and we didn’t feel like doing any more work. Steve had gone up to the
darkroom to see Kress. Lamont said, “Let’s go up to Munich.”
“That suits me, but what excuse have we got?” I asked.
“If we must have an excuse, I can think of at least four,” he said
thoughtfully. “We’re out of cigarettes and candy. We ought to be on hand
when they unpack the sculpture at the Collecting Point. We’ve worked for
a week without taking a day off. And perhaps there’ll be some mail for us
at Posey’s office.”
“What about the little brown bear? Do you think he’ll mind our taking
off?” I asked. This was Lamont’s name for Steve, but it was never used
when he was within earshot.
“Steve’s had his trip for this week,” said Lamont, meaning Steve’s trip
to Alt Aussee.
Sergeant Peck, who had overheard part of our conversation, asked if he
might join us. We told him to be ready in ten minutes and went off to
notify Steve of our plans and to pack up our musette bags. Steve was
so busy helping Kress with his developing that he scarcely paid any
attention to us. After leaving him a final injunction to have at least
three trucks loaded before we got back the next evening, we called for
the command car. The driver, a restless redhead named Freedberg, who
hated the monotonous routine at Berchtesgaden, was delighted with the
idea of going to Munich. Sergeant Peck appeared and we set off.
We chose the shorter road through the mountains and overtook the convoy
on the Autobahn, halfway to Munich. The front escort jeep was holding
the speed down to thirty-five miles an hour, in accordance with my
instructions. The driver waved envyingly as we passed them doing fifty.
Twenty miles from Munich, Freedberg turned west off the Autobahn and took
the back road from Bad Tölz, a short cut which brought us directly to
Third Army Headquarters.
We arrived at Captain Posey’s office just as Lincoln Kirstein was leaving
for chow. He told us that the captain had gone to Pilsen the middle of
the week but was due back that evening. “There’s quite a lot of mail for
both of you,” Lincoln said. He handed us each a thick batch of letters.
It was the first mail I had received from home in six weeks. There were
forty-two letters!
“I told you there’d be mail for us,” said Lamont with a satisfied smile.
We had supper with Craig Smyth and Ham Coulter at the Detachment that
evening. Craig said that the convoy had not arrived before he left the
Collecting Point, but two of his German workmen were to be on duty the
next morning, even though it was Sunday. We arranged to meet him at his
office and supervise the unloading. Lincoln had said that Posey would not
be back before ten, so we spent the evening with Craig and Ham at their
apartment.
Just before we returned to Third Army Headquarters, Ham gave us a small
paper-bound volume. It was entitled _The Ludwigs of Bavaria_. The author
was Henry Channon.
“This is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read,” Ham said.
“You might take it along with you.”
I thanked him, and stuck it in my musette bag. Before our operations
in Bavaria ended two months later, that little book had come to mean
a great deal to the members of the evacuation team. We called it our
“Bavarian bible.” So alluring were Channon’s descriptions of the
“Seven Wonders of Bavaria” that whenever we had a free day—or even
a few hours to ourselves—we made excursions to these architectural
fantasies: the swirling, baroque churches of Wies, Weltenburg,
Ottobeuren and Vierzehnheiligen; the Amalienburg and the palace of
Herrenchiemsee. The Residenz at Würzburg, which we had seen, was one
of the seven. Unofficially we added an eighth to the list: Schloss
Linderhof, Ludwig II’s opulent little palace near Oberammergau—ornate and
vulgar, yet fascinating in its lonely mountain setting. But these were
extracurricular activities, falling outside the orbit of our official
work.
We found Captain Posey at his office when we got there a few minutes
before ten that evening. He asked us for a complete account of our
operations at Berchtesgaden. We reported that we had sent a total of
fourteen truckloads up to Munich the first week; that we had cleaned
out half the pictures, but that we had just begun on the sculpture. We
estimated that it would take us another ten days to finish; we would
probably fill seventeen or eighteen more trucks.
We asked him what plans he would have for us when we completed the job.
He said he might send us to the Castle of Neuschwanstein. The place
was full of things looted from Paris. In fact, it was one of the major
repositories of the _Einsatzstab Rosenberg_. The French were clamoring to
have it evacuated. Then there was another big repository in a Carthusian
monastery at Buxheim. That too contained loot from Paris. Perhaps we
could take a run down to both places and size up the jobs after we had
finished with the Göring things. The captain was tired after his long
trip, so we didn’t go into details about either of the two prospective
assignments. He offered us a billet for the night and the three of us
turned in shortly after eleven. It was none too soon for me: I still had
forty-two unopened letters from home in the pocket of my jacket.
When we arrived at the Collecting Point the next morning, the two German
workmen who had been with me at Hohenfurth were starting to unpack the
truck with the sculpture. Lamont and I examined each statue as it was
lifted from its nest of excelsior. All twenty-nine had come through
without a scratch. Our experiment was a success. We would be able to
use the same technique with the rest of the sculpture. I instructed the
workmen to leave all of the excelsior in the truck, as we had none to
spare.
I persuaded Craig to drive back to Berchtesgaden with us for the
night. He looked tired and I thought the change would do him good. His
responsibilities at the Collecting Point—the “Bau,” as we called it (our
abbreviation for Verwaltungsbau)—were heavy; and he never took a day off.
On the return trip he told us his latest troubles. Only three days ago a
small bomb had exploded in the basement of the “Bau.” It had blown one
of the young German workmen to bits. Craig gave all the grisly details,
which included discovering one of the poor fellow’s arms in a heap of
debris fifty feet from the scene of the explosion. The tragedy had had
one beneficial result. For weeks Craig had been harping on the subject of
additional guards for the Collecting Point. His words had fallen on deaf
ears—until the bomb episode. He said that a general and three colonels
arrived at the building within half an hour. Since then everyone had
been so “security-conscious” that he had had no further difficulty in
obtaining the desired number of guards. The Bomb Disposal Unit inspected
the premises and some pointed comments were made about the thoroughness
of the original survey.
In our absence Steve had loaded three trucks. As a reward for his
labors, I suggested that he take Craig up to the Eagle’s Nest the
following morning. While they were gone, Lamont and I finished three
more loads. We had the convoy of six lined up by noon. Craig returned
to Munich in one of the escort jeeps. This fifth convoy contained
one hundred and sixty-seven paintings, one hundred and six pieces
of sculpture, twenty-five tapestries, sixty-eight cases filled with
bibelots, and fifty-three pieces of furniture. It was our largest convoy
out of Berchtesgaden thus far.
It was also the first one to break down. Late in the afternoon, the rear
escort jeep arrived at the rest house with word that two of the trucks
had broken down fifteen miles out of Berchtesgaden. Steve and I drove
to Berchtesgaden to arrange to have them towed in for reloading. I also
wanted to do a little investigating. There could be little excuse for
breakdowns on the Munich road if the trucks had been in good mechanical
condition when they started out.
On the way into town, Steve said, “Tom, I think I know what caused the
trouble. I didn’t think of it till just now. But the other day on the
road back from Alt Aussee, two six-by-sixes passed me at a hell of a
clip. I thought I recognized the drivers as two of ours.”
I questioned the lieutenant in charge of the drivers. He professed
ignorance of any unauthorized junkets back to Alt Aussee.
“I am going to have a word with Tiny,” said Steve as we left the
lieutenant’s room. Tiny was the head mechanic and the only one of the
entire crew who was always on the job. Steve wanted to talk to him alone,
so I waited in the car.
A few minutes later he came back with a satisfied grin on his face. “I
got the whole story,” he said. “The drivers have been racing back and
forth to Alt Aussee all the time we’ve been here. They were crazy about
it up at the mine. Tiny says they hate it here at Berchtesgaden.”
“Well, we’ll fix that,” I said. I went back to see the lieutenant. “How
many drivers have you got and how many trucks?” I asked.
“Sixteen drivers and thirteen trucks,” he said.
“Send eight of the drivers and five of the trucks up to Munich first
thing in the morning and have them report to the trucking company. We can
finish the job here without them.”
Steve always sang when he was in a particularly happy frame of mind. That
evening, on the way back to the rest house, he was in exceptionally good
voice.
Five days later we completed the evacuation of the Göring collection.
The last two convoys, of four and seven trucks respectively, contained
the larger pictures, one hundred and seventy-seven of them; sixty
pieces of sculpture, twenty miscellaneous cases, sixty-seven pieces
of furniture and two hundred empty picture frames. We had heavy rain
that last week and the mud was ankle-deep around the loading platform.
Although it was early August, the nights were cold and the rest house,
emptied of its treasures, was a cheerless place. We were glad to see
the last of the trucks pull out of the drive. It had been a strenuous
operation—thirty-one truckloads in thirteen days. In the early afternoon
we would collect our personal belongings and return to Munich.
(8)
_LOOTERS’ CASTLE: SCHLOSS NEUSCHWANSTEIN_
A telephone call from Brigade Headquarters changed our plans. It was
Major Luther Miller of G-2. He had just made an inspection of a house
belonging to one of Göring’s henchmen and there was a lot of “art stuff”
in it. He had reported the find to Third Army Headquarters and Captain
Posey had told him to get in touch with me. Could I go up to the house
with him that afternoon?
Major Miller picked me up after lunch. He was a handsome fellow, tall
and sparely built. He had an easy, pleasant manner. As we drove along
he gave me further details about the house to which we were going. It
had been occupied until the day before by Fritz Görnnert and his wife.
Görnnert had been the social secretary and close confidant of Göring. The
Görnnerts had been living on the second and third floors. They shared the
house with a man named Angerer, who had the first floor. Both Görnnert
and Angerer had been apprehended and were now in jail. Major Miller had
found a suspiciously large number of tapestries and other art objects on
the premises. He thought they might be loot.
The house was an unpretentious villa hidden among pine trees high up
in the hills above the town. The place was under guard. On the ground
floor we examined the contents of a small store-room. There were several
cases bearing Angerer’s name and three or four large crates containing
Italian furniture. A similar store-room on the second floor contained a
dozen tapestries, a pile of Oriental rugs, a large collection of church
vestments and nearly a hundred rare textiles mounted on cardboard. I
noticed that the tapestries, vestments and textiles were individually
tagged and that the markings were in French.
Concealed beneath the tapestries were ten cases, each one about two feet
square and a foot high. Major Miller hadn’t seen these before. On each
one was stenciled in Gothic letters: “Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.”
They contained a magnificent collection of Oriental weapons.
In a room which Görnnert had apparently used for a study we found six
handsome leather portfolios filled with Old Master drawings. The drawings
were by Dutch and French artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
There was a possibility that all of these things, with the exception of
the weapon collection, which Göring had probably entrusted to Görnnert,
were the legitimate property of the tenants. It was equally possible
that they had been illegally acquired. In the circumstances, Major
Miller wished me to take charge of them. I said that I could take them
to the Central Collecting Point at Munich where they would be held in
safekeeping until ownership had been determined.
The house had been thoroughly ransacked. Drawers had been pulled out and
their contents disarranged. Closet doors stood open and the clothing
on the hangers had been gone over. The beds were rumpled, for even the
mattresses had been searched. Despite the topsy-turvy look of things,
there was no evidence of wanton destruction. The search had been thorough
and methodical. I asked the major what his men had been looking for, but
his answer was noncommittal. He did say, though, that the discovery of
documents hidden in a false partition in the living room had prompted the
search.
The following morning Steve, Lamont and I went to the Görnnert house in
the command car. It would have been difficult to take a large truck up
the narrow winding road. In any case, I thought we could probably load
all of the stuff in the command car. Major Miller had sent one of his
officers ahead with the key. The house had been searched again. This time
it looked as though a cyclone had struck it. Pillows had been ripped
open; drawers had been emptied on the floor; clothes were scattered all
over the bedrooms. I was relieved to find that the things which we had
come to take away had not been tampered with. I asked the lieutenant with
the key what had been going on in the house, and he muttered something
about “those CIC boys.” I seemed to have touched on a sore subject,
so I didn’t pursue the matter. Lamont, who knew the ways of the Army
far better than I, said that probably there had been a “jurisdictional
dispute” over who had the right to search the place and that perhaps two
different outfits had taken a crack at it. I was glad that Major Miller’s
emissary was there to bear witness to _our_ behavior.
We bundled up the rugs, tapestries and textiles and got out as quickly
as possible. They completely filled the command car. Lamont and Steve
sat in front with the driver. I wedged myself in between the top of the
pile and the canvas top of the car. There was no room for the ten cases
of weapons, so I sent a message to Major Miller to have one of his men
deliver them to us later in the day.
When we got back to the rest house, Kress had dismantled his darkroom
and after lunch we loaded the photographic equipment onto the one truck
we had held over for that purpose. There was ample space for the things
from the Görnnert house. Before packing them we had to make a complete
list of the items. There were two hundred and thirteen church vestments,
eighty-one mounted textiles, twenty rugs and eleven tapestries. It was
suppertime when we finished. As the ten cases of weapons hadn’t arrived,
we decided to wait till morning and load everything at once.
That evening Major Anderson of the 101st Airborne came over with the
official receipt which I was to sign. It was an elaborate document
comprising Sergeant Peck’s seventy-page inventory and a covering letter
from the C.O. of the 101st Airborne Division to the Commanding General of
the Third Army stating that I had received from Major Anderson the entire
Göring collection for delivery to the Central Collecting Point at Munich.
Having discharged his responsibility, the major was free to go home to
the U.S.A. That called for a celebration and he had brought a bottle
of cognac. It was sixty years old. He said that it came from Hitler’s
private stock at the Berghof. Even Steve, who had harbored a slight
grudge toward Anderson since the night of our arrival in Berchtesgaden,
relented and the four of us toasted the successful evacuation of the
Göring treasures.
The major had another surprise for us: he had engaged a room at the
Berchtesgadener Hof. He insisted that the three of us move over from the
rest house. The next day was Sunday. What would be the point of going up
to Munich? We had been working hard for two weeks. Why not take life easy
for a day or two?
The Berchtesgadener Hof was a luxurious resort hotel. Its appointments
were modern and lavish. In the days of the Nazi regime, it had been
patronized by all visiting dignitaries, save the chosen few who had been
invited to stay at the Berghof or the small hotel at Obersalzberg. It
was now being used by the Army as a “leave hotel.” We had an enormous
double room with twin beds and a couch. We had our own private terrace.
The room faced south with a wonderful view of the mountains. We even had
a telephone which worked. I hadn’t seen such magnificence since the Royal
Monceau in Paris. There was a room for our driver on the top floor. The
final de luxe touch was the schedule of meal hours; breakfast wasn’t even
served until eight-thirty. It was hard to believe that we were in Germany.
We were awakened early by a call from Major Miller. He had another job
for me—two, in fact. They had been interrogating Görnnert and he had told
them that several pieces of valuable sculpture had been buried in the
grounds of his house. The major had located the spot and the things were
to be excavated before noon. Also he wanted me to go with him to inspect
a cache of pictures reported hidden in a forester’s house not far from
Berchtesgaden. I said I’d be ready in an hour.
The phone rang again. This time it was Captain Posey. Had we remembered
to pick up the pictures at St. Agatha? The ones Mussolini had given to
Hitler? No, we hadn’t. We were to be sure to attend to that before we
returned to Munich. Steve was cursing these early callers and Lamont was
shaking his head sadly. Our life of ease was getting off to a hell of a
poor start.
When Major Miller and I reached the Görnnert place, the Sergeant of the
Guard and one of his men were standing beside a hole in the ground some
twenty yards behind the house. The hole was about six feet square and
four feet deep. Four bundles wrapped in discolored newspaper lay on the
ground at the edge of the excavation. The first bundle I opened contained
a wood statue of the Madonna and Child, about eighteen inches high. It
had been an attractive example of the fifteenth century French school,
but moisture had seriously damaged the original polychromy and the wood
beneath was soft and pulpy. The next two bundles contained pieces of
similar workmanship, but they were not polychromed. One was a Madonna and
Child; the other a figure of St. Barbara. Although they were damp, the
wood had not disintegrated. The fourth package contained the prize of the
lot, an ivory figure of the Madonna and Child. It was a fine piece from
the hand of a French sculptor of the late fourteenth century. The ivory
was discolored but otherwise in good condition. I wrapped the statues in
fresh paper and put them in the car.
Our next objective was the little village of Hintersee, a few kilometers
west of Berchtesgaden. The forester’s house, a large chalet with
overhanging eaves, stood at the edge of a meadow several hundred yards
from the road. I explained the purpose of our visit to the young woman
in peasant dress who answered our knock. She took us to a room on the
second floor which was filled with unframed canvases stacked in neat
rows along the walls. They were the work of contemporary German painters
and, according to the young woman, had been the property of the local
Nazi organization. From my point of view, the trip had been a waste of
time. There wasn’t a looted picture in the lot. While I looked at the
paintings, Major Miller thumbed through a pile of books on a big table
in one corner of the room. Among them he found a volume called _Die
Polnische Grausamkeit_—_The Polish Atrocity_. A characteristic sample
of German propaganda, it was a compilation of “horror photographs”
illustrating the alleged inhuman treatment of Germans by the Poles. It
added a gruesome touch to our visit.
[Illustration: Removal of treasures from the castle of Neuschwanstein was
completed by Captain Adams and Captain de Brye.]
[Illustration: Neuschwanstein—Ludwig II’s fantastic castle in which the
Nazis stored looted art treasures from France.]
[Illustration: Neuschwanstein. Packing looted furniture for return to
France. The carpentry shop was set up in the castle kitchen. (Note the
large range in the foreground.)]
[Illustration: Neuschwanstein. Typical storage room in the castle. In
adjoining room Lieutenants Howe, Moore and Kovalyak packed 2,000 pieces
of gold and silver looted from M. David-Weill.]
When I got back to the hotel at noon I found messages from Steve and
Lamont. Steve had gone over to Unterstein to see about the repairs on
his Steyr truck, the one he and Kress had spent so much time on—fitting
it up as a mobile photographic unit. There was also some work to be done
on the Mercedes-Benz, which had been standing idle, concealed behind a
clump of bushes by the rest house, during our evacuation of the Göring
collection. Steve had been right about the car; Colonel Davitt at Alt
Aussee had not pressed his claim to it.
Lamont had taken off for St. Agatha in a truck borrowed from Brigade
Headquarters to pick up the Hitler-Mussolini pictures.
There was also a message brought down by courier from Captain Posey’s
office. It contained a list of three places in the vicinity of
Berchtesgaden which should be inspected on the chance that they contained
items from the Göring collection. One of them was the forester’s hut
at Hintersee which I had just seen. The other two were castles in
the neighborhood: Schloss Stauffeneck-Tiereck and Schloss Marzoll. I
asked Major Anderson at lunch what he knew about them. He had nothing
to contribute on the subject and said I’d probably draw a blank on
all three. After removing the Göring things from the train, he had
taken the precaution of publishing a notice to all residents of the
area instructing them to declare all art works in their possession.
He had done this as a means of recovering objects which might have
been sequestered by Göring’s agents and objects which might have been
surreptitiously removed from the train while it stood on the siding.
The results had been disappointing. Only about thirty pictures had been
turned in and none of them was in any way connected with Göring.
The major’s prediction was correct. Lamont, Steve and I visited the two
castles the next day. In addition to their own furnishings, Schloss
Stauffeneck-Tiereck and Schloss Marzoll contained only books from the
University of Munich. These fruitless researches took all day. It was
after five when we left Berchtesgaden.
It was raining when we reached Munich three hours later. Kress had no
place to stay and it took us an hour to locate a civilian agency which
provided billets for transients. The only thing they had to offer was a
room for one night in a ruined nunnery on the Mathilde-Strasse. It was a
gloomy place. There was no light and the windows were without glass. One
of the Sisters, candle in hand, led us along a dark corridor to a small
single room at the back. We followed with our flashlights. We gave Kress
a box of K rations and told him we’d come back for him in the morning.
Steve was of two minds about the place: on the one hand it wasn’t good
enough for Kress; on the other he was impressed by the compassion of
the Sisters in offering refuge to strangers. He wanted me to point out
to Kress the anomaly of his being given sanctuary by the Church. I
convinced him that my German wasn’t fluent enough. We thanked the Sister
and went off to find ourselves a billet. We decided on the Excelsior,
the hotel for transient officers. We were several miles from Third Army
Headquarters, whereas the hotel was only a few blocks away.