back to make sure the trucks were still following. He couldn’t count
them all, they were so strung out and the road was so winding. But we
had instructed the Negro lieutenant to give orders to his men to signal
the truck ahead in case of trouble, so we felt reasonably sure that
everything was in order. When we reached Fuschl See we stopped along the
lake shore to take count. One after another eight trucks pulled up. Five
were missing. Fifteen minutes passed and still no sign of the laggards.
Steve said not to worry, to give them another quarter of an hour.
The blue waters of the lake were inviting. Schiller might have composed
the opening lines of _Wilhelm Tell_ on this very spot. “Es lächelt der
See, er ladet zum Bade.” Steve and Lamont decided to have a swim. I
dipped my hand in the water; it was icy. While they swam I kept an eye
out for the missing vehicles. Presently two officers drove by in a jeep.
I hailed them and ask if they had seen our trucks. They had—about ten
miles back two trucks had gone off the road. They thought there had
been two or three others at the scene of the accident. Lamont and Steve
dressed quickly. Steve said he’d go on with the eight trucks and meet us
in Salzburg. Then Lamont and I started back toward Bad Ischl.
We hadn’t gone more than five miles when we came upon three of our
vehicles. We signaled them to pull over to the side of the road. At first
we couldn’t make out what the drivers were saying—all three talked at
once. We finally got the story. A driver had taken a curve too fast and
had lost control of his truck. The one behind had been following too
closely and had also crashed over the side. The first driver had got
pinned under his truck and they had had to amputate a finger before he
could be extricated. The lieutenant in charge had stayed behind to take
care of things. He had told them to try to catch up with the rest of
the convoy. By the time they had given us all the details, we realized
that they had been drinking. And we guessed that alcohol had also
had something to do with the truck going off the road. We would have
something to say to the lieutenant when he reached Berchtesgaden. He was
new on the job, having replaced Lieutenant Barboza only two days ago. We
were thankful that our precious packing materials had been put in two of
the trucks up ahead.
Steve was waiting for us in the Mozart Platz when we reached Salzburg an
hour and a half later with our three trucks in tow. He told the drivers
where they could get chow. The three of us went across the river to the
Gablerbräu, the small hotel for transients, for our own supper. The
Berchtesgaden operation hadn’t begun auspiciously.
Our troubles weren’t over. When we pulled into Berchtesgaden at eight
o’clock, we couldn’t find Major Anderson, so we had to fend for
ourselves. We managed to put the drivers up for the one night in a
barracks by the railway station before going on to Unterstein ourselves.
The lieutenant in charge of the drivers hadn’t turned up when we were
ready to go, so I left word that he was to report to me first thing the
next morning. While we three felt unhappy over the lack of billeting
arrangements for us, we were too tired to think much about it that night.
Bed was all that mattered. The officer on duty at the Unterstein rest
house said there was an empty room over the entrance hall which we could
use until we got permanent quarters. There were three bunks, so we moved
in.
By contrast, everything started off beautifully the following morning.
Major Anderson appeared as we were finishing breakfast.
His apologies were profuse and he did everything he could to make
amends. We declined his offer to obtain rooms for us at the elegant
Berchtesgadener Hof in town. We wanted to be on the spot. There was
plenty of room in the rest house where we would be working; and we could
mess with the half-dozen officers billeted in the adjacent barracks. The
major introduced us to Edward Peck, the sergeant, who had been working on
an inventory of the collection.
Together we made a tour of the premises. The paintings alone filled forty
rooms. Four rooms and a wide corridor at the end of the ground-floor
hall were jammed with sculpture. Still another room was piled high with
tapestries. Rugs filled two rooms adjoining the one with the tapestries.
Two more rooms were given over to empty frames, hundreds of them. There
was the “Gold Room” where the objects of great intrinsic value were
kept under lock and key. And there were three more rooms crammed with
barrels, boxes and trunks full of porcelain. One very large room was a
sea of books and magazines, eleven thousand altogether. A small chapel on
the premises was overflowing with fine Italian Renaissance furniture.
The preliminary survey was discouraging. Although the objects were
infinitely more accessible than those at the mine had been, this
advantage was largely offset by the fact that they were all loose and
would have to be packed individually. Even the porcelain in barrels would
have to be repacked.
Our first request was for a work party of twelve men—GIs, not PWs.
We suggested to the young C.O., Major Paul Miller, that he call for
volunteers. If possible, we wanted men who might prefer this kind of job
to guard duty or other routine work. They could start in on the books
while we mapped out our plan of attack on the rest of the things. Steve
went off with Major Miller to select the crew, and Lamont and I settled
down to discuss other problems with Major Anderson and Sergeant Peck.
It was the sergeant’s idea that the collection could be packed up one
room at a time. He had compiled his inventory with that thought in mind.
Unfortunately we couldn’t carry out the evacuation in that order. We
explained why his system wouldn’t work: paintings, for example, had to
be arranged according to size. Otherwise we couldn’t build loads that
would travel safely. Even if we could have packed the pictures as he
suggested—one room at a time—it would have meant the loss of valuable
truck space. We assured him that, in the long run, our plan was the
practical one. It did, however, involve considerable preliminary work.
The first job would be to assemble all of the pictures—and there were a
thousand of them—in a series of rooms on one floor of the building. As
the sergeant had not quite finished his lists, we agreed to devote our
energies to the books for the rest of the day. By morning he would have
his inventory completed. Then the pictures could be shifted.
Lamont and I wanted to know more about the collection. How did it get to
Berchtesgaden in the first place? Major Anderson was the man who could
answer our questions.
As the war ended, the French reached the town ahead of the Americans.
They had it to themselves for about three days and had raised hell
generally. Göring’s special train bearing the collection had reached
Berchtesgaden just ahead of the French. The collection, having been
removed from the Reichsmarschall’s place, Karinhall, outside Berlin,
was to have been stored in an enormous bunker by his hunting lodge up
the road. But there hadn’t been time. The men in charge of the train
got only a part of the things unloaded. Some of them were put in the
bunker, others in a villa near by. Most of the collection was left in the
nine cars of the train. The men had been more interested in unloading a
stock of champagne and whisky which had been brought along in two of the
compartments.
When the French entered the town, the train was standing on a siding not
far from the bunker. They may have made off with a few of the things, but
there were no apparent depredations. They peppered it along one side with
machine-gun fire. However, the damage had been relatively slight.
Then the French had cleared out and the train was, so to speak, dumped in
Major Anderson’s lap, since he was the Military Government Officer with
the 101st Airborne Division. Under his supervision, the collection had
been transferred from the train, from the bunker and from the villa, to
the rest house. Later he had been instrumental in having it set up as an
exhibition. The exhibition had been a great success—perhaps too great a
success. He meant that it had attracted so much attention that some of
the higher-ups began to worry about the security of the things. Finally
he had received orders that the show was to close and of course he had
complied at once.
He said that General Arnold had come to see the exhibition the day after
that. We asked if he had let him in. Well, what did we think? But he had
turned down a three-star general who had come along after hearing that
General Arnold had been admitted. The general, he said, was hopping mad.
The major’s most interesting experience in connection with the
collection was his visit with Frau Göring. He heard that some of the
best pictures were in her possession, so he took a run down to Zell am
See where she was staying in a Schloss belonging to a South American.
He found the castle; he found Emmy; and he found the pictures. There
were indeed some of the best pictures—fifteen priceless gems of the
fifteenth century Flemish school, from the celebrated Renders collection
of Brussels. Göring had bought the entire collection of about thirty
paintings. We knew that M. Renders was already pressing for the return
of his treasures, claiming that he had been forced to sell them to the
Reichsmarschall. But that was another story.
Frau Göring wept bitterly when the major took the pictures, protesting
that they were her personal property and not that of her husband. On the
same visit he had recovered another painting in the collection. Frau
Göring’s nurse handed over a canvas measuring about thirty inches square.
She said Göring had given it to her the last time she saw him. As he
placed the package in her hands he had said, “Guard this carefully. It is
of great value. If you should ever be in need, you can sell it, and you
will not want for anything the rest of your life.” The package contained
Göring’s Vermeer.
Major Anderson stayed for lunch. As we walked back from the mess, a
command car pulled up in front of the rest house. Bancel La Farge and a
man in civilian clothes climbed out. I hadn’t seen Bancel for two months.
He was a major now. The civilian with him was an old friend of mine, John
Walker, Chief Curator of the National Gallery at Washington and a special
adviser to the Roberts Commission. John had flown over to make a brief
inspection tour of MFA&A activities. Bancel was serving as his guide.
They were on their way to Salzburg and Alt Aussee.
Major Anderson proposed a trip to the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain
hide-out, suggesting that the visitors could look at the Göring pictures
that evening. Lamont and I said we had work to do, but we were easily
talked out of that.
You could see the Eagle’s Nest from the rest house. It was perched on top
of the highest peak of the great mountain range which rose sharply from
the pine forests across the valley. We crossed to the western side and
began a steep ascent. About a thousand feet above the floor of the valley
we came to Obersalzberg, once a select community of houses belonging
to the most exalted members of the Nazi hierarchy. In addition to the
Berghof, Hitler’s massive chalet, it included a luxurious hotel—the
Platter Hof—SS barracks, and week-end “cottages” for Göring and Martin
Bormann. The British bombed Obersalzberg in April 1945. The place was now
in ruins. The Berghof was still standing but gutted by fire and stripped
of all removable ornamentation by souvenir hunters.
We continued up the winding road carved from the solid rock, through
three tunnels, at length emerging onto a terraced turnaround, around,
five thousand feet above Berchtesgaden. The major told us that the road
had been built by slave labor. Three thousand men had worked on it for
almost three years.
[Illustration: _Portrait of a Young Girl_ by Chardin (_left_) and _Young
Girl with Chinese Figure_ by Fragonard (_right_) were acquired by Göring
from the confiscated Rothschild Collection of Paris. The paintings have
been returned to France.]
[Illustration: _Christ and the Adulteress_, the fraudulent Vermeer, for
which Göring exchanged 137 paintings of unquestioned authenticity.]
[Illustration: _Portrait of the Artist’s Sister_ by Rembrandt. One of the
five Rembrandts in the Göring Collection.]
The Eagle’s Nest was still four hundred feet above. From the turnaround
there were two means of access: an elevator and a footpath. The elevator
shaft, hewn out of the mountain itself, was another feat of engineering
skill. A broad archway of carved stone marked the entrance. Beside the
elevator stood a sign which read, “For Field Grade Officers Only”—that
is, majors and above.
“A sentiment worthy of the builder,” Lamont observed as we took to the
footpath.
On our steep climb we wondered what Steve would say to such
discrimination. We hadn’t long to wait. He made a trip to the Eagle’s
Nest a few days later. When stopped by the guard, he looked at him
defiantly and asked, “What do you take me for, a Nazi?” Steve rode up in
the elevator.
The Eagle’s Nest was devoid of architectural distinction. Built of cut
stone, it resembled a small fort, two stories high. From the huge,
octagonal room on the second floor—a room forty feet across, with windows
on five sides—one could look eastward into Austria, southward to Italy. A
mile below lay the green valleys and blue lakes of Bavaria. They used to
say that every time Hitler opened a window a cloud blew in. The severity
of the furnishings matched the bleakness of the exterior. An enormous
conference table occupied the center of the room. Before the stone
fireplace stood a mammoth sofa and two chairs. A smaller room adjoined
the main octagon at a lower level. The heavy carpet was frayed along one
side. The caretaker, pointing to the damage, said that in his frequent
frenzies Hitler used to gnaw the carpet, a habit which had earned him
the nickname of “_Der Teppich-Beisser_,” the rug-biter. Considering the
labor expended on this mountain eyrie, the place had been little used.
The same caretaker told us that Hitler had never stayed there overnight.
Daytime conferences had been held there occasionally, but that was all.
It was late when we got back to the rest house, so our guests postponed
their inspection of the Göring collection until the following morning.
That evening Lamont and I made a second and more thorough survey of the
rooms in which the paintings were stacked. We began with a room which
contained works of the Dutch, Flemish, German and French schools. The
inventory listed five Rembrandt portraits. One was the _Artist’s Sister_;
another was his son _Titus_; the third was his wife, _Saskia_; the fourth
was the portrait of a _Bearded Old Man_; and the fifth was the likeness
of a _Man with a Turban_.
We examined the backs of the pictures for markings which might give us
clues to previous ownership. Two of the portraits—those of Saskia and of
the artist’s sister—had belonged to Katz, one of the best known Dutch
dealers. I had been surprised to learn in Paris that Katz, a Jew, had
done business with the Nazis. But I was also told that only through
acceding to their demands for pictures had he been able to obtain permits
for his relatives to leave Holland. According to the information I
received, he had succeeded thereby in smuggling twenty-seven members of
his family into Switzerland. A revealing commentary on the extent and
quality of his paintings.
The portrait of Titus had been in the Van Pannwitz collection. Mme.
Catalina van Pannwitz, South American born, but a resident of the
Netherlands, I believe, had sold a large part of her collection to
Göring. Whether it had been a bona fide or a forced sale was said to be a
moot question.
Another important Dutch private collection, that of Ten Cate at Almelo,
had “contributed” the _Man with a Turban_. And the _Bearded Old Man_ had
been bought from the Swiss dealer, Wendland, who had agents in Paris. He
had allegedly discovered the painting in Marseilles.
These five pictures posed an interesting problem in restitution. To whom
should they be returned? Who were the rightful owners—as of the summer of
1945?
At the time we were beginning our work on the Göring collection, definite
plans for the restitution of works of art were being formulated by the
American Military Government. They were an important part of the general
restitution program then being planned by the Reparations, Deliveries
and Restitution Division of the U. S. Group Control Council. Pending the
implementation of the program, the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives
Section of U. S. Forces, European Theater, was the technical custodian of
all art works eventually to be restituted.
Bancel La Farge, who became Chief of the Section when SHAEF dissolved,
had outlined the plans to us on our way back from the Eagle’s Nest
that afternoon. There were two main categories of works of art slated
for prompt restitution to the overrun countries from which they had
been taken. The first included all art objects _easily identifiable as
loot_—the great Jewish collections and the property of other “enemies
of the state” which had been seized by the Nazis. The second embraced
all art works _not_ readily identifiable as loot, but for which some
compensation was known or believed to have been paid by the Nazis.
The actual restitution was to be made on a wholesale scale. Works
of art were to be returned _en bloc_ to the claimant nations, _not_
to individual claimants of those nations. To expedite this “mass
evacuation” country by country, properly qualified art representatives
would be invited to the American Occupied Zone, specifically to the
Central Collecting Point at Munich, where they could present their
claims. Once their claims were substantiated—either by documents in their
possession or by records at the Collecting Point—the representatives
would be responsible for the actual removal.
We asked Bancel how the various representatives were to be selected.
He explained that several of the overrun countries had set up special
Fine Arts Commissions. The one in France was called the _Commission de
Récupération Artistique_. The one in Holland had an unpronounceable
name, so it was known simply as “C.G.R.”—the initials stood for the name
translated into French, _Commission de Récupération Générale_. And the
one in Belgium had such a long name that he couldn’t remember it offhand.
Czechoslovakia, Poland and Greece would probably establish similar
committees before long. Each commission would choose a representative
and submit his name to the MFA&A Section for approval. Once the names
were approved and the necessary military clearances obtained, the
representatives could enter the American Zone, proceed to Munich and
start to work.
Bancel said that each representative would have to sign a receipt in
the name of his country before he could remove any works of art from
the Collecting Point. The receipt would release our government from all
further responsibility for the objects concerned—as of the time they left
the Collecting Point. Furthermore, it would contain a clause binding the
receiving nation to rectify any mistakes in restitution. For example, if
the Dutch representative inadvertently included a painting which later
turned out to be the property of a Belgian, then, by the provisions of
the receipt, Holland would be obligated to return that painting to
Belgium. The chief merit of this system of fine arts restitution lay
in the fact that it relieved American personnel of the heavy burden of
settling individual claims. From the point of view of our government,
this was an extremely important consideration because of the limited
number of men available for so formidable an undertaking. And from the
point of view of the receiving nations, the system had the advantage of
accelerating the recovery of their looted treasures.
In the room where Lamont and I had seen the Rembrandts, we found a pair
of panels by Boucher, the great French master of the eighteenth century.
Each represented an ardent youth making amorous advances to a coy and
but half-protesting maiden in a rustic setting. They were appropriately
entitled _Seduction_ and were said to have been painted for the boudoir
of Madame de Pompadour. According to the inventory, the panels had been
bought from Wendland, the dealer of Paris and Lucerne.
These slightly prurient canvases flanked one of the most beautiful
fifteenth century Flemish paintings I had ever seen, _The Mystic Marriage
of St. Catherine_ by Gerard David. The Madonna with the Child on her lap
was portrayed against a landscape background, St. Catherine kneeling at
her right, dressed in russet velvet. Round about were grouped five other
female saints, each richly gowned in a different color. It was not a
large composition, measuring only about twenty-five inches square, but
it possessed the dignity and monumentality of a great altarpiece. The
authenticity of its sentiment put to shame the facile virtuosity of the
two Bouchers which stood on either side.
The second room we visited that evening contained an equally
miscellaneous assortment of pictures. Here the canvases were even more
varied in size. A _Dutch Interior_ by Pieter de Hooch, a _View of the
Piazza San Marco_ by Canaletto, and two Courbet landscapes were lined
up along one wall. The de Hooch, an exceptionally fine example of the
work of this seventeenth century master, was listed in the inventory as
having belonged to Baron Édouard de Rothschild of Paris. The Courbets
were something of a rarity, as Göring had few French paintings of the
nineteenth century. One of the landscapes, a winter scene, was an
important work, signed and dated 1869. The inventory did not indicate
from whom it had been acquired. In one corner stood a full-length
portrait of the Duke of Richmond by Van Dyck. Our list stated that it
had come from the Katz collection. Beside it was a brilliant landscape
by Rubens. There were perhaps ten other pictures in the room, among them
several nondescript panels which appeared to be by an artist of the
fifteenth century Florentine school, a portrait by the sixteenth century
German master, Bernhard Strigel, a “fête champêtre” by Lancret, and two
or three seascapes of the seventeenth century Dutch school.
Lamont and I had been looking at this assemblage for some little time
before we noticed an unframed canvas standing on the washbasin by the
window. The upper edge of the picture leaned against the wall mirror at
an angle which made it difficult to get a good look at the composition
from where we stood. Closer inspection revealed the subject to be _Christ
and the Woman Taken in Adultery_. I studied it for a few minutes and was
still puzzled. Turning to Lamont I asked, “What do you make of this? I
can’t even place it as to school, let alone guess the artist.”
“Unless I am very much mistaken,” he said slowly, “that is the famous
Göring ‘Vermeer.’”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “Why, I could paint something which would look
more like a Vermeer than that.”
We consulted the inventory. Lamont was right. A few lines below the
listing of the Rubens landscape—a picture I had just been admiring in
another part of the room—appeared the entry “Vermeer, Jan ... ‘The
Adulteress’ ... Canvas, 90 cm. × 96 cm.” The subject coincided with that
of the picture on the washbasin. The measurements were identical.
I tried to visualize the picture properly framed, properly lighted and
hanging in a richly furnished room. But still I couldn’t conceive how
such trappings could blind one to the flat greens and blues, the lack
of subtlety in the modeling of the flesh tones, the absence of that
convincing rendering of the “total visual effect” which Vermeer had so
completely mastered.
“Who attributed this painting to Vermeer?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Lamont, “but it is related stylistically to the
‘Vermeer,’ in the Boymans Museum at Rotterdam, the _Christ at Emmaus_.”
So this was the painting Hofer was talking about; this was the painting
Göring had given the nurse. One of the notorious Van Meegeren fakes.
Lamont’s reference to the Boymans’ “Vermeer” called to mind the great
furor in the art world nearly a decade ago when that picture had turned
up in the art market.