The Rape of Europa

by Lynn H. Nicholas

  The visitors discussed various problems with Smyth, including the possibility of heating the Collecting Point during the coming winter. It was far from a sure thing. Smyth wrote: “If not, job easy. If so, need more officers, preferably supply or engineering to help. If not, can have jury-rig—not elaborate, absolutely simple. If so, must be conceived in more permanent terms because of necessity of rebuilding for insulation.” Later there arose the question of where the coal for heating would come from. “Reply: Group CC would have to decide and furnish. Question: how to proceed at present. Reply: proceed as if Galleries were to be heated.”11 A bit later Smyth told his staff only that they would be able to keep the gallery “a little above freezing.” Group CC was General Clay’s turf. And Clay was at the Potsdam Conference at that very moment, trying to get a clear mandate for the running of the American share of the shattered German nation.

  The Wiesbaden Collecting Point was still in an embryonic stage. Experience at Munich had shown that architectural training, at least at the beginning, was just as important as museology. And the three-hundred-room Landesmuseum certainly needed someone who could make it habitable in the shortest possible time. Fortune brought the MFAA another exceptionally dedicated officer in the person of Captain Walter Farmer, an engineer with architectural and interior design experience. Farmer, longing to be released from his unit—which was engaged in the dreary business of building POW cages—had offered his services to the MFAA office at SHAEF and was immediately accepted. He was ordered to take over on July 1 and to have the Collecting Point ready by August 20. This was an eon compared to the two weeks granted Smyth, but still not very long.

  The Landesmuseum was not in any better shape than the Munich buildings had been. One large area had been occupied by a Luftwaffe machine shop, and the remains of five antiaircraft gun emplacements graced the roof. U.S. Twelfth Army had a clothing depot in the art galleries; the Rationing Office was in Archaeology. DP families lived in every other viable space. There were no unbroken windows at all, and the heating had not been used for years. Farmer’s first act was to make the perimeter secure. He was assigned a labor force of 150 German sappers, still in their uniforms, who began putting up fences and floodlights. To find out where building materials might be hidden, he ordered a meeting of local contractors in the movie theater.

  Soon the museum’s windows were glazed, tons of rubble and flak fragments were cleared from the roofs, and interior doors, 90 percent of which had been blown off their hinges, were rehung. Most miraculous of all, the heating system was coaxed into operation; the proper humidity so vital to panel paintings was provided by putting wet blankets in the air ducts and keeping certain areas of the floors wet. Staff was hired and plenty of art historical advice was forthcoming to Farmer from other MFAA officers working in Frankfurt. One such was Edith Standen, a WAC captain and former curator of the Widener Collection who had been assigned the immense and tedious job of inventorying the artistic contents of the Reichsbank in Frankfurt in preparation for its move to Wiesbaden. (Hers was musty and exhausting work. The crates, Nationalgalerie pictures, and golden Polish church treasures were one thing, the two-foot-high stacks of rugs and charred archives quite something else.)

  By late July, Farmer, exhilarated by his job, wrote with some understatement that “everything necessary has been obtained by one means or another.” His confidence was fortunate, for he was about to be given responsibility for the entire assemblage of works of art evacuated from Berlin, plus much more. It was, as Smyth had found in Munich, not easy. Farmer too had his problems when it came to security. Noting that he “hated to make money estimates, but the average American demands it,” he casually mentioned to the local commander that the incoming works were worth more than $50 million. This made such an impression that he was given extra guards. He needed them. In the first week the Collecting Point was open, fifty-two truckloads, impressively escorted by tanks, arrived. And they kept coming: “Three more truckloads of prints yesterday, and Thursday two truckloads of gold and church ornaments and a bit later six truckloads of paintings etc.,” Farmer reported. There were no hours left for unpacking the objects or contemplation. Even the famous head of Nefertiti, which Farmer was especially proud to be guarding, would have to wait until 1946 to be viewed.12

  In late August the British too transferred most of their holdings to a permanent Collecting Point in a vast schloss at Celle, thirty miles northwest of Brunswick. Here were taken objects from the Berlin collections, found in the mines which had come under British jurisdiction. From Schönebeck and Grasleben, which had been looted and where a fire that had started in the film archives had burned for days and caused extensive damage, the objects arrived in terrible confusion and poor condition. Director Harbord, more interested in reviving theater and putting on exhibitions, left administration of the Collecting Point entirely to a German dealer and collector named E. J. Otto who had volunteered his services. Harbord’s successors were not much more enthusiastic about the tedious processes of opening and checking the contents of the thousands of crates of German-owned objects at Celle which contained, among other things, the priceless Gans collection of Roman gold objects.

  Repeated attempts by Berlin officials to gain access to the Collecting Point were resisted by both Otto and the British. It was not until September 1947 that a new assistant, using inventory lists recently sent from Berlin, discovered that thirty-two pieces of the gold hoard were missing. By now it was impossible to tell at what point they had been removed. Otto and his staff were all fired by the embarrassed British, and a police investigation instituted. A curator from the Schloss Museum in Berlin was put in charge of the Collecting Point. Further inventorying revealed that more gold items had vanished. They have never been found.13

  British officers faced with hundreds of uncrated Nationalgalerie pictures at Grasleben

  While the field officers were engaged in these strenuous activities, certain of their peacetime colleagues were collecting people and information. The OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit, consisting of naval officers/art historians James Plaut, Theodore Rousseau, and Lane Faison had begun operations in Germany in late May 1945, in a gingerbread-covered villa conveniently located not far from Alt Aussee. Their information was not only of interest to the MFAA officers; their principal sponsorship was by the Army Judge Advocate’s office, which was investigating war crimes. Before they arrived in Germany the three officers had already looked into Alois Miedl’s activities in Spain and attempted without success to extradite him. They had done further preliminary work in France and England, drawing on the documents collected by the Intelligence agencies of various nations. Since the previous autumn Army authorities had had lists of the Nazi art principals, and Douglas Cooper of British Intelligence had been questioning any POWs taken to England who seemed to have art backgrounds. Lists of suggested questions and names of Nazi agencies were distributed to all Intelligence units. By the time the Alt Aussee interrogation center was set up, Mühlmann, Lohse, Hofer, Goering’s secretary Gisela Limberger, and all of the Reichsmarschall’s records were in custody.

  The work of arrest and interrogation was not so pleasant: Frau Dietrich dropped all the charm she had displayed to the Führer when Lane Faison came for her account books, but soon calmed down when she saw the pistol (never used) he wore.14 Once in captivity, the German art purveyors spoke volumes. Hofer seemed able to remember every transaction, reeling off the details of certain of them with ease while avoiding those which revealed his own venality. Mühlmann, after trying to escape twice and responding initially with contempt, eventually talked a great deal, even telling his captors little anecdotes about Hitler and Hoffmann. His testimony is full of claims: that he tried to keep collections together, that he tried to save things for Austria, that he helped preserve Polish treasures. But unlike many of his colleagues, he had no illusions about the reality of his acts and at the end of one statement wrote, “The Third Reich had to lose the war because this war was based on
robbery and on a system of injustice and violence, which could only be broken from the outside. Every individual has now to pay personally for the mortgage which the German people has accepted.”15

  Some had paid already. Bunjes was not the only suicide: von Behr was found, still in his uniform, together with his wife in his apartments at Schloss Banz near Bamberg. They had gone out in style by drinking an excellent vintage (1918) champagne laced with cyanide. In a storeroom deep in his cellars, walled up for an unknown posterity, were all the records of Alfred Rosenberg’s ill-fated Ministry, which now would be used as evidence at Nuremberg. Haberstock and his records were found nearby at the castle of the Baron von Pollnitz, who had been so helpful in the retrieval of the Wildenstein collection from its Louvre guardians. Gurlitt was there too. After Haberstock was arrested, von Pollnitz told Frau Haberstock that he would hide the dealer’s remaining pictures if she would reveal their whereabouts. She declined this offer. MFAA officers later by chance found some of them in the famous Schloss Thurn and Taxis in Württemberg.

  Hermann Voss was different. He managed to travel to Wiesbaden, where he offered to assist the Americans in the recovery of the Linz collections from Alt Aussee. It seems never to have occurred to him that his wartime activities would be viewed as criminal by the Allies; he expected that the Americans would arrange for his wife and his personal papers to be brought from Dresden so that he could donate them to some public institution or university, where he no doubt planned to continue his studies. He even presented the Monuments men with a copy of his poem deploring the German conquest of France. He was, therefore, quite amazed to be arrested immediately by Walter Farmer and sent off to Alt Aussee to be interrogated.16

  It took longer to track down ERR executive Gerhard Utikal, who knew all too well what was in store for him and had started working on a farm under an assumed name. His wife and two small children were found in a small Bavarian town. When “confronted with the alternative of either revealing her husband’s whereabouts or of being interned herself,” she yielded his address. The officer who had located Frau Utikal was later congratulated by MFAA officer Thomas Howe for the “discretion and psychological skill used in dealing with [her].”17

  As the Nazi art gatherers and their records were brought in, the OSS trio slowly began to comprehend the staggering magnitude of the German operation. The more they learned, the less sympathy they had for those who had traded with and for the Nazis. And indeed the evidence of cynical collaboration was devastating. Reports and questioning produced endless examples of betrayal and corruption, and of the extraordinary ability of the Germans to compartmentalize and rationalize their actions. Their responses for the most part have a terrible similarity: they were only protecting the art; they were only following orders. These statements were backed by reams of stamped and notarized testimonials from wives, doctors, and colleagues who always mentioned that those being questioned helped this or that Jew, and only gave lip service to the Nazi party.

  After the months of investigation Plaut, Rousseau, and Faison produced three very long and overwhelmingly detailed “Consolidated Interrogation Reports.” Another on the Dienststelle Mühlmann was written by Jan Vlug, a Dutch Intelligence officer working with them. Separate reports were also filed on each of the principals. Again and again the feelings of the writers penetrate their official prose. In the middle of his endless pages of details Vlug allows himself to exclaim that Mühlmann is “obstinate, he has no conscience, he does not care about Art, he is a liar and a vile person.” Rousseau felt that his analysis of the Goering collection “dispels any illusion that might remain about Goering as the ‘best’ of the Nazis. In this one pursuit in which he might have shown himself to be in fact a different type of man, he was the prototype of all the worst in National Socialism. He was cruel, grasping, deceitful and hypocritical… well-suited to take his place with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and the rest.”18 Faison recommended that the Linz operation be declared a criminal organization. Nazi looting, he wrote, was different from that of any previous war in having been “officially planned and expertly carried out… to enhance the cultural prestige of the Master Race.”19

  The OSS team: Theodore Rousseau (left) and James Plaut at their interrogation center (Inset: Lane Faison, July 1945)

  Despite their disgust the OSS and MFAA men were human. Craig Smyth, who later had to supervise the house arrest of Hermann Voss, found it difficult to treat so eminent a scholar as a criminal and had him report daily to someone else. Monuments officer Charles Parkhurst, sent to question the widow of Hans Posse, whom he found living on the proceeds of sales of the pathetic contents of two suitcases of family bibelots, described her as a “gentle, elderly person” and broke off his interrogation when she began to weep. In the few answers she did provide it was clear that she was very proud of her husband’s accomplishments. She even showed Parkhurst photographs of Hitler at Posse’s state funeral, but of his actual transactions she clearly knew nothing.20 Plaut doubted that Bruno Lohse had really known the extent of Goering’s evildoing and noted that both he and Fräulein Limberger had become despondent when all was revealed. Rousseau and Faison too, after weeks of questioning Miss Limberger, were convinced that despite the fact that she had read the damning daily correspondence from Hofer to Goering, she bore no blame. When they had finished with her, Faison could not bring himself to leave her at the squalid internment camp to which she had been assigned and instead asked her where she would like to go. She named the Munich dealer Walter Bornheim, he of the suitcases full of francs, and a principal supplier to both Linz and Goering. Faison consented, and left her at the military post in Gräfelfing, where Bornheim lived.21

  In June 1945 both the Americans and the Europeans, who by now had established their own recovery commissions at home, still believed that an international restitution commission would be set up. The day the Reparations Conference opened in Moscow, in a breakthrough for the British, the European Advisory Council back in London agreed that German works of art should not be used for reparations “pending restitution.”22 After this had been completed, according to their thinking, claims would be made to the still dreamt-of international commission for the “replacement in kind” of missing or destroyed items, an idea particularly dear to the French. None of this could take place until the structure of the four-way occupation of Germany had been agreed upon by the Big Three at their summit conference which would begin on July 17 in Potsdam, just outside Berlin.

  By the second week of July, SHAEF headquarters in Frankfurt swarmed with officers and diplomats preparing for the coming conference. John Brown had arrived on June 12, after a tour of the American-held repositories, and was billeted in a comfortable, fully furnished “middle-class” house lacking only hot water. These amenities, he discovered upon reading his billeting notice, had been guaranteed in the following manner: “Occupants will not be notified prior to four hours before they must complete evacuation, so that the houses will be left habitable. Occupants will not be permitted to remove furniture, rugs or furnishings.”23 John Walker had joined him there, living on the princely per diem of $7.00 per day, to prepare for his inspection trip. Brown, who had finally met with Clay to discuss MFAA thinking, was optimistic that “something really constructive will eventuate from this meeting at Potsdam. … I sense a feeling in the air…. President Truman is a great man in his quiet way.”24

  MFAA discussions concentrated on the future inter-Allied restitution commission and its relation to Military Government. Its duties, they felt, would be eased by the continuing recovery of major works from their refuges, which would obviate the need for replacement in kind from the German patrimony. No one in this group had any knowledge of the quite different plans being made at the highest levels of the United States government, though they were aware that not everyone thought as they did. In his diary Walker noted in passing that Colonel Leslie Jefferson, head of the division of which MFAA was a branch, was “a hard boiled regular Army colonel with no in
terest whatever in art. He wants U.S. to get something out of this war. Dislikes French.”25

  The Allied Commission for Reparations had begun its deliberations on June 11 in Moscow. From the beginning Pauley realized that the Soviet Union intended to take anything it could move out of its zone of occupation. The United States, he felt therefore, should “claim all we can accept … we cannot use plants, machinery and labor. But we can take, and should assert to the fullest extent our demand for gold currencies, foreign assets, patents, processes, technical know-how of every type.”26 Works of art were not specifically mentioned in this message but were most definitely included in Pauley’s thinking, for on June 26 Eisenhower was informed “at the President’s request” that any removals of property under control of U.S. forces in Germany and Austria for the purpose of restitution “should first be submitted … for the approval of the United States Representative of the Reparations Commission.”

  To make the process “more efficient,” a member of Pauley’s staff, who had no connection to any of the already established MFAA agencies, was assigned to Eisenhower “with authority to act promptly on matters submitted.” Works of art would only be returned to the government of an Allied nation when “evidence submitted to my representative conclusively establishes identity of particular works of art. Prior to each and every delivery of an art object to any Allied Nation a proper statement shall be sent… to the effect that the value of the art object returned may or may not be included in the final reparations accounting for each nation.”27

  Since each Allied nation was to get a certain percentage of Germany’s remaining wealth, the more the other nations’ reparations slices could be reduced by works of art and other objects, the more assets would be left for the United States. Pauley was not referring to items such as the Bruges Madonna. He was thinking of the billions of reichsmarks’ worth of art which had been purchased by the Nazis. Somewhere along the line he had talked with Walter Andreas Hofer, who had stated to him that all Goering’s pictures had been “legitimately acquired” and revealed how much had been paid for them.28 To Pauley these were assets like any others which might accrue to America. But by July 14, three days before the Potsdam Conference would convene, the Allied representatives in Moscow had not been able to define precisely who would get what shares of Germany’s assets, or even which nations would be included; nor could they agree on exact definitions of restitution, war booty, or trophies.29 It was becoming more and more certain that each power would do as it pleased in its own zone. Within the American administration itself, controversies raged over the inclusion of works of art and gold in the reparations pool. Thanks to British prodding, art was again removed from the reparations accounts in the final working papers prepared for discussions at the summit. The only thing that was definite was that “Mr. Pauley is of the view that the U.S. should assert as large a claim to reparations as possible and that we should seek payment in German gold and external assets.”30