got away with it so far. The Third Army regulation forbidding officers
to drive was strictly enforced. Perhaps my uniform baffled the MPs.
It consisted of a Navy cap with blue cover, a British battle jacket
with Navy shoulder boards, khaki trousers and black riding boots. It
was my personal opinion that the MPs mistook the shoulder bars for the
insignia of a Polish officer. The Poles, and the other liaison officers
as well, were allowed to drive their own cars. Steve used to pooh-pooh
my apprehensions about the MPs. “They’re a bunch of dumbheads,” he would
say. “I ought to know. I used to be one.” All the same, he didn’t do much
daytime driving around town.
Captain Posey had our next job lined up for us. We were to evacuate
the records of the _Einsatzstab Rosenberg_—the German art-looting
organization—from Neuschwanstein Castle. The job would include the
removal of part of the stolen art treasures also. The captain told us
that the castle contained a great quantity of uncrated objects, mostly
gold and silver. They presented a serious security problem and it wasn’t
safe to leave them there indefinitely. Even though the French were
anxious to get everything back from Neuschwanstein, for the present they
would have to be content with the gold and the silver objects and as many
of the smaller cases as we could handle. It would be more practicable
to ship the larger things—furniture, sculpture and pictures—direct to
France by rail. This possibility was being investigated. It would save
moving the things twice—first from Neuschwanstein to Munich, and then
from Munich to Paris. But the records were badly needed at the Collecting
Point in connection with the identification of the plunder stored there.
So we were to concentrate on them and on the objects of great intrinsic
value.
It was going to take three or four days to line up the trucks necessary
for this operation. There was a critical shortage of transportation
at the moment because all available vehicles were being used to haul
firewood. This was popularly known as “Patton’s pet project.” For some
weeks it had first priority after foodstuffs.
We welcomed the delay, for it gave us time to make a trip to Frankfurt.
All three of us had urgent business to attend to there. Lamont’s and
Steve’s records had to be straightened out. Both of them had been
working in the field for so long that the headquarters to which they
were technically assigned had lost track of them. And I wanted to find
out what had happened to the personal belongings I had left in Frankfurt
months ago. When I left I had expected to be gone ten days.
In the back of our minds, too, lurked the hope of becoming “incorporated”
as a Special Evacuation Team. That’s what we were in fact, but we wanted
to be recognized as such in name. The three of us worked well together
and did not want to be separated. The decision would rest with Major La
Farge and Lieutenant Kuhn.
We wheedled a command car out of the sergeant at the motor pool and took
off late in the afternoon. Lamont, Steve and I rode in the Mercedes-Benz,
the command car following. I had little confidence in our rakish
convertible. The car had been behaving well enough mechanically, but the
tires were paper-thin. They were an odd size and we had not been able to
get any replacements. It was reassuring to know that the sturdy command
car was trailing along behind.
We arrived at Ulm in time for supper. Long before we reached the city,
we could see the soaring single spire of the cathedral silhouetted
against the sky. There was literally nothing left of the old city. All
the medieval houses which, with the cathedral, had made it one of the
most picturesque cities in Germany, lay in ruins. But the cathedral was
undamaged.
We stopped for gas just outside Ulm. To our surprise, the Army attendant
filled our tanks. This was Seventh Army territory. In Third Army area the
maximum was five gallons. I mentioned this to the attendant. He said,
“There’s no gas shortage here. General Patton must be building up one
hell of a big stockpile.”
We spent the night in Stuttgart. As the main transient hotel was full, we
were assigned rooms at a small inn on the outskirts of the battered city.
It took us an hour to find the place, so it was past midnight when we
turned in.
The next morning we detoured a few kilometers in order to visit the
castle at Ludwigsburg. The little town was laid out in the French manner,
and its atmosphere was that of a miniature Versailles. The caretaker told
us that the kings of Württemberg had lived at the castle until 1918. Our
visit to it was the one pleasant experience of the day, which happened
to be my birthday. We had our first flat tire in the castle courtyard, a
second one an hour later, and a third between Mannheim and Darmstadt. It
was Sunday and we had a devilish time finding places where we could get
the inner tubes repaired. It was ten P.M. when we pulled into Frankfurt.
The trip from Stuttgart had taken eleven hours instead of the usual four.
We had spent seven hours on tire repairs.
My old room with the pink brocaded furniture was vacant, so I moved in
for the night. In my absence it had been successively occupied by three
lieutenant colonels. All of my belongings had been boxed and stored away
in the closet. Lamont and Steve put up at the house next door.
We called on Bancel La Farge and Charlie Kuhn at USFET Headquarters
the next morning. We were lucky to find them together. Their office at
that time was a kind of house divided against itself. Thanks to the
organizational whim of a colonel, Bancel and Charlie had to spend part of
the day in the office at the big Farben building—where we found them—and
part at their office in Höchst. Höchst was about six miles away. The
remnant of the U. S. Group Control Council, which had not yet moved up
to Berlin, was located there—in another vast complex of I. G. Farben
buildings. It was an exhausting arrangement.
Bancel and Charlie looked tired—and worried too. They seemed glad to
see us, but they were preoccupied and upset about something. Presently
Charlie showed us a document which had just reached his desk a few days
earlier. It was unsigned and undated.
It bore the letterhead “Headquarters U. S. Group Control Council.” The
subject was “Art Objects in the U. S. Zone.”[2] In the first paragraph
reference was made to the great number and value of the art objects
stored in emergency repositories throughout the U. S. Zone. Farther on,
the art objects were divided into three classes, according to ownership.
Those in “Class C” were defined as “works of art, placed in the U. S.
Zone by Germany for safekeeping, which are the bona fide property of the
German nation.”
Concerning the disposition of the works of art thus described, the letter
had this to say: “It is not believed that the U. S. would desire the
works of art in Class C to be made available for reparations and to be
divided among a number of nations. Even if this is to be done, these
works of art might well be returned to the U. S. to be inventoried, and
cared for by our leading museums.”
The next, and last, sentence contained this extraordinary proposal: “They
could be held in trusteeship for return, many years from now, to the
German people if and when the German nation had earned the right to their
return.”
Clipped to the document was a notation, dated July 29, 1945, bearing
the signature of the Chief of Staff of General Lucius D. Clay, Deputy
Military Governor. It read, in part, “General Clay states that this paper
has been approved by the President for implementation after the close of
the current Big 3 Conference.”
We were dumfounded. No wonder Bancel and Charlie were worried. It had
never occurred to any of us that German national art treasures would
be removed to the United States. After speculating on the possible
consequences attendant on an implementation of the document, we dropped
the subject. Momentarily there was nothing to do but wait—and hope that
the whole matter would be dropped.
By comparison, our personal problems seemed insignificant. But Charlie
and Bancel heard us out. They approved our idea of remaining together as
a team working out of USFET. I was already permanently assigned to USFET
and there were two vacancies on their T.O. (Table of Organization) to
which Lamont and Steve could be appointed. The necessary “paper work”
took up most of the day and involved a trip to ECAD headquarters at Bad
Homburg. At five o’clock we had our new orders.
Steve suggested that we drive up to Marburg to see Captain Hancock, the
Monuments officer in charge of the two great art repositories which had
been established there. They were the prototype of the Central Collecting
Point at Munich. However, they differed in an important respect from the
one at Munich: they contained practically no loot. Virtually everything
in them belonged to German museums and had been recovered by our
Monuments officers from the mines in which the Germans had placed them
for safekeeping during the war.
Marburg, some fifty miles north of Frankfurt, lay in the
Regierungsbezirk, or government district, of Kassel, which was in turn
a subdivision of the Province of Hesse. It was a two-hour drive, but we
stopped en route for supper with a Quartermaster outfit at Giessen, so it
was nearly eight o’clock when we arrived.
We found Walker Hancock in his office in the Staatsarchiv building. He
was a man in the middle forties, and of medium height. His face broke
into a smile and his fine dark eyes lighted up with an expression of
genuine pleasure at the sight of Lamont and Steve. This was the first
time they had seen one another since the close of the war when they
had been working together in Weimar. I had never met Walker Hancock,
but I had heard more about him than about any other American Monuments
officer. I knew that he had had a distinguished career as a sculptor
before the war and that he had been the first of our Monuments officers
to reach France. He had been attached to the First Army until the end of
hostilities. Lamont was devoted to Walker, and Steve’s regard for him
bordered on worship. While the three of them reminisced, I found myself
responding to his warmth and sincerity.
He wouldn’t hear of our returning to Frankfurt that night. He wanted
to show us the things in his two depots and we wouldn’t be able to see
more than a fraction of them before morning. The few that we did see
whetted our appetite for more. In the galleries on the second floor
we saw some of the finest pictures from the museums of the Rhineland:
there were three wonderful Van Goghs. One was the portrait of Armand
Rollin, the young man with a mustache and slouch hat. It belonged to the
Volkwang Museum at Essen. Color reproductions of this portrait had, in
recent years, rivaled those of Whistler’s _Mother_ in popularity. Walker
said that it had been covered with mold when he found it in the Siegen
mine with the rest of the Essen pictures. His assistant, Sheldon Keck,
formerly the restorer of the Brooklyn Museum, had successfully removed
the mold before it had done any serious damage.
The second Van Gogh was the famous large still life entitled _White
Roses_. The third was a brilliant late landscape. There were other
magnificent nineteenth century canvases: the bewitching portrait
of M. and Mme. Sisley by Renoir, a full-length Manet, and a great
Daumier. Walker climaxed the display with the celebrated Rembrandt
_Self-Portrait_ from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum of Cologne. This was the
last and most famous of the portraits the artist painted of himself.
We spent the night at the Gasthaus Sonne, a seventeenth century inn
facing the old market place. The proprietor reluctantly assigned us two
rooms on the second floor. They were normally reserved for the top brass.
Judging from the austerity of the furnishings and the simplicity of the
plumbing, I thought it unlikely that we would be routed from our beds by
any late-arriving generals.
Walker met us for breakfast the next morning with word that the war
with Japan had ended. Announcements in German had already been posted
in several of the shop windows. Though thrilling to us, the news seemed
to make very little impression on the citizens of the sleepy university
town. The people in the streets were as unsmiling as ever. If anything,
some of them looked a little grimmer than usual.
We drove to the Staatsarchiv building with Walker. He took us to a room
containing a fabulous collection of medieval art objects. There were
crosses and croziers, coffers and chalices, wrought in precious metals
and studded with jewels—masterpieces of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth
centuries. The most arresting individual piece was the golden Madonna,
an archaic seated figure two feet high, dating from the tenth century.
These marvelous relics of the Middle Ages belonged to the Cathedral of
Metz. It was one of the greatest collections of its kind in the entire
world. Its intrinsic value was enormous; its historic value incalculable.
Walker said that arrangements were being made for its early return to the
cathedral. The French were planning an elaborate ceremony in honor of the
event.
It was a five-minute drive to the other depot under Captain Hancock’s
direction. This was the Jubiläumsbau, or Jubilee Building, a handsome
structure of pre-Nazi, modern design. It was the headquarters of the
archaeological institute headed by Professor Richard Hamann, the
internationally famous medieval scholar. It also housed the archives of
“Photo Marburg,” the stupendous library of art photographs founded and
directed by the professor. Walker was putting the resources of Photo
Marburg to good use, compiling a complete photographic record of the
objects in his care.
Among the treasures stored in the Jubiläumsbau were some of the choicest
masterpieces from the Berlin state museums. Perhaps the most famous were
the twin canvases by Watteau entitled _Gersaint’s Signboard_. Regarded
by many as the supreme work of the greatest painter of the French Rococo
period, the two pictures had been the prized possessions of Frederick the
Great. Painted to hang side by side forming a continuous composition,
they represented the shop of M. Gersaint, dealer in works of art. It is
said that the paintings were finished in eight days. They were painted
in the year 1732 when the artist was at the height of his career. I was
told that, during the early years of the war, Göring made overtures to
the Louvre for one of its finest Watteaus. According to the story, the
negotiations ended abruptly when the museum signified its willingness to
part with the painting in exchange for _Gersaint’s Signboard_.
The brilliant French school of the eighteenth century was further
represented at the Jubiläumsbau by a superb Boucher—the subject, _Mercury
and Venus_—and two exquisite Chardins: _The Cook_, one of his most
enchanting scenes of everyday life, and the _Portrait of a Lady Sealing a
Letter_, an unusually large composition for this unpretentious painter
whose canvases are today worth a king’s ransom.
There were masterpieces of the German school; the great series of
Cranachs which had belonged to the Hohenzollerns filled one entire room.
Excellent examples of Rubens and Van Dyck represented the Flemish school;
Ruysdael and Van Goyen, the Dutch. The high quality of every picture
attested to the taste and connoisseurship of German collectors.
Walker said that he hoped to arrange a public exhibition of the pictures.
Marburg had been neglected by our bombers. Only one or two bombs had
fallen in the city and the resulting damage had been slight. Concussion
had blasted the windows of the Staatsarchiv, but the Jubiläumsbau was
untouched. Perhaps he would put on a series of small exhibitions, say
fifty pictures at a time. The members of his local German committee
were enthusiastic about the project. It would be an important first
step in the rehabilitation of German cultural institutions which
was an avowed part of the American Fine Arts program. Thanks to the
hesitancy of an officer at higher headquarters who was exasperatingly
“security-conscious,” Walker did not realize his ambition until three
months later, on the eve of his departure for the United States.
We celebrated VJ-Day on our return to Frankfurt that evening. The big
Casino, behind USFET headquarters, was the scene of the principal
festivities. Drinks were on the house until the bar closed at ten. It
was a warm summer night and the broad terrace over the main entrance was
crowded. An Army band blared noisily inside. Civilian attendants skulked
in the background, avidly collecting cigarette butts from the ash trays
and the terrace floor. They reaped a rich harvest that night.
The Mercedes-Benz presented a problem. Its status was a dubious one.
Since it was still registered with an MG Detachment in Austria, I
felt uncomfortable about driving it around Germany. At Charlie Kuhn’s
suggestion we filed a request with the Naval headquarters in Frankfurt
for assignment of the vehicle to our Special Evacuation Team. The request
was couched in impressive legal language which Charlie thought would do
the trick. Armed with a copy of this request, I felt confident that we
would not be molested by inquisitive MPs on our trip back to Munich.
We didn’t get started until late afternoon, having wasted two hours
dickering with the Transportation Officer at the Frankfurt MG Detachment
for a spare tire. We returned by way of Würzburg and Nürnberg. It was
dark when we reached Nürnberg, but the light of the full moon was
sufficient to reveal the ruined walls and towers of the old, inner city.
As we struck south of the city to the Autobahn, we could see the outlines
of the vast unfinished stadium, designed to seat one hundred and forty
thousand people. We had to proceed cautiously since many of the bridges
had been destroyed and detours were frequent. As a result it was midnight
when we reached Munich. The transient hotel was full, so we had to be
content with makeshift quarters at the Central Collecting Point.
In our absence the transportation situation had eased up a little.
Captain Posey told us the next morning that six trucks would be available
in the early afternoon. We decided to keep the command car for the trip
to Neuschwanstein and leave the Mercedes-Benz in Munich to be painted. In
anticipation of registration papers from the Navy, we thought it would be
appropriate to have the car painted battleship gray and stenciled with
white letters reading “U. S. Navy.” One of the mechanics in the garage
at the Central Collecting Point agreed to do this for us in exchange for
a bottle of rum and half a bottle of Scotch. Officers at Third Army
Headquarters had bar privileges plus a liquor ration, but the enlisted
men didn’t fare so well.
Our base of operations for the evacuation of the Castle of Neuschwanstein
was the picturesque little town of Füssen, some eighty miles south of
Munich, in the heart of the “Swan country.” This region of southern
Bavaria, celebrated for its association with the name of Richard Wagner,
is one of the most beautiful in all Germany. The mountains rise sharply
from the floor of the level green valley. The turreted castle, perched
on top of one of the lower peaks, at an elevation of a thousand feet,
is visible for miles. Built in the eighteen-seventies by Ludwig II, the
“Mad King” of Bavaria, it was the most fantastic creation of that exotic
monarch whose passion for building nearly bankrupted his kingdom. When we
saw the castle rising majestically from its pine-covered mountaintop, we
were struck by the incongruity of our six-truck convoy lumbering through
the romantic countryside.
We presented our credentials to a swarthy major who was the commanding
officer of the small MG Detachment at Füssen. He arranged for our billets
at the Alte Post, the hotel where officers of the Detachment were
quartered, and, after we had deposited our gear in a room on the fourth
floor, conducted us to the Schloss.
The steep road to the lower courtyard of the castle wound for more than
a mile up the side of the mountain. At the castle entrance, the major
identified us to the guard and our six trucks filed into the courtyard.
In the upper courtyard, reached by a broad flight of stone steps, we
found the caretaker who had the keys to the main section of the castle.
He did not, however, have access to the wing in which the records of the
_Einsatzstab Rosenberg_ were stored. The only door to that part of the
building had been locked and sealed by Lieutenant James Rorimer, the
Monuments officer of the Seventh Army, when the castle had first fallen
into American hands. We had brought the key with us from Third Army
Headquarters.
Before examining those rooms, we made a tour of the four main floors of
the castle. The hallways and vaulted kitchens on the first floor were
filled to overflowing with enormous packing cases and uncrated furniture,
all taken from French collections. Three smaller storage rooms resembling
the stock rooms of Tiffany’s and a porcelain factory combined, were
jammed with gold and silver and rare china. Most of the loot had been
concentrated on the first floor, but the unfinished rooms of the second
had been fitted with racks for the storage of paintings. In addition to
the looted pictures, there were several galleries of stacked paintings
from the museums of Munich. The living apartments on the third floor,
divested of their furnishings, were filled with stolen furniture, Louis
Quinze chairs, table and sofas and ornate Italian cabinets lined the
walls of rooms and corridors. They contrasted strangely with scenes from
the Wagner operas which King Ludwig had chosen as the theme for the mural
decorations. Only the gold-walled Throne Room and, on the floor above,
the lofty Fest-Saal, were devoid of loot.
We proceeded to the wing of the castle which contained the records.
Having broken the seals and unlocked the door, we entered a hallway about
thirty feet long. The doors opening onto this hallway were also locked
and sealed. Behind them lay the offices of the _Einsatzstab Rosenberg_.
They were crowded with bookshelves and filing cabinets. In one room stood
a huge show-case filled with fragile Roman glass. The rooms of the second
floor were full of French furniture and dozens of small packing cases.
These cases were made of carefully finished quarter-sawed oak. We had
seen similar ones in the Göring collection. They had been the traveling
cases for precious objects belonging to the Rothschilds. These too
contained Rothschild treasures—exquisite bibelots of jade, agate, onyx
and jasper, and innumerable pieces of Oriental and European porcelain.
At one end of the hallway were two rooms which had been used as a
photographic laboratory. We had brought Kress with us. Steve went off to
make arrangements to install his equipment, while Lamont and I calculated
the number of men we would need for the evacuation work the next morning.
We asked the major for twenty—two shifts of ten.