spirited away these five pieces. The credit for recovering the treasures
goes to an American officer of German birth, Lieutenant Walter Horn,
professor of art at the University of California. The two officials at
first disclaimed any knowledge of their whereabouts. After hours of
relentless grilling by Lieutenant Horn, the men finally admitted their
guilt. They were promptly tried, heavily fined and sent to prison. Three
months later, at the request of the Austrian Government, the imperial
treasures were flown back to Vienna. This historic shipment contained
other relics which the Nazis had taken from the Schatzkammer—relics of
the greatest religious significance. They included an alleged fragment of
the True Cross, a section of the tablecloth said to have been used at the
Last Supper, a lance venerated as the one which had touched the wounds of
Christ, and links from the chains traditionally believed to have bound
St. Peter, St. Paul and St. John.
On Captain Rae’s instructions, Steve and I went to Nürnberg to pack the
Stoss altarpiece. (At that time the coronation regalia was still in the
bunker, where, on the afternoon of our arrival, we had an opportunity to
examine it.) We found that the heavy framework which supported the altar
panels was not stored in the bunker. Because of its size—the upright
pieces were thirty feet high—it had been taken to Schloss Wiesenthau, an
old castle outside Forchheim, thirty miles away.
Leaving Steve to start packing the smaller figures and pinnacles, I got
hold of a semitrailer, the only vehicle long enough to accommodate a load
of such length. It was an hour’s drive to the castle. With a crew of
twenty PWs, I finished loading the framework in two hours and returned to
Nürnberg in time for supper.
That evening Steve and I figured out the number of trucks we would need
for the altarpiece. Lamont had remained in Munich to make tentative
arrangements, pending word from us. He was going to ask for ten trucks
and we came to the conclusion that this would be about the right
number—in addition, of course, to the semitrailer for the supporting
framework. We got out our maps and studied our probable route to Cracow.
One road would take us through Dresden and Breslau; another by way of
Pilsen and Prague. Perhaps we could go one way and return the other. In
either case we would have to pass through Russian-occupied territory.
It would probably take some time to obtain the necessary clearances. We
figured on taking enough gas for the round trip, since we doubted if
there would be any to spare in Poland. Altogether it promised to be a
complicated expedition, but already we had visions of a triumphal entry
into Cracow.
Our ambitious plans collapsed the following morning. While Steve and I
were at breakfast, I was called to the telephone. The corporal in Captain
Rae’s office was on the wire. I was to return to Munich at once. Major La
Farge was arriving from Frankfurt and wanted to see me that night. Plans
for the trip to Cracow were indefinitely postponed. Internal conditions
in Poland were too unsettled to risk returning the altarpiece.
Our plans had miscarried before, but this was our first major
disappointment. We had begun to look on the Polish venture as the fitting
climax of our work as a Special Evacuation Team. On the way back to
Munich, Steve said he had a feeling that the team was going to be split
up.
Steve’s misgivings were prophetic. At Craig’s apartment after dinner,
Bancel La Farge outlined the plans he had for us. Colonel Dalferes
had acceded to Colonel Dewald’s request. Lamont, Steve and a third
officer—new to MFA&A work—were to resume the evacuation of the salt mine
at Alt Aussee. If the snows held off, it would be possible to carry on
operations there for another month or six weeks.
I was to return to USFET Headquarters at Frankfurt as Deputy Chief of the
MFA&A Section, replacing Charlie Kuhn who had just received his orders
to go home. I knew that Charlie would soon be eligible for release from
active duty, but had no idea that his departure was so imminent.
We didn’t have much to say to one another on the way to our quarters
that night. Steve had already made up his mind that he wasn’t going to
like the new man. Lamont said that he thought it was going to be an
awful anticlimax to reopen the mine. And for me, the prospect of routine
administrative work at USFET was uninviting. After three months of
strenuous and exciting field work, it wouldn’t be easy to settle down in
an office. All three of us felt that the great days were over.
During our last week together in Munich we had little time to feel sorry
for ourselves. Everyone was preoccupied with the restitution program.
We had our full share of the work. Another important shipment was to be
made to Belgium. It was to include the Michelangelo Madonna, the eleven
paintings stolen from the church in Bruges when the statue was taken, and
the four panels by Dirk Bouts from the famous altarpiece in the church
of St. Pierre at Louvain. These panels, which formed the wings of the
altarpiece, had been removed by the Germans in August 1942. Before the
first World War one wing had been in the Berlin Gallery, the other in the
Alte Pinakothek at Munich. As in the case of the Ghent altarpiece, they
had been restored—unjustly, according to the Germans—to Belgium by the
Versailles Treaty.
This shipment to Belgium represented the first practical application of
the “come and get it” theory of restitution, evolved by Major La Farge.
Belgium had already received the Ghent altarpiece as token restitution.
Now it was up to the Belgians to carry on at their own expense. The
special representatives who came down from Brussels to supervise this
initial shipment were Dr. Paul Coremans, a great technical expert, and
Lieutenant Pierre Longuy of the Ministry of Fine Arts. They had their own
truck but had been unable to bring suitable packing materials. We had an
ample supply of pads and blankets which we had stored at the Collecting
Point after our evacuation of the Göring collection. We placed them
at the disposal of the Belgians. But it was Saturday and no civilian
packers were available. Dr. Coremans gratefully accepted the offer of our
services. Steve, Lamont and I loaded the truck. It was the last operation
of the Special Evacuation Team.
The Belgians had no sooner departed than the French and Dutch
representatives arrived. Captain Hubert de Brye for France looked more
like a sportsman than a scholar; but he was a man of wide cultivation and
had a sense of humor which endeared him to his associates in Munich. He
and Ham Coulter were kindred spirits and became great friends.
Ham, who had been responsible for the rehabilitation of both the
Collecting Point and the Führerbau, now had two assistants—Captain George
Lacy and Dietrich Sattler, the latter a German architect. Through this
division of the work, Ham found time for new duties: he took the foreign
representatives in tow, arranged for their billets, their mess cards,
their PX rations and so on. It was an irritating but not a thankless job,
for the recipients of his attentions were devoted to their “wet nurse.”
[Illustration: The Albrecht Dürer house at Nürnberg—before and after the
German collapse. In an underground bunker across the street were stored
the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire and the famous Veit Stoss
altarpiece.]
[Illustration: The Veit Stoss altarpiece from the Church of Our Lady in
Cracow, which was carried off by the Nazis at the beginning of the war,
has been returned to Poland. _Left_, open; _right_, closed.]
The Dutch representative was Lieutenant Colonel Alphonse Vorenkamp. He
was a little man with gray hair, shrewd gray eyes and steel-rimmed
spectacles. An eminent authority on Dutch painting, he had been for
several years a member of the faculty at Smith College. He enjoyed the
unusual distinction of having served in both the American and Dutch
Armies during the present war.
I had met him in San Francisco in 1944, shortly after his discharge
from the service. He had been a buck private; and I gathered from the
story of his experiences that our Army had released him in self-defense.
He told me that he often had difficulty in understanding the drill
sergeant. Once, without thinking he had stepped out of formation and
asked politely, “Sergeant, would you mind repeating that last order!”
Vorenkamp said that he had paid dearly for his indiscretion, so dearly in
fact that he had seriously considered changing his name from Alphonse to
Latrinus. Alphonse, he said, was a ridiculous name for a Dutchman anyway.
He preferred to be called Phonse.
Released from the Army, he had gone back to his teaching. Then, only
a few months ago, the Dutch Government had requested his services in
connection with the restitution of looted art. They had offered him a
lieutenant-colonelcy and he had accepted.
The Dutch, as well as the British and French, had made a practice
of conferring upon qualified civilians ranks consistent with the
responsibilities of given jobs. Our government’s failure to do
likewise—so far as the art program was concerned—resulted in a disparity
in rank which frequently placed American MFA&A personnel at a great
disadvantage.
Of all the foreign representatives, none served his country more
zealously than Phonse Vorenkamp. Throughout the fall and winter months,
his convoys shuttled back and forth between Munich and Amsterdam. When I
last heard from him—in the late spring—he had restored to Holland more
than nine hundred paintings, upward of two thousand pieces of sculpture,
porcelain and glass, along with truckloads of tapestries, rugs and
furniture.
I left Munich on a rainy morning at the end of September. Lamont and
Steve were planning to depart for Alt Aussee at the same time. The
three of us had agreed to meet in front of the Collecting Point at
eight-thirty. I was a few minutes late and when I got there the guard at
the entrance said they had already gone. I hadn’t felt so forlorn since
the day Craig and I had parted in Bad Homburg months before. As I started
down the steps to the command car, Phonse Vorenkamp called from the
doorway. He had come to work a little earlier than usual, just to see me
off. He was full of waspish good humor, joked about the magnificence of
my new job in Frankfurt, and promised to look me up when he came through
with his first convoy. The driver stepped on the starter and, as we
rounded the corner into the Brienner-Strasse, Phonse waved us on our way.
(10)
_MISSION TO AMSTERDAM; THE WIESBADEN MANIFESTO_
I reported to Major La Farge upon arrival. Since my visit to Frankfurt
with Lamont and Steve six weeks before, there had been several changes
in the MFA&A Section. With the removal to Berlin of the Monuments
officers attached to the U. S. Group Control Council, our office at USFET
Headquarters in Frankfurt had been transferred to Höchst. The move was
logical enough because we were part of the Restitution Control Branch
of the Economics Division, which was located there. For all practical
purposes, however, we would have been better off in Frankfurt, since our
work involved daily contacts with other divisions—all located at the main
headquarters.
The Höchst office was a barnlike room, some thirty feet square, on
the second floor of the Exposition Building. It required considerable
ingenuity to find the room, for it was tucked in behind a row of
laboratories occupied by white-coated German civilians, former employees
of I. G. Farben, who were now working for the American Military
Government. At one end of the room were desks for the Chief and Deputy
Chief. The rest of the furniture consisted of four long work tables and
two small file cabinets. The staff was equally meager—Major La Farge,
Lieutenant Edith Standen, Corporal James Reeds and a German civilian
stenographer.
The first few days were a period of intensive indoctrination. The morning
I arrived, Bancel defined the relationship between our office and the one
at Berlin; and between us and the two districts of the American Zone—the
Eastern District, which was under Third Army, and the Western District,
under Seventh Army. He described the Berlin office as the final authority
in determining policy. In theory, if not always in fact, a given policy
was adopted only after an exchange of views between the Frankfurt-Höchst
office and the one in Berlin. The activation of policy was our function.
USFET—that is, our office—was an operational headquarters. Berlin was not.
And how did we activate policy? By means of directives. Directives to
whom? To Third Army at Munich and Seventh Army at Heidelberg. That
sounded simple enough, until Bancel explained that a directive was not
exactly an imperial decree. Just as it was our prerogative to activate
policies approved by Berlin, so it was the prerogative of the Armies to
implement our directives as they deemed expedient. He reminded me that
the two Armies were independent and autonomous within their respective
areas. In other words, we could tell them _what_ to do, but not _how_
to do it. Bancel was an old hand at writing directives, knowing how to
give each phrase just the right emphasis. At first the longer ones seemed
stilted and occasionally ambiguous. But I was not accustomed to military
jargon. Later I came to realize that Army communications always sounded
stilted; and what I had mistaken for ambiguity was often deliberate
circumlocution, calculated to soften the force of an unpalatable order.
Bancel said there were more important things to worry about than the
composition of directives. One was the problem of token restitutions. He
was sorry to postpone the one to Poland, but that couldn’t be helped.
Now that France and Belgium had received theirs, Holland was next on the
list. The ceremony in Brussels had made a great hit. He thought a similar
affair might be arranged at The Hague. Vorenkamp was selecting a group of
pictures at the Collecting Point. We would provide a plane to fly them
to Amsterdam. Captain Rae was to notify our office as soon as Vorenkamp
was ready to leave—probably within the next two days. In the meantime
Bancel was having orders cut for me to go to Holland. I was to see the
American ambassador, explain the idea of these token restitutions, and
sound him out on the subject of planning a ceremony similar to the one
our ambassador had arranged in Brussels. Colonel Anthony Biddle, Chief of
the Allied Contacts Section at USFET Headquarters, had promised Bancel
to write a letter of introduction for me to take to The Hague. Bancel
suggested that I make tentative arrangements with the motor pool for a
car and driver.
It was almost noon and Bancel had an appointment in Frankfurt at
twelve-thirty. He just had time to catch the bus. After he left, Reeds
and the stenographer went out to lunch, so Edith Standen and I had the
office to ourselves. We had a lot to talk over, as I had not seen her
since June when we worked together on the inventory of the Berlin Museum
collections at the Reichsbank.
In the meantime, she had been stationed at Höchst. When the Group CC
outfit—to which she was officially attached—moved to Berlin, she had
preferred to remain with the USFET office. On the Organizational Chart
of the MFA&A Section, Edith was listed as the “Officer in Charge of
Technical Files.” Actually she was in charge of a great many other things
as well. When the Chief and Deputy Chief were away from headquarters at
the same time—and they often were—Edith took over the affairs of the
Section. She must have been born with these remarkable administrative
gifts, for she could have had little opportunity to develop them as the
cloistered curator of the Widener Collection where, as she said herself,
she was “accustomed to the silent padding of butlers and the spontaneous
appearance of orchids and gardenias among the Rembrandts and the
Raphaels.”
I asked her if there had been any new developments regarding the proposed
removal of German-owned art to the United States. Yes, there had been.
But nothing conclusive. There was a cable from General Clay to the War
Department early in September.[3] The cable spoke of “holding German
objects of art in trust for eventual return to the German people.” But
it didn’t contain the clause “if and when the German nation had earned
the right to their return” which had appeared in the original document.
Besides the cable, there had been a communication from Berlin asking for
an estimate of the cubic footage in art repositories of the American
Zone. It was a question impossible to answer accurately. But Bancel and
Charlie had figured out a reply, citing the approximate size of one of
the repositories and leaving it up to Berlin to multiply the figures
by the total number in the entire zone. Now that John Nicholas Brown
and Charlie Kuhn were back in the United States, they might be able to
discourage the projected removal. I had only one piece of information to
contribute on the subject: a letter from George Stout saying that he had
been asked by the Roberts Commission to give an opinion, based on purely
technical grounds, of the risk involved in sending paintings to America.
He did so, stating that to remove them would _cube_ the risk of leaving
them in Germany.
When Corporal Reeds returned to the office, Edith and I went across the
street to the Officers’ Mess. While we were at lunch, she told me that
Jim Reeds had been a discovery of George’s. He had been with George and
Bancel at their office in Wiesbaden. Jim was a tall, serious fellow with
sandy hair and a turned-up nose. Edith said that he had been a medical
student before the war and that he came from Missouri. There was so much
paper work to do in the office that he never got caught up. The German
typist was slow and inaccurate. Jim had to do over nearly half the
letters he gave her to copy. But his patience was inexhaustible and he
never complained.
Bancel didn’t get back from Frankfurt until late in the afternoon. The
return of the Veit Stoss altarpiece had come up again and he had had a
long talk about it with the Polish liaison officer at USFET, who was a
nephew of the Archbishop of Cracow. After that he had had a session with
Colonel A. J. de la Bretesche, the French liaison officer. And, for good
measure, he had to take up the problem of clearance for the two Czech
representatives who would be arriving in a few days. He said wearily
that practically all of his days were like that, now that restitution
was going full speed ahead. I told him that I had had an uneventful
but profitable afternoon, going through the correspondence which had
accumulated on his desk. There had been several telephone calls, among
them one from Colonel Walter Kluss. Bancel said he would answer that one
in person, as he wanted to introduce me to the colonel, who was chief of
the Restitution Control Branch. Restitution involved settling the claims
of the occupied countries for everything the Germans had taken from
them. These claims covered every conceivable kind of property—factory
equipment, vehicles, barges, machinery, racehorses, livestock, household
furniture, etc.
The colonel’s office was at the end of the corridor. On our way down the
hall, Bancel said that the Army could do with a few more officers like
Colonel Kluss. This observation didn’t give me a very clear picture of
the colonel, but when I met him I knew what Bancel meant. There was an
unassuming friendliness and simplicity about him that I didn’t usually
associate with full colonels. His interest in the activities of the MFA&A
Section was genuine and personal. He was particularly fond of Bancel and
Edith and, during our visit with him that afternoon, spoke admiringly of
the work which they and Charlie Kuhn had done. While other sections of
the Restitution Control Branch were still generalizing about restitution,
the MFA&A Section had tackled the problem realistically. It wasn’t a
question of mapping out a program which might work. The program _did_
work. The wisdom and foresight of Bancel’s planning appealed to the
practical side of Colonel Kluss’ nature and, throughout the months of our
association with him, he was never too busy to help us when we went to
him with our troubles.
Bancel and I took the seven o’clock bus over to Frankfurt that evening.
We had dinner at the Officers’ Mess in the Casino behind USFET
Headquarters. We were joined there by Lieutenant William Lovegrove,
the officer whom Bancel had selected as our representative at Paris in
connection with the restitution of looted art works to the French. With
the arrival of the French representative in Munich, regular shipments
would soon be departing for France. Their destination in Paris was to
be the Musée du Jeu de Paume, which was now the headquarters of the
_Commission de Récupération Artistique_, the commission composed of
officials from the French museums charged with the task of sorting and
distributing the plundered treasures. Among the officials selected to
assist in this work was Captain Rose Valland, the courageous Frenchwoman
who, as I mentioned earlier, had spied on the Nazi thieves in that same
museum during the Occupation.
We had roughly estimated that it would require from three to six months
to send back the main bulk of the French loot from Germany. Mass
evacuation, as I have mentioned before, had the advantage of accelerating
restitution. It had the disadvantage of rendering difficult our procedure
of evaluating and photographing objects before they were returned. It
was our intention that Lieutenant Lovegrove should obtain the desired
photographs and appraisals. American military establishments in France
were being drastically reduced, but we planned to attach him to the USFET
Mission to France. We had been told that the Mission would be withdrawn
in the early spring. If Lovegrove’s work weren’t finished by that time,
Bancel thought it might be possible to attach him to our Paris Embassy
when the Mission folded.
When Bancel introduced me to Lovegrove that evening at the Casino, I
thought he would be very much at home in an embassy. He was of medium
height, bald, had a pink and white complexion and wore a small mustache.
He was self-possessed without being blasé. Lovegrove was a sculptor and
had lived in Paris for many years before the war. Bancel said that he
spoke a more perfect French than most Frenchmen.
Subsequent developments proved the wisdom of Bancel’s choice. Lovegrove
was exceedingly popular with his French associates at the Musée du Jeu de
Paume. His extraordinary tact and his capacity for hard work were equally
remarkable.
I particularly remember our last meeting. It was in February, when I
was stopping briefly in Paris on my way home from Germany. By that time
hundreds of carloads of stolen art had been received at the Jeu de
Paume. There were one or two final matters which I wished to take up with
M. Henraux and M. Dreyfus, members of the _Commission de Récupération
Artistique_. When Lovegrove and I arrived at the museum, we found
these two charming, elderly gentlemen in their office. With them was
M. David-Weill. He was examining a fine gold snuffbox. The office was
littered with gold and silver objects. They were part of the fabulous
collection which Lamont, Steve and I had packed by candlelight in the
Castle of Neuschwanstein six months before.
During the second week of October, I left for Amsterdam. It was a
three-hundred-mile drive from Frankfurt. Cassidy, the driver of the jeep,
was a New Jersey farm boy who, unlike most drivers, preferred long trips
to short local runs. The foothills of the Taunus Mountains were bright
with fall coloring along the back road to Limburg. From there we turned
west to the Rhine. Then, skirting the east bank of the river, we crossed
over into the British Zone at Cologne. From Cologne—where we lunched at
a British mess—our road led through Duisburg, Wesel and the skeleton of
Emerich.
We crossed the Dutch frontier at five and continued through battered
Arnhem to Utrecht. Utrecht was full of exuberant Canadians. I stopped
at the headquarters of the local Town Major to inquire about a mess for
transient officers. A friendly lieutenant, a blonde Dutch girl on his
arm, was on his way to supper and suggested that I join them. He said
that Cassidy could eat at a Red Cross Club.
The dining room in the officers’ hotel was noisy and crowded. Most of the
officers, the lieutenant explained, were going home in a few days. It was
good to be in a city which, superficially at least, showed no scars of
battle.
We reached Amsterdam about nine-thirty. At night the canals were
confusing. Cassidy and I looked in vain for the Town Major. Finally we
found a Canadian “leave hotel.” The enlisted man on duty at the desk
dispensed with the formality of the billet permit I should have obtained
from the Town Major, and assigned us rooms on the same floor. Cassidy
decided that the Canadians were a democratic outfit.