Chapter VI: Part 6

Rivaling the Vermeer in international significance were the fifteen cases of paintings and sculpture from Monte Cassino. The paintings included Titian’s _Danaë_, Raphael’s _Madonna of the Divine Love_, Peter Breughel’s _Blind Leading the Blind_, a _Crucifixion_ by Van Dyck, an _Annunciation_ by Filippino Lippi, a _Sacra Conversazione_ by Palma Vecchio, a _Landscape_ by Claude Lorraine, and Sebastiano del Piombo’s _Portrait of Pope Clement VII_. Among the sculpture were antique bronzes of the greatest rarity and importance from Herculaneum and Pompeii. All had belonged to the Naples Museum. In 1943 the Italians had placed them, together with one hundred and seventy-two other cases of objects from the Naples Museum, in the Abbey of Monte Cassino for safekeeping. The following January, arrangements were made for all of the cases to be returned to the Vatican. When they arrived, fifteen were missing. Members of the Hermann Göring Division had carried them off as a birthday gift for the Reichsmarschall. Göring was incensed, when he learned of the arrival of these treasures, and refused to accept them. There is reason to believe that such was his reaction, for he had striven to maintain a semblance of legality in his art transactions. Even this rapacious collector could not have interpreted the behavior of his loyal officers as “correct,” so far as the Monte Cassino affair was concerned. After the Reichsmarschall’s refusal of the cases, they were brought to Alt Aussee for storage, pending their later return to Italy.

The Springerwerke had been child’s play compared with the task confronting us in the Kammergrafen. We began arbitrarily with the big pictures. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Van Dyck, Rubens, Rembrandt—all were represented in profusion. Many of them were from private collections in Holland, Belgium and France, and were unknown to us save through reproduction. It was a great lesson in connoisseurship, particularly when we had exhausted the “stars” and come to the lesser masters. The Dutch school of the seventeenth century was abundantly represented. There were scores, hundreds, of still lifes and flower paintings. My predilection for them amused Lamont and Sieber. I had always admired these incredibly deft creations of the seventeenth century Dutch artists, and here was an unparalleled opportunity to study them.

There was one peculiar thing about our selections: if a picture looked good to us down in the mine, it invariably looked better when we examined it later in the light of day at the mine entrance. This happened time and again. I remember one instance in particular. The painting was a large Rembrandt, a study of two dead peacocks. Down in the mine we had looked at it without much enthusiasm, though we admired it, and had even hesitated to include it in that first selection, which was to number only the best of the best. The next morning, as it was being loaded onto the truck, we were struck by its distinction.

And I remember the next time I saw that picture: it was at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was included in the small group of outstanding Dutch masterpieces returned to Holland by special plane as a gesture of token restitution in the name of General Eisenhower!

Lamont and I liked Sieber, the German restorer. Lamont referred to him as the “tragic Gilles in white.” Not that there was anything particularly tragic about him, any more than there was about the plight in which most Nazis found themselves. He made no bones about having joined the Party in the early thirties—ironically enough at the suggestion of one of his clients, a Jewish art dealer, who had thought it would be a good thing for Sieber’s business. Sieber had been a restorer of pictures in Berlin and had done a little dealing on the side. It was the half-mournful expression he perpetually wore, together with his white costume, that accounted for Lamont’s appellation. George had described him as a good, run-of-the-mill restorer, perhaps a little better than average. He had sized him up as a man ninety-eight per cent preoccupied with his profession and possibly two per cent concerned with politics. And George, as I think I have observed before, was a good judge of men. Sieber was a quiet, willing worker. He was neither fawning on the one hand, nor arrogant on the other. When you asked him a question, you always got a considered answer.

One evening we drew Sieber out on the subject of the attempted destruction of the mine. We had heard several versions of this fantastic plot and, according to one, Sieber had been instrumental in foiling the conspirators. The story was as follows: On the tenth, thirteenth and thirtieth of April 1945, Glinz, the Gauinspektor of Ober-Donau, had come to the mine with eight great cases marked in black letters “_Marmor—Nicht stürzen_,” that is, “Marble—Don’t drop.” He was acting on explicit instructions from Eigruber, Gauleiter of the region, to place them at strategic positions in the mine tunnels. Each case contained a hundred-pound bomb. Had these bombs been detonated, the entire contents of the mine would have been destroyed. The resulting cave-ins would have blocked every means of access. It would have taken months to repair the apparatus which carried off the water seeping constantly into the mine chambers. By that time the treasures they contained would have been completely ruined. It is generally agreed that Eigruber had obtained Hitler’s tacit consent to this artistic Götterdämmerung, if not his actual approval of it.

I learned later that Captain Posey found a letter from Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, stating in the first paragraph that the contents of the mine must, at all costs, be kept from falling into the hands of the enemy. And then the second paragraph stated that the contents of the mine must not be harmed.

Members of the Austrian resistance movement got wind of this diabolical plan and took Sieber into their confidence. His intimate knowledge of the mine passageways enabled him to set off small charges of dynamite here and there along the tunnels without endangering the contents of the chambers beyond. The resulting damage was slight and served a twofold purpose: it gave the impression that the mine had been permanently walled up; and, if that ruse were discovered, immediate access to the art works themselves was denied the plotters. Eigruber did discover that his attempt had been thwarted and in his rage gave orders for the counterconspirators to be rounded up and shot. But by that time it was the seventh of May, so the tragedy was mercifully averted.

Sieber told the story in a straightforward, factual way. I don’t think it mattered to him who got control of the mine, but it was simply unthinkable that any harm should come to the precious things it housed. It was very much to his credit that he never capitalized on the part he played in this affair. The only other reference he made to it was when he later showed us the places where he had set off the charges of dynamite.

During all the time we were at the mine, Sieber made only one request of us. It came at the very end of our stay and was reasonable enough: he asked if we could expedite his return to Germany. There seemed to be little prospect of regular employment for him in Austria, but that was of less concern to him than the welfare of his wife and young daughter who lived with him in a house near the mine. Some months later, one of our officers tried to get him a job in Wiesbaden, but he was not acceptable to the Military Government authorities there because of his political affiliations. The last I heard of him, he and his family were still at Alt Aussee, waiting for permission to go back to Germany. I hope they finally got it.

Our concentrated efforts underground produced the desired results. Pictures were coming out of the mine at such a prodigious rate that George called a halt. Enough of a backlog had been accumulated to make further selection down in the mine unnecessary for a couple of days. Lamont and I had better help with the actual loading.

Loading a truck was a specialized operation, and George had perfected the technique. Lamont, Steve and Shrady were his pupils. That left me the only neophyte. So far I had had experience only with the loading of cases and heavier objects such as furniture and sculpture.

Packing pictures, especially unframed ones—and there were a great many of the latter at Alt Aussee—was an altogether different problem. The first step was to place a length of waterproof paper over the side bars of the truck and spread it smoothly on the floor to the center of the truck bed. For this we had a large supply of stout, green, clothlike paper which had been used by the Wehrmacht as protection against gas attacks. Then a strip of felt was laid over the paper. The third step was to place “sausages” in two rows, end to end, on the floor of the truck. The space between the rows would depend on the size of the pictures to be loaded, for they were intended to cushion the shock as the trucks rumbled along over bumpy roads. The “sausages” had been George’s invention. Packing materials of all kinds were at a premium, and certain types just didn’t exist. To make up for the lack of the usual packer’s pads, George had improvised this substitute. In one of the mine chambers he had found a large supply of ordinary curtain material of machine-made ecru lace. This had been cut up into yard lengths, eighteen inches wide. When rolled around a central core of coarser cloth, or sometimes excelsior, and tied with string, they were a very satisfactory “ersatz” product. We used to refer to them augustly as the pads made from Hitler’s window curtains. Their manufacture was periodically one of the major industries at the mine. George had trained a crew of the gnomes and they loved to turn them out. It was easy work. Seated at long benches they resembled a kind of Alpine “husking bee.”

Once the paper, felt and “sausages” were in place, the pictures could be brought to the truck. One after another they were placed in a stack leading from the sideboards of the truck to the center. Pads and small blankets were inserted between them to prevent rubbing. To ensure safe packing, all the pictures in a given row had to be carefully selected as to size, ranging from large to medium in one, and from medium to small in another. That was the most tedious part of the entire operation. As soon as a row had been “built,” it required only a few minutes to bring first the felt and then the green paper over the top of the row, tuck both down along the sides, and then lash the whole stack firmly to the side of the truck. By this method it was possible to load as many as a hundred and fifty medium-sized canvases on a single truck, for three rows of twenty-five each could be built up on either side of our big two-and-a-half-ton trucks. A truck loaded in this way could often accommodate several pieces of sculpture as well. Carefully padded and swathed in blankets, these could be placed down the center. The final step was to adjust the tarpaulin over the bows and to close the tailboard. A truck of the size we used could normally be loaded in two hours.

We were at the mercy of the weather, as far as loading was concerned. On rainy days we could work on only one truck at a time, because there was but one doorway with a protective stoop under which a single truck could park. Taking advantage of the sunny mornings, we would divide up into two teams—George and Steve on one truck, Lamont and I on another. As soon as a truck was filled and the tarpaulin securely fastened down, it was driven to one side of the narrow terrace in front of the building. The average convoy consisted of six trucks.

We had a crew of eighteen Negro drivers. Barboza, the C.O., was a very starchy lieutenant, Jamaica born. He and his men were billeted down in the little town of Bad Aussee. They were magnificent drivers but a bit reckless. Their occasional disregard for their vehicles was a worry to George. It would have been so with any drivers, I guess. A breakdown on the steep mountain roads could be a serious matter. It meant the complete disruption of the convoy schedule, involving reloading en route. To provide for this contingency, we made a practice of loading the trucks to three-quarters of their capacity. The contents of a single truck could thus be absorbed by the others.

When a convoy was ready to start, either George or I would lead off in a jeep and escort the six trucks down the precipitous road to Alt Aussee. Two half-tracks from the 11th Armored Division, as front and rear guards, would be waiting to accompany the convoy to Munich.

At breakfast one morning George said, “This looks like a good day to load the gold-seal products.” He meant the Michelangelo Madonna and the Ghent altarpiece. This was an important event, for they were unquestionably the two most precious things still at the mine. Every possible precaution would have to be taken to make this operation a success. It must go off without a hitch. If anything happened to either of these masterpieces, the repercussions would be catastrophic. They would overshadow all the accomplishments of our MFA&A officers.

For the past several days, George and Steve had been working on the Madonna. She was now heavily padded and trussed up like a ham, ready to be brought out of the mine. We all went down to the Kaiser Josef chamber where we had first seen her. George made a final inspection of the ropes and pulleys which had been set up to hoist her onto the waiting train. Then, with a satisfied smile, he said, “I think we could bounce her from Alp to Alp, all the way to Munich, without doing her any harm.”

Once the statue was gently loaded on the little flat car, the train pulled slowly out of the mine chamber and switched back onto the track of the main tunnel. From there it chugged slowly—George walking alongside—to the mine entrance where the truck stood waiting. This truck and the one which was to carry the altarpiece had been put in perfect condition. And George had put the fear of God into the two drivers, both of whom he had personally chosen from our crew. A dozen of the gnomes were waiting to lift the marble onto the truck. We slid it cautiously to the fore part where boards had been laid parallel and nailed to the floor. These would prevent shifting. On either side of the statue, small packing cases about two feet square were arranged in even rows and lashed firmly to the sides of the truck. These cases had been stored in a chamber of the mine called the Kapelle. They contained the coin collection intended for the Linz Museum and were accordingly marked “Münz Kabinett” or Coin Room. Blankets were wedged in between the cases and the statue. The large case containing the Greek sarcophagus from Salonika was set in place behind the statue and similarly secured to the floor and at the sides. That done, the truck was ready to go.

As George was putting the finishing touches on the packing, he said, “Tom, will you go down and get the ‘Lamb’?” To be entrusted with the removal of the great altarpiece was an exciting assignment. I wanted to share it with someone who would also get a kick out of telling his grandchildren that he had actually brought the famous panels out of their underground hiding place. I called Lamont, and the two of us, followed by eight of the gnomes, hitched four of the “dogs” to the little engine and proceeded to the Mineral Kabinett. One of the “dogs,” especially designed to carry pictures of unusual height, had a lower bed than the others. We would use this one for the big central panel of the altarpiece. Otherwise it would not clear a portion of the mine tunnel where the jagged rocks hung low over the track.

The panels were now in their cases, and it was a relatively simple matter to carry them from the storage room to the train. We had to make two trips down and back in order to get all ten cases up to the mine entrance. They were much lighter than the statue, but the loading was a more exacting undertaking. Lashing them upright in parallel rows, in the truck, and stowing cases on either side for ballast, took time. We didn’t finish until well after six. It had taken most of the day to load the “gold-seal products.”

That night we held a conference in George’s room. He was to go to Munich the next morning with the convoy to supervise the unloading of the Madonna and the “Lamb” at the depot. He expected to come back directly, but might have to go on up to Frankfurt. He mapped out the work he wanted us to do while he was away. In addition to the job at the mine, there was a special one down at Bad Ischl. A series of famous panels by Albrecht Altdorfer, one of the greatest German painters of the fifteenth century, was stored on the second floor of a highly combustible old inn. These panels were among his finest works and belonged to the monastery of St. Florian outside Linz. Fifty or sixty pieces of sculpture—mostly polychromed wood figures, fifteenth century Gothic—also the property of the monastery, were stored there too. George thought we’d better figure on two trucks. We were to pick up the stuff, bring it back to the mine and then send it to Munich with the next convoy.

We made notations of what he had told us, and then Steve produced drinks—something of an occasion, for liquor was hard to come by at the mine. Somehow he had got hold of a bottle of cognac and insisted on making “Alpine Specials.” This was a drink consisting of a jigger of cognac and an equal amount of a pink syrupy liquid resembling grenadine. Steve prized the syrup. Eder, the chemical engineer at the mine, had concocted it especially for him. The mixture made a drink of dubious merit. We drank to the success of George’s trip to Munich.

The convoy got off early the next morning. Lamont and I went down with George as far as the village. Two half-tracks were waiting to escort the trucks to Munich. They were equipped with radios for intercommunication, in case of delays along the way. Between Alt Aussee and Salzburg, the road led through isolated country. Conditions were as yet far from settled. Small bands of SS troops still lurked in the mountains. The half-tracks weren’t just going along for the ride.

When we returned to the mine, we found Steve and Shrady in conversation. They were planning an excursion and asked us to join them. We expressed pious disapproval of letting up on the job the minute George’s back was turned. Steve’s answer was, “That’s a crock. I haven’t taken a day off in two weeks. You can do as you like, me lads; I’m off to see the wizard.” The two of them climbed into the sporty Mercedes-Benz convertible which Shrady had recently acquired, and drove off down the mountain.

“I have an idea,” said Lamont. “They can have their fun today. We’ll have ours tomorrow, while they pick up the Altdorfer panels at Bad Ischl.”

Lamont turned to the loading of trucks, while I went down to the Kammergrafen with Sieber. In the course of the morning I selected approximately two hundred pictures. We concentrated on those of small size, which were stored on the top racks, and the work went rapidly. Among the paintings we chose was one which had a typewritten label on the back. I read the words “Von dem Führer noch nicht entschieden”—not yet decided upon by the Führer. I asked Sieber what this signified. He explained that every picture intended for the Linz Museum—and this was one of them—had to be personally approved by Hitler before it could be officially included in the prospective collection. I could easily understand that the Führer would have wanted to examine the more important acquisitions, but that each canvas had to receive his personal approval struck me as preposterous. Hitler had entrusted the formation of his collections first to Dr. Hans Posse, a noted scholar, and, after his death, to Dr. Hermann Voss, director of the Dresden Gallery. This meticulous procedure, involving the submission of all pictures to the Führer in Munich, must have been trying to those two luminaries of the German art world.

When I came up from the mine for lunch I found that Lamont had completed the loading of two trucks. As the stock of pictures in the packing room at the mine entrance was almost exhausted, he said that he would join Sieber and me in making further selections. We returned to the Kammergrafen and continued with the smaller pictures.

On one of the top shelves we found a cardboard carton bearing the name of Dr. Helmut von Hümmel, who had been connected with the formation of the Linz collections. The label indicated that the contents had been destined for the museum. On the carton appeared the word “_Sittenbilder_.” Lamont and I knew the word “_Bilder_” meant pictures, but the other two syllables conveyed nothing. Sieber knew very little English but tried to explain. He thought perhaps the word meant “customs,” or something like that. I thought that I understood him. He probably meant that they were little scenes from everyday life.

We opened the carton. On top were three small watercolors, with beautiful gray-blue mounts and carved, gilt frames. If they were not by François Boucher, they were by a close pupil. The workmanship was exquisite and they were highly pornographic. So these were “_Sittenbilder_.” In our limited German we tried to tell Sieber that they might be called “scenes from life,” but hardly everyday life.

The rest of the things in the carton were of the same order, some of them contemporary, all of them licentious. None approached the first three watercolors in sheer virtuosity of technique. We wondered just which department of the Linz Museum would have harbored them.

Later we showed them to Steve. When he looked at the three watercolors he asked, “Who did those?”

“They look very much like Boucher,” I said without thinking.

“Boucher?” asked Steve incredulously. “Not the fellow who painted that ‘Holy Family’ I saw this afternoon?”

Lamont said quickly, “Tom means a pupil of Boucher, not Boucher himself.”

“Well, that’s more like it,” said Steve. “I didn’t see how an artist who painted anything so beautiful as that big picture could paint smutty things like these.”

The Holy Family to which he referred was a sensitive and tender representation. Steve’s point was well taken. The fact that he had not seen much eighteenth century French painting didn’t alter the validity of his argument.

On our way up from the Kammergrafen that afternoon we stopped at the Kapelle. This was one of the mine chambers which I had visited only long enough to take out some of the cases used in packing the Bruges Madonna. In addition to the Münz Kabinett collections, the Kapelle contained the magnificent collection of Spanish armor—casques, breastplates, full suits of armor, and a great number of firearms—which had been gathered together at Schloss Konopischt by the late Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Most of it was of sixteenth century workmanship, exquisitely inlaid with gold and silver. Formerly Austrian, it had been the property of the Czech government since the last World War. Nonetheless, the Germans had carried it off, using some flimsy nationalistic argument to justify their action. While the atmosphere of the mine was excellent for paintings, it was not satisfactory for metal objects. Consequently, every piece in the Konopischt collection had been heavily coated with grease to keep it from oxidizing.

Their storage room, the Kapelle, was—as the name indicates—a chapel, dedicated to the memory of Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor. It had an electrically illuminated altar, hewn from a block of translucent salt crystal, which was one of the sights of the mine.

That night when Steve and Shrady returned from their outing we all had hot chocolate and cheese and crackers in the comfortable kitchen on the ground floor of the main building. They had had a wonderful day. Maria, Shrady’s interpreter-secretary, had been with them. They had gone first to St. Wolfgang. There a sentry had tried to prevent them from driving up the road leading to the little church. Leopold, the Belgian king, was living near there with his wife, and motorists were not allowed on that road. But they had got around the sentry and gone into the church to see the wonderful carved altarpiece by Michael Pacher. Steve had brought us some colored photographs of it. Afterward they had had a swim in the lake and a picnic lunch. And in the afternoon—this had been the high spot of the day—they had gone over to Bad Ischl and called on Franz Léhar. The old fellow had been delighted to see them, had played the _Merry Widow_ waltz for them and given them autographed photographs. It sounded like fun. Our day at the mine had been very prosaic in comparison. Mention of Bad Ischl reminded Lamont of his scheme for the next day. He proposed to Steve and Shrady that they should call for the Altdorfer panels. They fell in with the suggestion at once, and before we could explain that we thought we’d take the day off, Steve was telling us about some of the things we should see in the neighborhood.

We slept late and when we got up the sky was gray and threatening. It was no day for an outing. In fact it was so cold that we decided we’d be warmer down in the mine. There was still one series of chambers which we had not explored. This was the Mondsberg, and it took us almost three-quarters of an hour to reach it. The pictures were arranged on racks as in the Kammergrafen and the Springerwerke, only in the Mondsberg there were a great many contemporary paintings. It didn’t take us long to run through them. They were all obviously German-owned and, judging from the labels, the great majority of the canvases had been included in the annual exhibitions at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich.

Ranged along one side of the main chamber was a row of old pictures. These were of high quality, and we went through them carefully. I came to a canvas which looked vaguely familiar. It was the portrait of a young woman dressed in a gown of cherry brocade. I guessed it to be sixteenth century Venetian, perhaps by Paris Bordone. I said to Lamont, “I’m sure I’ve seen that picture somewhere, but I can’t place it.”

“Let’s see if there’s any mark on the back that might give you a lead,” said Lamont.

He found a label and started reading aloud, “California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco....”

I thought he was joking. But not at all. There was the printed label of my museum. And there too _in my own handwriting_ appeared the words “Portrait of a Young Woman, by Paris Bordone”! No wonder the portrait had looked familiar. I had borrowed it from a New York art dealer for a special loan exhibition of Venetian painting in the summer of 1938. I learned from the mine records that the dealer had subsequently sold the picture to a Jewish private collector in Paris. The Nazis had confiscated it with the rest of his collection. It was a weird business finding it seven years later in an Austrian salt mine.

After supper that evening Shrady asked us to go down to Alt Aussee with him. Some Viennese friends of his were having an evening of music. The weather had cleared and the snow on the mountains was pink in the afterglow as we drove down the winding road from the mine. The house, a small chalet, stood on the outskirts of the village. Our host, his wife and their two daughters, had taken refuge there just before the Russians reached Vienna.

He introduced us to Dr. Victor Luithlen, one of the curators of the Vienna Museum, who had driven over from Laufen. Many of the finest things from the museum were stored in the salt mine there. Dr. Luithlen was the custodian.

Both he and Shrady played the piano well. Luithlen played some Brahms and Shrady followed with the music he had composed for a ballet based on Poe’s “Raven.” Shrady said that it had been produced by the Russian Ballet in New York. It was a very flamboyant piece and Shrady performed it with terrific virtuosity.

Afterward coffee and strudel were served. The atmosphere of the household was casual and friendly. I was reminded of what an Austrian friend of mine had once told me: “In other countries, conditions are often serious, but not desperate; in Austria they are often desperate but never serious.”

Thinking that George Stout might have returned from Munich, Lamont and I went back up to the mine that night before the others. George had just come in. He brought exciting but disturbing news. We were to continue the work at Alt Aussee for another ten days. Then we were to transfer our base of operations to Berchtesgaden. Our job there would be the evacuation of the Göring collection! On our way through Salzburg we were to pick up the pictures and tapestries from the Vienna Museum. These were the paintings by Velásquez, Titian and Breughel which had been highjacked by the Nazis two months ago and later retrieved by our officers. The disturbing part of what George had to tell was that he was going to leave us to carry on alone at the mine. He would try to join us at Berchtesgaden. But there was a possibility that he might not be able to make it.

Months ago George had put in a request for transfer to the Pacific. He felt that things were shaping up on the European scene and that others could carry on the work. There would be a big job protecting and salvaging works of art in Japan. He didn’t think that a program had been planned. He had offered his services. He had already told us that he had asked for this assignment, but we had never considered it as a possibility of the present or even of the immediate future. Now it looked as though it might materialize at once. In any case he was going up to Frankfurt the day after tomorrow to find out.

“As senior officer, Tom,” George said, “you will take over as headman of the team. I’ll take you down to see Colonel Davitt before I go. He is responsible for the security guard here at the mine and has been extremely co-operative. You should go to him if you have any complaints about the arrangements after I am gone.”

Back in our rooms that night Lamont said, “I have a hunch that this is the last we’ll see of George. It’s not like him to talk the way he did tonight if he hasn’t a pretty good idea that he won’t be coming back.”

Together we mapped out a tentative division of the work ahead. Steve, who had come into the room in time to hear George’s news, joined our discussion. It was after midnight when the first meeting of the “three powers” broke up.

While George was in Munich he had been informed of the imminent withdrawal of Third Army from the part of Austria in which we were working. No one could, or would, tell him the exact date, but it appeared likely that it would take place within two weeks. It was difficult for me to understand why the arrival of another American army—General Mark Clark’s Fifth from Italy—should cause the cessation of our operations. But of course the Army had its own way of doing things. We were attached to Third Army and if they were getting out, we would have to get out with them. All along we had known that this might happen before we could empty the mine. It was quite probable that Fifth Army would want to resume the work, but it would take time. Such a delay would impede the processes of restitution, and we had therefore been giving first attention to the finest things.

Having taken stock of the paintings, sculpture and furniture on which we were going to concentrate in the time we had left, we spent George’s last day working as usual. The loading went well and we finished four more trucks. Another convoy would be ready to take off in the morning.

George had his own jeep and driver and could make better time than the convoy, so after early breakfast we went down to Colonel Davitt’s office. George explained the change in his own plans and said that I would be taking over at the mine. Then he thanked the colonel for his co-operation. It was a long speech for George.

When he had finished, Colonel Davitt said, “In all the time you’ve been here, you haven’t made a single unreasonable demand. If Lieutenant Howe can come anywhere near that record, we’ll get along all right.”

Compliments embarrassed George, so he said good-by as quickly as possible and climbed into his jeep. He wished me luck and drove off. I waited for Lamont to come down with the convoy and give me a lift back up the mountain.

(7)

_THE ROTHSCHILD JEWELS; THE GÖRING COLLECTION_

We had our share of troubles during those last ten days at Alt Aussee. They began that first day of my investiture as head of the team. Lamont and I were sorting pictures in the room at the mine entrance. It was early in the afternoon and we were about to start loading our third truck. I had just said to Lamont that I thought the morning’s convoy had probably passed Salzburg, when a jeep pulled up to the door. The driver called out to us that one of our trucks had broken down at Goisern. That was an hour’s drive from the mine. Why hadn’t we been notified earlier? I asked. He didn’t know. Perhaps there hadn’t been anybody around to bring back word. Maybe the driver had thought he could repair the truck.

We got hold of Steve and the three of us started for Goisern in the messenger’s jeep. We’d have to transfer the load, so an empty truck followed us. We were thankful that the breakdown hadn’t happened while the convoy was going over the Pötschen Pass. It would have been a tough job to shift the pictures from one truck to another on that steep and dangerous part of the road. It was bad enough as it was, because it looked as though we’d have rain. One of the trucks had a lot of very large pictures. We hoped that it wasn’t the one that had broken down.

It was a little after three when we reached Goisern. The truck had been parked by the headquarters of a small detachment of troops on the edge of town. There were several houses near by but plenty of room for us to maneuver the empty truck alongside. The Negro driver of the stranded truck said that it had “thrown a rod” and would have to be taken to Ordnance for repairs. That meant that the vehicle would be laid up for two or three weeks. We’d have to see about a replacement. The main thing was to get on with the unloading before it began to rain. And it _was_ the truck with the big pictures.

With the two trucks lined up alongside, and only a few inches apart, we could hoist the pictures over the sideboards. In this way each row of paintings was kept in the same order. Lamont and Steve boarded the empty truck, while one of the gnomes from the mine and I started unlashing the first stack of loaded pictures. Before long a crowd of women and children had collected to watch this unusual operation. There were excited “oh’s” and “ah’s” as we began to transfer one masterpiece after another—two large Van Dycks, a Veronese, a pair of colossal decorative canvases by Hubert Robert, a Rubens, and so on. The spectators were quiet and well behaved, whispering among themselves. They didn’t pester us with questions. We rather enjoyed having an audience. We finished the job in an hour and a half.

It wasn’t too soon, for as we were securing the tarpaulin at the rear of the newly loaded truck, it began to pour. We parked the truck, arranged for an overnight guard, then climbed into our jeep and started back to the mine. In a few minutes the rain turned to hail. The stones were so large that we were afraid they’d break the windshield of the jeep. We pulled over to the side of the road and waited for the storm to let up. While we waited, the gnome told us that sometimes the hailstones were large enough to kill sheep grazing in the high meadows. Only the summer before he had lost two of his own lambs during one of the heavy summer storms. He swore that the stones were the size of tennis balls.

We were thoroughly soaked and half frozen when we got back to the mine. But we had won our race with the weather, and the truck would proceed to Munich with the next convoy.

During the next three days we were beset by a series of minor difficulties. Two of the trucks broke down on the way up to the mine to be loaded. It took half a day to get replacements, so the convoy was delayed. One night the guard on duty at the mine entrance developed an unwarranted interest in art and poked around among the pictures which Lamont and I had carefully stacked according to size for loading the next morning. No harm was done, but it caused a delay. He was under strict orders to let no one into the temporary storage room and was not to go in there himself. It was partly our fault; we shouldn’t have trusted him with the key. The captain of the guard was notified and appropriate disciplinary action taken. The gnomes developed a tendency to prolong their regular rest periods beyond a point Steve considered reasonable, and we had to come to an understanding about that. On the whole, however, the work went fairly well.

Even the great chambers of the Kammergrafen were beginning to thin out. They were far from empty, but we had cleared them of a substantial part of the external loot, that is, the loot which had come from countries outside Germany. There were still quantities of things taken from Austrian collections, but they had not been our primary concern. The time had come to make a final check, to make sure that we had not overlooked anything important in the category of external loot.

Together with Sieber, we started this last inspection. We checked off the pictures first. Our work there had been pretty thorough. After that the sculpture. This also seemed to be well weeded out. And the furniture too.

Sieber was ahead of us with his flashlight. The light fell on two cartons standing in a dark corner behind a group of Renaissance bronzes. I asked what was in them. Sieber shrugged his shoulders. They had never been opened. He had forgotten that they were there. We dragged them out and looked for an identifying label. Sieber recalled that one of the former custodians at the mine had said the things inside were “_sehr wertvoll_”—very valuable, but he knew nothing more.

We carried the boxes to a table where there was better light. They were the same size, square, and about two feet high. They were not heavy. We pried open the lid of one of them with great care. It might be Roman glass, and that stuff breaks almost when you look at it. But it wasn’t Roman glass. Inside was a row of small cardboard boxes. I lifted the lid and removed a layer of cotton. On the cotton beneath lay a magnificent golden pendant studded with rubies, emeralds and pearls. The central motif, a mermaid exquisitely modeled and wrought in iridescent enamel, proclaimed the piece the work of an Italian goldsmith of the Renaissance. The surrounding framework of intricate scrolls, shells and columns blazed with jewels.

There were forty boxes filled with jewels—necklaces, pendants and brooches—all of equal splendor. The collection was worth a fortune. Each piece bore a minute tag on which appeared an identifying letter and a number. These were Rothschild jewels. And we had stumbled on them quite by accident.

Lamont and I agreed that they should be taken to Munich without delay. There they could be stored in a vault. Furthermore we decided to deliver them ourselves. It wouldn’t do to risk such precious objects with the regular convoy. We admonished Sieber to say nothing about our find. In the meantime we would keep the two boxes under lock and key in our room.

That night we told Steve we had a special surprise for him. After barring the door against unexpected visitors, we emptied the boxes onto one of the beds. We told him not to look until we were ready. We arranged each piece with the greatest care, straightening out the links of the necklaces, adjusting the great baroque pearls of the pendants, balancing one piece with another, until the whole glittering collection was spread out on the white counterpane. Then we signaled to Steve to turn around.

“God Almighty, where did you find those?” he asked.

While we were telling him how we had happened onto the two cartons that afternoon, he kept shaking his head, and when we had finished, said solemnly, “They’re beyond my apprehension.” The expression stuck and from that time on we invoked it whenever we were confronted with an unexpected problem.

Early the following morning we stowed the jewels in the back seat of our command car and set out for Munich. Halfway to Salzburg we encountered Captain Posey, headed in the opposite direction. He was surprised to see us, and still more surprised when we told him what we had in the car. He was on his way to the mine. There were some things he wanted to tell us about our next job—at Berchtesgaden—but if we would come to his office the next day that would be time enough. He wasn’t going to stay at the mine more than a couple of hours. He should be back in Munich before midnight. He said there was one thing we could do when we reached Salzburg—call on the Property Control Officer and arrange for clearance on the removal of the Vienna Museum pictures to the Munich depot. This was an important part of the plan which George had outlined, so we said that we’d see what we could do.

We had some difficulty finding the right office. There were two Military Government Detachments in Salzburg—one for the city, and the other for the region. They were on opposite sides of the river. We caught Lieutenant Colonel Homer K. Heller, the Property Control Officer, as he was leaving for lunch. I explained that it was our intention to call for the paintings and tapestries on our way to Berchtesgaden the following week. He said he could not authorize the removal; that we would have to see Colonel W. B. Featherstone at the headquarters across the river. If the colonel gave his O.K., it would be all right with him. He didn’t think that the colonel would take kindly to the idea. This was a surprise. Who would have the temerity to question the authority of Third Army? Lamont was amused. He told me I could have the pleasure of tackling Colonel Featherstone alone.

It was after two o’clock before the colonel was free. Nothing doing on the Vienna pictures. That would require an O.K. from Verona. Why Verona, I asked? “General Clark’s headquarters,” was the answer. Didn’t I know that the Fifth Army was taking over the area very shortly? Then the colonel, in accents tinged with sarcasm, expressed his satisfaction at finally meeting one of the Monuments officers of the Third Army. He had heard such a lot about them and the wide territory they had covered. He had been told that a group of them was working at the Alt Aussee mine, but I was the first one he had laid eyes on.

I gathered that he was mildly nettled by Third Army in general and by me in particular. As a matter of fact, the colonel’s attitude about the Vienna pictures was logical: why move them out of Austria? If, as he supposed, they were to be returned to Vienna eventually, why take them all the way to Munich? I had no answer to that and took refuge in the old “I only work here” excuse. He found it rather droll that the Navy should be mixed up in this high-class van and storage business. I had too, once, but the novelty had worn off. I rejoined Lamont and the jewels. I wondered what Captain Posey would have to say to all this.

We reached Munich too late that afternoon to see Craig at the depot, so we took the jewels with us to his quarters. I had not seen him since my departure for Alt Aussee some weeks before. In the interim, there had been a tightening up on billeting facilities. As a result he and Ham Coulter were now sharing a single apartment. I was the only one adversely affected by this arrangement. Craig no longer had a spare couch for chance guests.

When Lamont and I walked in, we found them talking with a newly arrived naval lieutenant. He was Lane Faison, who had been around Harvard in my day. In recent years he had been teaching at Williams and was at present in OSS. After we had been there a little while, Lamont asked very casually, “Would you boys care to see the Rothschild jewels?”

Ham wanted to know what the hell he was talking about. “Well, we have two boxes filled with them here in the hall,” Lamont said.

For the second time we displayed the treasures. Craig’s enthusiasm was tempered with concern for their safety. He was relieved when we said we had come purposely to put them in one of the steel vaults at the depot. We went with him to the Königsplatz forthwith and stowed them safely for the night.

Lamont and I continued on our way to Third Army Headquarters. Lincoln was working late. When we walked in he looked up from his typewriter and said “Hello” in a flat voice. Lincoln was in one of his uncommunicative moods. We left him alone and busied ourselves with letters from home which we found on Posey’s desk. Lincoln went on with his typing. Presently he stopped and said, “George’s orders came through. He’s gone to the Pacific.”

“It ought to be interesting work,” said Lamont.

“Oh, you knew about his orders?” asked Lincoln.

“No,” said Lamont.

That broke the mood. We had a lively session for the next hour. Lincoln was always a reservoir of information, a lot of it in the realm of rumor, but all of it fascinating. That evening he was unusually full of news. He had a perfect audience in Lamont and me because we had been completely out of touch with things while at the mine.

After exhausting his stock of fact and fiction, he produced his latest box of food from home. There were brandied peaches, tins of lobster and caviar, several kinds of cheese, dried fruits and crackers. It was a combination you’d never risk at home, if you were in your right mind.

“You do very well for yourself,” I said when he had the refreshments spread out on his desk.

“My wife knows the enlisted men’s motto: ‘Nothing is too good for our boys, and nothing is what they get.’”

We finished the box and Lincoln showed us an article he had written on Nazi sculpture. We were reading it when Captain Posey came in. He asked if we had stopped in Salzburg to see Colonel Heller. I told him what had happened there. If he was annoyed, he gave no sign of it. He rummaged in his desk and brought out a list of instructions for us in connection with the operation at Berchtesgaden. He suggested that we stop there on the way back to Alt Aussee; it wouldn’t be very much out of our way. He gave us the names of the officers we should see about billeting, and so on. It would be well to have all these things settled in advance. Then he gave us some special orders for Lieutenant Shrady, who was to be transferred to Heidelberg, now that the evacuation of the mine was ending.

Captain Posey said that I was to take over the Mercedes-Benz. It had been obtained originally for the evacuation team. We were to take it with us to Berchtesgaden. I could make good use of the car, transportation facilities being what they were, but I didn’t relish the prospect of taking it from Shrady. He had spent money of his own fixing it up and looked on it as his personal property. I told Captain Posey how I felt. He said he had a letter for me which would take care of the matter. It was a letter directing me to deliver Lieutenant Shrady’s orders and to appropriate the car.

When we saw Faison at the depot the next morning, he asked if he might drive back with us. He was joining Plaut and Rousseau at House 71 to work with them on the investigation of Nazi art looting. I said we’d be glad to have him. The three of us started off after early lunch. We were looking forward to the Berchtesgaden detour. None of us had been there during the Nazi regime and I, for one, was curious to see what changes had taken place in the picturesque resort town since I had last seen it fifteen years before.

We took the Salzburg Autobahn past Chiemsee almost to Traunstein, and then turned off to the southwest. This was the finest secondary road I ever traveled. It led into the mountains and the scenery was worthy of Switzerland. Thanks to perfectly banked turns, we made the ninety-mile run in two hours.

The little town was as peaceful and quiet as I remembered it. In fact it was so quiet that Lamont and I had difficulty locating an Army outfit to give us directions. We learned that the 44th AAA Brigade had just moved in and that the last remnants of the famous 101st Airborne Division were pulling out. There was no love lost between the two, as we found out later. Consequently, when I asked an officer of the AAA Brigade where I would find Major Anderson of the 101st Airborne, he informed me curtly that that outfit was no longer at Berchtesgaden. Then I asked if he knew where the Göring collection was. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, so I rephrased my question, inquiring about the captured pictures which had been on exhibition a short time ago. Yes, he knew vaguely that there had been some kind of a show. He thought it had been over in Unterstein, not in Berchtesgaden. Well, where was Unterstein? He said it was about four kilometers to the south, on the road to the Königssee.

His directions weren’t too explicit, but eventually we found the little back road which landed us in Unterstein ten minutes later. In a clearing on the left side of the road stood the building we were looking for. It was a low rambling structure of whitewashed stucco in the familiar Bavarian farmhouse style. It had been a rest house for the Luftwaffe. The center section, three stories high, had a gabled roof with widely overhanging eaves. On either side were long wings two stories high, similarly roofed. The casement windows were shuttered throughout.