because there were thousands of small objects—many of them fragile and
extremely valuable—which we could not trust to the inexpert hands of
our work party. There was no electricity in the small storage rooms, so
we had to work by candlelight. It took us one evening to pack the Roman
glass and the four succeeding evenings, working till midnight, to pack
the two thousand pieces of gold and silver in the David-Weill collection.
The Nazi looters had thoughtfully saved the well-made cases in which
they had carted off this magnificent collection from M. David-Weill’s
house in Paris. There were candelabra, dishes, knives, forks, spoons,
snuffboxes—the rarest examples of the art of the French goldsmiths of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This unique collection had
created a sensation when it was exhibited in Paris a few years before
the war. The fact that the incomparable assemblage would probably one
day be left to the Louvre by the eminent connoisseur, who had spent a
lifetime collecting it, had not deterred the Nazi robbers. He was a Jew.
That justified its confiscation. Aside from the pleasure it gave me to
handle the beautiful objects, I relished the idea of helping to recover
the property of a fellow Californian: M. David-Weill had been born in
San Francisco. The Nazis had been methodical as usual. Every piece was
to have been systematically recatalogued while the collection was at
Neuschwanstein. On some of the shelves we found slips of paper stating
that this or that object had not yet been photographed—“_noch nicht
fotografiert_.”
The tedious manual labor involved in packing small objects and the great
distance which the packed cases had to be carried when ready for loading
were the chief difficulties at Neuschwanstein. Not only did the cases
have to be carried several hundred feet from the storage rooms to the
door of the castle; but from the door to the trucks was a long trek, down
two flights of steps and across a wide courtyard. In this respect the
operation resembled the evacuation of the monastery at Hohenfurth.
Three months after our partial evacuation of the castle, a team composed
of Captain Edward Adams, Lieutenant (jg) Charles Parkhurst, USNR, and
Captain Hubert de Brye, a French officer, completed the removal of the
loot. This gigantic undertaking required eight weeks. If I remember the
figures correctly, more than twelve thousand objects were boxed and
carted away. The cases were built in a carpenter shop set up in the
castle kitchens. One hundred and fifty truckloads were delivered to the
railroad siding at Füssen and thence transported to Paris. It was an
extraordinary achievement, carried out despite heavy snowfall. The only
operation which rivaled it was the evacuation of the salt mine at Alt
Aussee.
The last morning of our stay at Füssen, Lamont and I had a special
mission to perform. A German art dealer named Gustav Rochlitz was living
at Gipsmühle, a five-minute drive from Hohenschwangau, the small village
below the castle. For a number of years Rochlitz had had a gallery in
Paris. His dealings with the Nazis, in particular his trafficking in
confiscated pictures, had been the subject of special investigation
by Lieutenants Plaut and Rousseau, our OSS friends. They were the two
American naval officers who were preparing an exhaustive report on the
activities of the infamous _Einsatzstab Rosenberg_. They had interrogated
Rochlitz and placed him under house arrest. In his possession were
twenty-two modern French paintings, including works by Dérain, Matisse
and Picasso, formerly belonging to well known Jewish collections. He had
obtained them from Göring and other leading Nazis in exchange for old
master paintings. We were to relieve Herr Rochlitz of these canvases.
At the farmhouse in which Rochlitz and his wife were living, the maid
of all work who answered our knock said that no one was at home. Herr
Rochlitz would not be back before noon. Lamont and I returned to our jeep
and started back across the fields to the highway. We had driven about
a hundred yards when we saw a heavy-set sullen-faced man of about fifty
walking toward us.
“I’ll bet that’s Rochlitz,” I said to Lamont. Stopping the car, I called
out to him, “Herr Rochlitz?”
After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded.
“Hop in, we want to have a talk with you,” I said.
We returned to the farmhouse and followed our truculent host up the
stairs to a sitting room on the second floor. There we were joined by his
wife, a timid young woman who, like her husband, spoke fluent English.
I said that we had come for the pictures. Rochlitz made no protest. He
brusquely directed his wife to bring them in. As she left the room, I
thought it odd that he hadn’t gone along to help her. But she returned
almost immediately with the paintings in her arms. All twenty-two were
rolled around a long mailing tube. Together they spread the canvases
about the room, on the table, on the chairs and on the floor. They were,
without exception, works of excellent quality. One large early Picasso,
the portrait of a woman and child, was alone worth a small fortune.
I was wondering what Rochlitz had given in exchange for the lot, when he
began to explain how the pictures had come into his possession. He must
have taken us for credulous fools, because the story he told made him out
a victim of tragic circumstance. He said that Göring had made an offer on
several of his pictures. Rochlitz had accepted but insisted on being paid
in cash. Göring had agreed to the terms and the pictures were delivered.
Then, instead of paying in cash, Göring had forced him to accept these
modern paintings. He had protested, but to no avail. Of course these
pictures were all right in their way, he said deprecatingly, but he was
not a dealer in modern art. Naturally he did not know that they had been
confiscated. It was all a dreadful mistake, but what could he do? I said
that I realized how badly he must have felt and that I knew he would be
relieved to learn that the pictures were now going back to their rightful
owners.
The pictures were carefully rerolled and we got up to leave. At the door,
Rochlitz told us that he had lost his entire stock. He had stored all of
his paintings at Baden-Baden, in the French Zone. Did we think he would
be able to recover them? We assured him that justice would be done and,
leaving him to interpret that remark as he saw fit, drove off with the
twenty-two pictures.
(9)
_HIDDEN TREASURES AT NÜRNBERG_
On our return to Munich that evening, Craig told us that preparations
were being made for the immediate restitution of several important
masterpieces recovered in the American Zone. General Eisenhower had
approved a proposal to return at once to each of the countries overrun
by the Germans at least one outstanding work of art. This was to be done
in his name, as a gesture of “token restitution” symbolizing American
policy with regard to ultimate restitution of all stolen art treasures to
the rightful owner nations. It was felt that the gracious gesture on the
part of the Commanding General of United States Forces in Europe would
serve to reaffirm our intentions to right the wrongs of Nazi oppression.
In view of the vast amount of art which had thus far been recovered,
it would be months before it could all be restored to the plundered
countries. Meanwhile these “token restitutions” would be an earnest of
American good will. They would be sent back from Germany at the expense
of the United States Government. Thereafter, representatives of the
various countries would be invited to come to our Collecting Points to
select, assemble and, in transportation of their own providing, remove
those objects which the Germans had stolen.
Belgium was to receive the first token restitution. The great van Eyck
altarpiece—_The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb_—was the obvious choice
among the stolen Belgian treasures.
The famous panels had been reposing in the Central Collecting Point at
Munich since we had removed them from the salt mine at Alt Aussee. A
special plane had been chartered to fly them to Brussels. The Belgian
Government had signified approval of air transportation. Direct rail
communication between Munich and Brussels had not been resumed, and the
highways were not in the best of condition. By truck, it would be a rough
two-day trip; by air, a matter of three hours.
Bancel La Farge had already flown from Frankfurt to Brussels, where
plans had been made for an appropriate ceremony on the arrival of the
altarpiece. The American Ambassador was to present the panels to the
Prince Regent on behalf of General Eisenhower. It was to be an historic
occasion.
I went out to the airport to confirm the arrangements for the C-54. It
was only a fifteen-minute drive from the Königsplatz to the field. I was
also to check on the condition of the streets: they were in good shape
all the way.
The plane was to take off at noon. Lamont, Steve and I supervised the
loading of the ten precious cases. We led off in a jeep. The truck
followed with the panels. Four of the civilian packers went along to load
the cases onto the plane. Captain Posey was to escort the altarpiece to
Brussels.
When we got to the airport we learned that the plane had not arrived.
There would be a two-hour delay. At the end of two hours, we were
informed that there was bad weather south of Brussels. All flights
had been canceled for the day. We drove back to the Collecting Point
at the Königsplatz and had just finished unloading the panels when a
message came from the field. The weather had cleared. The plane would
be taking off in half an hour. I caught Captain Posey as he was leaving
the building for his office at Third Army Headquarters. The cases were
reloaded and we were on our way to the field in fifteen minutes.
The truck was driven onto the field where the big C-54 stood waiting. In
another quarter of an hour the panels were aboard and lashed securely
to metal supports in the forepart of the passenger compartment. Captain
Posey, the only passenger, waved jauntily as the doors swung shut.
Enviously we watched the giant plane roll down the field, lift waveringly
from the airstrip and swing off to the northwest. The altarpiece was on
the last lap of an extraordinary journey. We wished George Stout could
have been in on this.
The plane reached Brussels without mishap. The return of the great
national treasure was celebrated throughout the country. Encouraged by
the success of this first “token restitution,” Major La Farge directed
that a similar gesture be made to France. At the Collecting Point Craig
selected seventy-one masterpieces looted from French private collections.
The group included Fragonard, Chardin, Lancret, Rubens, Van Dyck, Hals,
and a large number of seventeenth century Dutch masters. Only examples of
the highest quality were chosen.
Ham Coulter, the naval officer who worked with Craig at the “Bau,”
was the emissary appointed to accompany the paintings to Paris. It
was decided to return them by truck, inasmuch as it would have been
impracticable to attempt shipping uncrated pictures by air. The convoy
consisted of two trucks—one for the pictures, the other for extra
gasoline. It was a hard two-day trip from Munich to Paris. Ham got
through safely, but reported on his return that the roads had been
extremely rough a good part of the way. He had delivered the pictures in
Paris to the Musée du Jeu de Paume, the little museum which the Germans
had used during the Occupation as the clearinghouse for their methodical
plundering of the Jewish collections. His expedition had been marred by
only one minor incident. When the paintings were being unloaded at the
museum, one of the women attendants watching the operation noticed that
some of the canvases were unframed. She had asked, “And where are the
frames?” This was too much for Coulter. In perfect French, the courteous
lieutenant told her precisely what she could do about the frames.
Shortly after the return of the Ghent altarpiece, Captain Posey was
demobilized. His duties as MFA&A Officer at Third Army Headquarters in
Munich were assumed by Captain Edwin Rae. I had not seen Rae since the
early summer when he and Lieutenant Edith Standen had been assigned to
assist me in inventorying the collections of the Berlin museums in the
vaults of the Reichsbank at Frankfurt. Edwin was a meticulous fellow,
gentle but determined. Although by no means lacking in a sense of humor,
he resented joking references to a fancied resemblance to Houdon’s well
known portrait of Voltaire, and I didn’t blame him.
He took on his new responsibilities with quiet assurance and in a
short time won the complete confidence of his superiors at Third Army
Headquarters. Throughout his long tenure of office, he maintained an
unruffled calm in the face of obstacles which would have exhausted a
less patient man. He was responsible for all matters pertaining to the
Fine Arts in the Eastern Military District of the American Zone—that is,
Bavaria—an area more than twice the size of the two provinces Greater
Hesse and Württemberg-Baden comprising the Western Military District of
our Zone.
During the early days of Captain Rae’s regime, Charlie Kuhn paid a
brief visit to Munich. He had just completed the transfer of the Berlin
Museum collections from Frankfurt to the Landesmuseum at Wiesbaden.
The university buildings in Frankfurt—which I had requisitioned for a
Collecting Point—had proved unsuitable. The repairs, he said, would have
taken months. On the other hand, the Wiesbaden Museum, though damaged,
was ideal for the purpose. Of course there hadn’t been a glass left in
any of the windows, and the roof had had to be repaired. But thanks
to the energy and ingenuity of Walter Farmer, the building had been
rehabilitated in two months. Captain Farmer was the director of the new
Collecting Point. When I asked where Farmer had got the glass, Charlie
was evasive. All he would say was that Captain Farmer was “wise in the
ways of the Army.”
Charlie was headed for Vienna to confer with Lieutenant Colonel Ernest
Dewald, Chief of the MFA&A Section at USFA Headquarters (United States
Forces, Austria). Colonel Dewald wanted to complete the evacuation of
the mine at Alt Aussee, which was now under his jurisdiction. For this
project he hoped to obtain the services of the officers who had worked
there when the mine had been Third Army’s responsibility. Captain Rae was
reluctant to lend the Special Evacuation Team, because there was still
so much work to be done in Bavaria. But he agreed, provided that Charlie
could sell the idea to the Chief of Staff at Third Army. This Charlie
succeeded in doing, and departed for Vienna a day later. Steve was crazy
to see Vienna—I think his parents had been born there—so Charlie took him
along.
After they had left, Captain Rae requested Lamont and me to make an
inspection trip to northern Bavaria. Our first stop was Bamberg. There we
examined the _Neue Residenz_, which Rae contemplated establishing as an
auxiliary Collecting Point to house the contents of various repositories
in Upper Franconia. Reports reaching his office indicated that storage
conditions in that area were unsatisfactory. Either the repositories
were not weatherproof, or they were not being adequately guarded.
It was also rumored that UNRRA was planning to fill the _Neue Residenz_
with DPs—Displaced Persons. Captain Rae was determined to put a stop to
that, because the building, a fine example of late seventeenth century
architecture, was on the SHAEF List of Protected Monuments. This fact
should have guaranteed its immunity from such a hazard. Even during
combat, the SHAEF list had been a great protection to monuments of
historic and artistic importance. Now that no “doctrine of military
necessity” could be invoked to justify improper use of the building, Rae
did not propose to countenance its occupancy by DPs.
The _Neue Residenz_ contained dozens of empty, brocaded rooms—but no
plumbing. We decided that it would do for a Collecting Point and agreed
with Rae that the DPs should be housed elsewhere if possible. The officer
from the local MG Detachment, who was showing us around, confirmed
the report that UNRRA intended to move in. He didn’t think they would
relinquish the building without a protest. The influx of refugees from
the Russian Zone had doubled the town’s normal population of sixty
thousand.
It was a disappointment to find that the superb sculpture in the
cathedral across the square was still bricked up. The shelters had
proved a needless precaution, for Bamberg had not been bombed. Only the
bridge over the Regnitz had been blown up, and the Germans had done that
themselves.
From Bamberg we drove north to Coburg, where we had a twofold mission.
First we were to obtain specific information about ten cases which
contained a collection of art objects belonging to a prince of Hesse.
The cases were said to be stored in Feste Coburg, the walled castle
above the town. If they were the property of Philip of Hesse, then they
would probably be taken into custody by the American authorities. We had
been told that he was in prison. His art dealings during the past few
years were being reviewed by the OSS officers charged with the special
investigation of Nazi art-looting activities. Philip was the son of the
Landgräfin of Hesse. It was in the flower-filled Waffenraum of her castle
near Frankfurt that I had seen the family tombs months before.
If, on the other hand, the cases belonged to a different prince of
Hesse—one whose political record was clean—and storage conditions were
satisfactory, we would simply leave them where they were for the time
being.
Our second objective was Schloss Tambach, a few kilometers from Coburg.
Paintings stolen by Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, from the palace
at Warsaw were stored there. Schloss Tambach also contained pictures
from the Stettin Museum. Stettin was now in the Russian Zone of Occupied
Germany.
On our arrival in Coburg, Lamont and I drove to the headquarters of the
local MG Detachment, which were located in the Palais Edinburgh. This
unpretentious building was once the residence of Queen Victoria’s son,
the Duke of Edinburgh. There we arranged with Lieutenant Milton A. Pelz,
the Monuments officer of the Coburg Detachment, to inspect the storage
rooms at the castle.
Pelz was a big fellow who spoke German fluently. He welcomed us
hospitably and took us up to the castle where we met Dr. Grundmann, who
had the keys to the storage rooms. This silent, sour-faced German was
curator of the Prince’s collections. He said that his employer was Prince
Ludwig of Hesse, a cousin of Philip. The cases contained paintings and
_objets d’art_ which had been in the possession of the family for years.
Grundmann had personally removed them from Ludwig’s estate in Silesia the
day before the Russians occupied the area.
Ludwig’s most important treasure was the world-famous painting by Holbein
known as the _Madonna of Bürgermeister Meyer_. Painted in 1526, it had
hung for years in the palace at Darmstadt. The Dresden Gallery owned a
seventeenth century replica. Early in the war, Prince Ludwig had sent the
original to his Silesian castle for safekeeping. Grundmann had brought it
back to Bavaria along with the ten cases now at Coburg. From Coburg he
had taken the Holbein to Schloss Banz, a castle not far from Bamberg.
He said that the Prince was living at Wolfsgarten, a small country place
near Darmstadt. Ludwig was eager to regain possession of the painting.
Did we think that could be arranged? We told him he would have to obtain
an authorization from Captain Rae at Munich.
Schloss Tambach was a ten-minute drive from Coburg. This great country
house, built around three sides of a courtyard, belonged to the Countess
of Ortenburg. She occupied the center section. A detachment of troops was
billeted in one wing. The other was filled with the Stettin and Warsaw
pictures. There were over two hundred from the Stettin Museum. Nineteenth
century German paintings predominated, but I noticed two fine Hals
portraits and a Van Gogh landscape among them.
The civilian custodian, answerable to the MG authorities at Coburg, was
Dr. Wilhelm Eggebrecht. He had been curator of the Stettin Museum until
thrown out by the Nazis because his wife was one-quarter Jewish. He was a
mousy little fellow with a bald head and gold-rimmed spectacles. He asked
apprehensively if we intended to send the paintings back to Russian-held
Stettin. We said that we had come only to check on the physical security
of the present storage place. So far as we knew, the paintings would
remain where they were for the present. This inconclusive piece of
information seemed to reassure him.
The paintings looted from Warsaw were the _pièces de résistance_ of
the treasures at Schloss Tambach—especially the nine great canvases by
Bellotto, the eighteenth century Venetian master. Governor Frank had
ruthlessly removed the pictures from their stretchers and rolled them up
for shipment. As a result of this rough handling, the paint had flaked
off in places, but the damage was not serious. When we examined the
pictures, they were spread out on the floor. They filled two rooms, forty
feet square. Later they were taken to the Munich Collecting Point and
mounted on new stretchers, in preparation for their return to Warsaw.
When we got back to Munich, Steve had returned from Vienna. He had news
for us. Charlie Kuhn had already left for Frankfurt. Colonel Dewald was
coming to Munich in a few days to talk to Colonel Roy Dalferes, Rae’s
Chief of Staff at Third Army, about reopening the Alt Aussee mine. Either
Charlie or Bancel would come down from USFET Headquarters when Dewald
arrived. A new man had joined the MFA&A Section at USFA—Andrew Ritchie,
director of the Buffalo Museum. He had come over as a civilian. Steve
thought that Ritchie would be the USFA representative at Munich. There
was a lot of stuff at the Collecting Point which would eventually go back
to Austria. It would have to be checked with the records there. That
would be Ritchie’s job. Steve told us also that Lincoln Kirstein had gone
home. His mother was seriously ill and Lincoln had left on emergency
orders.
The three of us went to Captain Rae’s office. Lamont and I had to make
a report on our trip to Coburg. Rae had a new assignment for us. He
had just received orders from USFET Headquarters to prepare the Cracow
altarpiece for shipment. It was to be sent back to Poland as a token
restitution. This was the colossal carved altarpiece by Veit Stoss
which the Nazis had stolen from the Church of St. Mary at Cracow. Veit
Stoss had been commissioned by the King of Poland in 1477 to carve the
great work. It had taken him ten years. After the invasion of Poland in
1939, the Nazis had carted it off, lock, stock and barrel, to Nürnberg.
They contended that, since Veit Stoss had been a native of Nürnberg, it
belonged in the city of his birth.
The missing altarpiece was the first of her looted treasures for which
Poland had registered a claim with the American authorities at the close
of the war. After months of diligent investigation, it was found by
American officers in an underground bunker across the street from the
Albrecht Dürer house in Nürnberg. In addition to the dismantled figures
of the central panel—painted and gilded figures of hollow wood ten
feet high—the twelve ornate side panels, together with the statues and
pinnacles surmounting the framework, had been crowded into the bunker.
The same bunker contained another priceless looted treasure—the
coronation regalia of the Holy Roman Empire. Among these venerable
objects were the jeweled crown of the Emperor Conrad—commonly called
the “Crown of Charlemagne”—dating from the eleventh century, a shield,
two swords and the orb. Since 1804 they had been preserved in the
Schatzkammer, the Imperial Treasure Room, at Vienna. In 1938, the Nazis
removed them to Nürnberg, basing their claim to possession on a fifteenth
century decree of the Emperor Sigismund that they were to be kept in that
city.