Stealing the Mystic Lamb

by Noah Charney

  The Halifax aircraft took off from the base at Brindisi in southern Italy at just before midnight, against a backdrop of bright moonlight, Leckie recalled. The seven-man aircraft crew knew only that they had to drop the four SOE agents at specified coordinates. They flew north along the Italian coastline, the moonlight reflecting off the stark mirror of the sea below them, the night clear and crisp. Leckie turned the plane northwest as they passed Ancona, and then wove between Venice and Trieste en route to the Austrian Alps.

  Leckie later said:I now wonder what my feelings would have been, then, if I had known one of my passengers was a former Luftwaffe paymaster who had defected to the French Resistance. He was a native of the area to which we were now heading, and had discovered from relatives the Nazi plan to conceal massive collections of art treasures in this area, which was well known to him from childhood. Albrecht Gaiswinkler . . . seemed to be the ideal person to receive specialist training in England to become one of the four special agents I was now transporting to the site of this clandestine operation.

  At 2:50 AM, the dispatcher on the Halifax, Sergeant John Lennox, indicated to Gaiswinkler and his team, shivering and cramped in the unheated fuselage, that it was time to drop. The Halifax began its run at a height of eight hundred feet to drop the equipment containers first, the automatic parachutes billowing gently as the cargo floated down towards the mountain slopes, silhouetted sharply against the white moon and smothered in snow.

  As the Halifax banked and circled for the second run, the parachutists prepared to jump. Against the biting wind high above the Austrian mountains, the four-man team jumped from their bomber transport. They parachuted safely, despite the difficult landing in enormous snowdrifts in which they sank up to their armpits.

  But when they landed they could not find the equipment crates, which had sunk into the deep snow. There was no one from the Resistance there to meet them. After a search, they located only the crate containing the radio transmitter. Their relief was cut quick—the radio had been irreparably damaged in the landing. They were without help and without means to contact Bari, with only sidearms and knives for weaponry.

  The team suddenly realized that they had been dropped on the wrong slope. Instead of the Zielgebiet am Zinken Plateau, they had landed some kilometers away, on the ominously named Höllingebirge, “Hell Mountain.”

  Then they heard the sounds of dogs and soldiers echoing in the distance around the pine-clad mountainside.

  Patrols all around had certainly heard the bomber and perhaps saw the parachutes against the night sky. The team checked the roads down the mountain slope but found roadblocks, checkpoints, and patrols. Fortunately the snowbound woods were not patrolled. They made their way slowly through the drifts in the blue light of breaking dawn.

  The team had to navigate to Gaiswinkler’s hometown, Bad Aussee, where his brother Max would house them. They arrived at the town of Steinkogl bei Ebensee at the foot of Hell Mountain. Stripping off their jumpsuits, they tried to appear as normal as possible in the civilian clothes they wore underneath.

  They boarded a train to Bad Aussee. Onboard rumors circulated that some English soldiers had been spotted parachuting in. No one suspected that the English might have sent Austrian double agents. Gaiswinkler and his team also learned that the German Sixth Army under General Fabianku had been chased out of northwestern Italy and the northern Balkans by the Yugoslav Partizan Army and was encamped throughout the region.

  Some kilometers before the Bad Aussee station, the team jumped from the moving train, rightly anticipating checkpoints at transit stations. They hiked through the woods, avoiding roads, until they collapsed, exhausted, at the home of Max Gaiswinkler.

  Without the radio, the team was cut off from headquarters, meaning that they had no way of learning of the travel plans of Joseph Goebbels, one of their two targets. They would have to find another radio, but by the time they did, they learned that Goebbels would not be visiting the area. The assassination plan, wild and unlikely as it had been, was off. Their sole focus was on salvation of the treasures of Alt Aussee.

  Their adventures were about to begin.

  The Austrian double agents were unaware that a parallel operation was under way. The Allied Third Army, under General Patton, raced towards Alt Aussee even as Gaiswinkler was trying to secure it. In this army were Monuments Men Robert K. Posey and Lincoln Kirstein.

  Baby-faced Captain Robert Kelley Posey was an architect as a civilian, born in 1904 and raised in relative poverty by Alabama farmers. Fresh out of Auburn University, he became a liberal activist, speaking out at political rallies against Fascism and the Ku Klux Klan. He taught at Auburn briefly, before spending the body of his professional career at the prestigious New York architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. He left a rich archive of letters written to his wife, Alice, and his young son, Dennis (affectionately known as Woogie), while he was in Europe during the war.

  Posey had grown up hard and poor. Giftless Christmases were the norm, as his family struggled to survive as farmers. His only playmate was the family goat, which died the same year as his father—when he was only eleven. From that tender age, he began working two jobs to help his family through the Depression: at the local grocery store and at a soda fountain. It was the ROTC that gave him hope for a brighter future. Even with the ROTC scholarship, he intended to attend university for only one year, to allow his brother a chance to study as well, as funds were too tight for both of them to go. When he saw how strong a student Posey was, his brother deferred and encouraged him to finish his degree at Auburn.

  Posey had military aspirations throughout his life. Much of his time at Auburn was spent in the company of the army ROTC, and he enlisted in the Army Reserves the moment he graduated. When Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, he felt a nationalistic pull and wanted to ship off immediately, but it was six frustrating months before he was called up from the Reserves. After training in the thick of a Louisiana summer, which Posey described as the most humid and uncomfortable experience of his life, he was shipped off for the coldest: a Canadian port on the Arctic Ocean in Churchill, Manitoba. There Posey’s skills as an architect were put to use, as part of a team designing Arctic runways that would permit planes to land safely, should the Nazis invade North America by that most unlikely of attack routes—the North Pole. From there, thanks to his architectural training, he was picked for the new Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the army—a role that would prove a good deal more dramatic than duty within the Arctic Circle.

  Posey was a man of high morals, with a tender heart. While stationed in Germany during the war, he came across a group of American soldiers who had found a rabbit in a cage in the yard beside a German cottage. Having eaten nothing but K rations for weeks, the GIs planned to kill and cook it. But as they approached, a woman opened the door to the cottage and called out in halting, accented English that it was her son’s rabbit. Her husband had been an SS officer, but he was dead, and the rabbit was the only thing her eight-year-old son had left of his father. Posey walked over to the cage and hung one of his “Off Limits” signs on it, adding by hand “By Order of Captain Robert Posey, U.S. Third Army.” The soldiers slunk away. From that point on he made a habit of feeding lonely animals he encountered on his wanderings, animals abandoned by owners who were lost or dead or had fled. He wrote, “I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it.”

  Posey was a practical joker. When he first joined the Third Army, he shaved either end of his moustache so it looked like Hitler’s—a gag that General George Patton found less than amusing. But his sense of humor was balanced by a pride in service; his family had been soldiers since the Revolutionary War. Intent on honoring his family and serving his country in combat, Posey volunteered as a grunt for the Battle of the Bulge. He survived the battle, thoug
h he injured his foot, and he never knew if he had inflicted any damage on the enemy—his eyesight was so poor he had been told simply to keep firing in the appropriate direction until he ran out of ammunition. But a sense of outrage also kept him going when his legs could barely keep up and sleep swelled his eyes. Upon visiting the recently liberated concentration camp of Buchenwald, Posey would take a souvenir he came across in an abandoned office and keep it with him for the rest of the war: a photograph of a Nazi concentration camp officer, beaming with pride as he holds aloft a noose.

  Posey’s partner in the MFAA was already a cultural icon in the United States at the start of the war and would go on to a stellar career at the forefront of American arts. Born in 1907 in Rochester, New York, and raised in Boston, the physically towering Lincoln Kirstein was the son of a Jewish businessman who embodied the American dream, working his way up from a start without advantage to great success, counting President Roosevelt among his friends. Young Lincoln attended Harvard, where he founded the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, the precursor to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He also founded a literary magazine called Hound and Horn, which published the works of major writers like e. e. cummings as well as the first warning about Hitler’s stance on so-called degenerate art, authored pseudonymously by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. Kirstein worked as an artist and writer, having already published six books by his thirty-seventh year, and was one of the central figures of New York City culture in the years before the war. He married the artist Fidela Cadmus in 1941, though he was involved in same-sex relationships throughout his life. Kirstein was charismatic and driven, but he suffered from depression that may have been undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

  Kirstein enlisted with the Naval Reserves in 1942. He was turned down for reasons that most Americans fail to remember: Until the war grew so extensive that more troops were needed and restrictions loosened, one had to be a third-generation American citizen in order to serve as an officer in the U.S. armed forces. Kirstein did not fit the bill. America, too, at this time had its own racial profiling system, and many Jews, blacks, Asians, and immigrants were not permitted to serve as officers. Adding insult to injury, Kirstein was next rejected from the Coast Guard because of his poor vision. So the wildly accomplished Lincoln Kirstein, already a prominent artist and intellectual, had to enlist as a private, which he did in February 1943.

  Even after having completed basic training, Kirstein was rejected by three different departments in which he sought to serve: counterespionage, army intelligence, and the Signal Corps. He finally found a post as a combat engineer, writing instructional manuals while posted in safe but thumb-twiddling Fort Belvoir, Virginia. To occupy his time, he worked with other members of the art community on the War Art Project, in which known artists donated works for display and sometimes sale to raise funds for the war. Thanks to his involvement, this project shifted from being an independent fund-raiser to an army-supported endeavor. Kirstein selected nine artworks to be featured in an issue of Life magazine, then to be exhibited with others in the American Battle Art exhibits, held at the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in an effort to support the war effort.

  Noting his service, and his outstanding qualifications and connections, the Roberts Commission tapped Kirstein to join the MFAA division even though he was not an officer. In June 1944 Kirstein arrived in Shrivenham, England, to join the other MFAA recruits. But when he arrived, he found the division in disarray. There was no organization to speak of, and the Civilian Affairs officers in charge at Shrivenham had never even heard of the MFAA. Kirstein and the other recruits were told to wait until the situation could be clarified. The commission wanted Kirstein to serve as MFAA representative to one of the Allied armies, but a legal clause in the military bureaucracy prevented a private from serving in the MFAA. By October 1944, Kirstein was depressed and dismayed, writing, “I, for one, think the behavior of the [Roberts] Commission has been, to put it mildly, callous and insulting.” It was not until December 1944, after six months in bureaucratic Limbo, that Kirstein was assigned to the Allied Third Army to assist Robert K. Posey.

  Posey had already been active with the MFAA for months, and he trained Kirstein at an army base in Metz, Germany. They were a decidedly odd couple. Posey, the Alabama farm boy, was a true soldier and knowledgeable architect but lacked any knowledge of foreign languages or fine arts background. Kirstein was an erudite Jewish artist and intellectual celebrity in New York, fluent in French and with passable German.

  Posey instructed Kirstein in the role of Monuments Men. At this stage, gathering information was key, as were locating local artworks and rigging damaged buildings and monuments in the wake of the fighting. The extent of the Nazi art looting plan was as yet unknown to the MFAA, and their days were spent interviewing locals, piecing together possible locations of missing art, securing that which remained, and writing reports on their progress—or lack thereof. Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb had been specifically named as one of the most important works to seek and protect.

  As the Third Army entered France, the first rumors filtered in regarding the wholesale Nazi looting of art and antiquities, thanks in large part to the individual efforts of the spy Rose Valland. Before this time none of the Allies knew of Hitler’s planned supermuseum or of the Nazis’ widespread proactive hunting of artworks. The rumors were disturbing indeed.

  Posey and Kirstein gathered frustratingly contradictory tidbits of information on the location of The Lamb. It was often singled out as the subject of gossip, but the rumors served only to tease. Their best source, at first, was Dr. Edward Ewing, an archivist whom they interviewed in Metz. He told them that Goebbels’s Nazi propaganda division had long been claiming that the Allies intended to steal Europe’s artworks and that the Nazis should therefore confiscate all they could to keep it from thieving Allied hands. A similar deception had occurred in 1941, when Italian propagandists published a pamphlet to incite anti-British sentiment. It was entitled “What the English Have Done in Cyrenaica” and showed photographs of looted antiquities, broken statuary, and graffiti-covered walls at the ancient Greco-Roman city in modern-day Libya. What no one realized was that the damage supposedly done by the English had actually occurred centuries ago—the entire site was a ruin. What was left had been looted by the Italians themselves, and the Italians had added graffiti, all in a setup to frame the Allies as vandals and thieves.

  Posey and Kirstein asked about major works they knew had disappeared, focusing on The Ghent Altarpiece. Ewing had heard rumors that it was in Germany, in a bunker at the Rhine fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, near Coblenz. Another rumor suggested that it had been taken by Göring to Carinhall. It was at Berghof, Hitler’s villa in the Austrian Alps, or at Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. Was it in a vault at Berlin’s Reichsbank? At Buchner’s office in Munich? In Sweden, in Switzerland, in Spain? Or perhaps, as some sources suggested, it was in a salt mine in Austria. Which of the rumors, if any, were true?

  On 29 March 1945 the Third Army was camped at Trier, an ancient German town full of Roman antiquities and the birthplace of Karl Marx. Trier had been decimated by Allied bombs. Kirstein wrote of the once-glorious city:The desolation is frozen, as if the moment of combustion was suddenly arrested, and the air had lost its power to hold atoms together and various centers of gravity had a dogfight for matter, and matter lost. For some unknown reason one intact bridge remained. . . . The town was practically empty. Out of 90,000 [inhabitants] about 2,000 were there, living in a system of wine cellars. They looked very chipper, women in slacks, men in regular working suits. The convention is to look right through them. Some of the houses have white sheets or pillow cases hanging out. Hardly a whole thing left. 15th century fragments of water spouts, Baroque pediments and Gothic turrets in superb disarray mixed up with new meat cutters, champagne bottles, travel posters, fresh purple and yellow crocuses, and a lovely day, gas and decomposition,
enamel signs and silver-gilt candelabra, and appalling, appalling shivered, subsided blank waste. Certainly Saint Lô [a French city likewise demolished by fighting] was worse, but it didn’t have anything of importance. Here everything was early Christian, or Roman, or Romanesque, or marvelous Baroque.

  In an effort to instill in their fellow soldiers a level of respect for their surroundings, Posey and Kirstein had developed a habit of writing up a short history of the towns that the Third Army was occupying. Their hope was to educate the troops and minimize looting and defacement. This strategy had been successful in the French towns of Nancy and Metz, and so, when the immediate work was done, the Monuments Men set about putting together an introduction to Trier.

  Captain Posey had been nursing a pain in one of his wisdom teeth for months, which finally became too much to bear. The army dentists were stationed nearly one hundred miles away. So Kirstein walked into town to see if he could find a local dentist. He encountered a teenage boy in the street who seemed friendly and eager to interact with an American soldier. Kirstein barely spoke German, and the boy no English, but Kirstein thought the boy might be willing to help. He offered the boy some Pep-o-Mint chewing gum, and a bond was established. Kirstein then mimed a toothache, puffing up his cheek and wincing in pain. The boy seemed to understand. He led Kirstein by the hand through town and pointed to the office of a local dentist.