore and Keck found, not bullion, but thousands of Polish church treasures. Farther west Rorimer, now with Seventh Army, had reported the discovery of a cache in the twin Kochendorf mines at Heilbronn just north of Stuttgart, while almost simultaneous pleas for help had come from Hancock, from a place called Bernterode in Thuringia.

  Lincoln Kirstein questions a custodian at Hungen.

  Heilbronn, the storage place for the museums and libraries of Alsace and Heidelberg, was flooded, its body-strewn buildings smoldering with sporadic flare-ups of flame, and jammed with Polish and Russian DPs and terrified civilians. For lack of engineering or any other support, Rorimer was forced, for the time being, to leave the mine to military guards and German mine personnel, whose political leanings were as yet unclear.11

  Posey and Kirstein had meanwhile discovered eight large buildings full of Jewish books, anti-Semitic clippings, and religious objects from all over Europe, in the town of Hungen, where they had been stockpiled for the future use of Rosenberg’s racial studies institute, which was to have been built at Chiemsee in Bavaria.12

  Flying from one headquarters to another, with intermittent visits to SHAEF, Stout begged for what he needed: at least 250 men to guard the repositories already discovered, access to trucks, and, above all, someplace to take the incredible quantities of art they had found, which they now knew would be hugely increased once the ERR and Linz stores were captured. These recommendations went out in reports and requests which Stout wrote night after night after his grueling day’s work was done. He did not get to Bernterode until May 1.

  This mine was the last place in the world one might expect to find works of art, for it was a huge munitions dump filled by the German High Command with four hundred thousand tons of ammunition and many more tons of military supplies. In its twenty-three kilometers of corridors and chambers more than seven hundred French, Italian, and Russian slave laborers had been employed. But in mid-March all the civilians had been sent away and, it was reported by the DPs, German military units had brought numerous transports to the mine, which had been completely sealed on April 2. An American ordinance unit with bomb disposal experts had discovered it on April 27. Five hundred meters down the main corridor they had noticed a freshly built brick wall. Breaking through proved quite difficult: the brick was five feet thick, and behind it was a locked door.

  Never in their wildest dreams could the Americans have envisioned what they now saw: in the partitioned room were four enormous caskets, one decorated with a wreath and ribbons bearing Nazi symbols and the name Adolf Hitler in large letters. Hung over the caskets and carefully placed about the chamber were numbers of German regimental banners. Boxes, paintings, and tapestries were stacked in one area. Wary of booby traps, the frightened men, sure they had found the Führer’s tomb, posted a guard and called their superiors at First Army. Further inspection revealed “a richly jeweled sceptre and orb, two crowns, and two swords with finely wrought gold and silver scabbards.” To Hancock, who arrived the next day, the theatrical arrangement clearly seemed to be a shrine, suggesting “the setting for a pagan ritual.” And indeed the coffins, hastily marked with handwritten cards taped to the tops, contained the remains, not of Hitler, but of three of Germany’s most revered rulers: Field Marshal von Hindenburg, Frederick the Great, and Frederick William I, a fact confirmed by the bomb experts, who, taking no chances, had checked inside and seen the shrivelled but well-embalmed remains of the once plump “Soldier-King.” The fourth coffin belonged to von Hindenburg’s wife. Next to them was a little metal box containing twenty-four photographs of contemporary Field Marshals, topped by one of Hitler. Above were 225 banners dating from the earliest Prussian wars to World War I. In three boxes were the Prussian crown regalia, which in addition to the things already listed included a magnificent plumed Totenhelm. A little note assured any finder that there were no jewels in the crowns as these had been removed “for honorable sale.”

  In the excitement Hancock had not at first paid much attention to the picture
s. There were 271 in all, strangely at odds with the military splendor about them. Among the first he examined were, to his amazement, Watteau’s magnificent Embarkation for Cythera from the Charlottenburg Palace, Boucher’s Venus and Adonis, Chardin’s La Cuisinière, and several Lancrets. More in keeping with the ambience was a series of Cranachs. A large number were court portraits from the Palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam. Close examination of the whole room, to which there was only one entrance which had been locked from the inside, produced a final mystery: how had those who had brought all this in come out?

  Removing the huge coffins would not be easy. To help out, First Army sent Lieutenant Steve Kovalyak, whose ability to circumvent Army regulations and obtain equipment became so invaluable to the MFAA men that they enlisted him permanently in their number. Packing started on May 3, but was delayed by constant power failures. Nerves were frayed by knowledge that thousands of tons of explosives lay in the mine levels just below. Again the lack of materials forced ingenuity upon them: this time gasproof clothing from the Army stores cushioned the Watteaus and Lancrets. The caskets were brought to the surface on V-E Day; while they worked, the men listened to news of this event on the radio. The last and heaviest coffin, which held Frederick the Great, took more than an hour to load in the elevator; as it rose slowly above ground, the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by “God Save the King,” rang out into the evening.

  There was no escort for the remains of the Prussian heroes as there had been for the gold; they were deposited very quietly in the Castle of Marburg. Their accoutrements fared better. Walker Hancock had taken the crown regalia to First Army headquarters in Weimar. Commanding General Courtney Hodges took one look and immediately ordered Hancock to drive them to Frankfurt to be stored with the gold. The route would be on the autobahn, which Hancock considered now “as safe as the Merritt Parkway.” General Hodges did not agree, and the treasure, jewel-less though it might be, was given two motorcycles, three jeeps with machine guns, two armored cars with antiaircraft guns, and a weapons carrier with two guards.13

  While it was relatively easy to inspire front-line commanders to provide transportation and labor for glamorous evacuations such as Merkers and Bernterode (which Lamont Moore later described as “a very special technicolor project” and “an anti-nationalistic move prompted by the whim of the General in the area,” respectively14), there was markedly less enthusiasm for moving the cache at Siegen. The Eighth Division still proudly guarded the premises, which had become a military tourist attraction of sorts. Signs all over Aachen directed the curious to the mine. Soldiers were shown around and allowed to try on what they believed was Charlemagne’s crown, but was in fact a reproduction. The contents of the mine were suffering terribly in the dampness, which could not be controlled without electric power; but there seemed to be no other place to take them.

  Things came to a head when trucks, rare as hen’s teeth, suddenly became available. Taking matters into his own hands, Walker Hancock loaded the convoy with items from Cologne and the Charlemagne relics from Aachen and sent them off to the vaults of the cathedrals of those two cities, virtually the only buildings left standing. Labor to load and unload was miraculously produced by the resourceful Kovalyak from local prisons and DP camps. This shipment violated every Army rule: no clearances for movement between different commands were obtained, and the objects were returned to the Germans. The trucks going to Aachen, surprisingly, had French drivers, reputed to be reckless. Hancock told them that they were transporting “Charlemagne himself … the robe of the Blessed Virgin, the swaddling clothes of the Enfant Jesus, the shroud of John the Baptist, and the bones of several other saints.” Thus imbued with the fear of divine retribution, the Frenchmen drove the trucks with infinite care.15

  The rest of the contents of Siegen did not fare so well. Struggling with famished laborers and ever more difficult transportation problems, Lamont Moore and Stout did not get the objects out until the first week of June. At the Stadtsarchiv in Marburg the Siegen treasures joined the Bernterode paintings. The delay and waves made at various headquarters had not been all bad. On May 20 word finally came from SHAEF that in order to carry out earlier directives, commanders should “with the advice of MFAA specialist officers reserve and properly equip for use as collecting depots for works of art… buildings suitable for the purpose.”16 Marburg thus became the first official American “Collecting Point” operating in Germany. Faute de mieux the Army had become, as the Roberts Commission planners and John Nicholas Brown had foreseen, responsible for a staggering horde. And it was about to increase a hundredfold.

  Just after the middle of April the American Third and Seventh Armies, joined by the French First Army, now all well within Germany, had turned southeast toward Bavaria and Austria. They reached Neuschwanstein on the twenty-eighth, Munich on the thirtieth, Berchtesgaden on May 4, and Alt Aussee on May 8. Rorimer, armed with Rose Valland’s information, arrived at Neuschwanstein just a week later. On the way there the accuracy of her information had been confirmed at the Monastery of Buxheim, also on her list, where Rorimer got a foretaste of what was to come: here were seventy-two boxes marked “D-W”—for David-Weill—still bearing the French shipping labels. Rorimer’s reception was not friendly. The custodian had at first refused to open the doors. Inside, the corridors were stacked with beautiful furniture of all periods and nations, from French to Russian, and the chapel floor was covered with layers of rugs and tapestries a foot deep. In adjoining rooms he found a dormitory for a hundred evacuated children.17

  Siegen, 1945: Eighth Infantry Division in the museum business

  Leaving this “minor” deposit under guard, Rorimer went on to the incredible castle at Füssen. Neuschwanstein was intact and well guarded, though it was clear from gaps in certain rooms that the ERR had made great efforts to remove what they could at the last minute. Rorimer was amazed to find more than thirteen hundred paintings from the Bavarian museums mixed in with the confiscated French works. In a vault behind a hidden steel door were boxes containing the Rothschild jewels, other precious goldsmith’s work, and more than a thousand pieces of silver from the David-Weill collections. Best of all was a room containing all the meticulously kept ERR records: well over twenty thousand catalogue cards, each representing a confiscated work or group of works, eight thousand negatives, shipping books, and even the rubber stamps with which the code names of the various collections had been marked on frames and boxes. Rorimer locked this chamber very carefully, and, using an antique Rothschild emblem, added wax seals to the door, which the guards were ordered to inspect regularly.

  From the venerable custodian of the castle Rorimer learned that Bruno Lohse and a colleague were lodged in a nursing home in the town. The matron of the house, referring to the Nazis as “dogs and fiends,” took Rorimer, who had brought along Counter Intelligence officers, in to see the two ERR operatives. Lohse gave Rorimer the names of the other ERR repositories, but pretended to know nothing more; to improve his memory he was arrested and locked up in the local jail.

  The Neuschwanstein deposits were impressive, but no one yet knew the location of the most important items, those which had been supplied to Goering and Hitler. Following the trail, Rorimer, now accompanied by Calvin Hathaway, cautiously entered the newly conquered country to the southeast, passing the road to Schliersee, where Hans Frank would shortly be arrested, and going on to the beautiful Chiemsee with its twin islands. On one was an ancient Benedictine abbey and on the other another of Ludwig II’s castles, Herrenchiemsee, an expensive reproduction of Versailles, which contained three hundred more crates of ERR loot, along with the furniture of the Residenz in Munich and a large number of sightseeing GIs.

  From there they went on to Berchtesgaden. Here all was chaos. French troops had blocked the roads into the town and up to the ruins of Hitler’s Berghof so that American troops could not move in, and after raising the French flag over Hitler’s house had proceeded with great enthusiasm to l
oot it and all the other residences in the famous Nazi resort. Empty picture frames were scattered everywhere; two della Robbia tondi lay on the ground outside one of the tunnels which linked the houses. French officers were seen carrying off rugs and other objects. Order was only gradually being established by the crack American 101st Airborne Division under the command of General Maxwell Taylor.

  A preliminary search of the vicinity turned up no major repository. Puzzled, Rorimer, after alerting the 101st to be on the lookout for a large cache, returned to his headquarters. On the way back he inspected and secured as best he could the Nazi party buildings in Munich, which had been looted and vandalized by the local citizenry before the entry of American troops, who were now joining in.18

  Goering was worried about his collections too. The Reichsmarschall, unlike many of his associates, had not swallowed poison, but had been arrested in some style, riding in his fancy car with Frau Emmy and much luggage, to what he had hoped would be a meeting with General Eisenhower himself at Schloss Fischhorn near Salzburg. In this he was disappointed; he was taken instead to a detention center at Augsburg.

  Rorimer requested that Goering be interrogated about the location of his collections; meanwhile, further conversation with a now more cooperative Lohse confirmed that the probable site was Berchtesgaden, and that Hofer would probably be found wherever the art was. On May 14 Captain Zoller, a French interrogator who had sat up all night drinking wine with Goering, told Rorimer that the Reichsmarschall had announced that he was after all a “Renaissance type,” and had talked at length about his collection and his intention of leaving it all to the German people. He was therefore “anxious to have his things saved.” He himself had last seen them on his trains in the tunnel at Unterstein. Unlike Lohse, he doubted that Hofer would still be around.19