In the first room were something like four hundred pictures lined up
against the wall in a series of rows. In two adjoining rooms were great
wooden cases piled one above another. In a fourth were leather-bound
boxes containing the priceless etchings, engravings and woodcuts from the
Berlin Print Room. Still another room was filled with cases containing
the renowned Egyptian collections. It was rumored that one of them held
the world-famous head of Queen Nefertete, probably the best known and
certainly the most beloved single piece of all Egyptian sculpture. It had
occupied a place of special honor in the Berlin Museum, in a gallery all
to itself.
Still other rooms were jammed with cases of paintings and sculpture of
the various European schools. In a series of smaller alcoves were heaped
huge piles of Oriental rugs and rare fabrics. And last, one enormous
room with bookshelves was filled from floor to ceiling with some thirty
thousand volumes from the Berlin Patent Office. Quite separate and apart
from all these things was a unique collection of ecclesiastical vessels
of gold and silver, the greater part of them looted from Poland. These
extremely precious objects were kept in a special vault on the floor
above.
Captain Dunn brought out a thick stack of papers. It was the complete
inventory. Major Hammond said that the two officers who would help
with the checking were a Captain Edwin Rae and a WAC lieutenant named
Standen. Aside from having heard that Rae had been a student of Charlie
Kuhn’s at Harvard, I knew nothing about him. But the name Standen rang
a bell: was she, by any chance, Edith Standen who had been curator of
the Widener Collection? Major Hammond smilingly replied, “The same.” I
had known her years ago in Cambridge where we had taken Professor Sachs’
course in Museum Administration at the same time. I remembered her as
a tall, dark, distinguished-looking English girl. To be exact, she was
half English: her father had been a British Army officer, her mother a
Bostonian. Recalling her very reserved manner and her scholarly tastes, I
found it difficult to imagine her in uniform.
Early the following morning, I met my cohorts at the entrance to the
Reichsbank. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Captain Rae was
an old acquaintance if not an old friend. He also had been around the
Fogg Museum in my time. Edith looked very smart in her uniform. She had
a brisk, almost jovial manner which was not to be reconciled with her
aloof and dignified bearing in the marble halls of the Widener house at
Elkins Park. We hunted up Captain Dunn and set to work. Our first task
was to count and check off the paintings stacked in the main room. We
got through them with reasonable speed, refraining with some difficulty
from pausing to admire certain pictures we particularly fancied. Then we
tackled the Oriental rugs, and that proved to be a thoroughly thankless
and arduous task. We had a crew of eight PWs—prisoners of war—to help us
spread the musty carpets out on the floor. Owing to the fact that the
smaller carpets—in some cases they were hardly more than fragments—had
been rolled up inside larger ones, we ended with nearly a hundred more
items than the inventory called for. That troubled Captain Dunn a bit,
but I told him that it didn’t matter so long as we were over. We’d have
to start worrying only if we came out short. By five o’clock we were
tired and dirty and barely a third of the way through with the job.
The next day we started in on the patent records. There had been a fire
in the mine where the records were originally stored. Many of them were
slightly charred, and all of them had been impregnated with smoke.
When we had finished counting the whole thirty thousand, we smelled
just the way they did. As a matter of fact we hadn’t wanted to assume
responsibility for these records in the first place. Certainly they had
nothing to do with art. But Major Hammond had felt that they properly
fell to us as archives. And of course they were archives of a sort.
On the morning of the third day, as I was about to leave my office for
the Reichsbank, I had a phone call from Charlie Kuhn. He asked me how the
work was coming along and then, in a guarded voice, said that something
unexpected had turned up and that he might have to send me away for a few
days. He told me he couldn’t talk about it on the telephone, and anyway,
it wasn’t definite. He’d probably know by afternoon. I was to call him
later. This was hardly the kind of conversation to prepare one for a
humdrum day of taking inventory, even if one were counting real treasure.
And for a person with my curiosity, the morning’s work was torture.
When I called Charlie after lunch he was out but had left word that I was
to come to his office at two o’clock. When I got there he was sitting at
his desk. He looked up from the dispatch he was reading and said with
a rueful smile, “Tom, I am going to send you out on a job I’d give my
eyeteeth to have for myself.” Then he explained that certain developments
had suddenly made it necessary to step up the work of evacuating art
repositories down in Bavaria and in even more distant areas. For the
first time in my life I knew what was meant by the expression “my heart
jumped a beat”—for that was exactly what happened to mine! No wonder
Charlie was envious. This sounded like the real thing.
Charlie told me that I was to fly down to Munich the next morning and
that I would probably be gone about ten days. To save time he had already
had my orders cut. All I had to do was to pick them up at the AG office.
I was to report to Third Army Headquarters and get in touch with George
Stout as soon as possible. Charlie didn’t know just where I’d find
George. He was out in the wilds somewhere. As a matter of fact he wasn’t
too sure about the exact location of Third Army Headquarters. A new
headquarters was being established and the only information he had was
that it would be somewhere in or near Munich. The name, he said, would be
“Lucky Rear” and I would simply have to make inquiries and be guided by
signs posted along the streets.
I asked Charlie what I should do about the completion of the inventory
at the Reichsbank, and also about the impending report from the Corps of
Engineers on the University of Frankfurt building. He suggested that I
leave the former in Captain Rae’s hands and the latter with Lieutenant
Buchman. Upon my return I could take up where I had left off.
That evening I threw my things together, packing only enough clothes to
see me through the next ten days. Not knowing where I would be billeted I
took the precaution of including my blankets. Even at that my luggage was
compact and light, which was desirable as I was traveling by air.
(3)
_MUNICH AND THE BEGINNING OF FIELD WORK_
The next morning I was up before six and had early breakfast. It was a
wonderful day for the trip, brilliantly clear. The corporal in our office
took me out to the airfield, the one near Hanau where Craig Smyth and I
had landed weeks before. It was going to be fun to see Craig again and
find out what he had been up to since we had parted that morning in Bad
Homburg. The drive to the airfield took about forty-five minutes. There
was a wait of half an hour at the field, and it was after ten when we
took off in our big C-47. We flew over little villages with red roofs,
occasionally a large town—but none that I could identify—and now and then
a silvery lake.
Just before we reached Munich, someone said, “There’s Dachau.” Directly
below us, on one side of a broad sweep of dark pine trees, we saw a group
of low buildings and a series of fenced-in enclosures. On that sunny
morning the place looked deserted and singularly peaceful. Yet only a
few weeks before it had been filled with the miserable victims of Nazi
brutality.
In another ten minutes we landed on the dusty field of the principal
Munich airport. Most of the administration buildings had a slightly
battered look but were in working order. It was a welcome relief to
take refuge from the blazing sunshine in the cool hallway of the main
building. The imposing yellow brick lobby was decorated with painted
shields of the different German states or “Länder.” The arms of Bavaria,
Saxony, Hesse-Nassau and the rest formed a colorful frieze around the
walls.
A conveyance of some kind was scheduled to leave for town in a few
minutes. Meanwhile there were sandwiches and coffee for the plane
passengers. By the time we had finished, a weapons carrier had pulled
up before the entrance. Several of us climbed into its dust-encrusted
interior. It took me a little while to get my bearings as we drove toward
Munich. I had spotted the familiar pepper-pot domes of the Frauenkirche
from the air but had recognized no other landmark of the flat, sprawling
city which I had known well before the war.
It was not until we turned into the broad Prinz Regenten-Strasse that
I knew exactly where I was. As we drove down this handsome avenue, I
got a good look at a long, colonnaded building of white stone. The roof
was draped with what appeared to be an enormous, dark green fishnet.
The billowing scallops of the net flapped about the gleaming cornice of
the building. It was the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the huge exhibition
gallery dedicated by Hitler in the middle thirties to the kind of art
of which he approved—an art in which there was no place for untrammeled
freedom of expression, only the pictorial and plastic representation
of all the Nazi regime stood for. The dangling fishnet was part of the
elaborate camouflage. I judged from the condition of the building that
the net had admirably served its purpose.
In a moment we rounded the corner by the Prinz Karl Palais. Despite the
disfiguring coat of ugly olive paint which covered its classic façade, it
had not escaped the bombs. The little palace, where Mussolini had stayed,
had a hollow, battered look and the formal garden behind it was a waste
of furrowed ground and straggling weeds. We turned left into the wide
Ludwig-Strasse and came to a grinding halt beside a bleak gray building
whose walls were pockmarked with artillery fire. I asked our driver if
this were Lucky Rear headquarters and was told curtly that it wasn’t,
but that it was the end of the line. It was MP headquarters and I’d have
to see if they’d give me a car to take me to my destination, which the
driver said was “’way the hell” on the other side of town.
Before going inside I looked down the street to the left. The familiar
old buildings were still standing, but they were no longer the trim,
cream-colored structures which had once given that part of the city such
a clean, orderly air. Most of them were burned out. Farther along on
the right, the Theatinerkirche was masked with scaffolding. At the end
of the street the Feldherren-Halle, Ludwig I’s copy of the Loggia dei
Lanzi, divested of its statuary, reared its columns in the midst of the
desolation.
It was gray and cool in the rooms of the MP building, but the place was
crowded. Soldiers were everywhere and things seemed to be at sixes and
sevens. After making several inquiries and being passed from one desk to
another, I finally got hold of a brisk young sergeant to whom I explained
my troubles. At first he said there wasn’t a chance of getting a ride out
to Lucky Rear. Every jeep was tied up and would be for hours. They had
just moved into Munich and hadn’t got things organized yet. Then all at
once he relented and with a grin said, “Oh, you’re Navy, aren’t you? In
that case I’ll have to fix you up somehow. We can’t have the Navy saying
the Army doesn’t co-operate.”
He walked over to a window that looked down on the courtyard below,
shouted instructions to someone and then told me I’d find a jeep and
driver outside. “Think nothing of it, Lieutenant,” he said in answer to
my thanks. “Maybe I’ll be wanting a ship to take me home one of these
days before long. Have to keep on the good side of the Navy.”
[Illustration: In the Kaiser Josef chamber of the Alt Aussee mine Karl
Sieber and Lieutenant Kern view Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, stolen
from a church at Bruges.]
[Illustration: Lieutenants Kovalyak, Stout and Howe pack the Michelangelo
Madonna for return to Bruges. The statue was restored to the Church of
Notre Dame in September of 1945.]
[Illustration: The famous Ghent altarpiece by van Eyck was flown from
the Alt Aussee mine to Belgium in the name of Eisenhower as a token
restitution.]
[Illustration: Karl Sieber, German restorer, Lieutenant Kern, American
Monuments officer, and Max Eder, Austrian engineer, examine the panels of
the Ghent altarpiece stored in the Alt Aussee mine.]
On my way out I gathered up my luggage from the landing below and
climbed into the waiting jeep. We turned the corner and followed the
Prinz Regenten-Strasse to the river. I noticed for the first time that
a temporary track had been laid along one side. This had been done, the
driver said, in order to cart away the rubble which had accumulated
in the downtown section. We turned right and followed the Isar for
several blocks, crossed to the left over the Ludwig bridge, then drove
out the Rosenheimer-Strasse to the east for a distance of about three
miles. Our destination was the enormous complex of buildings called the
Reichszeugmeisterei, or Quartermaster Corps buildings, in which the
rear echelon of General Patton’s Third Army had just established its
headquarters.
Even in the baking sunlight of that June day, the place had a cold,
unfriendly appearance. We halted for identification at the entrance, and
there I was introduced to Third Army discipline. One of the guards gave
me a black look and growled, “Put your cap on.” Startled by this burly
order, I hastily complied and then experienced a feeling of extreme
irritation at having been so easily cowed. I could at least have asked
him to say “sir.”
The driver, sensing my discomfiture, remarked good-naturedly, “You’ll get
used to that sort of thing around here, sir. They’re very, very fussy now
that the shooting’s over. Seems like they don’t have anything else to
worry about, except enforcing a lot of regulations.” This was my first
sample of what I learned to call by its popular name, “chicken”—a prudent
abbreviation for the exasperating rules and regulations one finds at an
Army headquarters. Third Army had its share of them—perhaps a little
more than its share. But I didn’t find that out all at once. It took me
all of two days.
My driver let me out in front of the main building, over the central
doorway of which the emblem of the Third Army was proudly displayed—a
bold “A” inside a circle. The private at the information desk had never
heard of the “Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section,” but said that
if it was a part of G-5 it would be on the fifth floor. I found the
office of the Assistant Chief of Staff and was directed to a room at the
end of a corridor at least two blocks long. I was told that the officer I
should see was Captain Robert Posey. I knew that name from the reports I
had studied at Versailles, as well as from a magazine article describing
his discovery, months before, of some early frescoes in the little
Romanesque church of Mont St. Martin which had been damaged by bombing.
The article had been written by an old friend of mine, Lincoln Kirstein,
who was connected with the MFA&A work in Europe.
When I opened the door of the MFA&A office, George Stout was standing in
the middle of the room. The expression of surprise on his face changed to
relief after he had read the letter I handed him from Charlie Kuhn.
“You couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time,” he said. “I came
down from Alt Aussee today to see Posey, but I just missed him. He left
this morning for a conference in Frankfurt. I wanted to find out what
had happened to the armed escort he promised me for my convoys. We’re
evacuating the mine and desperately shorthanded, so I’ve got to get back
tonight. It’s a six-hour drive.”
“Charlie said you needed help. What do you want me to do?” I asked. I
hoped he would take me along.
“I’d like to have you stay here until we get this escort problem
straightened out. I was promised two half-tracks, but they didn’t show
up this morning. I’ve got a call in about them right now. It’s three
o’clock. I ought to make Salzburg by five-thirty. There’ll surely be some
word about the escort by that time, and I’ll phone you from there.”
Before he left, George introduced me to Lieutenant Colonel William
Hamilton, the Assistant Chief of Staff, and explained to him that I had
come down on special orders from SHAEF to help with the evacuation work.
George told the colonel that I would be joining him at the mine as soon
as Captain Posey returned and provided me with the necessary clearance.
After we had left Colonel Hamilton’s office, I asked George what he meant
by “clearance.” He laughed and said that I would have to obtain a written
permit from Posey before I could operate in Third Army territory. As
Third Army’s Monuments Officer, Posey had absolute jurisdiction in all
matters pertaining to the fine arts in the area occupied by his Army. At
that time it included a portion of Austria which later came under General
Mark Clark’s command.
“Don’t worry,” said George. “I’ll have you at the mine in a few days, and
you’ll probably be sorry you ever laid eyes on the place.”
I went back to the MFA&A office and was about to settle down at Captain
Posey’s vacant desk. I looked across to a corner of the room where
a lanky enlisted man sat hunched up at a typewriter. It was Lincoln
Kirstein, looking more than ever like a world-weary Rachmaninoff. Lincoln
a private in the U. S. Army! What a far cry from the world of modern art
and the ballet! He was thoroughly enjoying my astonishment.
“This is a surprise, but it explains a lot of things,” I said, dragging a
chair over to his desk. “So you are the Svengali of the Fine Arts here at
Third Army.”
“You mustn’t say things like that around this headquarters,” he said
apprehensively.
During the next two hours we covered a lot of territory. First of all, I
wanted to know why he was an enlisted man chained to a typewriter. With
his extraordinary intelligence and wide knowledge of the Fine Arts, he
could have been more useful as an officer. He said that he had applied
for a commission and had been turned down. I was sorry I had brought up
the subject, but knowing Lincoln’s fondness for the dramatic I thought it
quite possible that he had wanted to be able to say in later years that
he had gone through the war as an enlisted man. He agreed that he could
have been of greater service to the Fine Arts project as an officer.
Then I asked him what his “boss”—he was to be mine too—was like. He said
that Captain Posey, an architect in civilian life, had had a spectacular
career during combat. In the face of almost insurmountable obstacles,
such as lack of personnel and transportation and especially the lack of
any real co-operation from the higher-ups, he had accomplished miracles.
Now that the press was devoting more and more space to the work the
Monuments officers were doing—the discovery of treasures in salt mines
and so on—they were beginning to pay loving attention to Captain Posey
around the headquarters.
I gathered from Lincoln that the present phase of our activities appealed
to the captain less than the protection and repair of historic monuments
under fire. If true, this was understandable enough. He was an architect.
Why would he, except as a matter of general cultural interest, find
work that lay essentially in the domain of a museum man particularly
absorbing? It seemed reasonable to assume that Captain Posey would
welcome museum men to shoulder a part of the burden. But I was to learn
later that my assumption was not altogether correct.
Eventually I had to interrupt our conversation. It was getting late, and
still no word about the escort vehicles. Lincoln told me where I would
find the officer who was to have called George. He was Captain Blyth, a
rough-and-ready kind of fellow, an ex-trooper from the state of Virginia.
The outlook was not encouraging. No vehicles were as yet available.
Finally, at six o’clock, he rang up to say that he wouldn’t know anything
before morning.
Lincoln returned from chow, I gave him the message in case George called
while I was out and went down to eat. It was after eight when George
telephoned. The connection from Salzburg was bad, and so was his temper
when I told him I had nothing to report.
Lincoln usually spent his evenings at the office. That night we stayed
till after eleven. Here and there he had picked up some fascinating
German art books and magazines, all of them Nazi publications lavishly
illustrated. They bore eloquent testimony to Hitler’s patronage of
the arts. The banality of the contemporary work in painting was
stultifying—dozens of rosy-cheeked, buxom maidens and stalwart,
brown-limbed youths reeking with “strength through joy,” and acres of
idyllic landscapes. The sculpture was better, though too often the
tendency toward the colossal was tiresomely in evidence. It was in
recording the art of the past, notably in the monographs dealing with
the great monuments of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, that admirable
progress had been made. I asked Lincoln enviously how he had got hold of
these things. He answered laconically that he had “liberated” them.
Captain Blyth had good news for me the next morning. Two armored vehicles
had left Munich for the mine. I gave the message to George when he called
just before noon.
“They’re a little late,” he said. “Thanks to the fine co-operation of
the 11th Armored Division, I am being taken care of from this end of the
line. I’ll try to catch your fellows in Salzburg and tell them to go
back where they came from. I am sending you a letter by the next convoy.
It’s about a repository which ought to be evacuated right away. I can’t
give you any of the details over the phone without violating security
regulations. As soon as Posey gets back, you ought to go to work on it.
After that I want you to help me here.”
After George had hung up, I asked Lincoln if he had any idea what
repository George had in mind. Lincoln said it might be the monastery at
Hohenfurth. It was in Czechoslovakia, just over the border from Austria.
While we were discussing this possibility, Craig Smyth walked in.
As soon as he had recovered from the surprise of finding me at Captain
Posey’s desk, he explained the reason for his visit. Something had to
be done right away about the building he was setting up as a collecting
point. He had been promised a twenty-four-hour guard. He had been
promised a barrier of barbed wire. So far, Third Army had failed to
provide either one. A lot of valuable stuff had already been delivered to
the building, and George was sending in more. He couldn’t wait any longer.
“Let’s have a talk with Colonel Hamilton,” I said. As we walked down to
the Assistant Chief of Staff’s office, Craig told me that the buildings
he had requisitioned were the ones Bancel La Farge had suggested when we
saw him at Wiesbaden a month ago.
“Can’t this matter wait until Captain Posey returns?” the colonel asked.
“I am afraid it can’t, sir,” said Craig. “As you know, the two buildings
were the headquarters of the Nazi party. The Nazis meant to destroy them
before Munich fell. Having failed to do so, I think it quite possible
that they may still attempt it. Both buildings are honeycombed with
underground passageways. Only this morning we located the exit of one
of them. It was half a block from the building. We hadn’t known of its
existence before. The works of art stored in the building at present are
worth millions of dollars. In the circumstances, I am not willing to
accept the responsibility for what may happen to them. I must have guards
or a barrier at once.”
The colonel reached for the telephone and gave orders that a cordon of
guards was to be placed on the buildings immediately. He made a second
call, this time about the barbed wire. When he had finished he told Craig
that the guard detail would report that afternoon; the barbed wire would
be strung around the building the next morning. We thanked the colonel
and returned to Posey’s office.