Chapter VIII: Part 8

Our first problem was to find some small packing cases. We searched the rest house without success. Then Lamont remembered seeing a pile of individual wooden file cabinets in the little chapel where most of the furniture was stored. These were admirably suited to our purpose. They were rectangular boxes about six feet long and two feet high. Each was divided into three compartments. There were thirty of them—more than enough for the job. We had a supply of flannel cloths which we had borrowed from a packing firm in Munich. After wrapping each piece, we placed it in one of the compartments of the file cabinet. We stuffed the compartments with excelsior so that the objects could not move about.

A few of the items were equipped with special leather cases. Among these were two swords: one, with a beautifully etched blade of Toledo steel, had been presented to Göring by the Spanish air force; the other, with a jewel-studded gold handle, had been a gift from Mussolini. There was also a gold baton encrusted with precious stones, a present from the Reichsmarschall’s own air force.

Of all these objects, perhaps twenty were of modern workmanship. In contrast to the older things, they were ornate without being beautiful. Ugliest of the lot was a standing lamp. The stalk, eight inches in diameter, was a shaft of beaten gold. The shade, with a filigree design, was also of gold, as were the pull cords. Rivaling it in costly vulgarity was a set of gold table ornaments. The large centerpiece consisted of an elliptical framework. At each end and in the center of the two sides stood Egyptian maidens, fashioned of gold, four feet high. The German slang word for such stuff is “kitsch.” I think the closest English equivalent is “corny.”

Toward the end of the afternoon we were waited on by a delegation of three officers from the 101st Airborne Division. They had come to inquire if we would consider turning over to them the gold sword which Mussolini had given to Göring. They wanted it as a trophy for a club of 101st Airborne officers which they were organizing. They planned to set up a clubroom when they got back home and have annual reunions. The sword, they said, would be such an appropriate souvenir. I told them that I had been directed to ship everything to Munich and did not have authority to make any other disposition of objects in the collection. But, since the sword could not be regarded as a “cultural object”—a fact which I called to their attention—I suggested that they take the matter up with Third Army Headquarters in Munich. I refrained from informing them that, for all of me, they could have their pick of the modern objects in the “Gold Room.”

We made an interesting discovery that afternoon. Rummaging in a closet off the “Gold Room” we found a stack of photograph albums. At the bottom of the heap lay an enormous portfolio. It contained architect’s drawings for the proposed expansion of Karinhall. The estate, greatly enlarged, was to have become a public museum. We had heard that Göring intended to present his art collection to the Reich on his sixtieth birthday. Here was concrete proof of those intentions. Each drawing bore the date “January 1945.”

Steve returned in triumph at noon the next day. With him in the command car was Kress, looking more timid than ever. Steve said that Kress had had a bad time after we left Alt Aussee; the boys at House 71 had clapped him in jail and left him there for two days before interrogating him. Steve had been “burned up” about it and had given them a piece of his mind. He said contemptuously that he had known all along they didn’t have anything on Kress. But he was content to let bygones be bygones. Steve had his man Friday back again.

He pointed happily to the six-by-six which had pulled up behind the command car. All of Kress’ photographic equipment was packed up inside it. There was a tremendous lot of stuff: three large cameras, a metal table for drying prints, reflectors, a sink, pipes of various sizes, boxes of film and paper, and a couple of large cabinets. Steve planned to get everything installed at once. Kress was to sleep in one of the rooms of the rest house. An adjoining room was to be set up as a darkroom.

We showed Steve our new quarters and suggested that Kress take over our old room. The one next door would make a good darkroom. I asked Steve how he was going to get all the stuff installed. He’d have to have a plumber. That didn’t bother Steve. He asked me to tell the mess sergeant that Kress was to have his meals with the civilian help in the kitchen. He’d take care of everything else. Steve was as good as his word. He found a plumber and by the end of the day Kress was ready to start work.

Notwithstanding these interruptions, Lamont and I managed to load and dispatch a convoy of three trucks. This third convoy contained two hundred paintings, thirty tapestries, fifteen more pieces of large sculpture and a dozen pieces of Italian Renaissance furniture.

At odd moments during our first days at Berchtesgaden, we had worried about the sculpture. In the first three convoys we had disposed of only thirty of the two hundred and fifty pieces. Most of those remaining were just under life size. We had no materials with which to build crates. And even if we had had the lumber, the labor of building them would have greatly delayed the evacuation. That evening we found the solution of the problem. The three of us were standing on the open porch outside our room after supper. Two of the trucks were parked by the loading platform directly below. Why not make a checkerboard pattern of ropes, strung waist high across the truck bed? The floor of the truck could be padded with excelsior. We could set a statue in each of the squares. The ropes would hold each piece in place. If we stuffed quantities of excelsior between the statues, they wouldn’t rub. Perhaps it was a crazy idea. On the other hand, it might work.

The following morning Steve and two of the men prepared the truck while Lamont and I selected the statues for the trial load. We chose thirty of the largest pieces. We figured on seven or eight rows, with four statues in each row. Kress set up his camera on the porch and photographed the progress of the operation. One by one the long row of madonnas, saints and angels was set in place. We hadn’t been far off in our calculations. There were twenty-nine in all. The truck looked like a tumbrel of the French Revolution filled with victims for the guillotine. It was a new technique in the packing of sculpture. Steve said we’d have to send George Stout a photograph. “And we’ll have to send for more excelsior, too,” Lamont said. He was quite right. We had used up the last shred.

That afternoon Steve combed the countryside for a fresh supply of excelsior, returning just before supper with three new bales. In the meantime, Lamont went over, with Kress, the paintings to be photographed. Sergeant Peck and I completed numbering the last of the pictures.

The next day we loaded three more trucks. With Steve on hand to crack the whip over the men, the loading went fast, so fast in fact that Sergeant Peck had a hard time checking off the paintings as they were hoisted onto the trucks. We packed four hundred pictures, the cases containing the gold and silver objects which Lamont and I had finished the day before, and another dozen pieces of furniture. The convoy—our fourth—got off in the early afternoon. We placed a special guard on the truck with the sculpture to make sure that the driver didn’t smoke on the way.

We finished one more truck and stopped for a cigarette. It was a hot day and we didn’t feel like doing any more work. Steve had gone up to the darkroom to see Kress. Lamont said, “Let’s go up to Munich.”

“That suits me, but what excuse have we got?” I asked.

“If we must have an excuse, I can think of at least four,” he said thoughtfully. “We’re out of cigarettes and candy. We ought to be on hand when they unpack the sculpture at the Collecting Point. We’ve worked for a week without taking a day off. And perhaps there’ll be some mail for us at Posey’s office.”

“What about the little brown bear? Do you think he’ll mind our taking off?” I asked. This was Lamont’s name for Steve, but it was never used when he was within earshot.

“Steve’s had his trip for this week,” said Lamont, meaning Steve’s trip to Alt Aussee.

Sergeant Peck, who had overheard part of our conversation, asked if he might join us. We told him to be ready in ten minutes and went off to notify Steve of our plans and to pack up our musette bags. Steve was so busy helping Kress with his developing that he scarcely paid any attention to us. After leaving him a final injunction to have at least three trucks loaded before we got back the next evening, we called for the command car. The driver, a restless redhead named Freedberg, who hated the monotonous routine at Berchtesgaden, was delighted with the idea of going to Munich. Sergeant Peck appeared and we set off.

We chose the shorter road through the mountains and overtook the convoy on the Autobahn, halfway to Munich. The front escort jeep was holding the speed down to thirty-five miles an hour, in accordance with my instructions. The driver waved envyingly as we passed them doing fifty. Twenty miles from Munich, Freedberg turned west off the Autobahn and took the back road from Bad Tölz, a short cut which brought us directly to Third Army Headquarters.

We arrived at Captain Posey’s office just as Lincoln Kirstein was leaving for chow. He told us that the captain had gone to Pilsen the middle of the week but was due back that evening. “There’s quite a lot of mail for both of you,” Lincoln said. He handed us each a thick batch of letters. It was the first mail I had received from home in six weeks. There were forty-two letters!

“I told you there’d be mail for us,” said Lamont with a satisfied smile.

We had supper with Craig Smyth and Ham Coulter at the Detachment that evening. Craig said that the convoy had not arrived before he left the Collecting Point, but two of his German workmen were to be on duty the next morning, even though it was Sunday. We arranged to meet him at his office and supervise the unloading. Lincoln had said that Posey would not be back before ten, so we spent the evening with Craig and Ham at their apartment.

Just before we returned to Third Army Headquarters, Ham gave us a small paper-bound volume. It was entitled _The Ludwigs of Bavaria_. The author was Henry Channon.

“This is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read,” Ham said. “You might take it along with you.”

I thanked him, and stuck it in my musette bag. Before our operations in Bavaria ended two months later, that little book had come to mean a great deal to the members of the evacuation team. We called it our “Bavarian bible.” So alluring were Channon’s descriptions of the “Seven Wonders of Bavaria” that whenever we had a free day—or even a few hours to ourselves—we made excursions to these architectural fantasies: the swirling, baroque churches of Wies, Weltenburg, Ottobeuren and Vierzehnheiligen; the Amalienburg and the palace of Herrenchiemsee. The Residenz at Würzburg, which we had seen, was one of the seven. Unofficially we added an eighth to the list: Schloss Linderhof, Ludwig II’s opulent little palace near Oberammergau—ornate and vulgar, yet fascinating in its lonely mountain setting. But these were extracurricular activities, falling outside the orbit of our official work.

We found Captain Posey at his office when we got there a few minutes before ten that evening. He asked us for a complete account of our operations at Berchtesgaden. We reported that we had sent a total of fourteen truckloads up to Munich the first week; that we had cleaned out half the pictures, but that we had just begun on the sculpture. We estimated that it would take us another ten days to finish; we would probably fill seventeen or eighteen more trucks.

We asked him what plans he would have for us when we completed the job. He said he might send us to the Castle of Neuschwanstein. The place was full of things looted from Paris. In fact, it was one of the major repositories of the _Einsatzstab Rosenberg_. The French were clamoring to have it evacuated. Then there was another big repository in a Carthusian monastery at Buxheim. That too contained loot from Paris. Perhaps we could take a run down to both places and size up the jobs after we had finished with the Göring things. The captain was tired after his long trip, so we didn’t go into details about either of the two prospective assignments. He offered us a billet for the night and the three of us turned in shortly after eleven. It was none too soon for me: I still had forty-two unopened letters from home in the pocket of my jacket.

When we arrived at the Collecting Point the next morning, the two German workmen who had been with me at Hohenfurth were starting to unpack the truck with the sculpture. Lamont and I examined each statue as it was lifted from its nest of excelsior. All twenty-nine had come through without a scratch. Our experiment was a success. We would be able to use the same technique with the rest of the sculpture. I instructed the workmen to leave all of the excelsior in the truck, as we had none to spare.

I persuaded Craig to drive back to Berchtesgaden with us for the night. He looked tired and I thought the change would do him good. His responsibilities at the Collecting Point—the “Bau,” as we called it (our abbreviation for Verwaltungsbau)—were heavy; and he never took a day off.

On the return trip he told us his latest troubles. Only three days ago a small bomb had exploded in the basement of the “Bau.” It had blown one of the young German workmen to bits. Craig gave all the grisly details, which included discovering one of the poor fellow’s arms in a heap of debris fifty feet from the scene of the explosion. The tragedy had had one beneficial result. For weeks Craig had been harping on the subject of additional guards for the Collecting Point. His words had fallen on deaf ears—until the bomb episode. He said that a general and three colonels arrived at the building within half an hour. Since then everyone had been so “security-conscious” that he had had no further difficulty in obtaining the desired number of guards. The Bomb Disposal Unit inspected the premises and some pointed comments were made about the thoroughness of the original survey.

In our absence Steve had loaded three trucks. As a reward for his labors, I suggested that he take Craig up to the Eagle’s Nest the following morning. While they were gone, Lamont and I finished three more loads. We had the convoy of six lined up by noon. Craig returned to Munich in one of the escort jeeps. This fifth convoy contained one hundred and sixty-seven paintings, one hundred and six pieces of sculpture, twenty-five tapestries, sixty-eight cases filled with bibelots, and fifty-three pieces of furniture. It was our largest convoy out of Berchtesgaden thus far.

It was also the first one to break down. Late in the afternoon, the rear escort jeep arrived at the rest house with word that two of the trucks had broken down fifteen miles out of Berchtesgaden. Steve and I drove to Berchtesgaden to arrange to have them towed in for reloading. I also wanted to do a little investigating. There could be little excuse for breakdowns on the Munich road if the trucks had been in good mechanical condition when they started out.

On the way into town, Steve said, “Tom, I think I know what caused the trouble. I didn’t think of it till just now. But the other day on the road back from Alt Aussee, two six-by-sixes passed me at a hell of a clip. I thought I recognized the drivers as two of ours.”

I questioned the lieutenant in charge of the drivers. He professed ignorance of any unauthorized junkets back to Alt Aussee.

“I am going to have a word with Tiny,” said Steve as we left the lieutenant’s room. Tiny was the head mechanic and the only one of the entire crew who was always on the job. Steve wanted to talk to him alone, so I waited in the car.

A few minutes later he came back with a satisfied grin on his face. “I got the whole story,” he said. “The drivers have been racing back and forth to Alt Aussee all the time we’ve been here. They were crazy about it up at the mine. Tiny says they hate it here at Berchtesgaden.”

“Well, we’ll fix that,” I said. I went back to see the lieutenant. “How many drivers have you got and how many trucks?” I asked.

“Sixteen drivers and thirteen trucks,” he said.

“Send eight of the drivers and five of the trucks up to Munich first thing in the morning and have them report to the trucking company. We can finish the job here without them.”

Steve always sang when he was in a particularly happy frame of mind. That evening, on the way back to the rest house, he was in exceptionally good voice.

Five days later we completed the evacuation of the Göring collection. The last two convoys, of four and seven trucks respectively, contained the larger pictures, one hundred and seventy-seven of them; sixty pieces of sculpture, twenty miscellaneous cases, sixty-seven pieces of furniture and two hundred empty picture frames. We had heavy rain that last week and the mud was ankle-deep around the loading platform. Although it was early August, the nights were cold and the rest house, emptied of its treasures, was a cheerless place. We were glad to see the last of the trucks pull out of the drive. It had been a strenuous operation—thirty-one truckloads in thirteen days. In the early afternoon we would collect our personal belongings and return to Munich.

(8)

_LOOTERS’ CASTLE: SCHLOSS NEUSCHWANSTEIN_

A telephone call from Brigade Headquarters changed our plans. It was Major Luther Miller of G-2. He had just made an inspection of a house belonging to one of Göring’s henchmen and there was a lot of “art stuff” in it. He had reported the find to Third Army Headquarters and Captain Posey had told him to get in touch with me. Could I go up to the house with him that afternoon?

Major Miller picked me up after lunch. He was a handsome fellow, tall and sparely built. He had an easy, pleasant manner. As we drove along he gave me further details about the house to which we were going. It had been occupied until the day before by Fritz Görnnert and his wife. Görnnert had been the social secretary and close confidant of Göring. The Görnnerts had been living on the second and third floors. They shared the house with a man named Angerer, who had the first floor. Both Görnnert and Angerer had been apprehended and were now in jail. Major Miller had found a suspiciously large number of tapestries and other art objects on the premises. He thought they might be loot.

The house was an unpretentious villa hidden among pine trees high up in the hills above the town. The place was under guard. On the ground floor we examined the contents of a small store-room. There were several cases bearing Angerer’s name and three or four large crates containing Italian furniture. A similar store-room on the second floor contained a dozen tapestries, a pile of Oriental rugs, a large collection of church vestments and nearly a hundred rare textiles mounted on cardboard. I noticed that the tapestries, vestments and textiles were individually tagged and that the markings were in French.

Concealed beneath the tapestries were ten cases, each one about two feet square and a foot high. Major Miller hadn’t seen these before. On each one was stenciled in Gothic letters: “Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.” They contained a magnificent collection of Oriental weapons.

In a room which Görnnert had apparently used for a study we found six handsome leather portfolios filled with Old Master drawings. The drawings were by Dutch and French artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

There was a possibility that all of these things, with the exception of the weapon collection, which Göring had probably entrusted to Görnnert, were the legitimate property of the tenants. It was equally possible that they had been illegally acquired. In the circumstances, Major Miller wished me to take charge of them. I said that I could take them to the Central Collecting Point at Munich where they would be held in safekeeping until ownership had been determined.

The house had been thoroughly ransacked. Drawers had been pulled out and their contents disarranged. Closet doors stood open and the clothing on the hangers had been gone over. The beds were rumpled, for even the mattresses had been searched. Despite the topsy-turvy look of things, there was no evidence of wanton destruction. The search had been thorough and methodical. I asked the major what his men had been looking for, but his answer was noncommittal. He did say, though, that the discovery of documents hidden in a false partition in the living room had prompted the search.

The following morning Steve, Lamont and I went to the Görnnert house in the command car. It would have been difficult to take a large truck up the narrow winding road. In any case, I thought we could probably load all of the stuff in the command car. Major Miller had sent one of his officers ahead with the key. The house had been searched again. This time it looked as though a cyclone had struck it. Pillows had been ripped open; drawers had been emptied on the floor; clothes were scattered all over the bedrooms. I was relieved to find that the things which we had come to take away had not been tampered with. I asked the lieutenant with the key what had been going on in the house, and he muttered something about “those CIC boys.” I seemed to have touched on a sore subject, so I didn’t pursue the matter. Lamont, who knew the ways of the Army far better than I, said that probably there had been a “jurisdictional dispute” over who had the right to search the place and that perhaps two different outfits had taken a crack at it. I was glad that Major Miller’s emissary was there to bear witness to _our_ behavior.

We bundled up the rugs, tapestries and textiles and got out as quickly as possible. They completely filled the command car. Lamont and Steve sat in front with the driver. I wedged myself in between the top of the pile and the canvas top of the car. There was no room for the ten cases of weapons, so I sent a message to Major Miller to have one of his men deliver them to us later in the day.

When we got back to the rest house, Kress had dismantled his darkroom and after lunch we loaded the photographic equipment onto the one truck we had held over for that purpose. There was ample space for the things from the Görnnert house. Before packing them we had to make a complete list of the items. There were two hundred and thirteen church vestments, eighty-one mounted textiles, twenty rugs and eleven tapestries. It was suppertime when we finished. As the ten cases of weapons hadn’t arrived, we decided to wait till morning and load everything at once.

That evening Major Anderson of the 101st Airborne came over with the official receipt which I was to sign. It was an elaborate document comprising Sergeant Peck’s seventy-page inventory and a covering letter from the C.O. of the 101st Airborne Division to the Commanding General of the Third Army stating that I had received from Major Anderson the entire Göring collection for delivery to the Central Collecting Point at Munich. Having discharged his responsibility, the major was free to go home to the U.S.A. That called for a celebration and he had brought a bottle of cognac. It was sixty years old. He said that it came from Hitler’s private stock at the Berghof. Even Steve, who had harbored a slight grudge toward Anderson since the night of our arrival in Berchtesgaden, relented and the four of us toasted the successful evacuation of the Göring treasures.

The major had another surprise for us: he had engaged a room at the Berchtesgadener Hof. He insisted that the three of us move over from the rest house. The next day was Sunday. What would be the point of going up to Munich? We had been working hard for two weeks. Why not take life easy for a day or two?

The Berchtesgadener Hof was a luxurious resort hotel. Its appointments were modern and lavish. In the days of the Nazi regime, it had been patronized by all visiting dignitaries, save the chosen few who had been invited to stay at the Berghof or the small hotel at Obersalzberg. It was now being used by the Army as a “leave hotel.” We had an enormous double room with twin beds and a couch. We had our own private terrace. The room faced south with a wonderful view of the mountains. We even had a telephone which worked. I hadn’t seen such magnificence since the Royal Monceau in Paris. There was a room for our driver on the top floor. The final de luxe touch was the schedule of meal hours; breakfast wasn’t even served until eight-thirty. It was hard to believe that we were in Germany.

We were awakened early by a call from Major Miller. He had another job for me—two, in fact. They had been interrogating Görnnert and he had told them that several pieces of valuable sculpture had been buried in the grounds of his house. The major had located the spot and the things were to be excavated before noon. Also he wanted me to go with him to inspect a cache of pictures reported hidden in a forester’s house not far from Berchtesgaden. I said I’d be ready in an hour.

The phone rang again. This time it was Captain Posey. Had we remembered to pick up the pictures at St. Agatha? The ones Mussolini had given to Hitler? No, we hadn’t. We were to be sure to attend to that before we returned to Munich. Steve was cursing these early callers and Lamont was shaking his head sadly. Our life of ease was getting off to a hell of a poor start.

When Major Miller and I reached the Görnnert place, the Sergeant of the Guard and one of his men were standing beside a hole in the ground some twenty yards behind the house. The hole was about six feet square and four feet deep. Four bundles wrapped in discolored newspaper lay on the ground at the edge of the excavation. The first bundle I opened contained a wood statue of the Madonna and Child, about eighteen inches high. It had been an attractive example of the fifteenth century French school, but moisture had seriously damaged the original polychromy and the wood beneath was soft and pulpy. The next two bundles contained pieces of similar workmanship, but they were not polychromed. One was a Madonna and Child; the other a figure of St. Barbara. Although they were damp, the wood had not disintegrated. The fourth package contained the prize of the lot, an ivory figure of the Madonna and Child. It was a fine piece from the hand of a French sculptor of the late fourteenth century. The ivory was discolored but otherwise in good condition. I wrapped the statues in fresh paper and put them in the car.

Our next objective was the little village of Hintersee, a few kilometers west of Berchtesgaden. The forester’s house, a large chalet with overhanging eaves, stood at the edge of a meadow several hundred yards from the road. I explained the purpose of our visit to the young woman in peasant dress who answered our knock. She took us to a room on the second floor which was filled with unframed canvases stacked in neat rows along the walls. They were the work of contemporary German painters and, according to the young woman, had been the property of the local Nazi organization. From my point of view, the trip had been a waste of time. There wasn’t a looted picture in the lot. While I looked at the paintings, Major Miller thumbed through a pile of books on a big table in one corner of the room. Among them he found a volume called _Die Polnische Grausamkeit_—_The Polish Atrocity_. A characteristic sample of German propaganda, it was a compilation of “horror photographs” illustrating the alleged inhuman treatment of Germans by the Poles. It added a gruesome touch to our visit.

When I got back to the hotel at noon I found messages from Steve and Lamont. Steve had gone over to Unterstein to see about the repairs on his Steyr truck, the one he and Kress had spent so much time on—fitting it up as a mobile photographic unit. There was also some work to be done on the Mercedes-Benz, which had been standing idle, concealed behind a clump of bushes by the rest house, during our evacuation of the Göring collection. Steve had been right about the car; Colonel Davitt at Alt Aussee had not pressed his claim to it.

Lamont had taken off for St. Agatha in a truck borrowed from Brigade Headquarters to pick up the Hitler-Mussolini pictures.

There was also a message brought down by courier from Captain Posey’s office. It contained a list of three places in the vicinity of Berchtesgaden which should be inspected on the chance that they contained items from the Göring collection. One of them was the forester’s hut at Hintersee which I had just seen. The other two were castles in the neighborhood: Schloss Stauffeneck-Tiereck and Schloss Marzoll. I asked Major Anderson at lunch what he knew about them. He had nothing to contribute on the subject and said I’d probably draw a blank on all three. After removing the Göring things from the train, he had taken the precaution of publishing a notice to all residents of the area instructing them to declare all art works in their possession. He had done this as a means of recovering objects which might have been sequestered by Göring’s agents and objects which might have been surreptitiously removed from the train while it stood on the siding. The results had been disappointing. Only about thirty pictures had been turned in and none of them was in any way connected with Göring.

The major’s prediction was correct. Lamont, Steve and I visited the two castles the next day. In addition to their own furnishings, Schloss Stauffeneck-Tiereck and Schloss Marzoll contained only books from the University of Munich. These fruitless researches took all day. It was after five when we left Berchtesgaden.

It was raining when we reached Munich three hours later. Kress had no place to stay and it took us an hour to locate a civilian agency which provided billets for transients. The only thing they had to offer was a room for one night in a ruined nunnery on the Mathilde-Strasse. It was a gloomy place. There was no light and the windows were without glass. One of the Sisters, candle in hand, led us along a dark corridor to a small single room at the back. We followed with our flashlights. We gave Kress a box of K rations and told him we’d come back for him in the morning. Steve was of two minds about the place: on the one hand it wasn’t good enough for Kress; on the other he was impressed by the compassion of the Sisters in offering refuge to strangers. He wanted me to point out to Kress the anomaly of his being given sanctuary by the Church. I convinced him that my German wasn’t fluent enough. We thanked the Sister and went off to find ourselves a billet. We decided on the Excelsior, the hotel for transient officers. We were several miles from Third Army Headquarters, whereas the hotel was only a few blocks away.

I didn’t like driving the Mercedes-Benz around Munich, even though I had got away with it so far. The Third Army regulation forbidding officers to drive was strictly enforced. Perhaps my uniform baffled the MPs. It consisted of a Navy cap with blue cover, a British battle jacket with Navy shoulder boards, khaki trousers and black riding boots. It was my personal opinion that the MPs mistook the shoulder bars for the insignia of a Polish officer. The Poles, and the other liaison officers as well, were allowed to drive their own cars. Steve used to pooh-pooh my apprehensions about the MPs. “They’re a bunch of dumbheads,” he would say. “I ought to know. I used to be one.” All the same, he didn’t do much daytime driving around town.

Captain Posey had our next job lined up for us. We were to evacuate the records of the _Einsatzstab Rosenberg_—the German art-looting organization—from Neuschwanstein Castle. The job would include the removal of part of the stolen art treasures also. The captain told us that the castle contained a great quantity of uncrated objects, mostly gold and silver. They presented a serious security problem and it wasn’t safe to leave them there indefinitely. Even though the French were anxious to get everything back from Neuschwanstein, for the present they would have to be content with the gold and the silver objects and as many of the smaller cases as we could handle. It would be more practicable to ship the larger things—furniture, sculpture and pictures—direct to France by rail. This possibility was being investigated. It would save moving the things twice—first from Neuschwanstein to Munich, and then from Munich to Paris. But the records were badly needed at the Collecting Point in connection with the identification of the plunder stored there. So we were to concentrate on them and on the objects of great intrinsic value.

It was going to take three or four days to line up the trucks necessary for this operation. There was a critical shortage of transportation at the moment because all available vehicles were being used to haul firewood. This was popularly known as “Patton’s pet project.” For some weeks it had first priority after foodstuffs.

We welcomed the delay, for it gave us time to make a trip to Frankfurt. All three of us had urgent business to attend to there. Lamont’s and Steve’s records had to be straightened out. Both of them had been working in the field for so long that the headquarters to which they were technically assigned had lost track of them. And I wanted to find out what had happened to the personal belongings I had left in Frankfurt months ago. When I left I had expected to be gone ten days.

In the back of our minds, too, lurked the hope of becoming “incorporated” as a Special Evacuation Team. That’s what we were in fact, but we wanted to be recognized as such in name. The three of us worked well together and did not want to be separated. The decision would rest with Major La Farge and Lieutenant Kuhn.

We wheedled a command car out of the sergeant at the motor pool and took off late in the afternoon. Lamont, Steve and I rode in the Mercedes-Benz, the command car following. I had little confidence in our rakish convertible. The car had been behaving well enough mechanically, but the tires were paper-thin. They were an odd size and we had not been able to get any replacements. It was reassuring to know that the sturdy command car was trailing along behind.

We arrived at Ulm in time for supper. Long before we reached the city, we could see the soaring single spire of the cathedral silhouetted against the sky. There was literally nothing left of the old city. All the medieval houses which, with the cathedral, had made it one of the most picturesque cities in Germany, lay in ruins. But the cathedral was undamaged.

We stopped for gas just outside Ulm. To our surprise, the Army attendant filled our tanks. This was Seventh Army territory. In Third Army area the maximum was five gallons. I mentioned this to the attendant. He said, “There’s no gas shortage here. General Patton must be building up one hell of a big stockpile.”

We spent the night in Stuttgart. As the main transient hotel was full, we were assigned rooms at a small inn on the outskirts of the battered city. It took us an hour to find the place, so it was past midnight when we turned in.

The next morning we detoured a few kilometers in order to visit the castle at Ludwigsburg. The little town was laid out in the French manner, and its atmosphere was that of a miniature Versailles. The caretaker told us that the kings of Württemberg had lived at the castle until 1918. Our visit to it was the one pleasant experience of the day, which happened to be my birthday. We had our first flat tire in the castle courtyard, a second one an hour later, and a third between Mannheim and Darmstadt. It was Sunday and we had a devilish time finding places where we could get the inner tubes repaired. It was ten P.M. when we pulled into Frankfurt. The trip from Stuttgart had taken eleven hours instead of the usual four. We had spent seven hours on tire repairs.

My old room with the pink brocaded furniture was vacant, so I moved in for the night. In my absence it had been successively occupied by three lieutenant colonels. All of my belongings had been boxed and stored away in the closet. Lamont and Steve put up at the house next door.

We called on Bancel La Farge and Charlie Kuhn at USFET Headquarters the next morning. We were lucky to find them together. Their office at that time was a kind of house divided against itself. Thanks to the organizational whim of a colonel, Bancel and Charlie had to spend part of the day in the office at the big Farben building—where we found them—and part at their office in Höchst. Höchst was about six miles away. The remnant of the U. S. Group Control Council, which had not yet moved up to Berlin, was located there—in another vast complex of I. G. Farben buildings. It was an exhausting arrangement.

Bancel and Charlie looked tired—and worried too. They seemed glad to see us, but they were preoccupied and upset about something. Presently Charlie showed us a document which had just reached his desk a few days earlier. It was unsigned and undated.

It bore the letterhead “Headquarters U. S. Group Control Council.” The subject was “Art Objects in the U. S. Zone.”[2] In the first paragraph reference was made to the great number and value of the art objects stored in emergency repositories throughout the U. S. Zone. Farther on, the art objects were divided into three classes, according to ownership.

Those in “Class C” were defined as “works of art, placed in the U. S. Zone by Germany for safekeeping, which are the bona fide property of the German nation.”

Concerning the disposition of the works of art thus described, the letter had this to say: “It is not believed that the U. S. would desire the works of art in Class C to be made available for reparations and to be divided among a number of nations. Even if this is to be done, these works of art might well be returned to the U. S. to be inventoried, and cared for by our leading museums.”

The next, and last, sentence contained this extraordinary proposal: “They could be held in trusteeship for return, many years from now, to the German people if and when the German nation had earned the right to their return.”

Clipped to the document was a notation, dated July 29, 1945, bearing the signature of the Chief of Staff of General Lucius D. Clay, Deputy Military Governor. It read, in part, “General Clay states that this paper has been approved by the President for implementation after the close of the current Big 3 Conference.”

We were dumfounded. No wonder Bancel and Charlie were worried. It had never occurred to any of us that German national art treasures would be removed to the United States. After speculating on the possible consequences attendant on an implementation of the document, we dropped the subject. Momentarily there was nothing to do but wait—and hope that the whole matter would be dropped.

By comparison, our personal problems seemed insignificant. But Charlie and Bancel heard us out. They approved our idea of remaining together as a team working out of USFET. I was already permanently assigned to USFET and there were two vacancies on their T.O. (Table of Organization) to which Lamont and Steve could be appointed. The necessary “paper work” took up most of the day and involved a trip to ECAD headquarters at Bad Homburg. At five o’clock we had our new orders.

Steve suggested that we drive up to Marburg to see Captain Hancock, the Monuments officer in charge of the two great art repositories which had been established there. They were the prototype of the Central Collecting Point at Munich. However, they differed in an important respect from the one at Munich: they contained practically no loot. Virtually everything in them belonged to German museums and had been recovered by our Monuments officers from the mines in which the Germans had placed them for safekeeping during the war.

Marburg, some fifty miles north of Frankfurt, lay in the Regierungsbezirk, or government district, of Kassel, which was in turn a subdivision of the Province of Hesse. It was a two-hour drive, but we stopped en route for supper with a Quartermaster outfit at Giessen, so it was nearly eight o’clock when we arrived.

We found Walker Hancock in his office in the Staatsarchiv building. He was a man in the middle forties, and of medium height. His face broke into a smile and his fine dark eyes lighted up with an expression of genuine pleasure at the sight of Lamont and Steve. This was the first time they had seen one another since the close of the war when they had been working together in Weimar. I had never met Walker Hancock, but I had heard more about him than about any other American Monuments officer. I knew that he had had a distinguished career as a sculptor before the war and that he had been the first of our Monuments officers to reach France. He had been attached to the First Army until the end of hostilities. Lamont was devoted to Walker, and Steve’s regard for him bordered on worship. While the three of them reminisced, I found myself responding to his warmth and sincerity.

He wouldn’t hear of our returning to Frankfurt that night. He wanted to show us the things in his two depots and we wouldn’t be able to see more than a fraction of them before morning. The few that we did see whetted our appetite for more. In the galleries on the second floor we saw some of the finest pictures from the museums of the Rhineland: there were three wonderful Van Goghs. One was the portrait of Armand Rollin, the young man with a mustache and slouch hat. It belonged to the Volkwang Museum at Essen. Color reproductions of this portrait had, in recent years, rivaled those of Whistler’s _Mother_ in popularity. Walker said that it had been covered with mold when he found it in the Siegen mine with the rest of the Essen pictures. His assistant, Sheldon Keck, formerly the restorer of the Brooklyn Museum, had successfully removed the mold before it had done any serious damage.

The second Van Gogh was the famous large still life entitled _White Roses_. The third was a brilliant late landscape. There were other magnificent nineteenth century canvases: the bewitching portrait of M. and Mme. Sisley by Renoir, a full-length Manet, and a great Daumier. Walker climaxed the display with the celebrated Rembrandt _Self-Portrait_ from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum of Cologne. This was the last and most famous of the portraits the artist painted of himself.

We spent the night at the Gasthaus Sonne, a seventeenth century inn facing the old market place. The proprietor reluctantly assigned us two rooms on the second floor. They were normally reserved for the top brass. Judging from the austerity of the furnishings and the simplicity of the plumbing, I thought it unlikely that we would be routed from our beds by any late-arriving generals.

Walker met us for breakfast the next morning with word that the war with Japan had ended. Announcements in German had already been posted in several of the shop windows. Though thrilling to us, the news seemed to make very little impression on the citizens of the sleepy university town. The people in the streets were as unsmiling as ever. If anything, some of them looked a little grimmer than usual.

We drove to the Staatsarchiv building with Walker. He took us to a room containing a fabulous collection of medieval art objects. There were crosses and croziers, coffers and chalices, wrought in precious metals and studded with jewels—masterpieces of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. The most arresting individual piece was the golden Madonna, an archaic seated figure two feet high, dating from the tenth century. These marvelous relics of the Middle Ages belonged to the Cathedral of Metz. It was one of the greatest collections of its kind in the entire world. Its intrinsic value was enormous; its historic value incalculable. Walker said that arrangements were being made for its early return to the cathedral. The French were planning an elaborate ceremony in honor of the event.

It was a five-minute drive to the other depot under Captain Hancock’s direction. This was the Jubiläumsbau, or Jubilee Building, a handsome structure of pre-Nazi, modern design. It was the headquarters of the archaeological institute headed by Professor Richard Hamann, the internationally famous medieval scholar. It also housed the archives of “Photo Marburg,” the stupendous library of art photographs founded and directed by the professor. Walker was putting the resources of Photo Marburg to good use, compiling a complete photographic record of the objects in his care.

Among the treasures stored in the Jubiläumsbau were some of the choicest masterpieces from the Berlin state museums. Perhaps the most famous were the twin canvases by Watteau entitled _Gersaint’s Signboard_. Regarded by many as the supreme work of the greatest painter of the French Rococo period, the two pictures had been the prized possessions of Frederick the Great. Painted to hang side by side forming a continuous composition, they represented the shop of M. Gersaint, dealer in works of art. It is said that the paintings were finished in eight days. They were painted in the year 1732 when the artist was at the height of his career. I was told that, during the early years of the war, Göring made overtures to the Louvre for one of its finest Watteaus. According to the story, the negotiations ended abruptly when the museum signified its willingness to part with the painting in exchange for _Gersaint’s Signboard_.

The brilliant French school of the eighteenth century was further represented at the Jubiläumsbau by a superb Boucher—the subject, _Mercury and Venus_—and two exquisite Chardins: _The Cook_, one of his most enchanting scenes of everyday life, and the _Portrait of a Lady Sealing a Letter_, an unusually large composition for this unpretentious painter whose canvases are today worth a king’s ransom.

There were masterpieces of the German school; the great series of Cranachs which had belonged to the Hohenzollerns filled one entire room. Excellent examples of Rubens and Van Dyck represented the Flemish school; Ruysdael and Van Goyen, the Dutch. The high quality of every picture attested to the taste and connoisseurship of German collectors.

Walker said that he hoped to arrange a public exhibition of the pictures. Marburg had been neglected by our bombers. Only one or two bombs had fallen in the city and the resulting damage had been slight. Concussion had blasted the windows of the Staatsarchiv, but the Jubiläumsbau was untouched. Perhaps he would put on a series of small exhibitions, say fifty pictures at a time. The members of his local German committee were enthusiastic about the project. It would be an important first step in the rehabilitation of German cultural institutions which was an avowed part of the American Fine Arts program. Thanks to the hesitancy of an officer at higher headquarters who was exasperatingly “security-conscious,” Walker did not realize his ambition until three months later, on the eve of his departure for the United States.

We celebrated VJ-Day on our return to Frankfurt that evening. The big Casino, behind USFET headquarters, was the scene of the principal festivities. Drinks were on the house until the bar closed at ten. It was a warm summer night and the broad terrace over the main entrance was crowded. An Army band blared noisily inside. Civilian attendants skulked in the background, avidly collecting cigarette butts from the ash trays and the terrace floor. They reaped a rich harvest that night.

The Mercedes-Benz presented a problem. Its status was a dubious one. Since it was still registered with an MG Detachment in Austria, I felt uncomfortable about driving it around Germany. At Charlie Kuhn’s suggestion we filed a request with the Naval headquarters in Frankfurt for assignment of the vehicle to our Special Evacuation Team. The request was couched in impressive legal language which Charlie thought would do the trick. Armed with a copy of this request, I felt confident that we would not be molested by inquisitive MPs on our trip back to Munich.

We didn’t get started until late afternoon, having wasted two hours dickering with the Transportation Officer at the Frankfurt MG Detachment for a spare tire. We returned by way of Würzburg and Nürnberg. It was dark when we reached Nürnberg, but the light of the full moon was sufficient to reveal the ruined walls and towers of the old, inner city. As we struck south of the city to the Autobahn, we could see the outlines of the vast unfinished stadium, designed to seat one hundred and forty thousand people. We had to proceed cautiously since many of the bridges had been destroyed and detours were frequent. As a result it was midnight when we reached Munich. The transient hotel was full, so we had to be content with makeshift quarters at the Central Collecting Point.

In our absence the transportation situation had eased up a little. Captain Posey told us the next morning that six trucks would be available in the early afternoon. We decided to keep the command car for the trip to Neuschwanstein and leave the Mercedes-Benz in Munich to be painted. In anticipation of registration papers from the Navy, we thought it would be appropriate to have the car painted battleship gray and stenciled with white letters reading “U. S. Navy.” One of the mechanics in the garage at the Central Collecting Point agreed to do this for us in exchange for a bottle of rum and half a bottle of Scotch. Officers at Third Army Headquarters had bar privileges plus a liquor ration, but the enlisted men didn’t fare so well.

Our base of operations for the evacuation of the Castle of Neuschwanstein was the picturesque little town of Füssen, some eighty miles south of Munich, in the heart of the “Swan country.” This region of southern Bavaria, celebrated for its association with the name of Richard Wagner, is one of the most beautiful in all Germany. The mountains rise sharply from the floor of the level green valley. The turreted castle, perched on top of one of the lower peaks, at an elevation of a thousand feet, is visible for miles. Built in the eighteen-seventies by Ludwig II, the “Mad King” of Bavaria, it was the most fantastic creation of that exotic monarch whose passion for building nearly bankrupted his kingdom. When we saw the castle rising majestically from its pine-covered mountaintop, we were struck by the incongruity of our six-truck convoy lumbering through the romantic countryside.