Chapter II: Part 2

The old caretaker explained that the central tomb was that of the Landgraf of Hesse who had died thirty years ago. Those on either side contained the remains of his two sons who had likewise died in the first World War. The other two coffins were those of the elder son’s wife and of a princess of Baden who had been killed in one of the air raids on Frankfurt in 1944. All five sarcophagi had originally stood in the little chapel across the courtyard. It had been destroyed by an incendiary bomb the winter before.

We left this funerary chamber with a feeling of relief and continued our inspection of the castle. A winding ramp in one of the towers led to the floors above. From the top story we had a superb view of the broad Frankfurt plain spread out below. The caretaker told us he had watched the bombings from that vantage point. The great banqueting hall, with a musicians’ gallery at one end, had been emptied of its original furnishings and was now a jumble of papers stacked in piles of varying heights. These were part of the Frankfurt archives. Others were stored in two rooms on the ground floor. All of the rooms were dry and weatherproof, so there was nothing further to be done about them for the present. There was no place in Frankfurt as yet to which they could be moved. “Off Limits” signs had been posted. They would discourage souvenir hunters from unauthorized delving.

On our way back to the car the caretaker told us that the castle still belonged to Margarethe, Landgräfin of Hesse, the youngest sister of the last Kaiser. Although she was now in her seventies, she came every day to put fresh flowers beside the tombs of her husband and her two sons. She lived at a newer castle, Schloss Friedrichshof, only a few kilometers away. He apparently didn’t know that Schloss Friedrichshof had been taken over by the Army and was being used as an officers’ country club. The old Landgräfin was living modestly in one of the small houses on the property. Her scapegrace son, Prince Philip, as I learned later, had played an active role in the artistic depredations of the Nazi ringleaders. I was to hear more of the Hesse family before the end of the year.

A second excursion took us still farther afield. On an overcast morning two days later, Buchman, Charlie Kuhn, Captain Rudolph Vassalle (who was the Public Safety Officer of the detachment) and I set out in the little Opel sedan which had been assigned the MFA&A office. We struck out to the east of Frankfurt on the road to Gelnhausen. We stopped at this pleasant little town with its lovely, early Gothic church and went through the formality of obtaining clearance from the local Military Government Detachment to make an inspection in that area.

From there we continued by a winding secondary road which led us through increasingly hilly country to Bad Brückenau. Our mission there was twofold: Captain Vassalle wanted to track down a young Nazi officer, reportedly a member of the SS, and to find a warehouse said to contain valuable works of art. I had gathered from Buchman that many such reports petered out on investigation. Still, there was always the chance that the one you dismissed as of no importance would turn out to be something worth while.

After making several inquiries, we eventually located a small house on the edge of town. In response to our insistent hammering, the door of the house was finally opened by a pallid young man probably in his late twenties. If he was the object of the captain’s search he had certainly undergone a remarkable metamorphosis, for he bore little resemblance to the dapper officer of whom Captain Vassalle carried a photograph for identification. The captain seemed satisfied that he was the man. So leaving them in conversation, the three of us followed up the business of the reported works of art. The other two occupants of the house—an old man and a young woman who may have been the wife of the man who had opened the door—responded to our questions with alacrity and took us to the cellar. There we were shown a cache of pictures, all of them unframed and none of them of any value. They appeared to be what the old man claimed—their own property, brought to Bad Brückenau when they had left Frankfurt to escape the bombings. In any case, we made a listing of the canvases, identifying them as best we could and making notations of the sizes, and also admonishing the couple not to remove them from the premises.

After that the old man took us across the back yard to a large modern barn which was heavily padlocked. Once inside he unshuttered a row of windows along one side of the main, ground-floor room. It was jammed to the ceiling with every conceivable item of household furnishings: chairs, tables, beds, bedding, kitchen utensils and porcelain. But no pictures. We poked around enough to satisfy ourselves that first appearances were not deceiving. They weren’t, so, having made certain that the old fellow, who claimed to be merely the custodian of these things, understood the regulations forbidding their removal, we picked up Captain Vassalle. He had completed his interrogation of the alleged SS officer and placed him under house arrest.

Our next objective was an old Schloss which, according to our map, was still a good hour’s drive to the northeast. As it was nearly noon and we were all hungry, we decided to investigate the possibilities of food in the neighborhood. On our way back through Bad Brückenau we stopped at the office of a small detachment of troops and asked where we could get some lunch. The hospitable second lieutenant on duty in the little stucco building, which had once been part of the Kurhaus establishment, gave us directions to the sprawling country hotel, high up above the town, where his outfit was quartered. He said that he would telephone ahead to warn the mess sergeant of our arrival.

For a little way we followed along the Sinn, which flows through the grassy valley in which Bad Brückenau nestles. Then we began to mount sharply and, for the next fifteen minutes, executed a series of hairpin turns and ended abruptly beside a rambling structure which commanded a wonderful view of the valley and the wooded hills on the other side. Our hosts were a group of friendly young fellows who seemed delighted to have the monotony of their rural routine interrupted by our visit. They asked Charlie and me the usual question—what was the Navy doing in the middle of Germany—and got our stock reply: we are planning to dig a canal from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.

We had a heavy downpour during lunch, and we waited for the rain to let up before starting out again. Then we took the winding road down into town, crossed the river and drove up into the hills on the other side of the valley. An hour’s drive brought us to upland meadow country and a grove of handsome lindens. At the end of a long double row of these fine trees stood Schloss Rossbach. “Castle” was a rather pompous name for the big seventeenth century country house with whitewashed walls and heavily barred ground-floor windows.

We were received by the owners, a Baron Thüngen and his wife, and explained that we had come to examine the condition of the works of art, which, according to our information, had been placed there for safekeeping. They ushered us up to a comfortable sitting room on the second floor where we settled down to wait while the baroness went off to get the keys. In the meantime we had a few words with her husband. His manner was that of the haughty landed proprietor, and he looked the part. He was a big, burly man in his sixties. He was dressed in rough tweeds and wore a matching hat, adorned with a bushy “shaving brush,” which he hadn’t bothered to remove indoors. That may have been unintentional, but I idly wondered if it weren’t deliberate discourtesy and rather wished that I had kept my own cap on. I wished also that I could have matched his insolent expression, but thought it unlikely because I was frankly enjoying the obvious distaste which our visit was causing the old codger.

However, his attitude was almost genial compared with that of his waspish wife, who reappeared about that time, armed with a huge hoop from which a great lot of keys jangled. The baroness, who was much younger than her husband, had very black hair and discontented dark eyes. She spoke excellent English, without a trace of accent. I felt reasonably sure that she was not German but couldn’t guess her nationality. It turned out that she was from the Argentine. She was a sullen piece and made no effort to conceal her irritation at our intrusion. She explained that neither she nor her husband had anything to do with the things stored there; that, in fact, it was a great inconvenience having to put up with them. She had asked the young woman who knew all about them to join us.

The young woman in question arrived and was completely charming. She took no apparent notice of the baroness’ indifference, which was that of a mistress toward a servant whom she scarcely knew. Her fresh, open manner cleared the atmosphere instantly. She introduced herself as Frau Holzinger, wife of the director of Frankfurt’s most famous museum, the Staedelsches Kunstinstitut. Because of conditions in Frankfurt, and more particularly because their house had been requisitioned by the American military authorities, she had come to Schloss Rossbach with her two young children. Country life, she continued, was better for the youngsters and, besides, her husband had thought that she might help with the things stored at the castle. I had met Dr. Holzinger when I went one day to have a look at what remained of the museum, so his wife and I hit it off at once. I was interested to learn that she was Swiss and a licensed physician. She smilingly suggested that we make a tour of the castle and she would show us what was there.

The first room to be inspected was a library adjoining the sitting room in which we had been waiting. Here we found a quantity of excellent French Impressionist paintings, all from the permanent collection of the Staedel, and a considerable number of fine Old Master drawings. Most of these were likewise the property of the museum, but a few—I remember one superb Rembrandt sketch—appeared to have come from Switzerland. Those would, of course, have to be looked into later, to determine their exact origin and how they came to be on loan at the museum. But for the moment we were concerned primarily with storage conditions and the problem of security. In another room we found an enormous collection of books, the library of one of the Frankfurt museums. In a third we encountered an array of medieval sculpture—saints of all sizes and description, some of carved wood, others of stone, plain or polychromed. These too were of museum origin.

The last storage room was below ground, a vast, cavernous chamber beneath the house. Here was row upon row of pictures, stacked in two tiers down the center of the room and also along two sides. From what we could make of them in the poor light, they were not of high quality. During the summer months they would be all right in this underground room, but we thought that the place would be very damp in the winter. Frau Holzinger assured us that this was so and that the pictures should be removed before the bad weather set in.

The baroness chipped in at this point and affably agreed with that idea, undoubtedly happy to further any scheme which involved getting rid of these unwelcome objects. She also warned us that the castle was far from safe as it was, what with roving bands of Poles all over the countryside. As we indicated that we were about to take our leave, she elaborated upon this theme, declaring that their very lives were in danger, that every night she and her husband could hear prowlers in the park. Since they—as Germans—were not allowed to have firearms, they would be at the mercy of these foreign ruffians if they should succeed in breaking into the castle. By this time we were all pretty fed up with the whining baroness. As we turned to go, Charlie Kuhn, eyeing her coldly, asked, “Who brought those Poles here in the first place, madam? We didn’t.”

To our delight, the weather had cleared and the sun was shining. Ahead of us on the roadway, the foliage of the lindens made a gaily moving pattern. Our work for the day was done and we still had half the afternoon. I got out the map and, after making some quick calculations, proposed that we could take in Würzburg and still get back to Frankfurt at a reasonable hour. We figured out that, with the extra jerry can of gas we had with us, we could just about make it. We would be able to fill up at Würzburg for the return trip. So, instead of continuing on the road back to Bad Brückenau, we turned south in the direction of Karlstadt.

It was pleasant to be traveling a good secondary road instead of the broad, characterless Autobahn, on which there were no unexpected turns, no picturesque villages. There was little traffic, so we made very good time. In half an hour we had threaded our way through Karlstadt-on-the-Main. In this part of Franconia the Main is a capricious river, winding casually in and out of the gently undulating hills. A little later we passed the village of Veitschöchheim where the Prince-Bishops of Würzburg had an elaborate country house during the eighteenth century. The house still stands, and its gardens, with a tiny lake and grottoes in the Franco-Italian manner, remain one of the finest examples of garden planning of that day. As we drove by we were glad that this inviting spot had not attracted the attention of our bombers.

Alas, such was not the case with Würzburg, as we realized the minute we reached its outskirts! The once-gracious city, surely one of the most beautiful in all Germany, was an appalling sight. Its broad avenues were now lined with nothing but the gaping, ruined remnants of the stately eighteenth century buildings which had lent the city an air of unparalleled distinction and consistency of design. High on its hilltop above the Main, the mellow walls of the medieval fortress of Marienberg caught the rays of the late afternoon sun. From the distance, the silhouette of that vast structure appeared unchanged, but the proud city of the Prince-Bishops which it overlooked was laid low.

We drove slowly along streets not yet cleared of rubble, until we came to the Residenz, the great palace of the Prince-Bishops, those lavish patrons of the arts to whom the city owed so much of its former grandeur. This magnificent building, erected in the first half of the eighteenth century by the celebrated baroque architect, Johann Balthasar Neumann, for two Prince-Bishops of the Schönborn family, was now a ghost palace, its staring glassless windows and blackened walls pathetic vestiges of its pristine splendor.

We walked up to the main entrance wondering if it could really be true that the crowning glory of the Residenz—the glorious ceiling by Tiepolo, representing Olympus and the Four Continents—was, as we had been told, still intact. With misgivings we turned left across the entrance hall to the Treppenhaus and mounted the grand staircase. We looked up and there it was—as dazzling and majestically beautiful as ever—that incomparable fresco, the masterpiece of the last great Italian painter. Someone with a far greater gift for words than I may be able to convey the exaltation one experiences on seeing that ceiling, not just for the first time but at any time. I can’t. It leaves artist and layman alike absolutely speechless. I think that, if I had to choose one great work of art, it would be this ceiling in the Residenz. You can have even the Sistine ceiling. I’ll take the Tiepolo.

For the next half hour we examined every corner of it. Aside from a few minor discolorations, the result of water having seeped through the lower side of the vault just above the cornice, the fresco was undamaged. Considering the destruction throughout the rest of the building, I could not understand how this portion of the palace could be in such a remarkable state of preservation. The explanation was an interesting example of how good can sometimes come out of evil. Some forty years ago, as I remember the story, there was a fire in the Residenz. The wooden roof over a large portion, if not all, of the building was burned away. When it came to replacing the roof, the city fathers decided it would be a prudent idea to cover the part above the Tiepolo with steel and concrete. This was done, and consequently, when the terrible conflagration of March 1945 swept Würzburg—following the single raid of twenty minutes which destroyed the city—the fresco was spared. As we wandered through other rooms of the Residenz—the Weisser Saal with its elaborate stucco ornamentation and the sumptuous Kaiser Saal facing the garden, once classic examples of the Rococo—I wished that those city fathers had gone a little farther with their steel and concrete.

We stopped briefly to examine the chapel in the south wing. Here, miraculously enough, there had been relatively little damage, but the caretaker expressed concern over the condition of the roof and said that if it weren’t repaired before the heavy rains the ceiling would be lost. Knowing how hard it was to obtain building materials for even the most historic monuments when people didn’t have a roof over their heads, we couldn’t reassure him with much conviction.

The spectacle of ruined Würzburg had a depressing effect upon us, so we weren’t very talkative on our way back to Frankfurt. We passed through only one town of any size, Aschaffenburg, which, like Würzburg, had suffered severe damage. Although I had not been long in Germany and had seen but few of her cities, I was beginning to realize that the reports of the Allied air attacks had not been exaggerated. I was ready to believe that there were only small towns and villages left in this ravaged country.

One morning Charlie Kuhn rang up to say that I should meet him at the Reichsbank early that afternoon. This was something I had been looking forward to for some time, the chance to look at the wonderful things from the Merkers mine which were temporarily stored there. With Charlie came two members of the MFA&A organization whom I had not seen since Versailles and then only briefly. They had been stationed at Barbizon, as part of the Allied Group Control Council for Germany (usually referred to simply as “Group CC”) the top level policy-making body as opposed to SHAEF, which dealt with the operational end of things. These two gentlemen were John Nicholas Brown, who had come over to Germany with the assimilated rank of colonel as General Eisenhower’s adviser on cultural affairs, and Major Mason Hammond, in civilian life professor of the Classics at Harvard.

It had been decided, now that we were about to acquire a permanent depot in which to store the treasures, to make one Monuments officer responsible for the entire collection. By this transfer of custody, the Property Control Officer in whose charge the things were at present, could be relieved of that responsibility. Major Hammond had with him a paper designating me as custodian. Knowing in a general way what was stored in the bank, I felt that I was on the point of being made a sort of director, pro tem, of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

The genial Property Control Officer, Captain William Dunn, was all smiles at the prospect of turning his burden over to someone else. But before this transfer could be made, a complete check of every item was necessary. Major Hammond knew just how he wanted this done. I was to have two assistants, who could come over the next morning from his office in Hoechst, twenty minutes from Frankfurt. The three of us, in company with Captain Dunn, would make the inventory.

We wandered through the series of rooms in which the things were stored. In the first room were something like four hundred pictures lined up against the wall in a series of rows. In two adjoining rooms were great wooden cases piled one above another. In a fourth were leather-bound boxes containing the priceless etchings, engravings and woodcuts from the Berlin Print Room. Still another room was filled with cases containing the renowned Egyptian collections. It was rumored that one of them held the world-famous head of Queen Nefertete, probably the best known and certainly the most beloved single piece of all Egyptian sculpture. It had occupied a place of special honor in the Berlin Museum, in a gallery all to itself.

Still other rooms were jammed with cases of paintings and sculpture of the various European schools. In a series of smaller alcoves were heaped huge piles of Oriental rugs and rare fabrics. And last, one enormous room with bookshelves was filled from floor to ceiling with some thirty thousand volumes from the Berlin Patent Office. Quite separate and apart from all these things was a unique collection of ecclesiastical vessels of gold and silver, the greater part of them looted from Poland. These extremely precious objects were kept in a special vault on the floor above.

Captain Dunn brought out a thick stack of papers. It was the complete inventory. Major Hammond said that the two officers who would help with the checking were a Captain Edwin Rae and a WAC lieutenant named Standen. Aside from having heard that Rae had been a student of Charlie Kuhn’s at Harvard, I knew nothing about him. But the name Standen rang a bell: was she, by any chance, Edith Standen who had been curator of the Widener Collection? Major Hammond smilingly replied, “The same.” I had known her years ago in Cambridge where we had taken Professor Sachs’ course in Museum Administration at the same time. I remembered her as a tall, dark, distinguished-looking English girl. To be exact, she was half English: her father had been a British Army officer, her mother a Bostonian. Recalling her very reserved manner and her scholarly tastes, I found it difficult to imagine her in uniform.

Early the following morning, I met my cohorts at the entrance to the Reichsbank. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Captain Rae was an old acquaintance if not an old friend. He also had been around the Fogg Museum in my time. Edith looked very smart in her uniform. She had a brisk, almost jovial manner which was not to be reconciled with her aloof and dignified bearing in the marble halls of the Widener house at Elkins Park. We hunted up Captain Dunn and set to work. Our first task was to count and check off the paintings stacked in the main room. We got through them with reasonable speed, refraining with some difficulty from pausing to admire certain pictures we particularly fancied. Then we tackled the Oriental rugs, and that proved to be a thoroughly thankless and arduous task. We had a crew of eight PWs—prisoners of war—to help us spread the musty carpets out on the floor. Owing to the fact that the smaller carpets—in some cases they were hardly more than fragments—had been rolled up inside larger ones, we ended with nearly a hundred more items than the inventory called for. That troubled Captain Dunn a bit, but I told him that it didn’t matter so long as we were over. We’d have to start worrying only if we came out short. By five o’clock we were tired and dirty and barely a third of the way through with the job.

The next day we started in on the patent records. There had been a fire in the mine where the records were originally stored. Many of them were slightly charred, and all of them had been impregnated with smoke. When we had finished counting the whole thirty thousand, we smelled just the way they did. As a matter of fact we hadn’t wanted to assume responsibility for these records in the first place. Certainly they had nothing to do with art. But Major Hammond had felt that they properly fell to us as archives. And of course they were archives of a sort.

On the morning of the third day, as I was about to leave my office for the Reichsbank, I had a phone call from Charlie Kuhn. He asked me how the work was coming along and then, in a guarded voice, said that something unexpected had turned up and that he might have to send me away for a few days. He told me he couldn’t talk about it on the telephone, and anyway, it wasn’t definite. He’d probably know by afternoon. I was to call him later. This was hardly the kind of conversation to prepare one for a humdrum day of taking inventory, even if one were counting real treasure. And for a person with my curiosity, the morning’s work was torture.

When I called Charlie after lunch he was out but had left word that I was to come to his office at two o’clock. When I got there he was sitting at his desk. He looked up from the dispatch he was reading and said with a rueful smile, “Tom, I am going to send you out on a job I’d give my eyeteeth to have for myself.” Then he explained that certain developments had suddenly made it necessary to step up the work of evacuating art repositories down in Bavaria and in even more distant areas. For the first time in my life I knew what was meant by the expression “my heart jumped a beat”—for that was exactly what happened to mine! No wonder Charlie was envious. This sounded like the real thing.

Charlie told me that I was to fly down to Munich the next morning and that I would probably be gone about ten days. To save time he had already had my orders cut. All I had to do was to pick them up at the AG office. I was to report to Third Army Headquarters and get in touch with George Stout as soon as possible. Charlie didn’t know just where I’d find George. He was out in the wilds somewhere. As a matter of fact he wasn’t too sure about the exact location of Third Army Headquarters. A new headquarters was being established and the only information he had was that it would be somewhere in or near Munich. The name, he said, would be “Lucky Rear” and I would simply have to make inquiries and be guided by signs posted along the streets.

I asked Charlie what I should do about the completion of the inventory at the Reichsbank, and also about the impending report from the Corps of Engineers on the University of Frankfurt building. He suggested that I leave the former in Captain Rae’s hands and the latter with Lieutenant Buchman. Upon my return I could take up where I had left off.

That evening I threw my things together, packing only enough clothes to see me through the next ten days. Not knowing where I would be billeted I took the precaution of including my blankets. Even at that my luggage was compact and light, which was desirable as I was traveling by air.

(3)

_MUNICH AND THE BEGINNING OF FIELD WORK_

The next morning I was up before six and had early breakfast. It was a wonderful day for the trip, brilliantly clear. The corporal in our office took me out to the airfield, the one near Hanau where Craig Smyth and I had landed weeks before. It was going to be fun to see Craig again and find out what he had been up to since we had parted that morning in Bad Homburg. The drive to the airfield took about forty-five minutes. There was a wait of half an hour at the field, and it was after ten when we took off in our big C-47. We flew over little villages with red roofs, occasionally a large town—but none that I could identify—and now and then a silvery lake.

Just before we reached Munich, someone said, “There’s Dachau.” Directly below us, on one side of a broad sweep of dark pine trees, we saw a group of low buildings and a series of fenced-in enclosures. On that sunny morning the place looked deserted and singularly peaceful. Yet only a few weeks before it had been filled with the miserable victims of Nazi brutality.

In another ten minutes we landed on the dusty field of the principal Munich airport. Most of the administration buildings had a slightly battered look but were in working order. It was a welcome relief to take refuge from the blazing sunshine in the cool hallway of the main building. The imposing yellow brick lobby was decorated with painted shields of the different German states or “Länder.” The arms of Bavaria, Saxony, Hesse-Nassau and the rest formed a colorful frieze around the walls.

A conveyance of some kind was scheduled to leave for town in a few minutes. Meanwhile there were sandwiches and coffee for the plane passengers. By the time we had finished, a weapons carrier had pulled up before the entrance. Several of us climbed into its dust-encrusted interior. It took me a little while to get my bearings as we drove toward Munich. I had spotted the familiar pepper-pot domes of the Frauenkirche from the air but had recognized no other landmark of the flat, sprawling city which I had known well before the war.

It was not until we turned into the broad Prinz Regenten-Strasse that I knew exactly where I was. As we drove down this handsome avenue, I got a good look at a long, colonnaded building of white stone. The roof was draped with what appeared to be an enormous, dark green fishnet. The billowing scallops of the net flapped about the gleaming cornice of the building. It was the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the huge exhibition gallery dedicated by Hitler in the middle thirties to the kind of art of which he approved—an art in which there was no place for untrammeled freedom of expression, only the pictorial and plastic representation of all the Nazi regime stood for. The dangling fishnet was part of the elaborate camouflage. I judged from the condition of the building that the net had admirably served its purpose.

In a moment we rounded the corner by the Prinz Karl Palais. Despite the disfiguring coat of ugly olive paint which covered its classic façade, it had not escaped the bombs. The little palace, where Mussolini had stayed, had a hollow, battered look and the formal garden behind it was a waste of furrowed ground and straggling weeds. We turned left into the wide Ludwig-Strasse and came to a grinding halt beside a bleak gray building whose walls were pockmarked with artillery fire. I asked our driver if this were Lucky Rear headquarters and was told curtly that it wasn’t, but that it was the end of the line. It was MP headquarters and I’d have to see if they’d give me a car to take me to my destination, which the driver said was “’way the hell” on the other side of town.

Before going inside I looked down the street to the left. The familiar old buildings were still standing, but they were no longer the trim, cream-colored structures which had once given that part of the city such a clean, orderly air. Most of them were burned out. Farther along on the right, the Theatinerkirche was masked with scaffolding. At the end of the street the Feldherren-Halle, Ludwig I’s copy of the Loggia dei Lanzi, divested of its statuary, reared its columns in the midst of the desolation.

It was gray and cool in the rooms of the MP building, but the place was crowded. Soldiers were everywhere and things seemed to be at sixes and sevens. After making several inquiries and being passed from one desk to another, I finally got hold of a brisk young sergeant to whom I explained my troubles. At first he said there wasn’t a chance of getting a ride out to Lucky Rear. Every jeep was tied up and would be for hours. They had just moved into Munich and hadn’t got things organized yet. Then all at once he relented and with a grin said, “Oh, you’re Navy, aren’t you? In that case I’ll have to fix you up somehow. We can’t have the Navy saying the Army doesn’t co-operate.”

He walked over to a window that looked down on the courtyard below, shouted instructions to someone and then told me I’d find a jeep and driver outside. “Think nothing of it, Lieutenant,” he said in answer to my thanks. “Maybe I’ll be wanting a ship to take me home one of these days before long. Have to keep on the good side of the Navy.”

On my way out I gathered up my luggage from the landing below and climbed into the waiting jeep. We turned the corner and followed the Prinz Regenten-Strasse to the river. I noticed for the first time that a temporary track had been laid along one side. This had been done, the driver said, in order to cart away the rubble which had accumulated in the downtown section. We turned right and followed the Isar for several blocks, crossed to the left over the Ludwig bridge, then drove out the Rosenheimer-Strasse to the east for a distance of about three miles. Our destination was the enormous complex of buildings called the Reichszeugmeisterei, or Quartermaster Corps buildings, in which the rear echelon of General Patton’s Third Army had just established its headquarters.

Even in the baking sunlight of that June day, the place had a cold, unfriendly appearance. We halted for identification at the entrance, and there I was introduced to Third Army discipline. One of the guards gave me a black look and growled, “Put your cap on.” Startled by this burly order, I hastily complied and then experienced a feeling of extreme irritation at having been so easily cowed. I could at least have asked him to say “sir.”

The driver, sensing my discomfiture, remarked good-naturedly, “You’ll get used to that sort of thing around here, sir. They’re very, very fussy now that the shooting’s over. Seems like they don’t have anything else to worry about, except enforcing a lot of regulations.” This was my first sample of what I learned to call by its popular name, “chicken”—a prudent abbreviation for the exasperating rules and regulations one finds at an Army headquarters. Third Army had its share of them—perhaps a little more than its share. But I didn’t find that out all at once. It took me all of two days.

My driver let me out in front of the main building, over the central doorway of which the emblem of the Third Army was proudly displayed—a bold “A” inside a circle. The private at the information desk had never heard of the “Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section,” but said that if it was a part of G-5 it would be on the fifth floor. I found the office of the Assistant Chief of Staff and was directed to a room at the end of a corridor at least two blocks long. I was told that the officer I should see was Captain Robert Posey. I knew that name from the reports I had studied at Versailles, as well as from a magazine article describing his discovery, months before, of some early frescoes in the little Romanesque church of Mont St. Martin which had been damaged by bombing. The article had been written by an old friend of mine, Lincoln Kirstein, who was connected with the MFA&A work in Europe.

When I opened the door of the MFA&A office, George Stout was standing in the middle of the room. The expression of surprise on his face changed to relief after he had read the letter I handed him from Charlie Kuhn.

“You couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time,” he said. “I came down from Alt Aussee today to see Posey, but I just missed him. He left this morning for a conference in Frankfurt. I wanted to find out what had happened to the armed escort he promised me for my convoys. We’re evacuating the mine and desperately shorthanded, so I’ve got to get back tonight. It’s a six-hour drive.”

“Charlie said you needed help. What do you want me to do?” I asked. I hoped he would take me along.

“I’d like to have you stay here until we get this escort problem straightened out. I was promised two half-tracks, but they didn’t show up this morning. I’ve got a call in about them right now. It’s three o’clock. I ought to make Salzburg by five-thirty. There’ll surely be some word about the escort by that time, and I’ll phone you from there.”

Before he left, George introduced me to Lieutenant Colonel William Hamilton, the Assistant Chief of Staff, and explained to him that I had come down on special orders from SHAEF to help with the evacuation work. George told the colonel that I would be joining him at the mine as soon as Captain Posey returned and provided me with the necessary clearance. After we had left Colonel Hamilton’s office, I asked George what he meant by “clearance.” He laughed and said that I would have to obtain a written permit from Posey before I could operate in Third Army territory. As Third Army’s Monuments Officer, Posey had absolute jurisdiction in all matters pertaining to the fine arts in the area occupied by his Army. At that time it included a portion of Austria which later came under General Mark Clark’s command.

“Don’t worry,” said George. “I’ll have you at the mine in a few days, and you’ll probably be sorry you ever laid eyes on the place.”

I went back to the MFA&A office and was about to settle down at Captain Posey’s vacant desk. I looked across to a corner of the room where a lanky enlisted man sat hunched up at a typewriter. It was Lincoln Kirstein, looking more than ever like a world-weary Rachmaninoff. Lincoln a private in the U. S. Army! What a far cry from the world of modern art and the ballet! He was thoroughly enjoying my astonishment.

“This is a surprise, but it explains a lot of things,” I said, dragging a chair over to his desk. “So you are the Svengali of the Fine Arts here at Third Army.”

“You mustn’t say things like that around this headquarters,” he said apprehensively.

During the next two hours we covered a lot of territory. First of all, I wanted to know why he was an enlisted man chained to a typewriter. With his extraordinary intelligence and wide knowledge of the Fine Arts, he could have been more useful as an officer. He said that he had applied for a commission and had been turned down. I was sorry I had brought up the subject, but knowing Lincoln’s fondness for the dramatic I thought it quite possible that he had wanted to be able to say in later years that he had gone through the war as an enlisted man. He agreed that he could have been of greater service to the Fine Arts project as an officer.

Then I asked him what his “boss”—he was to be mine too—was like. He said that Captain Posey, an architect in civilian life, had had a spectacular career during combat. In the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, such as lack of personnel and transportation and especially the lack of any real co-operation from the higher-ups, he had accomplished miracles. Now that the press was devoting more and more space to the work the Monuments officers were doing—the discovery of treasures in salt mines and so on—they were beginning to pay loving attention to Captain Posey around the headquarters.

I gathered from Lincoln that the present phase of our activities appealed to the captain less than the protection and repair of historic monuments under fire. If true, this was understandable enough. He was an architect. Why would he, except as a matter of general cultural interest, find work that lay essentially in the domain of a museum man particularly absorbing? It seemed reasonable to assume that Captain Posey would welcome museum men to shoulder a part of the burden. But I was to learn later that my assumption was not altogether correct.

Eventually I had to interrupt our conversation. It was getting late, and still no word about the escort vehicles. Lincoln told me where I would find the officer who was to have called George. He was Captain Blyth, a rough-and-ready kind of fellow, an ex-trooper from the state of Virginia. The outlook was not encouraging. No vehicles were as yet available. Finally, at six o’clock, he rang up to say that he wouldn’t know anything before morning.

Lincoln returned from chow, I gave him the message in case George called while I was out and went down to eat. It was after eight when George telephoned. The connection from Salzburg was bad, and so was his temper when I told him I had nothing to report.

Lincoln usually spent his evenings at the office. That night we stayed till after eleven. Here and there he had picked up some fascinating German art books and magazines, all of them Nazi publications lavishly illustrated. They bore eloquent testimony to Hitler’s patronage of the arts. The banality of the contemporary work in painting was stultifying—dozens of rosy-cheeked, buxom maidens and stalwart, brown-limbed youths reeking with “strength through joy,” and acres of idyllic landscapes. The sculpture was better, though too often the tendency toward the colossal was tiresomely in evidence. It was in recording the art of the past, notably in the monographs dealing with the great monuments of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, that admirable progress had been made. I asked Lincoln enviously how he had got hold of these things. He answered laconically that he had “liberated” them.

Captain Blyth had good news for me the next morning. Two armored vehicles had left Munich for the mine. I gave the message to George when he called just before noon.

“They’re a little late,” he said. “Thanks to the fine co-operation of the 11th Armored Division, I am being taken care of from this end of the line. I’ll try to catch your fellows in Salzburg and tell them to go back where they came from. I am sending you a letter by the next convoy. It’s about a repository which ought to be evacuated right away. I can’t give you any of the details over the phone without violating security regulations. As soon as Posey gets back, you ought to go to work on it. After that I want you to help me here.”

After George had hung up, I asked Lincoln if he had any idea what repository George had in mind. Lincoln said it might be the monastery at Hohenfurth. It was in Czechoslovakia, just over the border from Austria. While we were discussing this possibility, Craig Smyth walked in.

As soon as he had recovered from the surprise of finding me at Captain Posey’s desk, he explained the reason for his visit. Something had to be done right away about the building he was setting up as a collecting point. He had been promised a twenty-four-hour guard. He had been promised a barrier of barbed wire. So far, Third Army had failed to provide either one. A lot of valuable stuff had already been delivered to the building, and George was sending in more. He couldn’t wait any longer.

“Let’s have a talk with Colonel Hamilton,” I said. As we walked down to the Assistant Chief of Staff’s office, Craig told me that the buildings he had requisitioned were the ones Bancel La Farge had suggested when we saw him at Wiesbaden a month ago.

“Can’t this matter wait until Captain Posey returns?” the colonel asked.

“I am afraid it can’t, sir,” said Craig. “As you know, the two buildings were the headquarters of the Nazi party. The Nazis meant to destroy them before Munich fell. Having failed to do so, I think it quite possible that they may still attempt it. Both buildings are honeycombed with underground passageways. Only this morning we located the exit of one of them. It was half a block from the building. We hadn’t known of its existence before. The works of art stored in the building at present are worth millions of dollars. In the circumstances, I am not willing to accept the responsibility for what may happen to them. I must have guards or a barrier at once.”

The colonel reached for the telephone and gave orders that a cordon of guards was to be placed on the buildings immediately. He made a second call, this time about the barbed wire. When he had finished he told Craig that the guard detail would report that afternoon; the barbed wire would be strung around the building the next morning. We thanked the colonel and returned to Posey’s office.

We found two officers who had just come in from Dachau. They were waiting to see someone connected with Property Control. They had brought with them a flour sack filled with gold wedding rings; a large carton stuffed with gold teeth, bridgework, crowns and braces (in children’s sizes); a sack containing gold coins (for the most part Russian) and American greenbacks. As we looked at these mementos of the concentration camp, I thought of the atrocity film I had seen at Versailles and wondered how anyone could believe that those pictures had been an exaggeration.

I went back with Craig to his office at the Königsplatz. The damage to Munich was worse than I had realized. The great Deutsches Museum by the river was a hollow-eyed specter, but sufficiently intact to house DPs. Aside from its twin towers, little was left of the Frauenkirche. The buildings lining the Brienner-Strasse had been blasted and burned. Along the short block leading from the Carolinen Platz to the Königsplatz, the destruction was total: on the left stood the jagged remnants of the little villa Hitler had given D’Annunzio; on the right was a heap of rubble which had been the Braun Haus. But practically untouched were the two Ehrentempel—the memorials to the “martyrs” of the 1923 beer-hall “putsch.” The colonnades were draped with the same kind of green fishnet that had been used to camouflage the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. The classic façades of the museums on either side of the square—the Glyptothek and the Neue Staatsgalerie—were intact. The buildings themselves were a shambles.

I followed Craig up the broad flight of steps to the entrance of the Verwaltungsbau, or Administration Building. It was three stories high, built of stone, and occupied almost an entire block. True to the Nazi boast, it looked as though it had been built to “last a thousand years.” And it was so plain and massive that I didn’t see how it could change much in that time. There was nothing here that could “grow old gracefully.” The interior matched the exterior. There were two great central courts with marble stairs leading to the floor above.

Although the building had not been bombed, it had suffered severely from concussion. Craig said that when he had moved in two weeks ago the skylights over the courts had been open to the sky. On rainy days one could practically go boating on the first floor. There had been no glass in the windows. Now they had been boarded up or filled in with a translucent material as a substitute. All of the doors had been out of line and would not lock. But the repairs were already well under way and, according to Craig, the place would be shipshape in another month or six weeks. He said that his colleague, Hamilton Coulter, a former New York architect now a naval lieutenant, was directing the work and doing a magnificent job. Even under normal conditions it would have been a staggering task. With glass and lumber at a premium, to say nothing of the scarcity of skilled labor, a less resourceful man would have given up in despair.

Craig was rapidly building up a staff of German scholars and museum technicians to assist him in the administration of the establishment. It would soon rival a large American museum in complexity and scope. Storage rooms on the ground floor had been made weatherproof. Paintings and sculpture were already pouring in from the mine at Alt Aussee—six truckloads at a time. In accordance with standard museum practice, Craig had set up an efficient accessioning system. As each object came in, it was identified, marked and listed for future reference. Quarters had been set aside for a photographer. Racks were being built for pictures. A two-storied record room was being converted into a library.

Craig had also requisitioned the “twin” of this colossal building—the Führerbau, where Hitler had had his own offices. This was only a block away on the same street and also faced the Königsplatz. It was connected with the Verwaltungsbau by underground passageways. It was in the Führerbau that the Munich Pact of 1938—the pact that was to have guaranteed “peace in our time”—had been signed. Craig showed me the table at which Mr. Chamberlain had signed that document. Craig was using it now for a conference table.

Repairs were being concentrated on the Administration Building, since its “twin” was being held in reserve for later use. At the moment, however, a few of the rooms were occupied by a small guard detail. The truck drivers and armed guards who came each week with the convoys from the mine were also billeted there.

Just as Craig and I were finishing our inspection of the Führerbau, a convoy of six trucks, escorted by two half-tracks, pulled into the parking space behind the building. The convoy leader had a letter for me. It was the one George Stout had mentioned on the telephone. Lincoln was right. The repository George had in mind was the monastery at Hohenfurth. In his letter he stressed the fact that the evacuation should be undertaken at once. He suggested that I try to persuade Posey to send Lincoln along to help me.

Craig had a comfortable billet in the Kopernikus-Strasse, a four-room flat on the fourth floor of a modern apartment building. The back windows looked onto a garden. Over the tops of the poplar trees beyond, one could see the roof of the Prinz Regenten Theater where, back in the twenties, I had seen my first complete performance of Wagner’s _Ring_. Craig told me that the theater was undamaged except for the Speisesaal where, in prewar days, lavish refreshments were served during intermissions. That one room had caught a bomb.

I accepted Craig’s invitation to share the apartment with him while in Munich and made myself at home in the dining room. It had a couch, and there was a sideboard which I could use as a chest of drawers. The bathroom was across the hall and he said that the supply of hot water was inexhaustible. By comparison, the officers’ billets at Third Army Headquarters were tenements.

Ham Coulter had similar quarters on the ground floor. We stopped there for a drink on our way to supper at the Military Government Detachment. “Civilized” was the word that best described Ham. He was a tall, broad-shouldered fellow with sleek black hair, finely-chiseled features and keen, gray eyes. When he smiled, his mouth crinkled up at the corners, producing an agreeably sarcastic expression. Ham poured out the drinks with an elegance the ordinary German cognac didn’t deserve. They should have been dry martinis. I liked him at once that first evening, and when I came to know him better I found him the wittiest and most amiable of companions. He and Craig were a wonderful combination. They had the greatest admiration and respect for each other, and during the many months of their work together there was not the slightest disagreement between them.