by Noah Charney
Kirstein went back for Posey and brought him to the dentist’s office. To their surprise, the dentist spoke some English. As the dentist went to work in Posey’s gaping mouth, he began to chat with Kirstein, who sat waiting beside them.
What was their role in the U.S. Army?
They explained that they were there to protect art and monuments.
The dentist looked up suddenly. His son-in-law, he explained, was a former major in the German army and had the same job. Would they like to meet him? He lived in a village nearby.
Posey and Kirstein jumped at the offer to meet the dentist’s son-in-law. Perhaps he had information that could clarify the conflicting rumors about the location of the Nazi stolen art. It was this sort of happenstance detective work on which the Monuments Men relied. The dentist climbed into their jeep and directed them out of Trier, into the countryside.
But something seemed wrong. The dentist kept asking for them to stop along the way, with various suspicious excuses. Could they stop at this farm so he could buy vegetables? Would they stop at this house so he could pick up two bottles of wine to bring to his son-in-law and daughter? Could they make one more stop, at the inn up ahead, where he wanted to get a piece of news? As the town thinned to village and on to countryside, signs of welcome to the Allies waned. In Trier, every house flew a white flag, symbolizing that the inhabitants welcomed the Allied army. Wherever the dentist was leading them, there were no flags to be seen. Posey and Kirstein began to suspect a trap.
Then the dentist indicated a forest cottage up ahead at the foot of a hill, some distance outside of the nearest village. Wary, Kirstein and Posey sent the dentist into the weathered wooden cottage first. They heard the sounds of joyous greeting and a baby’s coo, and they decided it was safe to join him.
Inside the small, dark cottage the dentist introduced them to his son-in-law, Hermann Bunjes; his wife, Hildegard; his mother; his daughter, Eva; and Hermann and Eva’s infant son, Dietrich. The cottage was a fascinating tranquil oasis compared to the chaos of the war’s endgame, the disintegration of the German army playing out mere kilometers away. Kirstein described the cottage as having “the agreeable atmosphere of a scholar’s cultivated life, a long way from war.” Kirstein and Posey studied its walls, which were covered in prints of French Gothic art and architecture: Notre Dame de Paris, Cluny, La Sainte Chapelle, Chartres—places that the American GIs had seen for the first time in their lives as officers during the war. Chartres had mesmerized Posey, who rhapsodized about it in one of his many letters home to his wife. He had souvenir cards in his rucksack of many of the French Gothic monuments that he had seen, which he would give to his son, Woogie, on his return.
Hermann Bunjes spoke with them in French, Kirstein translating for Posey. He explained that he was a former SS officer, having been dismissed from duty by Count Wolff-Metternich after working as an art advisor to both Rosenberg and Göring himself. The Allied postwar report on ERR activity noted that, while Bunjes was never a member of the ERR, he was present in Paris as director of the German Art Historical Institute, and he acted initially as an advisor to Göring as an attaché to the ERR. He was a scholar, unsurprisingly, of French Gothic sculpture. Bunjes had been educated at the University of Bonn before doing postgraduate work at Harvard. He’d begun his book at Cluny in Paris, writing with the famous Harvard professor Arthur Kingsley Porter. His great passion was a book he had been writing for years on the twelfth-century sculpture of Île-de-France on Paris.
Kirstein described his feelings in meeting Bunjes:It was an odd and somehow symbolic entrance into contemporary German culture. Here, in the cold Spring, far above the murder of the cities, worked a German scholar in love with France, passionately in love, in that hopeless frustrated fatalism described by the German poet Rilke. When and how did he think he could go back? Yet his one desire was to finish his book. . . . It was hard to believe that this man had, for six years, been the confidant of Göring, the intimate of Hitler’s closest guards, that he had been in the SS.
Bunjes had information—lots of information. But there would be a price for what he knew. He wanted a promise of protection for himself and his family. From whom? Kirstein and Posey asked. As a former SS officer, Bunjes was a trained killer, the elite of Hitler’s army.
Bunjes needed protection from other Germans. The SS were so hated and feared by their fellow countrymen that he was in greatest danger of falling victim to their vigilante justice. Kirstein and Posey were not in a position to be able to guarantee protection and safe conduct for his family. But Bunjes agreed to talk anyway. Though once an enthusiast, he had sickened of Nazism—or so he claimed. He had certainly been complicit in art looting and cronying up to Göring. Did he truly regret what he had done, or was he simply currying favor with the powers at his doorstep?
As Bunjes spoke, new and critical information came to light. He had records of what art had been stolen by the Nazis from France. He seems to have acted as a sort of art agent, dealing with the ERR on Göring’s behalf. In March 1941 Bunjes had traveled to Berlin with a large portfolio containing photographs of ERR material, which he presented for Göring’s approval. He had also met with Alfred Rosenberg to discuss the availability of stolen art items for Göring’s personal acquisition. Bunjes knew the contents of that portfolio and more. He knew where the looted art described within was being stored.
Kirstein wrote of the encounter, “As we spoke in French, information tumbled out, incredible information, lavish answers to questions we had been sweating over for nine months, all told in ten minutes.” For the first time, Bunjes gave the Monuments Men a sense of what they were up against, of Hitler’s plans, of the fate of thousands of the world’s most important and beautiful works of art.
Bunjes later wrote of his experiences as an officer and his encounters with Göring:I was ordered to report to the reichsmarschall [Göring] for the first time on 4 February 1941 at 6:30 PM in the Quai d’Orsay, in Paris. Herr Feldführer von Behr of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg [in charge of ERR operations in France] was also there. [Göring] wanted to know details of the actual situation regarding the confiscation of Jewish art in occupied territories. He took the opportunity to give Herr von Behr photographs of the objects the führer wished to acquire for himself, and also of those that [Göring] himself desired.
As a matter of duty I informed the reichsmarschall of the meeting to discuss the protest of the French government about the work of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg. . . . The reichsmarschall said he would mention the matter to the führer. . . . On Wednesday 5 February I was summoned by the reichsmarschall to meet him in the Jeu de Paume, where he was inspecting the Jewish art treasures recently accumulated there. The reichsmarschall inspected the exhibition, escorted by myself, and made a selection of the works to be sent to the führer and those he wished to include in his own collection.
I took the opportunity of being alone with the reichsmarschall to draw his attention again to a note of protest from the French government against the activity of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, in which they referred to the clause in the Hague Convention [exempting cultural heritage from seizure in war]. . . . The reichsmarschall went into the matter thoroughly and directed me as follows, saying, “My orders are authoritative. You do exactly as I order. The works of art accumulated at the Jeu de Paume will be loaded immediately onto a special train bound for Germany. Those items which are for the führer and those which are for the reichsmarschall will be loaded into separate carriages attached to the reichsmarschall’s train on which he will return to Berlin at the beginning of next week. Herr von Behr will accompany the reichsmarschall in this special train on his journey to Berlin.”
When I objected that the lawyers might be of another opinion and that the commander in chief [of the German armed forces] in France might make protestations, the reichsmarschall replied with these words: “Dear Bunjes, leave that to me. I am the highest lawyer in the state.”
Bunjes had recognized the hypocrisy of a so-
called Art Protection unit stripping Europe of its artistic treasures, but he was far from guiltless. According to the postwar Allied ERR report, on May 16, 1942, Göring asked Bunjes to prepare a paper detailing the Einsatzstab confiscations and the protests of the defeated French government. The report describes Bunjes’s active attempts to rationalize the seizure of Jewish art and to quell the French protestations.
In essence, the Bunjes paper stresses the ingratitude of the French state and the French people for the altruistic efforts of the Einsatzstab, without which the destruction and loss of invaluable cultural material would have been inevitable. The paper is a classic in the literature of political treachery. Briefly stated, Bunjes offers the following transparent legal justification for the German action: The Hague Convention of 1907, signed by Germany and France, and observed in the armistice terms of May 1940, calls in Article 46 for the inviolability, among other things, of private property. Bunjes states, however, that the Compiègne armistice of 1940 was a pact made by Germany with the French state and the French people, but not with Jews and Freemasons; that the Reich, accordingly, was not bound to respect the rights of Jewish property owners; and further, that the Jews, in company with Communists, had made innumerable attempts since the signing of the armistice on the lives and persons of Wehrmacht personnel and German civilians, so that even sterner measures had to be taken to suppress Jewish lawlessness. Bunjes contends that the basis for the French protests, and petitions for the return of ownerless Jewish property, is the desire on the part of the French government to deceive Germany and further the prosecution of subversive activity against the Reich.
Was Bunjes forced by circumstance to prepare such a report? Could he have believed what he wrote, in love as he was with French art and culture? One may only guess at his true feelings, though he must have experienced at least some conflict. Bunjes was suffering from severe depression by the time Posey and Kirstein reached him.
Then Bunjes related, for the very first time to Allied ears, the plans for Hitler’s supermuseum. Files had been found indicating the mass seizure of artworks. Rose Valland’s reports to Jacques Jaujard had revealed the extent of the looting from France. But documentary evidence had not yet surfaced detailing the supermuseum. Bunjes described a number of Nazi art depots in castles: Neuschwanstein, which housed the collections stolen from French Jews; Tambach, filled with art looted from Poland; Baden Baden, with the art stripped from Alsace; and on. But the biggest cache of all, he said, was in a salt mine in the Austrian Alps. It had been converted into a high-tech storehouse for all of the looted art destined for Linz. It contained thousands of objects stolen from across Europe, including The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan van Eyck.
But, he warned, the SS guards of the secret salt-mine storehouse had been ordered to blow it all up if they failed to defend it against the Allies. The intelligence about which Woolley had written to Lord Macmillan was true. Hitler had released what became known as the Nero Decree on 19 March 1945, stating that everything that could be of any use to the Allies, particularly industrial and supply sites, should be destroyed if it could not be defended. It was thought that this included the looted art. Furthermore, what Bunjes could not have known is that August Eigruber, the ruthless Nazi official in charge of the Ober-Donau region of Austria, had received a personal letter from Hitler’s private secretary, closest friend, and reichsminister, Martin Bormann, instructing him to take all measures necessary to prevent the Alt Aussee treasure house from being captured by the Allies.
Eigruber’s total dedication to Hitler had seen him rise quickly through the Nazi ranks. He had been the gau director of the Nazi Party in Upper Austria and had served several months in prison when Nazism was banned there in May 1935. From 1936 until the Anschluss in 1938, when Austria officially became part of Greater Germany and Nazism was both legal and dominant, he was the leader of the underground party within that region. He joined the SS as an officer in 1938 and became the gauleiter of Oberdonau in Austria on 1 April 1940. In November 1942 he was appointed reich defense commissar, and by June 1943 he was an SS obergruppenführer—only one step down from Himmler himself. There is a photograph of Eigruber, with the facial expression of an awestruck groupie, his lips thin to the point of invisibility, upper lip ever curled under his lower lip in a childish manner, enthusiastically poring over the designs for Hitler’s citywide supermuseum in Linz, with the architect, Hermann Giesler, and Hitler himself. There was an air of Charlie Chaplin to Eigruber, with his Hitler-style smudge moustache and slightly stooped stance, his shoulders curled in, though his awkward physicality belied his iron-worker strength and sociopathic determination and the confidence instilled by his quick rise through the Nazi ranks.
Eigruber interpreted the unclear order from Bormann to prevent Allied seizure of the mine’s content as an instruction to destroy the art within it. His determination to see through his own interpretation of Hitler’s orders extended beyond the artworks in his charge. He had been an enthusiastic concentration camp officer at Mauthausen-Gusen during the war, and now he arranged for the gassing of mental patients and others who had been deemed unable to work before the war began. On 8 April, he would order the execution of every political prisoner in his region awaiting trial—at least forty-six people were shot the next morning.
What Bunjes related to Posey and Kirstein was incredible. “It must have been a great exercise in discipline on Captain Posey’s part as on mine to betray no flicker of surprise or recognition,” wrote Kirstein. Bunjes apparently thought that the Allies already knew all he had to say.
Posey and Kirstein rushed back to camp and informed their commanders. Bunjes had noted the location of the salt mine on a map. It was beside the village of Alt Aussee, near the spa town Bad Aussee, outside of Salzburg. This was off the path of the Allied strike. As it was of no strategic importance, Allied armies had not planned to clear that area for many weeks to come. The region was particularly dangerous. Its densely forested, steep mountains were thick with wandering small bands of scattered SS and the remnants of the German Sixth Army, retreating over the Italian Alps. The Nazi army was disintegrating, but the remaining pockets of soldiers, acting independently with guerrilla methods, were particularly dangerous and unpredictable.
To arrive at Alt Aussee would be easier said than done. Kirstein wrote:The terrain was extremely difficult. The mountains were lousy with SS and retreating German Sixth Army streaming over the Italian Alps. Two days before we had been caught, turning off from a back road, in the middle of a German motorized convoy. For ten miles we couldn’t figure out whose prisoner was whose. They must have been going somewhere to surrender, since they were armed, yet nothing happened.
It was a confusing time. The German forces were falling apart, the end of the war no longer in doubt. The only question was how long it would take before total German surrender and how much destruction would be wrought before that could happen. Would the Nazis obliterate a huge percentage of the history’s art treasures, simply out of spite, to prevent the world from ever seeing them again? They had shown themselves capable of such an atrocity, and worse. By 1942 the Allies knew of Hitler’s plans for the mass extermination of blacks, Jews, and other minority groups deemed racially inferior by the Nazis, although the full extent of the genocide only became clear when the first concentration camps were liberated in 1945. When SS leader Heinrich Himmler, by that time disheveled and wearing a patch over his left eye, was arrested by British soldiers while crossing a bridge at Bremervorde in northern Germany as he tried to escape to Switzerland, remaining SS burned all of Himmler’s stolen art before the British army could arrive and recapture it. And there were the precedents for similar destruction at the two French chateaux, Valencay and Rastignac.
According to Bunjes, The Ghent Altarpiece was hidden in the mine at Alt Aussee. But General Patton’s Third Army was headed towards Berlin. There was a friendly race between the Allied First, Third, Fourth, Seventh, and Ninth armies to be the first to fig
ht their way to Berlin. It was only after Eisenhower determined that the Red Army would reach Berlin long before the Allies could, and General Omar Bradley’s grim estimate that it would take another 100,000 Allied lives to capture the city, that the American military effort was redirected towards Austria. The so-called Alpine Redoubt of the Austrian Alps, particularly around Hitler’s holiday residence at Berghof, was thought to be the place where the Nazis would dig in for the final showdown. It was feared that it could take years, and thousands of lives, to extract the SS units entrenched in the steep alpine forests. Kirstein admitted his doubts in a letter back home to his sister: “As far as Germany goes I think they’ll be fighting for some time. In spite of the collapse of the Wehrmacht and the triumphant newspapers, there has been so far no place where a great many people were not killed winning it. . . . Hoping to see you before my retirement pay starts.”
Posey and Kirstein told General Patton what they had learned from Hermann Bunjes, and the decision was made. The Third Army would cut across to Austria in April 1945—a route that would place them squarely in the path of Alt Aussee. Kirstein wrote: “We were still some days away. . . . Captain Posey went forward to prime the tactical commanders. If they had not been pinpointed for our spot, American troops would have had no reason to occupy it until weeks later.” Now the entire Third Army, and a shift in the Allied strategic policy, might cash in on the unbelievable report of one disillusioned former SS scholar of twelfth-century French sculpture, hiding in a forest cottage and fearing attack from his fellow countrymen.