The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  Monuments officers in Austria examine returned Holy Roman regalia. Left to right: unidentified officer, Andrew Ritchie, Perry Cott, Ernest De Wald

  In general the Monuments officers in Germany had little time to become involved in such long-term projects. They travelled incessantly and usually alone. In the course of these peregrinations they gradually discovered more than two thousand caches in everything from castles to cowsheds, in which were hidden, often with great ingenuity, not only superb works of art but the records and artifacts of the maddest Nazi undertakings and most hideous experiments. The owners of the castles or the assigned guardians of the valuables greeted the Monuments men with attitudes ranging from nasty and suspicious, through arrogant or obsequious, to cooperative and welcoming. There were few signs of guilt or compunction. A certain number complained about their deprivations. After five years of war, the low-ranking MFAA officers, who were often not so low-ranking at home, and who frequently arrived in muddy field uniforms after hours of travel by jeep only to be received with condescension by elegantly dressed schloss owners, were sometimes hard put to be polite. One officer, confronted by an arrogant German noblewoman who complained that Polish DPs were making a mess of her schloss, sharply retorted that it was not his compatriots who had brought the Poles to Germany. There were frequent complaints about the “inconvenience” caused by the Allied occupation. The gentle sculptor Walker Hancock remarked later that it seemed not to occur to many Germans just how much “inconvenience” Hitler had caused the rest of the world.

  Daunting prospect: Five thousand bells looted from all over Europe await sorting in Hamburg.

  But the MFAA men were moving too fast to brood over these slights. An excerpt from Calvin Hathaway’s diary, tantalizing in its suggestive detail, gives us a little idea of the pace and variety of discoveries, all of which had to be dealt with, cross-indexed (which accounts for the strange use of capitalization), or reported to other authorities:

  Friday, 1 June. At Schloss HIRSCHBERG, conversation with major domo, CORINTH (relation of the painter)…. Cellar passageway lined with furniture brought from ITALY and installed in Schloss…. Two rooms in cellar, said to contain property of Baronin von HIRSCHBERG, are locked (Corinth says that the Baronin keeps the keys with her at GOSSENHOFEN) and sealed with warning prohibitions posted by chief of MUNCHEN Gestapo. Schwimmbad in cellar has furniture and draperies said to belong to BLEICHRODER and HIRSCHBERG. Boxes of books in passageway, part of library brought from Prinz Karl Palace in MUNCHEN, and are Party property. No action had been taken following my suggestion three weeks earlier that works of art belonging to Bavarian State collections be assembled in one room, which would then be posted off limits; Corinth asserts that succeeding military commanders (American) preferred to keep pictures on walls of rooms where they would look well… a chest of Party owned silver stored in one of the rooms of the cellar was taken away…. Departed Schloss HIRSCHBERG 1000 hours…. Schloss BERNRIED, formerly owned by Baron WENDLAND, now used for clinic operated by Swiss Legation; no works of art there. Mrs. BUSCH, an American citizen enjoying the proceeds of Anheuser-Busch beer, said to own several miles of lake frontage north of BERNRIED, and to have been in Germany during the entire war, had moved all her valuable furniture from her large house north of BERNRIED, which she had offered to Lt. Gen. PATCH for his accommodation. She is said to be in Switzerland at the moment, where she is staying with the U.S. Minister…. Proceeded to Schloss EURASBURG … owner, Kurt WOLF, owner of textile mill in Saxony, in neighborhood and being a nuisance. Furnishings of Schloss thoroughly second-rate, and not disturbed by present occupants…. Schloss a deposit for approximately 280 packing cases containing books and archival material evacuated from MUNCHEN; slight tendency evident to extract material from cases and leave it lying about. In carriage house off SW corner of Schloss are about 2500 bundles of archival material from MUNCHEN, stacked against walls behind rifled packing cases of evacuated personal belongings of various individuals. Bundles most easily accessible seem to belong to HEERESARCHIV…. Arrival at 2055 hrs at AUGSBURG. 112 mi.35

  And so to bed.

  The German schloss owner’s suspicions were not completely unwarranted, for there were of course lapses of honesty within the Allied ranks. While the few available Monuments officers were working on the major finds and the excited Army command was surrounding potential gold hoards with tank battalions, the guarding of smaller refuges and individual finds was less certain. Even more difficult to control was the discovery of works of art in the rubble of bombed buildings. For many who had fought across Europe or lost relatives to the Nazis, “Thou shalt not steal” simply did not apply when it came to Germany. Cases of looting by American forces in Germany began immediately and ran the gamut from well-intentioned if misguided preservation attempts to blatant thievery and arrogant intimidation of the defeated. Reports of stealing were seriously investigated by all agencies. Some became causes célebres.

  Most spectacular among these was the affair of the Hesse jewels. The gems in question had been buried in October 1944 under ancient flagstones in the subbasement of Kronberg Castle (near Frankfurt) by family retainers of Princess Margaret of Hesse, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and mother of Prince Philip of Hesse, the art procurer. It was a very considerable quantity, as several members of this large family, fearful of what would happen at war’s end, had withdrawn their belongings from bank vaults in order to entrust them to the earth. The jewels were packed in a lead case which was put inside a wooden box. The hole was sealed and disguised by a stonemason. The family unfortunately did not limit itself to hiding jewels: the mason was also asked to seal up sixteen hundred bottles of fine old wine, construction work much harder to conceal. Eighteen hundred less-fine bottles were left in the open.

  In April 1945 Patton’s Third Army arrived, gave the Hesse family four hours to move out, and requisitioned the castle as a headquarters. The eighteen hundred bottles quickly vanished. When the HQ moved on, the castle became an officers’ club and rest house. The staff soon found the sealed-up wine and, while looking for more, the newly mortared stone under which the jewels were hidden. The sergeant who found them turned them in to the commander of the rest house, a WAC officer named Katherine Nash, who assured him she would turn them over to the proper authorities. This she did not do. A few months later Princess Sophie of Hesse, who was about to get married and who had heard from a castle employee of the discovery of the jewels, asked Captain Nash if she could use some of them for her wedding. Captain Nash said she could, but when the Princess came back to get the jewels she was told they had been stolen. This was reported to the Criminal Investigation Division of the Army, but before any action had been taken Captain Nash returned to the United States to be demobilized. The Army, suspicious of her and of her lover, a Colonel Durant, who had also left, held up both demobilizations in order to keep the pair under military jurisdiction. The by now newlywed couple, but not the jewels, were found in a hotel in Chicago. After interrogation they confessed and were arrested along with the sergeant who had found the cache, and who had been promised a cut of the take. The gems were found in a locker in the train station where they had been left by the fence, who had lost his nerve and abandoned them. They had, for the most part, been pried out of their priceless original settings.

  After the arrest the Army put on a full-fledged press conference in the Pentagon. The press ogled such impressive items as a “12 carat canary yellow diamond” and “stacks of pearls, star sapphires and rubies.” It seemed that Mrs. Durant had not limited herself to the jewels, but had found plenty of other goodies in the castle. She had sent home a whole service of vermeil flatware with stone-studded handles, several volumes of letters to Queen Victoria; a Bible, tenderly inscribed in Victoria’s own hand, which the British monarch had given to her daughter when she married Emperor-to-be Friedrich in 1858; and numerous other books, medals, golden fans, and watches, the whole estimated at first to be worth $1.5 million
, a figure later revised to $3 million. The Army, seemingly unabashed by the scandal, called it the “greatest theft of modern times.” The Durants were taken back to Germany for a trial described as “stormy.” Testimony was given by many members of the Hesse family and their retainers. The defense said that the Hesses had “abandoned” the jewels when they buried them and that their claims were invalid as certain family members had been Nazis. Mrs. Durant said she had been questioned under duress in an insane asylum and would have made any statement just to get out, and that the Army had promised not to prosecute her. She even appealed to the Supreme Court. It was of no avail; she got five years, and her husband fifteen.36

  Other luckier thieves were saved for a time by circumstances beyond Army control. About the same time American forces took Merkers and Grasleben they also moved into a small town on the edge of the Harz Mountains. Quedlinburg was a favorite SS site. In 1936 Himmler had wished to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the death of King Henry I of Saxony, a forebear of the Holy Roman Emperors, whose successful and widespread conquests had earned him the title of “founder of Germany.” The King and his wife, Matilda, who had established several convents and had been sainted by the Church, were supposedly buried in the church at Quedlinburg. Himmler envisioned a yearly festival, to be called the Heinrichsfeier. The first event was duly celebrated despite the fact that the King’s bones seemed to be missing. Later excavations by large squads of SS archaeologists produced some in time for the next year’s festival, which featured their reinterment. Heavy researches in the region continued to produce parallels between the lives of Heinrich I and Heinrich Himmler, who secretly considered himself to be the Saxon King’s reincarnation. The Quedlinburg church was secularized and turned into an SS shrine, decorated with all the suitable Nazi trappings and symbols, in which SS officers acted as tour guides.37

  At some point in the war, to save them either from the SS, the Russians, or the Americans, the Quedlinburg clergy took the priceless treasures of their church—delicate reliquaries of rock crystal on gold stands, a silver casket set with ivory reliefs and precious stones, and the fabulous Samuhel Gospels, written entirely in gold ink and bound in a gold cover also set with jewels—to a mine shaft near the town. After the hiding place was accidentally discovered by a soldier of the American Eighty-seventh Field Artillery, a guard was posted who kept out Germans and refugees, but allowed his buddies free access to see the “Nazi loot.”

  One of these was Lieutenant Joe Tom Meador, of Whitewright, Texas. Meador, who had won three Bronze Stars in combat since D-Day, was also, it seems, an art lover. Upon seeing the things in the mine he wrapped several in his coat and removed them. Getting rid of the treasures was simple: he packed them in small boxes and mailed them home. His fellow officers were perfectly aware of the theft, but, as one remarked much later, they had been in combat for nearly a year and nobody cared.

  It would not be the last time Meador was tempted. After the war he took a job as a teacher at the American University of Biarritz, run by and for the Army. Classes were held in a requisitioned villa belonging to a French marquise, who was permitted to occupy one room. From her Meador stole a quantity of silver and china. For this he was court-martialled and reprimanded. The church authorities in Quedlinburg had meanwhile reported the theft of their treasures to the Army and an investigation was begun. Pursuit of the matter lapsed when Quedlinburg was sealed off in the Russian Zone. The case, one of hundreds, was dropped in 1949. Meador returned to Texas, where he showed his little collection to friends and family, who thought it was nice but did not question its origins. Meador never tried to sell anything, and as far as the world knew, the Quedlinburg treasures were gone forever.38

  More difficult to judge was the Robin Hood type. In April 1945 an art-loving naval reserve officer named Maley, who was fluent in German, asked to see the University of Würzburg’s famous collection of Greek vases. In the course of his visit the curators confided to Maley that the doorless rooms in which the vases were stored were not secure and that the collection was being raided by looters every night. The American officer was so upset that he contacted the harried local MFAA officer, Captain Giuli, and volunteered to organize a work party at his own expense to take the vases to safety. This offer was accepted and the work was done. Maley wrote a proper report and the MFAA officer inspected the new arrangements. What Giuli did not know, and Maley did not mention, was that the Naval officer had packed up one superb vase (and several small cups) in a crate, telling the surprised German curator in charge that another Würzburg University official had insisted on giving it to him as thanks for his help on condition Maley would lend it to the Art Institute of Chicago. Maley then left, having duly shipped the vase off to that city.

  The German curator reported all to the U.S. authorities and by May 8 an investigation had begun. It took some months for the case to move through channels to Washington. In August the CAD asked the Roberts Commission to find out if the Art Institute had received such an object. Lo and behold, Chicago did have the vase. The director of the Art Institute, Daniel Catton Rich, did not explain on what grounds the object had been taken in but produced a letter from Lieutenant Maley “which clarifies the situation,” in which Maley repeated his earlier claim, but agreed that the vase should be returned immediately to Germany and “regretted that his effort seems to have miscarried.” The CAD sent the vase back, but made the Art Institute do the packing.39 No one was punished or reprimanded in this case or in many similar ones, the Army and the RC being more interested in recovery than in punishment and its inevitable negative publicity.

  The things which were being properly guarded and reported were becoming a greater and greater problem. The one Collecting Point established at Marburg was already filling up with objects found in the north and was much too far from the major repositories in Austria and Bavaria. Munich, only a few hours from them, was the obvious place to set up a second center. James Rorimer in his first brief trip there had been impressed by the two recently looted Nazi party buildings, the Führerbau and the Verwaltungsbau, which stood side by side on the Königsplatz. Hitler’s offices and the grand room where Frau Dietrich had held her little art shows for the Führer had been ransacked, as had the vaults and studios in which his collection had been processed and stored. The floors were strewn with fancy framed photographs of Hitler, books, writing paper emblazoned with Nazi emblems, and reams of Party records.40

  Much of what had been in the vaults had been stolen, including most of the Schloss collection, which had arrived too late from France to be sent to the mines; but the fabric of the buildings was essentially intact and perfect for the MFAA’s needs. The problem now was how to keep such desirable space away from Patton’s Third Army, which was just about to set up its headquarters in Munich. Rumor had it that Patton himself had his eye on Hitler’s former offices. To counter this the lowly MFAA officers had only the SHAEF directive ordering the establishment of a Collecting Point. And formal authorization would have to come from Third Army, in whose territory Munich lay. Fortunately it was Robert Posey, Third Army’s own Monuments officer, who was technically in charge at Alt Aussee.

  To run the new Collecting Point, Stout and LaFarge had chosen Lt. Craig Hugh Smyth, another officer stolen from the Navy through the efforts of Paul Sachs back in Washington. Smyth was superbly qualified: he had been one of the first curators hired at the brand-new National Gallery of Art, and had accompanied its evacuated pictures to the repository at Biltmore. He would now, virtually overnight, have to prepare an equivalent organization to handle a quantity of art which would dwarf that of his former place of work, and do so in far different conditions. He got off to a fast start. Two hours after he arrived in Munich on the evening of June 4, 1945, he was taken to see the future Collecting Point.

  Earlier in the day Rorimer had toured the city with the Third Army Property Control Officer and persuaded him that another option, the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, still entirely draped with billowin
g dark green fishnet-like camouflage, was too small and would not do. They had gone on to the Nazi party buildings, where Rorimer intimidated the Property Officer by pointing out the “absurd security” which was being provided for the remaining valuables in the building by blocking certain access passages with grenade explosions, and stated that it was the best place for the Collecting Point and should be secured immediately. The Property Officer gave tentative permission, but warned that final authorization would be necessary. Smyth agreed on the suitability of the building. The next morning he moved into the vast complex. Rorimer, having started him off, left immediately for Neuschwanstein.41

  The task facing Smyth was enormous. In a devastated city and nation where almost nothing functioned, where every scrap of building material that remained was coveted by hundreds of people, he had to set up, in a war-blasted building, a safe refuge for some ten thousand works of art, among them some of the most important in the world. It would have to be secure, and not only weatherproof but heated and humidified to suit its precious contents. And the objects would not come one by one in carefully packed cases from which they would be gently lifted by white-gloved experts. They would come in endless truckloads, day after day and night after night.