The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  Reutti, travelling on black-market gasoline, drove out to the village in August. In the house of a printer they found hundreds more sheets, among them Dürer’s delicate watercolor of Irises, a number of Kunsthalle paintings, and furniture from Schloss Karnzow. At the deserted castle itself the storeroom lay wide open, filled with empty boxes and what appeared to be trash. It wasn’t. Under an old candle end was an Altdorfer Nativity. In another heap was Dürer’s St. Onofrius. Enough fragments of a Caspar David Friedrich painting were found to make reconstruction of it possible. Requests for further investigation in the small town, where most of the officials were related to the original seller, were rejected by the police chief on the interesting grounds that he had sixty-four murders to investigate and was too busy.

  For the next twenty years works from Bremen continued to appear on the Berlin market. Some were seized. A Masaccio Madonna and Child traced back to Fräulein von Kutschenbach was found hidden in a potato sack in 1951; in 1956 a woman brought in a Cranach and was given DM 150 and a pound of coffee. Two more Dürer watercolors emerged in 1962, but it was not until 1990 and the end of the Cold War that Viktor Baldin, who had carefully guarded his suitcase of drawings since 1945, was able, through Mikhail Gorbachev, to suggest that they be returned to Bremen. Negotiations for their return began after an exhibition of the drawings at the Hermitage in 1992.

  It was Reutti who took Rose Valland to Carinhall after the Russians had finished with it. All that remained of the enormous complex was a gable end decorated with Goering’s coat of arms and his daughter’s playhouse, a miniature of the Palace of Sans Souci. The grounds were littered with eighteenth-century French statues knocked off their pedestals and pieces of the columns and temples the Reichsmarschall had loved to collect. Gravelike holes indicated where large, rolled-up paintings and other treasures found by the Russians had been buried. In this devastation Mlle Valland found a considerable number of the confiscated works on her list, but at least a dozen, including a small marble group depicting the Rape of Europa, from the Maurice de Rothschild collection, had vanished without trace, either to Russia or into the depths of the lake before the house, where, local fishermen reported, strange things snagged their lines. In a far corner of the gardens she found Goering’s copy of the Nike of Samothrace: “A pathetic Victory of wet plaster, eroded and melting in the rain, while the real one, its wings spread wide, had already come back to the Louvre.”47

  The German repository at Ellingen: contents unknown. One of the hundreds for which Monuments officers were responsible.

  XII

  MIXED MOTIVES

  The Temptation of Germany’s

  Homeless Collections

  The death of Franklin Roosevelt had occurred less than a month before the meeting of the victorious armies, which were moving across Germany from both East and West. To his Vice President, Harry Truman, who had not even been shown the protocols of the Yalta Conference, now fell the terrible responsibility of postwar Germany. Truman and his men did not share Roosevelt’s strong desire to accommodate and support the Soviet Union after the war. To handle reparations discussions with the USSR and Britain, Truman chose a tough oilman and Democratic fund-raiser named Edwin Pauley who, as a Special Assistant, reported directly to the President and not to Treasury Secretary Morgenthau.

  Pauley felt that the United States should get a major share of the $20 billion worth of reparations which the Big Three had agreed to take from Germany, and should do so soon, as he had discovered in late April that the Russians were already taking everything, cultural and otherwise, that they could move from the areas controlled by their armies. The instructions being prepared for him to take to the Reparations Conference in Moscow therefore contained clauses which would keep the U.S. in this competition: in the “initial period” of occupation each nation would be allowed to remove essentially whatever it liked from its Zone. The Zone Commander would decide if the removal was “consistent with the purposes of occupation” and would be bound by any “relevant agreed policies which may be formulated … by the Allied Control Council” and the Reparations Commission. In the limbo period before these bodies began deliberations, this would leave plenty of leeway.1

  Pauley stopped in London in late May 1945 on his way to Moscow. He and his companion, Isadore Lubin of the Treasury, were briefed on arts matters by John Nicholas Brown and Colonel Newton. The attitude of the team from Washington came as shock. Brown wrote that he had gained the impression that “the boys who are headed for Moscow do not have quite the same theories about Art as I have. If the thing should go from bad to worse I can always come home and make the contacts or the proper amount of stink. … It might be fun. But I do not think it will go that far as the British are entirely on my side.”2 Roberts Commission representative Sumner Crosby too reported that Pauley, General Clay, and Colonel Bernstein, the former Treasury official who had supervised events at Merkers, “favor the use of works of art as a basis for reparations” and had argued that “the United States does not wish to claim such material recompense as industrial equipment or labor. In fact they say there is little in Germany that the United States wants unless it is art or cultural property. It is proposed, for instance, that an international trusteeship be established to take over the best items in German museums and collections until Germany has proved itself worthy of their return. Additional arguments are raised that no adequate housing exists in Germany for storing or exhibiting art.” He added that none of the Western Allies shared this view, and that the “United States must prove to the world that we have no intentions of fulfilling Nazi propaganda and that we are sufficiently civilized not to engage in looting ourselves.”3

  That Pauley meant business was made clear by his statement at a press conference in Paris that the gold found at Merkers would be considered as a source of reparations by his commission.4 Worried Monuments men remembered only too clearly that Colonel Bernstein had considered the paintings stored alongside the gold bullion there as “assets” too. John Brown therefore immediately sent Clay a long memorandum underlining the primarily custodial responsibilities of the Army, in which he emphasized that use of cultural material for reparations was “a policy not generally approved in the United States and Britain.” The Army, he advised, should not become involved in complicated issues of restitution, but should leave that to an independent inter-Allied commission.

  To emphasize the dimensions of the custodial tasks and the need for more personnel to deal with them, Brown used what would prove to be unfortunate imagery: “A vast store of heterogeneous objects and records will come under the control of the US Military Government. The present indications are that the number of deposits in Germany is so large, and their contents so extensive, that a great burden will immediately fall upon Military Government…. The magnitude of the task of taking an inventory of works of art taken into custody can perhaps be grasped by pointing out that there may well be several million items in the US Zone alone. Manifestly it would be impossible carefully to catalogue so vast and varied a hoard … with the MFAA personnel as at present available or contemplated.”5 It was no exaggeration: Brown’s numbers were correct and ever-increasing.

  The lines at which the Soviet and Allied forces had halted were not those agreed to as the boundaries of the final zones by the European Advisory Council during their long months of deliberation in London. Allied armies were more than a hundred miles into the proposed Soviet Zone of Germany along a four-hundred-mile front. On June 5 Stalin had refused to agree either to a summit meeting with Truman or to any convocation of the Allied Control Council if withdrawal to the agreed boundaries did not take place. With Eisenhower’s approval Truman ordered this to begin in Germany on June 21. Stalin, still busy consolidating his hold on the east of Germany, moved the date forward to July 1. Nothing at all was decided about Austria, and Truman only suggested vaguely that arrangements there be “left to local commanders.” The potential situation was frightening: British elements had been ordered ou
t of Vienna by the Soviets, and no one knew if and when Stalin would make further demands.

  Within the area of overlap, which included the salt-mine region of Thuringia, there were still hundreds of unevacuated repositories. Word of the withdrawal order reached the Roberts Commission through State Department channels. Fearing that the contents of the unevacuated caches would end up in Russian hands, a delegation rushed to see McCloy. After explaining that in their opinion “the American Army is at present in the position of Trustees who might be held accountable afterwards if it abandons the works of art now in its possession,” they requested that “all works of art which had been looted by the Germans from any sources or were displaced and stored in the territory now occupied by our Army” be taken to the American Zone. McCloy immediately cabled Eisenhower to ask that the art be moved back along with Army materiel. The State Department endorsed this policy. Ten days later David Finley was called in on a Saturday afternoon by Civil Affairs director Hilldring to define more precisely what should be removed. The State Department had felt that collections in private or public collections indigenous to the region should not be included. The order, with this change, which Finley felt was not as clear as might be desired, was personally approved by President Truman and went out on June 18, 1945.6

  The Army was told to comply with the instructions of the President “as fully as time permits.”7 There was not much of that, as the withdrawal had been set for July 1. It is abundantly clear from Finley’s memo that the RC knew that the Linz and Goering collections had been found, but had received no information as to their contents. Even less was known about the objects which would now be added to those already in the American Zone. To remedy this unsatisfactory situation, preparations were immediately begun to dispatch John Walker to Germany to see exactly what the Army was holding; if there was to be any possibility of the United States receiving some of this booty, a matter that would presumably be settled by Pauley and Co. at the Reparations Conference in Moscow, which had convened on June 11, the RC wished to be prepared.

  The diaries of all the Monuments men record sudden conferences, meetings, and changes of plan in the third week of June. Craig Smyth noted that Posey had suddenly gone to Frankfurt. “Reason for trip: order from War Department to hasten bringing in loot from areas that may be turned over to the Russians. Effort to get everything inside zone.” On the twenty-first the Presidential directive was the subject of a major strategy session in Frankfurt that would be, until quite different motives brought them together later in the year, the only time so many representatives of the various Army groups and the SHAEF command would assemble in one place. (Indeed, so unusual was it for these officers to meet, and so militarized had they become, that when OSS operative James Plaut unexpectedly encountered Lincoln Kirstein, with whom he had been closely associated for years in efforts to launch what later became the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, they both came to attention and saluted.8)

  It was clear to all that a great deal more storage space would be needed. On the following day, LaFarge and Rorimer went to Wiesbaden and managed to secure another large building, the Landesmuseum, the former bailiwick of Linz chief Voss, as their third Collecting Point.

  Reception of the withdrawal directive accelerated the already feverish pace of the field operatives. George Stout, who had gone up to Alt Aussee on June 15 with his famous sheepskin coats to begin the six-week evacuation process, did not at first know of the Presidential directive. He managed to get off one convoy on June 16, but his whole careful plan was upset by the sudden removal of transport and the additional officers he had been promised. As there was still no telephone communication with Third Army, he went to Salzburg to phone Posey, and the reason for the schedule changes was soon explained.

  Stout, who had been joined by his new assistant Thomas Carr Howe (director of the San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum) and Lamont Moore, was racing against time. On June 24 he “arranged to go on longer day 0400–2000.” The logistics were exhausting. He was responsible not only for the moving and packing of the mass of objects but also for the care and feeding of the drivers, loaders, and guards; the organization of the convoys; and the rescue of trucks that broke down in remote places. Night and day the MFAA men and the mine staff still dressed in their distinctive, button-covered white uniforms, rode back and forth in the shadowy chambers on the miniature trains. Innumerable truckloads wound down the precipitous roads to Munich, 150 miles distant. It rained and rained. Food was scarce; “All hands grumbling,” Stout wrote.

  Alt Aussee: George Stout supervises removal of the Bruges Madonna; note mattresses and lace-curtain packing material.

  When packing materials ran out they sent loads of tapestries instead of pictures while they waited for the sheepskin coats, crates, and excelsior to be recycled after the objects had been unpacked in Munich. Perfectionist Stout would not release anything that was not properly packed, and the convoys were so unreliable that by the July 1 deadline the Belgian masterpieces still had not been moved. But there having been no settlement of the issue of the Austrian boundaries by that date, the evacuation continued on into July. By the nineteenth, one month after the Alt Aussee team had started, they had moved eighty truckloads which had contained 1,850 unpacked paintings, 1,441 cases full of others, 11 large sculptures, 30 pieces of furniture, and 34 large packages of textiles—and this still left a large amount for the next generation of Monuments officers. Exhausted, George Stout left for Paris and home on July 29, having spent just over a year in Europe. He had taken one and a half days off.

  The British, though not in agreement with the American policy, nonetheless cooperated in this operation. At Schönebeck, one of the Berlin repositories, the Americans had in the first days of liberation taken only large quantities of documents relating to the giant Siemens industries, and not the art, before handing the area over to the British. Nearby the barges sent from Berlin by museum director Unverzagt had, since April, remained half unloaded at their quay, the rest of their cargo stacked up outside the mine. In the last three days before Schönebeck was left to the Soviets, the British moved all this, along with reams of archives, to a temporary Collecting Point in the former Imperial Palace at Goslar, well within their Zone.

  British Monuments officer Felix Harbord, not entirely immune to the fact that the Duke of Brunswick was related to the British Royal Family, also undertook the evacuation of the ducal schloss of Blankenburg. Here, the local Provincial Conservator, Karl Seeleke, had, with considerable bravery and the help of the entire town, including the sons of the Duke, stored the treasures of Brunswick. This operation, begun June 25, Harbord managed to continue until July 23, moving his cargo to Goslar on ever-varying routes through the Harz Mountains in relays of thirty British Army trucks escorted by three armored cars until the Red Army had secured the last road.9

  Those on the receiving end of these massive transfers worked just as hard as their mobile colleagues. The day before the first convoy was to arrive at the Munich Collecting Point the situation there was still terrible. Although a weatherproof room was ready and a registration system for incoming works had been devised, there was no steady guard unit assigned. The neighboring Führerbau had been broken into, the communicating tunnels were far from secure, and there still was no fence—there was not even a telephone. Half the picture handlers had been rejected as Nazis, and others, probably equally suspect, had quickly been hired from a Munich moving firm. Five hours before the trucks were due in, the guard detachment announced that it was leaving and would be replaced by another, which of course would not be familiar with the building. Lieutenant Smyth was forced to go in person to headquarters to fight for a guard battalion for that night.

  On June 17 the first major delivery arrived from Alt Aussee: eight trucks containing large numbers of top ERR pictures. By late July, Smyth would be responsible for 6,022 “items,” many of them cases with multiple contents, so that the actual total was far higher. Among them were the Altdorfer al
tar from St. Florian, the Belgian treasures, the Monte Cassino pictures, the cream of the Budapest Museum, the Czernin Vermeer, the Rothschild Vermeer and their jewels, an ancient primitive statue from Saloniki, most of Goering’s collection, and far more. Fortunately the barbed-wire fence had finally been put up, and the staff had been expanded to cope with the deluge. In the front office a secretarial pool of judiciously chosen but good-looking young German baronesses and other well-born ladies typed away—an arrangement criticized by the humorless Posey as inappropriate. But the security of the building was still marginal, the only fire protection was that which could be provided by the war-torn city, and many rooms were not yet weatherproof. There were more dramatic problems: despite sweeps by bomb experts an explosion on July 20 killed a sixteen-year-old worker and blew out all the power in the Collecting Point.

  A curator’s nightmare: one of the crowded storage rooms at the newly opened Central Collecting Point in Munich

  This episode unfortunately occurred two hours after the arrival of Bancel LaFarge and John Walker, who had come to view the repositories for the Roberts Commission. Walker found “everything perfectly arranged and functioning beautifully,” but noted that the “building was shaken” and “bomb disposal squads are going to search for the fifth time for booby traps.” When Smyth took him on a tour of Hitler’s quarters Walker thought it interesting “not only because of its bad taste, its bar, which had pornographic murals [Ziegler’s] … its Pullman style furniture … but also because of a childish love of secret passages … leading from one building to another and even under the square in front.”10