bedrooms on the second floor. Neat labels on the doors indicated that
they were occupied by lieutenant colonels. There were two other doors at
the end of the hall. Neither one was labeled, so I peered in. They were
the bathrooms. And what bathrooms! Marble floors, tiled walls, double
washbasins and built-in tubs. Although it was only the middle of the
morning, I had to sample one of those magnificent tubs. And as a kind of
tribute to all this elegance, I felt constrained to discard my khakis and
put on blues.
Captain La Farge had stressed the urgency of setting up an art depot, so
the next ten days were given over to that project. Buchman generously
shelved his own work to help me with it. Together we inspected the
University of Frankfurt. The newest of the German universities, it
had opened its doors at the outbreak of the first World War. The main
administration building, an imposing structure of red sandstone, had
been badly damaged by incendiaries but could be repaired. It would be a
big job, but we could worry about that later. The first step was to have
it allocated for our use. That had to be done through the proper Army
“channels.” Buchman steered me through. Then we had to obtain an estimate
of the repairs. It took three days to get one from the university
architect. It was thorough but impractical and had to be completely
revised. We took the revised estimate to the Army Engineers and asked
them to make an inspection of the building and check the architect’s
figures. They were swamped with work. It would be a week before they
could do anything. I said it was a high priority job, hoping to speed
things along. But the Engineers had heard that one before. We’d have to
be patient.
Charlie Kuhn and Colonel Webb had moved up to Frankfurt and were
established at SHAEF headquarters in the I. G. Farben building. Their
office was only a few blocks from mine, and during my negotiations for
the use of the university building I was in daily communication with them.
While waiting for the Engineers to make the promised inspection, I made
a couple of field trips with Buchman. The first was a visit to Schloss
Kronberg, a few kilometers from Frankfurt. It was a picturesque medieval
castle, unoccupied since the first part of the seventeenth century.
Valuable archives were stored there. We wanted to see if they were in
good condition, and also to make sure that the place had been posted with
the official “Off Limits” signs.
A flock of geese scattered before us as we drove up to the entrance
at the end of a narrow, winding road. We knocked on the door of the
caretaker’s cottage and explained the purpose of our visit to the old
fellow who timidly appeared with a large bunch of keys. He limped ahead
of us across the cobbled courtyard, and we waited while he fitted one of
the keys into the lock.
A wave of heavy perfume issued from the dark room as the door swung
open. When our eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, we saw that
we were in the original _Waffenraum_ of the castle. But, in addition to
the clustered weapons affixed to the walls, there were five sarcophagi
in the center of the vaulted room. Around them stood vases filled with
spring flowers. On the central sarcophagus rested a spiked helmet of the
first World War. The others were unadorned.
The old caretaker explained that the central tomb was that of the
Landgraf of Hesse who had died thirty years ago. Those on either side
contained the remains of his two sons who had likewise died in the first
World War. The other two coffins were those of the elder son’s wife and
of a princess of Baden who had been killed in one of the air raids on
Frankfurt in 1944. All five sarcophagi had originally stood in the little
chapel across the courtyard. It had been destroyed by an incendiary bomb
the winter before.
We left this funerary chamber with a feeling of relief and continued
our inspection of the castle. A winding ramp in one of the towers led
to the floors above. From the top story we had a superb view of the
broad Frankfurt plain spread out below. The caretaker told us he had
watched the bombings from that vantage point. The great banqueting
hall, with a musicians’ gallery at one end, had been emptied of its
original furnishings and was now a jumble of papers stacked in piles of
varying heights. These were part of the Frankfurt archives. Others were
stored in two rooms on the ground floor. All of the rooms were dry and
weatherproof, so there was nothing further to be done about them for the
present. There was no place in Frankfurt as yet to which they could be
moved. “Off Limits” signs had been posted. They would discourage souvenir
hunters from unauthorized delving.
On our way back to the car the caretaker told us that the castle still
belonged to Margarethe, Landgräfin of Hesse, the youngest sister of the
last Kaiser. Although she was now in her seventies, she came every day
to put fresh flowers beside the tombs of her husband and her two sons.
She lived at a newer castle, Schloss Friedrichshof, only a few kilometers
away. He apparently didn’t know that Schloss Friedrichshof had been
taken over by the Army and was being used as an officers’ country club.
The old Landgräfin was living modestly in one of the small houses on
the property. Her scapegrace son, Prince Philip, as I learned later,
had played an active role in the artistic depredations of the Nazi
ringleaders. I was to hear more of the Hesse family before the end of the
year.
A second excursion took us still farther afield. On an overcast morning
two days later, Buchman, Charlie Kuhn, Captain Rudolph Vassalle (who was
the Public Safety Officer of the detachment) and I set out in the little
Opel sedan which had been assigned the MFA&A office. We struck out to the
east of Frankfurt on the road to Gelnhausen. We stopped at this pleasant
little town with its lovely, early Gothic church and went through the
formality of obtaining clearance from the local Military Government
Detachment to make an inspection in that area.
From there we continued by a winding secondary road which led us through
increasingly hilly country to Bad Brückenau. Our mission there was
twofold: Captain Vassalle wanted to track down a young Nazi officer,
reportedly a member of the SS, and to find a warehouse said to contain
valuable works of art. I had gathered from Buchman that many such reports
petered out on investigation. Still, there was always the chance that
the one you dismissed as of no importance would turn out to be something
worth while.
[Illustration: The bronze coffin of Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was
found in a mine near Bernterode.]
[Illustration: Canova’s life-size marble statue of Napoleon’s sister was
found at the monastery of Hohenfurth.]
[Illustration: The administration buildings at the salt mine at Alt
Aussee, Austria. Removal of stolen art treasures from the mine was
carried out late in 1945.]
[Illustration: Truck at entrance to the main building of the mine is
being loaded with paintings, to be taken to Munich for dispersal to their
owner nations.]
After making several inquiries, we eventually located a small house on
the edge of town. In response to our insistent hammering, the door of
the house was finally opened by a pallid young man probably in his late
twenties. If he was the object of the captain’s search he had certainly
undergone a remarkable metamorphosis, for he bore little resemblance to
the dapper officer of whom Captain Vassalle carried a photograph for
identification. The captain seemed satisfied that he was the man. So
leaving them in conversation, the three of us followed up the business
of the reported works of art. The other two occupants of the house—an
old man and a young woman who may have been the wife of the man who
had opened the door—responded to our questions with alacrity and took
us to the cellar. There we were shown a cache of pictures, all of them
unframed and none of them of any value. They appeared to be what the old
man claimed—their own property, brought to Bad Brückenau when they had
left Frankfurt to escape the bombings. In any case, we made a listing of
the canvases, identifying them as best we could and making notations of
the sizes, and also admonishing the couple not to remove them from the
premises.
After that the old man took us across the back yard to a large modern
barn which was heavily padlocked. Once inside he unshuttered a row of
windows along one side of the main, ground-floor room. It was jammed to
the ceiling with every conceivable item of household furnishings: chairs,
tables, beds, bedding, kitchen utensils and porcelain. But no pictures.
We poked around enough to satisfy ourselves that first appearances were
not deceiving. They weren’t, so, having made certain that the old fellow,
who claimed to be merely the custodian of these things, understood the
regulations forbidding their removal, we picked up Captain Vassalle. He
had completed his interrogation of the alleged SS officer and placed him
under house arrest.
Our next objective was an old Schloss which, according to our map, was
still a good hour’s drive to the northeast. As it was nearly noon and we
were all hungry, we decided to investigate the possibilities of food in
the neighborhood. On our way back through Bad Brückenau we stopped at
the office of a small detachment of troops and asked where we could get
some lunch. The hospitable second lieutenant on duty in the little stucco
building, which had once been part of the Kurhaus establishment, gave us
directions to the sprawling country hotel, high up above the town, where
his outfit was quartered. He said that he would telephone ahead to warn
the mess sergeant of our arrival.
For a little way we followed along the Sinn, which flows through the
grassy valley in which Bad Brückenau nestles. Then we began to mount
sharply and, for the next fifteen minutes, executed a series of hairpin
turns and ended abruptly beside a rambling structure which commanded a
wonderful view of the valley and the wooded hills on the other side. Our
hosts were a group of friendly young fellows who seemed delighted to have
the monotony of their rural routine interrupted by our visit. They asked
Charlie and me the usual question—what was the Navy doing in the middle
of Germany—and got our stock reply: we are planning to dig a canal from
the North Sea to the Mediterranean.
We had a heavy downpour during lunch, and we waited for the rain to let
up before starting out again. Then we took the winding road down into
town, crossed the river and drove up into the hills on the other side of
the valley. An hour’s drive brought us to upland meadow country and a
grove of handsome lindens. At the end of a long double row of these fine
trees stood Schloss Rossbach. “Castle” was a rather pompous name for the
big seventeenth century country house with whitewashed walls and heavily
barred ground-floor windows.
We were received by the owners, a Baron Thüngen and his wife, and
explained that we had come to examine the condition of the works of
art, which, according to our information, had been placed there for
safekeeping. They ushered us up to a comfortable sitting room on the
second floor where we settled down to wait while the baroness went off to
get the keys. In the meantime we had a few words with her husband. His
manner was that of the haughty landed proprietor, and he looked the part.
He was a big, burly man in his sixties. He was dressed in rough tweeds
and wore a matching hat, adorned with a bushy “shaving brush,” which he
hadn’t bothered to remove indoors. That may have been unintentional, but
I idly wondered if it weren’t deliberate discourtesy and rather wished
that I had kept my own cap on. I wished also that I could have matched
his insolent expression, but thought it unlikely because I was frankly
enjoying the obvious distaste which our visit was causing the old codger.
However, his attitude was almost genial compared with that of his waspish
wife, who reappeared about that time, armed with a huge hoop from which
a great lot of keys jangled. The baroness, who was much younger than
her husband, had very black hair and discontented dark eyes. She spoke
excellent English, without a trace of accent. I felt reasonably sure that
she was not German but couldn’t guess her nationality. It turned out that
she was from the Argentine. She was a sullen piece and made no effort to
conceal her irritation at our intrusion. She explained that neither she
nor her husband had anything to do with the things stored there; that, in
fact, it was a great inconvenience having to put up with them. She had
asked the young woman who knew all about them to join us.
The young woman in question arrived and was completely charming. She
took no apparent notice of the baroness’ indifference, which was that
of a mistress toward a servant whom she scarcely knew. Her fresh, open
manner cleared the atmosphere instantly. She introduced herself as Frau
Holzinger, wife of the director of Frankfurt’s most famous museum, the
Staedelsches Kunstinstitut. Because of conditions in Frankfurt, and more
particularly because their house had been requisitioned by the American
military authorities, she had come to Schloss Rossbach with her two young
children. Country life, she continued, was better for the youngsters and,
besides, her husband had thought that she might help with the things
stored at the castle. I had met Dr. Holzinger when I went one day to
have a look at what remained of the museum, so his wife and I hit it off
at once. I was interested to learn that she was Swiss and a licensed
physician. She smilingly suggested that we make a tour of the castle and
she would show us what was there.
The first room to be inspected was a library adjoining the sitting room
in which we had been waiting. Here we found a quantity of excellent
French Impressionist paintings, all from the permanent collection of the
Staedel, and a considerable number of fine Old Master drawings. Most of
these were likewise the property of the museum, but a few—I remember one
superb Rembrandt sketch—appeared to have come from Switzerland. Those
would, of course, have to be looked into later, to determine their exact
origin and how they came to be on loan at the museum. But for the moment
we were concerned primarily with storage conditions and the problem of
security. In another room we found an enormous collection of books, the
library of one of the Frankfurt museums. In a third we encountered an
array of medieval sculpture—saints of all sizes and description, some of
carved wood, others of stone, plain or polychromed. These too were of
museum origin.
The last storage room was below ground, a vast, cavernous chamber beneath
the house. Here was row upon row of pictures, stacked in two tiers down
the center of the room and also along two sides. From what we could make
of them in the poor light, they were not of high quality. During the
summer months they would be all right in this underground room, but we
thought that the place would be very damp in the winter. Frau Holzinger
assured us that this was so and that the pictures should be removed
before the bad weather set in.
The baroness chipped in at this point and affably agreed with that idea,
undoubtedly happy to further any scheme which involved getting rid of
these unwelcome objects. She also warned us that the castle was far from
safe as it was, what with roving bands of Poles all over the countryside.
As we indicated that we were about to take our leave, she elaborated upon
this theme, declaring that their very lives were in danger, that every
night she and her husband could hear prowlers in the park. Since they—as
Germans—were not allowed to have firearms, they would be at the mercy
of these foreign ruffians if they should succeed in breaking into the
castle. By this time we were all pretty fed up with the whining baroness.
As we turned to go, Charlie Kuhn, eyeing her coldly, asked, “Who brought
those Poles here in the first place, madam? We didn’t.”
To our delight, the weather had cleared and the sun was shining. Ahead
of us on the roadway, the foliage of the lindens made a gaily moving
pattern. Our work for the day was done and we still had half the
afternoon. I got out the map and, after making some quick calculations,
proposed that we could take in Würzburg and still get back to Frankfurt
at a reasonable hour. We figured out that, with the extra jerry can of
gas we had with us, we could just about make it. We would be able to fill
up at Würzburg for the return trip. So, instead of continuing on the road
back to Bad Brückenau, we turned south in the direction of Karlstadt.
It was pleasant to be traveling a good secondary road instead of the
broad, characterless Autobahn, on which there were no unexpected
turns, no picturesque villages. There was little traffic, so we made
very good time. In half an hour we had threaded our way through
Karlstadt-on-the-Main. In this part of Franconia the Main is a capricious
river, winding casually in and out of the gently undulating hills.
A little later we passed the village of Veitschöchheim where the
Prince-Bishops of Würzburg had an elaborate country house during the
eighteenth century. The house still stands, and its gardens, with a tiny
lake and grottoes in the Franco-Italian manner, remain one of the finest
examples of garden planning of that day. As we drove by we were glad that
this inviting spot had not attracted the attention of our bombers.
Alas, such was not the case with Würzburg, as we realized the minute we
reached its outskirts! The once-gracious city, surely one of the most
beautiful in all Germany, was an appalling sight. Its broad avenues
were now lined with nothing but the gaping, ruined remnants of the
stately eighteenth century buildings which had lent the city an air of
unparalleled distinction and consistency of design. High on its hilltop
above the Main, the mellow walls of the medieval fortress of Marienberg
caught the rays of the late afternoon sun. From the distance, the
silhouette of that vast structure appeared unchanged, but the proud city
of the Prince-Bishops which it overlooked was laid low.
We drove slowly along streets not yet cleared of rubble, until we came
to the Residenz, the great palace of the Prince-Bishops, those lavish
patrons of the arts to whom the city owed so much of its former grandeur.
This magnificent building, erected in the first half of the eighteenth
century by the celebrated baroque architect, Johann Balthasar Neumann,
for two Prince-Bishops of the Schönborn family, was now a ghost palace,
its staring glassless windows and blackened walls pathetic vestiges of
its pristine splendor.
We walked up to the main entrance wondering if it could really be true
that the crowning glory of the Residenz—the glorious ceiling by Tiepolo,
representing Olympus and the Four Continents—was, as we had been told,
still intact. With misgivings we turned left across the entrance hall to
the Treppenhaus and mounted the grand staircase. We looked up and there
it was—as dazzling and majestically beautiful as ever—that incomparable
fresco, the masterpiece of the last great Italian painter. Someone with
a far greater gift for words than I may be able to convey the exaltation
one experiences on seeing that ceiling, not just for the first time
but at any time. I can’t. It leaves artist and layman alike absolutely
speechless. I think that, if I had to choose one great work of art, it
would be this ceiling in the Residenz. You can have even the Sistine
ceiling. I’ll take the Tiepolo.
For the next half hour we examined every corner of it. Aside from a few
minor discolorations, the result of water having seeped through the lower
side of the vault just above the cornice, the fresco was undamaged.
Considering the destruction throughout the rest of the building, I
could not understand how this portion of the palace could be in such a
remarkable state of preservation. The explanation was an interesting
example of how good can sometimes come out of evil. Some forty years
ago, as I remember the story, there was a fire in the Residenz. The
wooden roof over a large portion, if not all, of the building was burned
away. When it came to replacing the roof, the city fathers decided
it would be a prudent idea to cover the part above the Tiepolo with
steel and concrete. This was done, and consequently, when the terrible
conflagration of March 1945 swept Würzburg—following the single raid of
twenty minutes which destroyed the city—the fresco was spared. As we
wandered through other rooms of the Residenz—the Weisser Saal with its
elaborate stucco ornamentation and the sumptuous Kaiser Saal facing the
garden, once classic examples of the Rococo—I wished that those city
fathers had gone a little farther with their steel and concrete.
We stopped briefly to examine the chapel in the south wing. Here,
miraculously enough, there had been relatively little damage, but the
caretaker expressed concern over the condition of the roof and said that
if it weren’t repaired before the heavy rains the ceiling would be lost.
Knowing how hard it was to obtain building materials for even the most
historic monuments when people didn’t have a roof over their heads, we
couldn’t reassure him with much conviction.
The spectacle of ruined Würzburg had a depressing effect upon us, so we
weren’t very talkative on our way back to Frankfurt. We passed through
only one town of any size, Aschaffenburg, which, like Würzburg, had
suffered severe damage. Although I had not been long in Germany and
had seen but few of her cities, I was beginning to realize that the
reports of the Allied air attacks had not been exaggerated. I was ready
to believe that there were only small towns and villages left in this
ravaged country.
One morning Charlie Kuhn rang up to say that I should meet him at the
Reichsbank early that afternoon. This was something I had been looking
forward to for some time, the chance to look at the wonderful things
from the Merkers mine which were temporarily stored there. With Charlie
came two members of the MFA&A organization whom I had not seen since
Versailles and then only briefly. They had been stationed at Barbizon, as
part of the Allied Group Control Council for Germany (usually referred
to simply as “Group CC”) the top level policy-making body as opposed
to SHAEF, which dealt with the operational end of things. These two
gentlemen were John Nicholas Brown, who had come over to Germany with the
assimilated rank of colonel as General Eisenhower’s adviser on cultural
affairs, and Major Mason Hammond, in civilian life professor of the
Classics at Harvard.
It had been decided, now that we were about to acquire a permanent
depot in which to store the treasures, to make one Monuments officer
responsible for the entire collection. By this transfer of custody, the
Property Control Officer in whose charge the things were at present,
could be relieved of that responsibility. Major Hammond had with him a
paper designating me as custodian. Knowing in a general way what was
stored in the bank, I felt that I was on the point of being made a sort
of director, pro tem, of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
The genial Property Control Officer, Captain William Dunn, was all
smiles at the prospect of turning his burden over to someone else. But
before this transfer could be made, a complete check of every item was
necessary. Major Hammond knew just how he wanted this done. I was to have
two assistants, who could come over the next morning from his office in
Hoechst, twenty minutes from Frankfurt. The three of us, in company with
Captain Dunn, would make the inventory.