The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  Truckloads of art outside the Munich Collecting Point

  Smyth could not wait for official Third Army authorization to start organizing. The Machiavellian maneuvering for this he left to Posey and his éminence grise, Private Lincoln Kirstein. The premises had to be cleared of units billeted there and cleaned up. What was left of value had to be inventoried. Shattered windows and shell holes in the roof had to be repaired. Bomb squads were called in to check for booby traps and leftover explosives, which were found in large numbers. Smyth soon discovered a maze of tunnels, connecting the buildings to each other and to various outbuildings, that would have to be blocked or guarded. The whole complex would have to be surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. On top of all this, living and eating areas complete with cooking facilities would have to be provided for staff, workers, guards, and truck drivers, who also had to be hired or requested through various bureaucracies. The mayor of Munich was called upon to provide manual labor. MPs were grudgingly assigned by Third Army. Smyth himself would have to assemble an expert staff from approved lists of supposed non-Nazis, who had to be cleared by Military Intelligence. Immediate help was forthcoming from another Naval officer, Hamilton Coulter, an architect who took over the physical repairs.

  Things were going along smoothly by June 9, when the Third Army Accommodation Officer, a full colonel, suddenly appeared to see if the buildings “could be used otherwise by Third Army, and whether any other buildings would do as a repository.” Smyth and Co. pulled out all the stops. The enormous value of the incoming works was vulgarly emphasized; the perfection of the building for their purposes pointed out. The Third Army’s and Patton’s Images in History as Protectors of the World’s Greatest Treasures were suggested, and the impropriety of Patton occupying the same rooms as the hated Nazi dictator was mentioned. The colonel left without making a decision, but they had won: the building formally became the Collecting Point on June 14. Everyone was in fact happy. Pat-ton’s men took over the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, cradle of the Reich’s purified art, and turned it into a spiffy mess and officers’ club, decorated with huge Third Army symbols. Inside, a transformed German oompah band played the latest “degenerate” American hits during cocktails and dinner.

  The next days were frenzied. Now that the Collecting Point was an “authorized” unit it could begin to draw supplies and services. The units occupying most of the rooms moved out, trying to take all the furniture with them; no sooner had they left than the Counter Intelligence Corps tried to move in, bringing along huge locked safes full of documents. Cleaners arrived, but could only work half days, as they had to spend the other halves in desperate searches for food for their families. Before Germans could be hired they had to fill out the dreaded Fragebogen (questionnaire) on which one was supposed to list any Nazi affiliations, and be cleared by Military Government investigators. This was a dilemma for Smyth, who was sure that a number of the essential engineering staff who kept the heating plant working were Nazis. For the time being they stayed. But the biggest problem was still Third Army, the source of Smyth’s security force. Guards were arbitrarily withdrawn, and no permanent force was assigned; thus each new squad had to be briefed on the complex floor plan and problems of the two buildings.

  Meanwhile, Smyth knew that all around him were priceless things waiting for a secure refuge. On June 14, the very day on which the Collecting Point was authorized, he had gone to inspect the “art cache taken from Dr. Frank’s house and brought to … HQ…. Opening one case found among other things Leonardo’s Lady with the Ermine. In the same crate were a Dürer portrait, three Rembrandts including the Czartoryski landscape, six other paintings, and several drawings.” There was no sign of the Czartoryski Raphael. Smyth packed them away again until the Verwaltungsbau could be made secure. But there would be no way to pack up again the eight truckloads of paintings which were due to arrive from Alt Aussee in just three days.

  The Russians had been finding and emptying repositories with equal, if not greater, thoroughness than their Western allies. They had had plenty of practice by the time they got to German soil. For over a year they had been discovering the stacked-up caches left by the ERR and the Ahnenerbe in a trail which ran through the Baltics and Poland to Berlin and the Silesian countryside. The initial impetus had been to retrieve their own things, but the extraordinarily nasty and thorough destruction the Germans had left behind encouraged the removal of whatever came to hand.

  Pavlovsk curator Anatoly Kuchumov, travelling for the most part on foot, had begun his search in the immediate vicinity of the palace. The first objects found had simply been thrown into the mined parks. Bits of brocade, tables with sawed-off legs, chairs made into stools, and chopped-up moldings were found in bunkers. Carved doors of rare woods had been used to cover trenches. In billets and gardens in the surrounding villages he found statues from the palaces; a life-size portrait of Peter the Great, cut from its frame, was crumpled in an attic.

  By September 1944 Kuchumov had progressed to Estonia, travelling as best he could. In the small city of Vyr he found a repository filled with furniture from the Catherine Palace. His further discoveries illustrate all too clearly how widely the Germans had marketed his nation’s patrimony. Wandering about the town, peering into windows, he saw in one house a familiar-looking table. He politely asked to examine it. Underneath he indeed found an inscribed museum inventory number. In a cafeteria where he stopped for lunch, he saw cooks using two eighteenth-century Japanese bowls from Pavlovsk to mix dough. As he drove out of Vyr in an Army truck he spotted a heap of leather-bound books and smallish sculptures in a roadside ditch and picked them up. In the end nearly a boxcarload was retrieved on this foray. And on he went. In Tallinn he took palace chairs literally out from under astonished Red Army staff officers. In Riga were four hundred paintings, eight thousand cameos, and more. Another box-carload went east. By war’s end Kuchumov had reached Königsberg, the principal Nazi repository for the Eastern Occupied Territories. The castle had been bombed and burned, and odds and ends of furniture were scattered in the endless rooms and underground chambers and tunnels so beloved by the Nazis. But nowhere in the vast spaces could he find the twenty-nine wooden cases containing the fabled Amber Room panels, which were said to have been hidden there.42

  The Red Army had meanwhile met Allied forces in Germany and laid siege to Berlin, which they proceeded to bombard as thoroughly as the Nazis had Leningrad, Sevastopol, and so many other cities. All around them lay country filled with art-packed mines, caves, and castles. The Soviets were not unprepared. The Red Army, popularly depicted as a savage horde, in fact had a highly organized group of trained art specialists who carefully removed the best things before the less refined troops were turned loose. They were not interested in protecting buildings or preventing looting; they were part of the so-called Trophy Commission, whose objective was the gathering of valuable movable objects of all kinds, from heavy machinery to food, and its removal to the Soviet Union.

  The Russians arrived at Berlin’s Museum Island on May 2, three weeks after the American capture of Merkers. In those weeks the museums had been part of the final defense of the city. Bombardment was constant. The two curators responsible for the enormous expanses of the Nationalgalerie and the Pergamon, Kaiser Friedrich, Altes, and Neue museums had tried to protect what was left from the German defenders who, among other things, wanted to use the remaining parts of the Pergamon altar to build protective barricades. The first Russians appeared only hours after the abandonment of the premises by German forces.

  The very next day Dr. Kümmel, director of the Berlin Museums, was taken on a tour of all museum buildings and the Zoo flak tower by the Russians. It was a depressing experience. The Pergamon was badly damaged; its Far Eastern division had lost its glass roofs, and delicate reliefs were exposed to the elements. In the Kaiser Friedrich the Ravenna mosaics were shattered. Offices and storerooms were trashed and looted. Ominously, German museum officials were not now permitted access to t
he damaged storage areas in the New Mint or the Schloss Museum.

  Removal of works from all these sites by the Russians began four days later, which was five days before the final German surrender. They started with the repositories and museums which would later be in the sectors of Berlin assigned to the Western Allies, taking things to a Collecting Point in Karlshorst, well within the future Soviet Zone. Evacuation of the Flakturm Zoo, which would be in the British sector, went on for a month. Director Unverzagt of the Prehistory Museum, who had remained on the site, was forced to hand over the holdings of his museum, which presumably included the Trojan gold. Pictures from the Nationalgalerie which had been left there were taken to a schloss outside Berlin where the best were selected to go to the USSR and the rest were left to whoever wanted them and soon began to appear in Berlin shops.

  Events at the Flakturm Friedrichshain, which still held large numbers of things, among them many oversize, first-quality pictures, are less clear. The assigned German guards were not able to get to the tower for two days after the Russians arrived, but when they did, all seemed well. Checking again on May 5 they discovered that some of the storerooms had been entered; the next day they arrived to find that one floor had been set afire and was still burning. Smoke and heat prevented access to the other areas. When Kümmel and his Russian escort came on the seventh, the tower was unguarded and open to looters, who had indeed been busy. Damage assessment was virtually impossible in the unlighted spaces. Kümmel begged the Russian officers to post a serious guard, but this seems not to have been done. In the next ten days looting continued and there was another fire, which reduced whatever had been left inside to ashes. Unbeknownst to the despairing Berlin curators, the Russians had taken away a large truckload of the ashes and rubble, which they carefully sifted for small objects; but much remained untended in the vast heap inside the bunker.43

  Signorelli’s Pan, said to have perished at Friedrichshain

  Removal of the objects remaining in vaults on the Museum Island, safely within the Russian sector, was delayed until later in the year. The Russians were not undiscriminating. They took almost everything but Hitler’s favorite nineteenth-century kitsch. Berlin officials later huffily complained that no proper documents and receipts were given for these removals. To this day the Germans do not understand the Russian actions. As late as 1984 one curator resentfully wrote of the Russians, much of whose patrimony in those May days still languished in Nazi repositories, “The removals were called ‘safeguarding’ by the Soviet Occupying power. We could not understand the point of this. From what or whom should they be protected? We were perfectly capable of caring for these things.” The curator’s superior at the time, Dr. Kümmel, author of the report which had laid out the total stripping of France, could perhaps have explained.

  In the two months between the fall of Berlin and the Allied arrival there, the museum administration tried to maintain a semblance of organization and make their buildings somewhat habitable. The remaining objects were carefully sheltered, and the eternal list making, this time to determine what was lost, began once more. No one knew how long he would be employed. On May 17 the Russians authorized a carefully vetted city government known as the Magistrat, and museum officials were rehired if they had not been Nazis. (Only six, among them Kümmel, who was fired and later arrested by the Americans, were so designated.) Offices were set up under the name “State Museums of Berlin,” as the Prussian state, which had previously run things, no longer existed. The State Museums’ mission was to gather together what they could and reopen “for the people.”

  Somewhat less official was an effort begun by an art historian named Kurt Reutti, who persuaded the Magistrat to allow him to form a group which would gather up the works of art strewn about the offices and houses of the former Nazi powerful. Reutti and his unit, given the innocuous name of Central Office for Registration and Maintenance of Art Works, or Zentralstelle for short, poked through the ruined public buildings after the Russians had taken their fill. It was dreadful work: in the unlighted basements they frequently encountered unremoved bodies and unexploded mines. For transportation they had only a small handcart from the Staatsbibliothek. City workers were told to bring to the Zentralstelle any object they found. Untrained in such matters, they brought in tons of worthless junk. This rather worked to the unit’s advantage: a Russian officer who came to check up on its operation took one look and left in disgust. In the next years this organization would do its main work not in the ruins, but in the countryside around Berlin and in the shadowy world of black-market dealings and subterfuge which would flourish throughout the Cold War.44

  Another Russian Trophy unit had arrived in what was left of Dresden on May 8. Major Natalia Sokolova, who immediately toured the ruins of the Zwinger and the rest of the city, felt sure nothing could have survived—but then she reminded herself that the Hermitage curators had managed to save their paintings despite the “barbaric conditions” of the Leningrad siege, and assumed that the Germans had done the same. And indeed, the Russians soon discovered the evacuation plans for all of Saxony, which were explained to them by the Dresden museum people at Schloss Weesenstein, where much of the city’s collections and a certain amount of Linz stock were still stored.

  The investigators went first to the village of Grosscotta, where they descended into a dark, wet quarry tunnel. Far down the shaft their flashlights finally picked up the glimmer of gold. Before them stood a truck jammed with unpacked paintings. The first to appear in the flickering light was Rembrandt’s Abduction of Ganymede, then Giorgione’s Slumbering Venus, Titian’s Lady in White, and Dürer’s magnificent Dresden Altar. In a special crate was the Sistine Madonna by Raphael. At Weesenstein the Russians found most of the Dresden prints and drawings; mixed in with these were the Koenigs drawings which Posse had bought in Rotterdam. In a sandstone cave and a barracks near the Czech border they found more than a hundred other top Dresden pictures, some dripping wet, and hauled them up to the surface with a winch, which was first tested by bringing up three curators. In all, about seventeen hundred pictures were sent to the USSR in a heavily guarded train on which a special structure was built for the large works.45 In Moscow, at the Pushkin Museum, they joined the Pergamon altar and the rest of the Berlin objects. Later arrivals were distributed to the storerooms of the Hermitage and various other museums. No one in the West would see them for quite a time.

  Not all Russian removals were so officially regulated. There were too many hiding places. In some repositories troops burned objects or simply threw them out the windows to make room for living space. Officers who developed tastes for everything from antiquities to junk shipped it home unhindered in vast quantities. That their motives were not necessarily commercial is demonstrated by the adventures of the evacuated works from the Bremen Kunsthalle.

  In 1944 the Nazi mayor of Bremen had ordered the removal eastward of the holdings of the Kunsthalle. The reluctant staff complied. It was difficult to find a suitable refuge, but the director, Herr von Alten, had a friend, the dashing Count Konigsmarck, who lived with his mistress in Schloss Karnzow near Kyritz, about fifty miles northwest of Berlin. This gentleman agreed to take in the collection. The Kunsthalle holdings were packed as compactly as was possible; all the best prints and drawings were removed from their mats and put in folders, one of which held more than twenty-five Dürers, and then in boxes. The paintings were removed from their frames. The collection arrived safely at the lakeside schloss and was stored in the cellars. As the Red Army got closer, the Count walled the collection up in a small room and put metal file cabinets in front of the new wall. Only his mistress, Fräulein von Kutschenbach, was told of the location of the cache. When the Russians reached the town, the pair rowed out onto the lake, slashed their wrists, and prepared to die. The Count fell overboard and expired, but the Fräulein, having a change of heart, called for help and was taken off to a hospital in Kyritz, where she stayed for some months.46

  It did not take
the Russians long to find the storeroom. Viktor Baldin, an architect in peacetime, was called in to examine its contents. He found the drawings scattered “like so many leaves after an autumn storm,” and was overwhelmed by their quality: a van Gogh study for his Starry Night, the Dürers, and works by Goya, Rubens, and Rembrandt. When his superiors showed little interest and declined to provide transportation to remove the find, Baldin chose some four hundred sheets and put them in a suitcase which he guarded carefully. During his time in Schloss Karnzow he found other prints and drawings spread all around the countryside. He bought or bartered for those which Russian soldiers had picked up, in one deal trading a pair of boots for a Dürer Head of Christ. Some could not be saved: in the woods he came upon a stack of drawings which the rain had reduced to a pulp. In July 1945 the Russians withdrew from the area, leaving the schloss to the mercy of the local inhabitants and Fräulein von Kutschenbach, heiress to the Count’s estate. The adventures of the Kunsthalle works were far from over.

  Nothing more was heard of them until 1946, when a Berlin dealer asked Zentralstelle official Reutti to check on a big Cranach woodcut he had been offered which bore the Kunsthalle stamp. He said his client had 134 more with the same marking. Investigation revealed that others in Berlin had been offered Bremen objects. Two hundred eighteen more were reported to be at the house of another dealer, whose initial reluctance to produce them was overcome by the threat that the authorities would tear up the floors to find them if necessary. It seemed that they had all come from the same source near Kyritz.