safekeeping. Packed in ten cases, it was stored in the Château of Pau
together with many important works of art from the Louvre. The Director
of the French National Museums, mindful of his grave responsibilities,
obtained explicit guarantees from the Germans that these treasures would
be left inviolate. By the terms of this agreement, confirmed by the
Vichy Ministry of Fine Arts, the Ghent altar was not to be moved without
the joint consent of the Director of the French National Museums, the
Mayor of Ghent and the German organization for the protection of French
monuments.
Notwithstanding this contract, the Director of the French National
Museums learned quite by accident in August 1942 that the altarpiece had
just been taken to Paris. Dr. Ernst Büchner, who was director of the
Bavarian State Museums, in company with three other German officers had
gone to Pau the day before with a truck and ordered the Director of the
Museum there to hand over the retable. A telegram from M. Bonnard, Vichy
Minister of Fine Arts, arriving simultaneously, reinforced Dr. Büchner’s
demands. Nothing was known of its destination or whereabouts, beyond the
fact that it had been taken to Paris.
There the matter rested until the summer of 1944. With the arrival of
Allied armies on French soil, reports of missing masterpieces were
received by our MFA&A officers. The Ghent altarpiece was among them.
But there were no clues as to where it had gone. Months passed and by
the time our troops had approached Germany, our Monuments officers, all
similarly briefed with photographs and other pertinent data concerning
stolen works of art, began to hear rumors about the _Lamb_. It might be
in the Rhine fortress of Ehrenbreitstein; perhaps it had been taken to
the Berghof at Berchtesgaden or possibly to Karinhall, Göring’s palatial
estate near Berlin. And then again it might have been flown out of the
country altogether—to one of the neutral countries, Spain or Switzerland.
Captain Posey and Private Lincoln Kirstein picked up additional rumors
from museum directors in Luxembourg. They had heard that the altarpiece
was in a salt mine, but they had also been told that it was in the
vaults of the Berlin Reichsbank. It was impossible to reconcile these
conflicting pieces of information. Finally, near Trier, Posey and
Kirstein tracked down a young German scholar who had been in France
during the occupation. Lincoln told me later that it was hard to believe
that this unassuming fellow had been high in the confidence of Göring and
other members of the Nazi inner circle. From him they learned that the
altarpiece had been taken to Alt Aussee.
Then followed the rapid advance across Germany. To Posey and Kirstein it
was a period of agonizing suspense. They couldn’t be sure that Third Army
would move into the area in which the mine lay. Just as their hopes began
to fade, occupancy of the cherished area did fall to Third Army. Tactical
troops were alerted to the importance of the isolated mountain region.
It was of no significance as a military objective and would doubtless
otherwise have been left unoccupied for the moment. They pressed forward
through Bad Ischl and the wild confusion of capitulating German troops to
the wilder confusion of surrendering SS units in the little village of
Alt Aussee itself. From there it was but a mile to the mine.
When they reached the mine, they found it heavily guarded by men of
the 80th Infantry Division, but the mine had been dynamited. It wasn’t
possible to go into the mine chambers. Armed with acetylene lamps, Posey
and Lincoln entered the main tunnel. They groped their way along the damp
passageway for a distance of a quarter of a mile or more before they
reached the debris of the first block. After assessing the damage they
returned to consult the Austrian mineworkers. The miners said it would
take from ten days to two weeks to clear the passageway. Captain Posey
thought that the Army Engineers could do it in less than a week, perhaps
in two or three days. Both were wrong. They entered the first mine
chamber the next day.
And now, here before us, stood the fabulous panels which they had found
on that May morning a few weeks before. While we examined them, Sieber
pieced out the one gap in the story of the altarpiece: the Nazis had
taken it from Paris to the Castle of Neuschwanstein where a restorer from
Munich worked on the blisters which had developed on some of the panels.
The altarpiece remained at the castle for two years. It was brought to
the mine in the summer of 1944. Pieces of waxed paper were still affixed
to the surface of the panels, on the places where the blisters had been
laid. The big panel representing St. John had split lengthwise with the
grain of wood. This had happened at the mine. Sieber had repaired it,
and George said he had done a good job. As we were leaving the Mineral
Kabinett, Sieber asked me if Andrew Mellon really had offered ten million
dollars for the altarpiece. People had said so in Berlin. I hated to tell
him that the story was without foundation, so far as I knew.
When we came out of the mine at noon we found that Steve and Shrady had
finished loading two trucks. They said they had enough pictures left
to fill two more. The afternoon crew would be coming on at four. In
the meantime it was up to Lamont and me to select at least two hundred
paintings, so that the loading could go on without interruption.
After lunch we returned to the mine with Sieber. This time the trip on
the train was much longer. Our objective was a part of the mine called
the Springerwerke. Owing to the peculiar honeycomb structure of the mine
network, it had been necessary to establish guard posts at intervals
along the tunnels. One of these was at the entrance to the Springerwerke.
Two GIs were on duty. It was a dismal assignment as well as a cold one.
They were bundled up in fleece-lined coats which had been made for German
troops on the Russian front. George and Steve had obtained about two
hundred of these coats and were using them for packing unframed pictures.
Each time a convoy of empty trucks returned from Munich, they counted the
coats carefully to make sure that none had disappeared.
The Springerwerke contained more than two thousand paintings. They were
arranged in two tiers around three sides and down the center of a room
fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. In one section we found thirty
or forty Italian paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
from the well known Lanz Collection of Amsterdam. Next to them we came
upon the group of canvases, which the Germans in their greedy haste had
filched from Bruges when they had made off with the Michelangelo Madonna.
Aside from these two lots, the pictures had been stored according to
size rather than by provenance. It was a bewildering assortment. Quality
was to be our guide in making this initial selection. And as a kind
of corollary, we were to set aside for shipment all pictures bearing
the infamous “E.R.R.” stencil—the initials of the Rosenberg looting
organization. We had Sieber and four of the gnomes to help. Sieber stood
by with list and flashlight. Two of the gnomes hauled out the pictures
for us to examine. The other two put protective pads of paper filled with
excelsior across the corners of the ones chosen.
By the end of the afternoon we had picked out between a hundred and
fifty and two hundred paintings. The crew which had come on at four had
already gone up with one trainload. We took stock of the lot waiting
to go. We hadn’t done so badly: our selection included works of Hals,
Breughel, Titian, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Rubens, Van Dyck, Lancret,
Nattier, Reynolds, and a raft of smaller examples of the seventeenth
century Dutch school. Not a dud among them, we agreed smugly.
Before we knocked off for supper, Sieber showed us an adjoining room
divided into small compartments. Each one contained a miscellaneous
assortment of art objects—pictures, porcelain, bric-a-brac of various
kinds. Each compartment bore a label with the name of a different family,
fifteen or twenty in all. They were the pilfered possessions of Viennese
Jewish families. Our feelings were of both pathos and disgust. After
working with the fruits of looting on a grand scale, we found these
trifles sordid evidences of greedy persecution.
Lamont and I spent the next two days in the Springerwerke. We worked
nights as well. It was a molelike existence. On the third morning we
transferred our base of operations to the Kammergrafen, the largest of
the mine caverns and the most remote. It was three-quarters of a mile
from the mine entrance. Whereas the other mine chambers were on one
level, the great galleries of the Kammergrafen were on several. Beyond
those in which floors had been laid, there were vast unlighted caves of
echoing blackness.
The galleries were so high that those on the first level could
accommodate three tiers of pictures between floor and ceiling, while
those on the second had four tiers.
The records listed _six thousand pictures_. In addition there were
quantities of sculpture, hundreds of examples of the very finest
eighteenth century French cabinetwork, tapestries and rugs, and the books
and manuscripts of the Biblioteca Herziana in Rome—one of the greatest
historical libraries in the world. Kammergrafen was quality and quantity
combined, for here had been stored the collections for Linz.
Among the pictures, for example, were canvases from the Rothschild,
Gutmann and Mannheimer collections, the celebrated tempera panels of the
fourteenth century Hohenfurth altarpiece, Rembrandts and other great
Dutch masters from the stock of Goudstikker, who had been the Duveen of
Amsterdam, a collection of French pictures known as the “Sammlung Berta,”
and hundreds of nineteenth century German paintings, these last the
objects of Hitler’s special veneration.
The sculpture ranged from ancient to modern, with notable emphasis on
examples of the Gothic period. There were Egyptian tomb figures, Roman
portrait busts, Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, exquisite French marbles
of the eighteenth century and delicate Tanagra figurines. A bewildering
hodgepodge of the plastic arts.
There were tapestries from Cracow, furniture from the Castle at Posen,
rows of inlaid tables and cabinets from the Vienna Rothschilds, shelves
and cases filled with the finest porcelains, prints and drawings of the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the decorations from
the Reichskanzlei in Berlin, and Hitler’s own purchases from the annual
exhibitions of German art in Munich. Such was the Kammergrafen treasure.
And the best of it, as I have said before, was to have adorned the
galleries of the unbuilt Führer Museum at Linz, the city by the Danube
which Hitler aspired to raise to the dignity of Vienna.
The rarest treasure of that collection was the celebrated Vermeer
_Portrait of the Artist in His Studio_. This superb work of the
seventeenth Dutch master, by whom there are only some forty unquestioned
examples in the world, had been for years in the collection of Count
Czernin at Vienna. The collection was semipublic; I had visited it before
the war. Known simply as the “Czernin Vermeer,” the picture had long been
coveted by the great collectors. It had remained for Hitler to succeed
where others had failed: he acquired this masterpiece in 1940 for an
alleged price of one million, four hundred thousand Reichsmarks—part
of his earnings from the sale of _Mein Kampf_. He boasted at the time
that Mr. Mellon had offered six million dollars for it. Whether the
sale was made under duress is still a matter of controversy. Members of
the Czernin family today contend that it was. The picture has now been
returned to Vienna where the matter will be ultimately decided.
Rivaling the Vermeer in international significance were the fifteen
cases of paintings and sculpture from Monte Cassino. The paintings
included Titian’s _Danaë_, Raphael’s _Madonna of the Divine Love_, Peter
Breughel’s _Blind Leading the Blind_, a _Crucifixion_ by Van Dyck, an
_Annunciation_ by Filippino Lippi, a _Sacra Conversazione_ by Palma
Vecchio, a _Landscape_ by Claude Lorraine, and Sebastiano del Piombo’s
_Portrait of Pope Clement VII_. Among the sculpture were antique bronzes
of the greatest rarity and importance from Herculaneum and Pompeii. All
had belonged to the Naples Museum. In 1943 the Italians had placed them,
together with one hundred and seventy-two other cases of objects from
the Naples Museum, in the Abbey of Monte Cassino for safekeeping. The
following January, arrangements were made for all of the cases to be
returned to the Vatican. When they arrived, fifteen were missing. Members
of the Hermann Göring Division had carried them off as a birthday gift
for the Reichsmarschall. Göring was incensed, when he learned of the
arrival of these treasures, and refused to accept them. There is reason
to believe that such was his reaction, for he had striven to maintain
a semblance of legality in his art transactions. Even this rapacious
collector could not have interpreted the behavior of his loyal officers
as “correct,” so far as the Monte Cassino affair was concerned. After the
Reichsmarschall’s refusal of the cases, they were brought to Alt Aussee
for storage, pending their later return to Italy.
The Springerwerke had been child’s play compared with the task
confronting us in the Kammergrafen. We began arbitrarily with the big
pictures. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Van Dyck, Rubens, Rembrandt—all
were represented in profusion. Many of them were from private collections
in Holland, Belgium and France, and were unknown to us save through
reproduction. It was a great lesson in connoisseurship, particularly when
we had exhausted the “stars” and come to the lesser masters. The Dutch
school of the seventeenth century was abundantly represented. There were
scores, hundreds, of still lifes and flower paintings. My predilection
for them amused Lamont and Sieber. I had always admired these incredibly
deft creations of the seventeenth century Dutch artists, and here was an
unparalleled opportunity to study them.
There was one peculiar thing about our selections: if a picture looked
good to us down in the mine, it invariably looked better when we examined
it later in the light of day at the mine entrance. This happened time
and again. I remember one instance in particular. The painting was a
large Rembrandt, a study of two dead peacocks. Down in the mine we had
looked at it without much enthusiasm, though we admired it, and had even
hesitated to include it in that first selection, which was to number only
the best of the best. The next morning, as it was being loaded onto the
truck, we were struck by its distinction.
And I remember the next time I saw that picture: it was at the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was included in the small group of
outstanding Dutch masterpieces returned to Holland by special plane as a
gesture of token restitution in the name of General Eisenhower!
Lamont and I liked Sieber, the German restorer. Lamont referred to him as
the “tragic Gilles in white.” Not that there was anything particularly
tragic about him, any more than there was about the plight in which most
Nazis found themselves. He made no bones about having joined the Party
in the early thirties—ironically enough at the suggestion of one of his
clients, a Jewish art dealer, who had thought it would be a good thing
for Sieber’s business. Sieber had been a restorer of pictures in Berlin
and had done a little dealing on the side. It was the half-mournful
expression he perpetually wore, together with his white costume, that
accounted for Lamont’s appellation. George had described him as a good,
run-of-the-mill restorer, perhaps a little better than average. He
had sized him up as a man ninety-eight per cent preoccupied with his
profession and possibly two per cent concerned with politics. And George,
as I think I have observed before, was a good judge of men. Sieber was
a quiet, willing worker. He was neither fawning on the one hand, nor
arrogant on the other. When you asked him a question, you always got a
considered answer.
One evening we drew Sieber out on the subject of the attempted
destruction of the mine. We had heard several versions of this fantastic
plot and, according to one, Sieber had been instrumental in foiling
the conspirators. The story was as follows: On the tenth, thirteenth
and thirtieth of April 1945, Glinz, the Gauinspektor of Ober-Donau,
had come to the mine with eight great cases marked in black letters
“_Marmor—Nicht stürzen_,” that is, “Marble—Don’t drop.” He was acting on
explicit instructions from Eigruber, Gauleiter of the region, to place
them at strategic positions in the mine tunnels. Each case contained a
hundred-pound bomb. Had these bombs been detonated, the entire contents
of the mine would have been destroyed. The resulting cave-ins would have
blocked every means of access. It would have taken months to repair the
apparatus which carried off the water seeping constantly into the mine
chambers. By that time the treasures they contained would have been
completely ruined. It is generally agreed that Eigruber had obtained
Hitler’s tacit consent to this artistic Götterdämmerung, if not his
actual approval of it.
I learned later that Captain Posey found a letter from Martin Bormann,
Hitler’s deputy, stating in the first paragraph that the contents of
the mine must, at all costs, be kept from falling into the hands of the
enemy. And then the second paragraph stated that the contents of the mine
must not be harmed.
Members of the Austrian resistance movement got wind of this diabolical
plan and took Sieber into their confidence. His intimate knowledge of
the mine passageways enabled him to set off small charges of dynamite
here and there along the tunnels without endangering the contents of the
chambers beyond. The resulting damage was slight and served a twofold
purpose: it gave the impression that the mine had been permanently
walled up; and, if that ruse were discovered, immediate access to the
art works themselves was denied the plotters. Eigruber did discover
that his attempt had been thwarted and in his rage gave orders for the
counterconspirators to be rounded up and shot. But by that time it was
the seventh of May, so the tragedy was mercifully averted.
Sieber told the story in a straightforward, factual way. I don’t think
it mattered to him who got control of the mine, but it was simply
unthinkable that any harm should come to the precious things it housed.
It was very much to his credit that he never capitalized on the part he
played in this affair. The only other reference he made to it was when he
later showed us the places where he had set off the charges of dynamite.
During all the time we were at the mine, Sieber made only one request
of us. It came at the very end of our stay and was reasonable enough:
he asked if we could expedite his return to Germany. There seemed to be
little prospect of regular employment for him in Austria, but that was of
less concern to him than the welfare of his wife and young daughter who
lived with him in a house near the mine. Some months later, one of our
officers tried to get him a job in Wiesbaden, but he was not acceptable
to the Military Government authorities there because of his political
affiliations. The last I heard of him, he and his family were still at
Alt Aussee, waiting for permission to go back to Germany. I hope they
finally got it.
Our concentrated efforts underground produced the desired results.
Pictures were coming out of the mine at such a prodigious rate that
George called a halt. Enough of a backlog had been accumulated to make
further selection down in the mine unnecessary for a couple of days.
Lamont and I had better help with the actual loading.
Loading a truck was a specialized operation, and George had perfected the
technique. Lamont, Steve and Shrady were his pupils. That left me the
only neophyte. So far I had had experience only with the loading of cases
and heavier objects such as furniture and sculpture.
Packing pictures, especially unframed ones—and there were a great many of
the latter at Alt Aussee—was an altogether different problem. The first
step was to place a length of waterproof paper over the side bars of the
truck and spread it smoothly on the floor to the center of the truck bed.
For this we had a large supply of stout, green, clothlike paper which
had been used by the Wehrmacht as protection against gas attacks. Then
a strip of felt was laid over the paper. The third step was to place
“sausages” in two rows, end to end, on the floor of the truck. The space
between the rows would depend on the size of the pictures to be loaded,
for they were intended to cushion the shock as the trucks rumbled along
over bumpy roads. The “sausages” had been George’s invention. Packing
materials of all kinds were at a premium, and certain types just didn’t
exist. To make up for the lack of the usual packer’s pads, George had
improvised this substitute. In one of the mine chambers he had found a
large supply of ordinary curtain material of machine-made ecru lace. This
had been cut up into yard lengths, eighteen inches wide. When rolled
around a central core of coarser cloth, or sometimes excelsior, and tied
with string, they were a very satisfactory “ersatz” product. We used to
refer to them augustly as the pads made from Hitler’s window curtains.
Their manufacture was periodically one of the major industries at the
mine. George had trained a crew of the gnomes and they loved to turn them
out. It was easy work. Seated at long benches they resembled a kind of
Alpine “husking bee.”
Once the paper, felt and “sausages” were in place, the pictures could
be brought to the truck. One after another they were placed in a stack
leading from the sideboards of the truck to the center. Pads and small
blankets were inserted between them to prevent rubbing. To ensure safe
packing, all the pictures in a given row had to be carefully selected as
to size, ranging from large to medium in one, and from medium to small
in another. That was the most tedious part of the entire operation.
As soon as a row had been “built,” it required only a few minutes to
bring first the felt and then the green paper over the top of the row,
tuck both down along the sides, and then lash the whole stack firmly
to the side of the truck. By this method it was possible to load as
many as a hundred and fifty medium-sized canvases on a single truck,
for three rows of twenty-five each could be built up on either side of
our big two-and-a-half-ton trucks. A truck loaded in this way could
often accommodate several pieces of sculpture as well. Carefully padded
and swathed in blankets, these could be placed down the center. The
final step was to adjust the tarpaulin over the bows and to close the
tailboard. A truck of the size we used could normally be loaded in two
hours.
We were at the mercy of the weather, as far as loading was concerned. On
rainy days we could work on only one truck at a time, because there was
but one doorway with a protective stoop under which a single truck could
park. Taking advantage of the sunny mornings, we would divide up into two
teams—George and Steve on one truck, Lamont and I on another. As soon
as a truck was filled and the tarpaulin securely fastened down, it was
driven to one side of the narrow terrace in front of the building. The
average convoy consisted of six trucks.
We had a crew of eighteen Negro drivers. Barboza, the C.O., was a very
starchy lieutenant, Jamaica born. He and his men were billeted down in
the little town of Bad Aussee. They were magnificent drivers but a bit
reckless. Their occasional disregard for their vehicles was a worry to
George. It would have been so with any drivers, I guess. A breakdown on
the steep mountain roads could be a serious matter. It meant the complete
disruption of the convoy schedule, involving reloading en route. To
provide for this contingency, we made a practice of loading the trucks
to three-quarters of their capacity. The contents of a single truck could
thus be absorbed by the others.