devised the system of “birthday gifts”—a scheme whereby important
objects were added to the collection at no cost to the Reichsmarschall.
Each year, before Göring’s birthday on January twelfth, Hofer wrote
letters to wealthy industrialists and businessmen suggesting that the
Reichsmarschall would be gratified to receive a token of their continued
regard for him. Then he would designate a specific work of art—and the
price. More often than not, the piece in question had already been
acquired. The prospective donor had only to foot the bill. Now and then
the victim of this shakedown protested the price, but he usually came
through.
In Hofer, the Reichsmarschall had had a henchman as rapacious and greedy
as himself. And Hofer had possessed what his master lacked—a wide
knowledge of European collections and the international art market.
Göring had been a gold mine and Hofer had made the most of it.
Hofer had been arrested shortly after the close of hostilities. He
had been a “guest” at House 71 for some weeks now, and was being
grilled daily by our “cloak and dagger boys.” They were probing into
his activities of the past few years and had already extracted an
amazing lot of information for incorporation into an exhaustive report
on the Göring collection and “how it grew.” Hofer was just one of a
long procession of witnesses who were being questioned by Plaut and
Rousseau in the course of their tireless investigation of the artistic
depredations of the top Nazis. These OSS officers knew their business.
With infinite patience, they were cross-examining their witnesses
and gradually extracting information which was to lend an authentic
fascination to their reports.
Hofer’s wife, they told us, had ably assisted her husband. Her talents
as an expert restorer had been useful. She had been charged with the
technical care of the Göring collection—no small job when one stopped
to consider that it numbered over a thousand pictures. Indeed, there
had been more than enough work to keep one person busy all the time. We
learned that Frau Hofer was living temporarily at Berchtesgaden where,
until recently, she had been allowed to attend to emergency repairs on
some of the Göring pictures there.
We turned back to the subject of Hofer, who had not yet finished his
daily constitutional and could be seen still pacing back and forth below
us. He was, they said, a voluble witness and had an extraordinary memory.
He could recall minute details of complicated transactions which had
taken place several years before. On one occasion Hofer had recommended
an exchange of half a dozen paintings of secondary importance for two
of the very first quality. As I recall, the deal involved a group of
seventeenth century Dutch pictures on the one hand, and two Bouchers on
the others. Hofer had been able to reel off the names of all of them and
even give the price of each. It was just such feats of memory, they said
with a laugh, that made his vague and indefinite answers to certain
other questions seem more than merely inconsistent.
Listening to our hosts, we had forgotten the time. It was getting late
and George would be wondering what had happened to us. There had been a
heavy downpour while we were at dinner. The weather had cleared now, but
the evergreens were dripping as we pulled out of the drive.
The road to Alt Aussee ran along beside the swift and milky waters of an
Alpine river. It was a beautiful drive in the soft evening light. The
little village with its winding streets and brightly painted chalets was
an odd setting for GIs and jeeps, to say nothing of our lumbering command
car.
We found our way to the Command Post, which occupied a small hotel in
the center of the village. There we turned sharply to the right, into a
road so steep that it made the precipitous grades over which we had come
earlier that afternoon seem level by comparison. We drove about a mile on
this road and I was beginning to wonder if we wouldn’t soon be above the
timber line—perhaps even in the region of “eternal snow” to which Roger
had once so poetically referred—when we came to a bleak stone building
perched precariously on a narrow strip of level ground. Behind it, a
thousand feet below, stretched an unbroken sea of deep pine forests.
This was the control post, and the guard, a burly GI armed with a rifle,
signaled us to stop. We asked for Lieutenant Stout. He motioned up the
road, where, in the gathering dusk, we could distinguish the outlines of
a low building facing an irregular terrace. It was a distance of about
two hundred yards. We drove on up to the entrance where we found George
waiting for us.
He took us into the building which he said contained the administrative
offices of the salt mine—the Steinbergwerke, now a government
monopoly—and his own living quarters. We entered a kind of vestibule
with white plaster walls and a cement floor. A narrow track, the rails
of which were not more than eighteen inches apart, led from the entrance
to a pair of heavy doors in the far wall. “That,” said George, “is the
entrance to the mine.”
He led the way to a room on the second floor. Its most conspicuous
feature was a large porcelain stove. The woodwork was knotty pine. Aside
from the two single beds, the only furniture was a built-in settle with
a writing table which filled one corner. The table had a red and white
checked cover and over it, suspended from the ceiling, was an adjustable
lamp with a red and white checked shade. Opening off this room was
another bedroom, also pine-paneled, which was occupied by the captain
of the guard and one other officer. George apologized for the fact that
the only entrance to the other room was through ours. Apparently, in the
old days, the two rooms had formed a suite—ours having been the sitting
room—reserved for important visitors to the mine. For the first few days
there was so much coming and going that we had all the privacy of Grand
Central Station, but we soon got used to the traffic. George and Steve
Kovalyak shared a room just down the hall. Lamont had spoken of Steve
when we had been at Hohenfurth, and I was curious to meet this newcomer
to the MFA&A ranks. George said that Steve would be back before long. He
had gone out with Shrady. That was Lieutenant Frederick Shrady, the third
member of the trio of Monuments Officers at the mine.
While Lamont and I were getting our things unpacked, George sat and
talked with us about the work at the mine and what he expected us to
do. As he talked he soaked his hand in his helmet liner filled with hot
water. He had skinned one of his knuckles and an infection had set in.
The doctors wanted to bring the thing to a head before lancing it the
next day. I had noticed earlier that one of his hands looked red and
swollen. But George hadn’t said anything about it. As he was not one to
relish solicitous inquiries, I refrained from making any comment.
George outlined the local situation briefly. The principal bottle-neck
in the operation lay in the selection of the stuff which was to be
brought out of the various mine chambers. There were, he said, something
like ten thousand pictures stored in them, to say nothing of sculpture,
furniture, tapestries, rugs and books. At the moment he was concentrating
on the pictures and he wanted to get the best of them out first. The less
important ones—particularly the works of the nineteenth century German
painters whom Hitler admired so much—could wait for later removal.
He and Steve and Shrady had their hands full above ground. That left
only Sieber, the German restorer, who had been at the mine ever since
it had been converted into an art repository, to choose the paintings
down below. In addition Sieber had to supervise the other subterranean
operations, which included carrying the paintings from the storage
racks, dividing them into groups according to size, and padding the
corners so that the canvases wouldn’t rub together on the way up to the
mine entrance. Where we could be of real help would be down in the mine
chambers, picking out the cream of the pictures and getting them up
topside. (George’s vocabulary was peppered with nautical expressions.)
In the midst of his deliberate recital, we heard a door slam. The chorus
of “Giannina Mia” sung in a piercingly melodic baritone echoed from the
stairs. “Steve’s home,” said George.
A second later there was a knock on the door and the owner of the voice
materialized. Steve looked a bit startled when he caught sight of two
strange faces, but he grinned good-naturedly as George introduced us.
“I thought you were going out on the town with Shrady tonight,” said
George.
“No,” said Steve, “I left him down in the village and came back to talk
to Kress.”
Kress was an expert photographer who had been with the Kassel Museum
before the war. He had been captured when our troops took over at the
mine just as the war ended. Since Steve’s arrival, he had been his
personal PW. Steve was an enthusiastic amateur and had acquired all kinds
of photographic equipment. Kress, we gathered, was showing him how to use
it. Their “conversations” were something of a mystery, because Steve knew
no German, Kress no English.
“I use my High German, laddies,” Steve would say with a crafty grin and a
lift of the eyebrows, as he teetered on the balls of his feet.
We came to the conclusion that “High German” was so called because it
transcended all known rules of grammar and pronunciation. But, for
the two of them, it worked. Steve—stocky, gruff and belligerent—and
Kress—timid, beady-eyed and patient—would spend hours together. They
were a comical pair. Steve was always in command and very much the
captor. Kress was long-suffering and had a kind of doglike devotion to
his master, whose alternating jocular and tyrannical moods he seemed to
accept with equanimity and understanding. But all this we learned later.
That first evening, while George went on with his description of
the work, Steve sat quietly appraising Lamont and me with his keen,
gray-green eyes. He had worked with Lamont at Bernterode, so I was his
main target. Now and then he would look over at George and throw in a
remark. Between the two there existed an extraordinary bond. As far as
Steve was concerned, George was perfect, and Steve had no use for anyone
who thought otherwise. If, at the end of a hard day, he occasionally
beefed about George and his merciless perfection—well, that was Steve’s
prerogative. For his part, George had a fatherly affection for Steve and
a quiet admiration for his energy and resourcefulness and the way he
handled the men under him.
Presently Steve announced that it was late and went off to bed. I
wondered if he had sized me up. There was a flicker of amusement in
Lamont’s eyes and I guessed that he was wondering the same thing. When
George got up to go, he said, “You’ll find hot water down in the kitchen
in the morning. Breakfast will be at seven-thirty.”
Steve roused us early with a knock on the door and said he’d show us
the way to the kitchen. We rolled out, painfully conscious of the cold
mountain air. Below, in the warm kitchen, the sun was pouring in through
the open door. There were still traces of snow on the mountaintops. The
highest peak, Steve said, was Loser. Its snowy coronet glistened in the
bright morning light.
When my eyes became accustomed to the glare, I noticed that there were
several other people in the kitchen. One of them, a wrinkled little
fellow wearing _Lederhosen_ and white socks, was standing by the stove.
Steve saluted them cheerfully with a wave of his towel. They acknowledged
his greeting with good-natured nods and gruff monosyllables. These
curious mountain people, he said, belonged to families that had worked in
the mine for five hundred years. They were working for us now, as members
of his evacuation crew.
We washed at a row of basins along one wall. Above them hung a sign
lettered with the homely motto:
“_Nach der Arbeit_
_Vor dem Essen_
_Hände waschen_
_Nicht vergessen._”
It rang a poignant bell in my memory. That same admonition to wash before
eating had hung in the little pension at near-by Gründlsee where I had
spent a summer fifteen years ago.
Our mess hall was in the guardhouse down the road, the square stone
building where the sentry had challenged us the night before. We lined
up with our plates and, when they had been heaped with scrambled eggs,
helped ourselves to toast, jam and coffee and sat down at a long wooden
table in the adjoining room. George was finishing his breakfast as the
three of us came in. With him was Lieutenant Shrady, who had recently
been commissioned a Monuments officer at Bad Homburg. Subsequently he had
been sent down to Alt Aussee by Captain Posey. He was a lean, athletic,
good-looking fellow. Although he helped occasionally with the loading,
his primary duties at the mine were of an administrative nature—handling
the workmen’s payrolls through the local Military Government Detachment,
obtaining their food rations, making inspections in the area, filing
reports and so on. After he and George had left, Steve told us that
Shrady was a portrait painter. Right now he was working on a portrait of
his civilian interpreter-secretary who, according to Steve, was something
rather special in the way of Viennese beauty. This was a new slant on
the work at the mine and I was curious to know more about the glamorous
Maria, whom Steve described as being “beaucoup beautiful.” But George
was waiting to take us down into the mine. As we walked up the road,
Steve explained to us that the miners worked in two shifts—one crew
from four in the morning until midday, another from noon until eight in
the evening. The purpose of the early morning shift was to maintain an
uninterrupted flow of “stuff” from the mine, so that the daytime loading
of the trucks would not bog down for lack of cargo.
At the building in which the mine entrance was located we found George
with a group of the miners. It was just eight o’clock and the day’s work
was starting. We were introduced to two men dressed in white uniforms
which gave them an odd, hybrid appearance—a cross between a street
cleaner and a musical-comedy hussar. This outfit consisted of a white
duck jacket and trousers. The jacket had a wide, capelike collar reaching
to the shoulders. Two rows of ornamental black buttons converging at the
waistline adorned the front of the jacket, and a similar row ran up the
sleeves from cuff to elbow. In place of a belt, the jacket was held in
place by a tape drawstring. A black garrison cap completed the costume.
The two men were Karl Sieber, the restorer, and Max Eder, an engineer
from Vienna. It was Eder’s job to list the contents of each truck.
Perched on a soapbox, he sat all day at the loading entrance, record
book and paper before him on a makeshift desk. He wrote down the number
of each object as it was carried through the door to the truck outside.
The truck list was made in duplicate: the original was sent to Munich
with the convoy; the copy was kept at the mine to be incorporated in the
permanent records which Lieutenant Shrady was compiling in his office on
the floor above.
In the early days of their occupancy, the Nazis had recorded the loot,
piece by piece, as it entered the mine. The records were voluminous and
filled many ledgers. But, during the closing months of the war, such
quantities of loot had poured in that the system had broken down. Instead
of a single accession number, an object was sometimes given a number
which merely indicated with what shipment it had arrived. Occasionally
there would be several numbers on a single piece. Frequently a piece
would have no number at all. In spite of this confusion, Eder managed
somehow to produce orderly lists. If the information they contained was
not always definitive, it was invariably accurate.
George was anxious to get started. “It’s cold down in the mine,” he said.
“You’d better put on the warmest things you brought with you.”
“How cold is it?” I asked.
“Forty degrees, Fahrenheit,” he said. “The temperature doesn’t vary
appreciably during the year. I believe it rises to forty-seven in the
winter. And the humidity is equally constant, about sixty-five per cent.
That’s why this particular salt mine was chosen as a repository, as you
probably know.”
While we went up to get our jackets and mufflers, George ordered Sieber
to hitch up the train. When we returned we noticed that the miners, who
resembled a troop of Walt Disney dwarfs, were wearing heavy sweaters and
thick woolen jackets for protection against the subterranean cold.
The train’s locomotion was provided by a small gasoline engine with
narrow running boards on either side which afforded foothold for the
operator. Attached to it were half a dozen miniature flat-cars or
“dollies.” The miners called them “Hünde,” that is, dogs. They were about
five feet long, and on them were placed heavy wooden boxes approximately
two feet wide. The sides were roughly two feet high.
Following George’s example, we piled a couple of blankets on the bottom
of one of the boxes and squeezed ourselves in. Each box, with judicious
crowding, would accommodate two people facing each other.
At a signal from Sieber, who was sardined into a boxcar with George,
one of the gnomes primed the engine. After a couple of false starts,
it began to chug and the train rumbled into the dim cavern ahead. For
the first few yards, the irregular walls were whitewashed, but we soon
entered a narrow tunnel cut through the natural rock. It varied in height
and width. In some places there would be overhead clearance of seven or
eight feet, and a foot or more on either side. In others the passageway
was just wide enough for the train, and the jagged rocks above seemed
menacingly close. There were electric lights in part of the tunnel, but
these were strung at irregular intervals. They shed a dim glow on the
moist walls.
George shouted that we would stop first at the Kaiser Josef mine. The
track branched and a few minutes later we stopped beside a heavy iron
door set in the wall of the passageway. This part of the tunnel was not
illuminated, so carbide lamps were produced. By their flickering light,
George found the keyhole and unlocked the door.
We followed him into the unlighted mine chamber. Flashlights supplemented
the wavering flames of the miners’ lamps. Ahead of us we could make out
row after row of huge packing cases. Beyond them was a broad wooden
platform. The rays of our flashlights revealed a bulky object resting on
the center of the platform. We came closer. We could see that it was a
statue, a marble statue. And then we knew—it was Michelangelo’s Madonna
from Bruges, one of the world’s great masterpieces. The light of our
lamps played over the soft folds of the Madonna’s robe, the delicate
modeling of the face. Her grave eyes looked down, seemed only half aware
of the sturdy Child nestling close against her, one hand firmly held in
hers. It is one of the earliest works of the great sculptor and one of
his loveliest. The incongruous setting of the bare boards served only to
enhance its gentle beauty.
The statue was carved by Michelangelo in 1501, when he was only
twenty-six. It was bought from the sculptor by the Mouscron brothers
of Bruges, who presented it to the Church of Notre Dame early in the
sixteenth century. There it had remained until September 1944, when the
Germans, using the excuse that it must be “saved” from the American
barbarians, carried it off.
In the early days of the war, the statue had been removed from its
traditional place in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament to a specially
built shelter in another part of the church. The shelter was not sealed,
so visitors could see the statue on request. Then one afternoon in
September 1944, the Bishop of Bruges, prompted by the suggestion of a
German officer that the statue was not adequately protected, ordered the
shelter bricked up. That night, before his orders could be carried out,
German officers arrived at the church and demanded that the dean hand
over the statue. With an armed crew standing by, they removed it from the
shelter, dumped it onto a mattress on the floor of a Red Cross lorry and
drove away. At the same time, they perpetrated another act of vandalism.
They took with them eleven paintings belonging to the church. Among them
were works by Gerard David, Van Dyck and Caravaggio. The statue and the
pictures were brought to the Alt Aussee mine. It was a miracle that the
two lorries with their precious cargo got through safely, for the roads
were being constantly strafed by Allied planes.
Now we were about to prepare the Madonna for the trip back. This time she
would have more than a mattress for protection.
In the same mine chamber with the Michelangelo was another plundered
masterpiece of sculpture—an ancient Greek sarcophagus from Salonika. It
had been excavated only a few years ago and was believed to date from the
sixth century B.C. Already the Greek government was clamoring for its
return.
On our way back to the train, George said that the other cases—the ones
we had seen when we first went into the Kaiser Josef mine—contained the
dismantled panels of the Millionen Zimmer and the Chinesisches Kabinett
from Schönbrunn. The Alt Aussee mine, he said, had been originally
selected by the Viennese as a depot for Austrian works of art, which
accounted for the panels being there. They had been brought to the mine
in 1942. Then, a year later, the Nazis took it over as a repository for
the collections of the proposed Führer Museum at Linz.
We boarded the train again and rumbled along a dark tunnel to the Mineral
Kabinett, one of the smaller mine chambers. Again there was an iron
door to be unlocked. We walked through a vestibule into a low-ceilinged
room about twenty feet square. The walls were light partitions of
unfinished lumber. Ranged about them were the panels of the great Ghent
altarpiece—the _Adoration of the Mystic Lamb_—their jewel-like beauty
undimmed after five hundred years. The colors were as resplendent as the
day they were painted by Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432.
This famous altarpiece, the greatest single treasure of Belgium, had also
been seized by the Germans. One of the earliest examples of oil painting,
it consisted originally of twelve panels, eight of which were painted on
both sides. It was planned as a giant triptych of four central panels,
with four panels at either side. The matching side panels were designed
to fold together like shutters over a window. Therefore they were painted
on both sides.
I knew something of the history of the altarpiece. It belonged originally
to the Cathedral of St. Bavon in Ghent. Early in the nineteenth century,
the wings had been purchased by Edward Solly, an Englishman living in
Germany. In 1816, he had sold them to the King of Prussia and they were
placed in the Berlin Museum. There they had remained until restored to
Belgium by the terms of the Versailles Treaty. From 1918 on, the entire
triptych was again in the Cathedral of St. Bavon. In 1933, the attention
of the world was drawn to the altarpiece when the panel in the lower
left-hand corner was stolen. This was one of the panels painted on both
sides. The obverse represented the _Knights of Christ_; the reverse, _St.
John the Baptist_.
According to the story, the thief sent the cathedral authorities an
anonymous letter demanding a large sum of money and guarantee of his
immunity for the return of the panels. As proof that the panels were in
his possession, he is said to have returned the reverse panel with his
extortion letter. The authorities agreed to these terms but sought to lay
a trap for the culprit. Their attempt was unsuccessful and nothing was
heard of the panel until a year or so later.
On his deathbed, the thief—one of the beadles of the cathedral—confessed
his guilt. As he lay dying, he managed to gasp, “You will find the panel
...” but he got no further. The panel has never been found.