Stewart Leonard refused to carry out the order, going so far as to produce negative documentation. He had some success: Clay compromised but ordered thirty-nine of the hundred-plus pictures sent off while the rest were being investigated. Leonard was so upset that he resigned and sailed for home, but not before he had sent further protests to the Legal Division of the State Department. The Corsini Memling Portrait of a Gentleman, the Spiridon Leda and the Swan (at that time attributed to Leonardo), and sixteen other works were shipped out by Leonard’s hastily appointed successor, Stephen Munsing. In their coverage of the event, the German newspapers referred to Siviero as a “pirate who takes advantage of the political situation.”
Rodolfo Siviero (right) receives Naples masterpieces removed from Monte Cassino from Monuments officer Edgar Breitenbach.
Before any more pictures could be dispatched, the effect of Leonard’s protests on the State Department, sensitized by the dramas of the 202, became clear. They did not have the result he intended. Over the signature of Acting Secretary of State Lovett came a long telegram deploring rumors that “proposals for the sale of works of art for purposes of relief are being increasingly advanced.” The United States government should never, he said, “directly or indirectly aid in the sale and dispersal of art from Europe.” The cable included rumors that “French dealers are attempting to gain access to the collecting points on the ostensible grounds of aiding in the identification of art” and that “certain American museum officials are openly advocating the sale of objects from Nazi and German public collections”—the source for the latter being a remark by Theodore Rousseau, who had left the OSS to become curator of paintings at the Met, quoted in The New Yorker:
America has a chance to get some wonderful things here during the next few years. German museums are wrecked and will have to sell. … I think it’s absurd to let the Germans have the paintings the Nazi big-wigs got, often through forced sales, from all over Europe. Some of them ought to come here, and I don’t mean especially to the Metropolitan, which is fairly well off for paintings, but to museums in the West which aren’t.
Lovett’s cable ended with a demand for a public statement from Munich denying that any such policy was contemplated.56
Meanwhile, in Italy, Siviero had announced to the press that he had “won a diplomatic victory over the Americans in Berlin and overcome German sabotage in Munich” by recovering national treasures which the unprincipled Nazis had stolen “shortly before we heroically eliminated them from our country in 1945.” This revisionism was too much for Monuments officer Theodore Heinrich, who happened to be in Florence. He confronted Siviero, threatening to take the matter up with the American embassy, and forced him to make a public retraction.57
Siviero now returned to Munich to pursue his quest for the rest of the objects on his list. He bribed German staff at the Collecting Point to tell him what was there and even tried to influence director Munsing by offering him a luxurious trip to Italy.58 But he overplayed his hand; on June 1, 1949, his credentials were withdrawn on the grounds that “Mr. Siviero is reported to be a Communist who is conducting a virulent press campaign against U.S. restitution policy and who has spread many untruths concerning the U.S. government, the Munich Collecting Point and the personnel attached thereto.”59 Nothing daunted, Siviero continued his campaign from Italy. Things escalated to such a degree that 125 German employees at the Collecting Point sent a petition to President Truman. This was answered by an equally fiery broadside signed by the intellectual members of Italy’s ancient Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. The Italian government hastily removed Siviero “from further duty in connection with this activity because it was found that he could not deal successfully with the Americans and because he had entered into press polemics which proved embarrassing to the Italian government.”60
It all died down for a time, but a year later Siviero was back in the fray. His insistence on the illegality of some sales was considerably weakened, in the view of his opponents, by the circumstances surrounding the disposition of the Spiridon Leda. Once it had returned to Italy it had not been given to the former owner, the Countess Margaretha Spiridon-Callotti, but had been kept by the Italian state. The Countess had sued for its return, asserting that the painting had been “extorted” from her in 1941; but an investigation by Siviero had led to charges against her for attempting to defraud the state. In its case against the Countess the Italian government now used the exact same arguments as had the Collecting Point officials: that the picture had not even been brought to Italy until 1939, and then for purposes of sale. To this they added the gossipy accusations that the Countess had celebrated the event with a party, had thrown in a Leonardo drawing for the Führer, and had invested her ill-gotten gains in the palatial former residence of Barbara Hutton known as the Abbey of San Gregorio.61 The State Department now backed the Collecting Point officers, and nothing more was returned to Italy by them.
Siviero never changed his tune. Whenever possible he belittled the American role in the recovery of the Uffizi treasures and took the credit for himself, bringing forth periodic protests from former Monuments men. But for Italy his persistence was successful. In 1953, after the departure of the Americans, a special accord with the Adenauer government brought back most of the remaining objects on his list. Indefatigable and obsessed, he continued until his death in 1983 to hunt down art taken from Italy. Along the way his glory came from a series of exhibitions of recovered works which culminated in a posthumous one in his honor at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The lavish catalogue repeats all Siviero’s mythic themes, which, as was his custom, are embellished by a number of amusing variations.
Long after the American Monuments officers had left Germany, Rose Valland, like her Italian counterpart, continued her quest to retrieve or account for every single thing that had left France. She too had her days of glory: André Malraux awarded her the Légion d’honneur and the Medal of the Resistance. In 1964 her story was revealed, rather inaccurately, to the world in a film entitled The Train, which starred Paul Scofield as von Behr, Burt Lancaster as the Resistance Hero, and the glamorous Suzanne Flon as Rose. But after a time her persistence and her knowledge of collaboration and shady deals began to make her unpopular among those not wishing to be reminded of the events of the war. She was particularly reluctant to set a final date for claims on the unidentified and not very high-grade leftovers which remained after the better objects had been distributed among the museums. These had become an administrative headache for everyone, and many felt they should be sold. By 1965 Mlle Valland’s stubbornness had driven the director of the Musées de France to suggest to her that it might be time to look forward to peace and fraternity, forget the past, and leave the disposition of the works to the living, which “would take nothing away from the respect for the dead.”62 But Resistance heroine Valland never would compromise, and in her last years retreated entirely into her world of secret documents, which at her death were relegated, unsorted and chaotic, to a Musées storeroom in Malmaison.
In Germany as well, the dedicated continued to search. Wilhelm Arntz, a lawyer, spent years trying to track down every single “degenerate” picture removed by the Nazis, in the process uncovering considerable unsavory activity by auctioneers, dealers, and museums. Kurt Reutti, who had started the Zentralstelle in Berlin, scoured the East German countryside, travelling hobolike from place to place in empty boxcars or whatever vehicle he could find. His reception was sometimes mixed: in one village two ladies defended their possession of a stolen picture with pickax and shovel, while another gently led him to her house, where he was amazed to find the Kadolzburg altar from the Erasmus Chapel of the Berliner Schloss. The Russians had thrown it on the ground, and the old lady had saved it because she “could not let the Lord God just lie there.” Most extraordinary was his discovery of a group of large Chinese temple figures missing from the collections of Baron von der Heydt. These he traced to a remote house in Angermünde, northeast of Berlin
on the Polish border. Upon arriving Reutti was told that the “Chinese stuff” was on the dump:
It was a big dump. A man was splitting small logs on the head of a grey stone twelfth-century Tiger. Further on two goats jumped around two more stone faces which peered demon-like out of a pile of half rotten straw. Next to this in a pig sty was a big Chinese bronze drum full of manure.63
He had arrived just in time, for the woodcutter had planned to drag away the “junk” and throw it in a lake. (Reutti wondered to himself what theories of intercontinental trade this might have inspired in future archaeologists.) Baron von der Heydt had trouble getting the things to Switzerland, where he had taken up residence since the war, but the East Germans finally surrendered them in exchange for two butter knives and a tea glass and strainer which had once belonged to Lenin. Reutti was succeeded by searchers of equal passion such as Klaus Goldmann, curator of the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin, who spent years on his particular obsession, the location of the Trojan gold. Not until 1992 was that mystery solved by the revelation that the treasure did indeed go to Russia in 1945.
After the mid-fifties the question of Nazi loot was no longer of great interest except to museum professionals and dispossessed owners, though sporadic finds and returns did cause little flurries. The two tiny Pollaiuolo panels from the Uffizi entitled Hercules Killing the Hydra and Hercules Suffocating Antaeus, which had been unaccounted for in 1945, turned up in the hands of a former Wehrmacht soldier who had emigrated to California. The Soviet Union returned most of the Dresden and Berlin collections to the German Democratic Republic in the late fifties. In 1955, with the help of Miss Hall at the State Department, the Czartoryski family, after threatening a suit, got a cash settlement for two of the medieval enamels they had hidden so long before in Poland. The pieces had been sold to the Boston Museum by Wildenstein, who had found them in Liechtenstein. It was not an unfriendly arrangement; afterward, the Czartoryskis and Wildenstein joined forces in an attempt to trace their missing Raphael, which the Metropolitan wished to buy. But this effort, alas, came to naught, and the picture remains lost.64
For a long time there was little further news of the fate of missing objects. In Washington, Miss Hall and her successors toiled away on cases of theft by military personnel and whatever else came to their attention. In Austria, several thousand unidentified works languished in the monastery of Mauerbach until their presence was revealed by ArtNews reporter Andrew Decker in 1984. And in all nations, most of the records relating to confiscation and recovery lay classified and often sealed for terms of fifty years and more. The United States Army retired and then destroyed files on which there had been no action for a number of years, among them the one relating to the unsolved theft of church treasures from the small East German town of Quedlinburg.
This was too bad, for after decades of silence rumors began to circulate that certain objects from the treasure were being offered for sale in Switzerland. Joe Tom Meador, the light-fingered GI, had died in 1980 and his sister and brother had inherited the objects. They then seem to have sold a number locally. Their lawyer, more sophisticated, felt that the objects might bring more on the New York market, and had the gold and jewel-encrusted Samuhel Gospels appraised. The heirs were stunned to discover that this piece alone might be worth upwards of $2 million, but deeply disappointed when the appraiser also told them that it was probably stolen and therefore unsalable. Despite this advice, in the next few years they sent out feelers to dealers and museums. The Getty turned them down, as did Sotheby’s. One Paris dealer who was willing to play offered the Gospels around Europe at the exorbitant price of $9 million.
By now rumors of the availability of the manuscript were spreading nicely. In Washington, Willi Korte, a free-lance German researcher who had done considerable work in the American archives for Klaus Goldmann in his efforts to trace the Trojan gold, consulted an American lawyer, Thomas Kline, for advice on how to track down the owners and retrieve the treasure. But in 1990, before he could find them, news came that an entity called the German Cultural Foundation of the States had bought the Gospels from a Bavarian dealer for $3 million, of which two-thirds was paid to the Meadors on delivery. The Bavarian had acquired it in Switzerland, and was secretly negotiating the sale of a second Quedlinburg object through the same channels.
A sale of this magnitude inevitably attracted press attention, and William Honan, covering the story for The New York Times, began his own investigation to identify the sellers. It did not take long. As soon as their names were published, Meador’s old Army friends began to call Honan to report that they well remembered that Meador had taken the Quedlinburg objects. A little research in the Army files revealed his hometown. Korte and Kline rushed to Texas to try to negotiate with the family. After first agreeing to let the duo photograph the remaining objects and put them in a safe place, the Meadors suddenly changed their minds. Kline, by now representing the Quedlinburg Church authorities, obtained a restraining order which prohibited removal of the pieces, but in the meantime two more vanished from the bank.
The German Ministry of the Interior and the Cultural Foundation, who had not previously known the identity of the sellers, now offered to negotiate a settlement. In the end the Meadors got $2.75 million for the objects still in their possession. The German Cultural Foundation, which had been prepared to pay far more, did not wish to bring charges against them and even allowed a fancy little show at the Dallas Museum of Art before the ancient relics returned to a newly installed treasury at the Quedlinburg Church. The U.S. government was less relaxed: the Meadors will now have to deal with the IRS and possibly the FBI. Though many deplore this paying of “ransom” for stolen goods, the whole affair has had the salutary effect of inspiring a number of other ex-GIs or their families to turn in things they “found” during their duty overseas.65
The search for missing works of art still goes on. International law enforcement agencies and private foundations such as the Institute for Art Research in New York keep an eye on the markets. The reunification of Germany and the raising of the Iron Curtain have led to the renewal of investigations all over Europe. In the now accessible areas of eastern Germany, treasure hunters and adventurers scour long-sealed passages and remote caves, hoping to find the Amber Room or see the gleam of gold. The French Foreign Ministry has retrieved Rose Valland’s papers and is busily perusing them at the Quai d’Orsay. Scholarly groups in Germany and Eastern Europe are attempting once again to list losses, while the Russian and German governments are negotiating the still politically potent issue of restitution of objects held by their respective nations.
Still missing: Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin
This is, therefore, a story without an end. It has been sixty years since the Nazi whirlwind took hold, sweeping the lives of millions before it. Never had works of art been so important to a political movement and never had they been moved about on such a vast scale, pawns in the cynical and desperate games of ideology, greed, and survival. Many were lost and many are still in hiding. The miracle of it all is the fact that infinitely more are safe, thanks almost entirely to the tiny number of “Monuments men” of all nations who against overwhelming odds preserved them for us.
NOTES
CURRENCY VALUES, 1939
$1.00 = RM 2.50
$ 1.00 = FF 50
$1.00 = Dfl 1.90
$1.00 = SF 4.30
Dfl 100 = RM 133
FF 20 = RM 1
ABBREVIATIONS
AAA Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
ANF Archives Nationales de France, Paris.
CIR Consolidated Interrogation Report
DIR Detailed Interrogation Report
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States
LC Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.
MFAA Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives
NA National Archives, Washington, D.C.
&
nbsp; NGA National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
OSS/ALIU Office of Strategic Services/Art Looting Investigation Unit
RC Roberts Commission
RG Record Group
SD State Department, Washington, D.C.
SG Secretary General
UST7FFC United States Treasury, Foreign Funds Control, Washington, D.C.
1. PROLOGUE: THEY HAD FOUR YEARS
1. M. Feilchenfeldt, interview with author, 1986.
2. J. Pulitzer, Jr., letter to author, November 20, 1986.
3. Ibid.
4. Quoted in P. Gardner, “A Bit of Heidelberg Near Harvard Square,” ArtNews, Summer 1981.
5. P. Assouline, An Artful Life (New York, 1990), p. 258.
6. AAA, Barr Papers, Barr to Mabry, July 1, 1939.
7. Beaux Arts, “La Vente des oeuvres d’art dégénérés à Lucerne,” July 7, 1939. Translated by author.
8. A. Hentzen, Die Berliner National-Galerie im Bildersturm (Berlin, 1971), p. 53.
9. Barr Papers, various letters.
10. Alfred H. Barr, “Art in the Third Reich—Preview 1933,” Magazine of Art, October 1945, p. 213.
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