Chapter IX: Part 9

We presented our credentials to a swarthy major who was the commanding officer of the small MG Detachment at Füssen. He arranged for our billets at the Alte Post, the hotel where officers of the Detachment were quartered, and, after we had deposited our gear in a room on the fourth floor, conducted us to the Schloss.

The steep road to the lower courtyard of the castle wound for more than a mile up the side of the mountain. At the castle entrance, the major identified us to the guard and our six trucks filed into the courtyard. In the upper courtyard, reached by a broad flight of stone steps, we found the caretaker who had the keys to the main section of the castle. He did not, however, have access to the wing in which the records of the _Einsatzstab Rosenberg_ were stored. The only door to that part of the building had been locked and sealed by Lieutenant James Rorimer, the Monuments officer of the Seventh Army, when the castle had first fallen into American hands. We had brought the key with us from Third Army Headquarters.

Before examining those rooms, we made a tour of the four main floors of the castle. The hallways and vaulted kitchens on the first floor were filled to overflowing with enormous packing cases and uncrated furniture, all taken from French collections. Three smaller storage rooms resembling the stock rooms of Tiffany’s and a porcelain factory combined, were jammed with gold and silver and rare china. Most of the loot had been concentrated on the first floor, but the unfinished rooms of the second had been fitted with racks for the storage of paintings. In addition to the looted pictures, there were several galleries of stacked paintings from the museums of Munich. The living apartments on the third floor, divested of their furnishings, were filled with stolen furniture, Louis Quinze chairs, table and sofas and ornate Italian cabinets lined the walls of rooms and corridors. They contrasted strangely with scenes from the Wagner operas which King Ludwig had chosen as the theme for the mural decorations. Only the gold-walled Throne Room and, on the floor above, the lofty Fest-Saal, were devoid of loot.

We proceeded to the wing of the castle which contained the records. Having broken the seals and unlocked the door, we entered a hallway about thirty feet long. The doors opening onto this hallway were also locked and sealed. Behind them lay the offices of the _Einsatzstab Rosenberg_. They were crowded with bookshelves and filing cabinets. In one room stood a huge show-case filled with fragile Roman glass. The rooms of the second floor were full of French furniture and dozens of small packing cases. These cases were made of carefully finished quarter-sawed oak. We had seen similar ones in the Göring collection. They had been the traveling cases for precious objects belonging to the Rothschilds. These too contained Rothschild treasures—exquisite bibelots of jade, agate, onyx and jasper, and innumerable pieces of Oriental and European porcelain.

At one end of the hallway were two rooms which had been used as a photographic laboratory. We had brought Kress with us. Steve went off to make arrangements to install his equipment, while Lamont and I calculated the number of men we would need for the evacuation work the next morning. We asked the major for twenty—two shifts of ten.

The Neuschwanstein operation lasted eight days. We worked nights as well, because there were thousands of small objects—many of them fragile and extremely valuable—which we could not trust to the inexpert hands of our work party. There was no electricity in the small storage rooms, so we had to work by candlelight. It took us one evening to pack the Roman glass and the four succeeding evenings, working till midnight, to pack the two thousand pieces of gold and silver in the David-Weill collection. The Nazi looters had thoughtfully saved the well-made cases in which they had carted off this magnificent collection from M. David-Weill’s house in Paris. There were candelabra, dishes, knives, forks, spoons, snuffboxes—the rarest examples of the art of the French goldsmiths of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This unique collection had created a sensation when it was exhibited in Paris a few years before the war. The fact that the incomparable assemblage would probably one day be left to the Louvre by the eminent connoisseur, who had spent a lifetime collecting it, had not deterred the Nazi robbers. He was a Jew. That justified its confiscation. Aside from the pleasure it gave me to handle the beautiful objects, I relished the idea of helping to recover the property of a fellow Californian: M. David-Weill had been born in San Francisco. The Nazis had been methodical as usual. Every piece was to have been systematically recatalogued while the collection was at Neuschwanstein. On some of the shelves we found slips of paper stating that this or that object had not yet been photographed—“_noch nicht fotografiert_.”

The tedious manual labor involved in packing small objects and the great distance which the packed cases had to be carried when ready for loading were the chief difficulties at Neuschwanstein. Not only did the cases have to be carried several hundred feet from the storage rooms to the door of the castle; but from the door to the trucks was a long trek, down two flights of steps and across a wide courtyard. In this respect the operation resembled the evacuation of the monastery at Hohenfurth.

Three months after our partial evacuation of the castle, a team composed of Captain Edward Adams, Lieutenant (jg) Charles Parkhurst, USNR, and Captain Hubert de Brye, a French officer, completed the removal of the loot. This gigantic undertaking required eight weeks. If I remember the figures correctly, more than twelve thousand objects were boxed and carted away. The cases were built in a carpenter shop set up in the castle kitchens. One hundred and fifty truckloads were delivered to the railroad siding at Füssen and thence transported to Paris. It was an extraordinary achievement, carried out despite heavy snowfall. The only operation which rivaled it was the evacuation of the salt mine at Alt Aussee.

The last morning of our stay at Füssen, Lamont and I had a special mission to perform. A German art dealer named Gustav Rochlitz was living at Gipsmühle, a five-minute drive from Hohenschwangau, the small village below the castle. For a number of years Rochlitz had had a gallery in Paris. His dealings with the Nazis, in particular his trafficking in confiscated pictures, had been the subject of special investigation by Lieutenants Plaut and Rousseau, our OSS friends. They were the two American naval officers who were preparing an exhaustive report on the activities of the infamous _Einsatzstab Rosenberg_. They had interrogated Rochlitz and placed him under house arrest. In his possession were twenty-two modern French paintings, including works by Dérain, Matisse and Picasso, formerly belonging to well known Jewish collections. He had obtained them from Göring and other leading Nazis in exchange for old master paintings. We were to relieve Herr Rochlitz of these canvases.

At the farmhouse in which Rochlitz and his wife were living, the maid of all work who answered our knock said that no one was at home. Herr Rochlitz would not be back before noon. Lamont and I returned to our jeep and started back across the fields to the highway. We had driven about a hundred yards when we saw a heavy-set sullen-faced man of about fifty walking toward us.

“I’ll bet that’s Rochlitz,” I said to Lamont. Stopping the car, I called out to him, “Herr Rochlitz?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded.

“Hop in, we want to have a talk with you,” I said.

We returned to the farmhouse and followed our truculent host up the stairs to a sitting room on the second floor. There we were joined by his wife, a timid young woman who, like her husband, spoke fluent English.

I said that we had come for the pictures. Rochlitz made no protest. He brusquely directed his wife to bring them in. As she left the room, I thought it odd that he hadn’t gone along to help her. But she returned almost immediately with the paintings in her arms. All twenty-two were rolled around a long mailing tube. Together they spread the canvases about the room, on the table, on the chairs and on the floor. They were, without exception, works of excellent quality. One large early Picasso, the portrait of a woman and child, was alone worth a small fortune.

I was wondering what Rochlitz had given in exchange for the lot, when he began to explain how the pictures had come into his possession. He must have taken us for credulous fools, because the story he told made him out a victim of tragic circumstance. He said that Göring had made an offer on several of his pictures. Rochlitz had accepted but insisted on being paid in cash. Göring had agreed to the terms and the pictures were delivered. Then, instead of paying in cash, Göring had forced him to accept these modern paintings. He had protested, but to no avail. Of course these pictures were all right in their way, he said deprecatingly, but he was not a dealer in modern art. Naturally he did not know that they had been confiscated. It was all a dreadful mistake, but what could he do? I said that I realized how badly he must have felt and that I knew he would be relieved to learn that the pictures were now going back to their rightful owners.

The pictures were carefully rerolled and we got up to leave. At the door, Rochlitz told us that he had lost his entire stock. He had stored all of his paintings at Baden-Baden, in the French Zone. Did we think he would be able to recover them? We assured him that justice would be done and, leaving him to interpret that remark as he saw fit, drove off with the twenty-two pictures.

(9)

_HIDDEN TREASURES AT NÜRNBERG_

On our return to Munich that evening, Craig told us that preparations were being made for the immediate restitution of several important masterpieces recovered in the American Zone. General Eisenhower had approved a proposal to return at once to each of the countries overrun by the Germans at least one outstanding work of art. This was to be done in his name, as a gesture of “token restitution” symbolizing American policy with regard to ultimate restitution of all stolen art treasures to the rightful owner nations. It was felt that the gracious gesture on the part of the Commanding General of United States Forces in Europe would serve to reaffirm our intentions to right the wrongs of Nazi oppression. In view of the vast amount of art which had thus far been recovered, it would be months before it could all be restored to the plundered countries. Meanwhile these “token restitutions” would be an earnest of American good will. They would be sent back from Germany at the expense of the United States Government. Thereafter, representatives of the various countries would be invited to come to our Collecting Points to select, assemble and, in transportation of their own providing, remove those objects which the Germans had stolen.

Belgium was to receive the first token restitution. The great van Eyck altarpiece—_The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb_—was the obvious choice among the stolen Belgian treasures.

The famous panels had been reposing in the Central Collecting Point at Munich since we had removed them from the salt mine at Alt Aussee. A special plane had been chartered to fly them to Brussels. The Belgian Government had signified approval of air transportation. Direct rail communication between Munich and Brussels had not been resumed, and the highways were not in the best of condition. By truck, it would be a rough two-day trip; by air, a matter of three hours.

Bancel La Farge had already flown from Frankfurt to Brussels, where plans had been made for an appropriate ceremony on the arrival of the altarpiece. The American Ambassador was to present the panels to the Prince Regent on behalf of General Eisenhower. It was to be an historic occasion.

I went out to the airport to confirm the arrangements for the C-54. It was only a fifteen-minute drive from the Königsplatz to the field. I was also to check on the condition of the streets: they were in good shape all the way.

The plane was to take off at noon. Lamont, Steve and I supervised the loading of the ten precious cases. We led off in a jeep. The truck followed with the panels. Four of the civilian packers went along to load the cases onto the plane. Captain Posey was to escort the altarpiece to Brussels.

When we got to the airport we learned that the plane had not arrived. There would be a two-hour delay. At the end of two hours, we were informed that there was bad weather south of Brussels. All flights had been canceled for the day. We drove back to the Collecting Point at the Königsplatz and had just finished unloading the panels when a message came from the field. The weather had cleared. The plane would be taking off in half an hour. I caught Captain Posey as he was leaving the building for his office at Third Army Headquarters. The cases were reloaded and we were on our way to the field in fifteen minutes.

The truck was driven onto the field where the big C-54 stood waiting. In another quarter of an hour the panels were aboard and lashed securely to metal supports in the forepart of the passenger compartment. Captain Posey, the only passenger, waved jauntily as the doors swung shut. Enviously we watched the giant plane roll down the field, lift waveringly from the airstrip and swing off to the northwest. The altarpiece was on the last lap of an extraordinary journey. We wished George Stout could have been in on this.

The plane reached Brussels without mishap. The return of the great national treasure was celebrated throughout the country. Encouraged by the success of this first “token restitution,” Major La Farge directed that a similar gesture be made to France. At the Collecting Point Craig selected seventy-one masterpieces looted from French private collections. The group included Fragonard, Chardin, Lancret, Rubens, Van Dyck, Hals, and a large number of seventeenth century Dutch masters. Only examples of the highest quality were chosen.

Ham Coulter, the naval officer who worked with Craig at the “Bau,” was the emissary appointed to accompany the paintings to Paris. It was decided to return them by truck, inasmuch as it would have been impracticable to attempt shipping uncrated pictures by air. The convoy consisted of two trucks—one for the pictures, the other for extra gasoline. It was a hard two-day trip from Munich to Paris. Ham got through safely, but reported on his return that the roads had been extremely rough a good part of the way. He had delivered the pictures in Paris to the Musée du Jeu de Paume, the little museum which the Germans had used during the Occupation as the clearinghouse for their methodical plundering of the Jewish collections. His expedition had been marred by only one minor incident. When the paintings were being unloaded at the museum, one of the women attendants watching the operation noticed that some of the canvases were unframed. She had asked, “And where are the frames?” This was too much for Coulter. In perfect French, the courteous lieutenant told her precisely what she could do about the frames.

Shortly after the return of the Ghent altarpiece, Captain Posey was demobilized. His duties as MFA&A Officer at Third Army Headquarters in Munich were assumed by Captain Edwin Rae. I had not seen Rae since the early summer when he and Lieutenant Edith Standen had been assigned to assist me in inventorying the collections of the Berlin museums in the vaults of the Reichsbank at Frankfurt. Edwin was a meticulous fellow, gentle but determined. Although by no means lacking in a sense of humor, he resented joking references to a fancied resemblance to Houdon’s well known portrait of Voltaire, and I didn’t blame him.

He took on his new responsibilities with quiet assurance and in a short time won the complete confidence of his superiors at Third Army Headquarters. Throughout his long tenure of office, he maintained an unruffled calm in the face of obstacles which would have exhausted a less patient man. He was responsible for all matters pertaining to the Fine Arts in the Eastern Military District of the American Zone—that is, Bavaria—an area more than twice the size of the two provinces Greater Hesse and Württemberg-Baden comprising the Western Military District of our Zone.

During the early days of Captain Rae’s regime, Charlie Kuhn paid a brief visit to Munich. He had just completed the transfer of the Berlin Museum collections from Frankfurt to the Landesmuseum at Wiesbaden. The university buildings in Frankfurt—which I had requisitioned for a Collecting Point—had proved unsuitable. The repairs, he said, would have taken months. On the other hand, the Wiesbaden Museum, though damaged, was ideal for the purpose. Of course there hadn’t been a glass left in any of the windows, and the roof had had to be repaired. But thanks to the energy and ingenuity of Walter Farmer, the building had been rehabilitated in two months. Captain Farmer was the director of the new Collecting Point. When I asked where Farmer had got the glass, Charlie was evasive. All he would say was that Captain Farmer was “wise in the ways of the Army.”

Charlie was headed for Vienna to confer with Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Dewald, Chief of the MFA&A Section at USFA Headquarters (United States Forces, Austria). Colonel Dewald wanted to complete the evacuation of the mine at Alt Aussee, which was now under his jurisdiction. For this project he hoped to obtain the services of the officers who had worked there when the mine had been Third Army’s responsibility. Captain Rae was reluctant to lend the Special Evacuation Team, because there was still so much work to be done in Bavaria. But he agreed, provided that Charlie could sell the idea to the Chief of Staff at Third Army. This Charlie succeeded in doing, and departed for Vienna a day later. Steve was crazy to see Vienna—I think his parents had been born there—so Charlie took him along.

After they had left, Captain Rae requested Lamont and me to make an inspection trip to northern Bavaria. Our first stop was Bamberg. There we examined the _Neue Residenz_, which Rae contemplated establishing as an auxiliary Collecting Point to house the contents of various repositories in Upper Franconia. Reports reaching his office indicated that storage conditions in that area were unsatisfactory. Either the repositories were not weatherproof, or they were not being adequately guarded.

It was also rumored that UNRRA was planning to fill the _Neue Residenz_ with DPs—Displaced Persons. Captain Rae was determined to put a stop to that, because the building, a fine example of late seventeenth century architecture, was on the SHAEF List of Protected Monuments. This fact should have guaranteed its immunity from such a hazard. Even during combat, the SHAEF list had been a great protection to monuments of historic and artistic importance. Now that no “doctrine of military necessity” could be invoked to justify improper use of the building, Rae did not propose to countenance its occupancy by DPs.

The _Neue Residenz_ contained dozens of empty, brocaded rooms—but no plumbing. We decided that it would do for a Collecting Point and agreed with Rae that the DPs should be housed elsewhere if possible. The officer from the local MG Detachment, who was showing us around, confirmed the report that UNRRA intended to move in. He didn’t think they would relinquish the building without a protest. The influx of refugees from the Russian Zone had doubled the town’s normal population of sixty thousand.

It was a disappointment to find that the superb sculpture in the cathedral across the square was still bricked up. The shelters had proved a needless precaution, for Bamberg had not been bombed. Only the bridge over the Regnitz had been blown up, and the Germans had done that themselves.

From Bamberg we drove north to Coburg, where we had a twofold mission. First we were to obtain specific information about ten cases which contained a collection of art objects belonging to a prince of Hesse. The cases were said to be stored in Feste Coburg, the walled castle above the town. If they were the property of Philip of Hesse, then they would probably be taken into custody by the American authorities. We had been told that he was in prison. His art dealings during the past few years were being reviewed by the OSS officers charged with the special investigation of Nazi art-looting activities. Philip was the son of the Landgräfin of Hesse. It was in the flower-filled Waffenraum of her castle near Frankfurt that I had seen the family tombs months before.

If, on the other hand, the cases belonged to a different prince of Hesse—one whose political record was clean—and storage conditions were satisfactory, we would simply leave them where they were for the time being.

Our second objective was Schloss Tambach, a few kilometers from Coburg. Paintings stolen by Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, from the palace at Warsaw were stored there. Schloss Tambach also contained pictures from the Stettin Museum. Stettin was now in the Russian Zone of Occupied Germany.

On our arrival in Coburg, Lamont and I drove to the headquarters of the local MG Detachment, which were located in the Palais Edinburgh. This unpretentious building was once the residence of Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Edinburgh. There we arranged with Lieutenant Milton A. Pelz, the Monuments officer of the Coburg Detachment, to inspect the storage rooms at the castle.

Pelz was a big fellow who spoke German fluently. He welcomed us hospitably and took us up to the castle where we met Dr. Grundmann, who had the keys to the storage rooms. This silent, sour-faced German was curator of the Prince’s collections. He said that his employer was Prince Ludwig of Hesse, a cousin of Philip. The cases contained paintings and _objets d’art_ which had been in the possession of the family for years. Grundmann had personally removed them from Ludwig’s estate in Silesia the day before the Russians occupied the area.

Ludwig’s most important treasure was the world-famous painting by Holbein known as the _Madonna of Bürgermeister Meyer_. Painted in 1526, it had hung for years in the palace at Darmstadt. The Dresden Gallery owned a seventeenth century replica. Early in the war, Prince Ludwig had sent the original to his Silesian castle for safekeeping. Grundmann had brought it back to Bavaria along with the ten cases now at Coburg. From Coburg he had taken the Holbein to Schloss Banz, a castle not far from Bamberg.

He said that the Prince was living at Wolfsgarten, a small country place near Darmstadt. Ludwig was eager to regain possession of the painting. Did we think that could be arranged? We told him he would have to obtain an authorization from Captain Rae at Munich.

Schloss Tambach was a ten-minute drive from Coburg. This great country house, built around three sides of a courtyard, belonged to the Countess of Ortenburg. She occupied the center section. A detachment of troops was billeted in one wing. The other was filled with the Stettin and Warsaw pictures. There were over two hundred from the Stettin Museum. Nineteenth century German paintings predominated, but I noticed two fine Hals portraits and a Van Gogh landscape among them.

The civilian custodian, answerable to the MG authorities at Coburg, was Dr. Wilhelm Eggebrecht. He had been curator of the Stettin Museum until thrown out by the Nazis because his wife was one-quarter Jewish. He was a mousy little fellow with a bald head and gold-rimmed spectacles. He asked apprehensively if we intended to send the paintings back to Russian-held Stettin. We said that we had come only to check on the physical security of the present storage place. So far as we knew, the paintings would remain where they were for the present. This inconclusive piece of information seemed to reassure him.

The paintings looted from Warsaw were the _pièces de résistance_ of the treasures at Schloss Tambach—especially the nine great canvases by Bellotto, the eighteenth century Venetian master. Governor Frank had ruthlessly removed the pictures from their stretchers and rolled them up for shipment. As a result of this rough handling, the paint had flaked off in places, but the damage was not serious. When we examined the pictures, they were spread out on the floor. They filled two rooms, forty feet square. Later they were taken to the Munich Collecting Point and mounted on new stretchers, in preparation for their return to Warsaw.

When we got back to Munich, Steve had returned from Vienna. He had news for us. Charlie Kuhn had already left for Frankfurt. Colonel Dewald was coming to Munich in a few days to talk to Colonel Roy Dalferes, Rae’s Chief of Staff at Third Army, about reopening the Alt Aussee mine. Either Charlie or Bancel would come down from USFET Headquarters when Dewald arrived. A new man had joined the MFA&A Section at USFA—Andrew Ritchie, director of the Buffalo Museum. He had come over as a civilian. Steve thought that Ritchie would be the USFA representative at Munich. There was a lot of stuff at the Collecting Point which would eventually go back to Austria. It would have to be checked with the records there. That would be Ritchie’s job. Steve told us also that Lincoln Kirstein had gone home. His mother was seriously ill and Lincoln had left on emergency orders.

The three of us went to Captain Rae’s office. Lamont and I had to make a report on our trip to Coburg. Rae had a new assignment for us. He had just received orders from USFET Headquarters to prepare the Cracow altarpiece for shipment. It was to be sent back to Poland as a token restitution. This was the colossal carved altarpiece by Veit Stoss which the Nazis had stolen from the Church of St. Mary at Cracow. Veit Stoss had been commissioned by the King of Poland in 1477 to carve the great work. It had taken him ten years. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis had carted it off, lock, stock and barrel, to Nürnberg. They contended that, since Veit Stoss had been a native of Nürnberg, it belonged in the city of his birth.

The missing altarpiece was the first of her looted treasures for which Poland had registered a claim with the American authorities at the close of the war. After months of diligent investigation, it was found by American officers in an underground bunker across the street from the Albrecht Dürer house in Nürnberg. In addition to the dismantled figures of the central panel—painted and gilded figures of hollow wood ten feet high—the twelve ornate side panels, together with the statues and pinnacles surmounting the framework, had been crowded into the bunker.

The same bunker contained another priceless looted treasure—the coronation regalia of the Holy Roman Empire. Among these venerable objects were the jeweled crown of the Emperor Conrad—commonly called the “Crown of Charlemagne”—dating from the eleventh century, a shield, two swords and the orb. Since 1804 they had been preserved in the Schatzkammer, the Imperial Treasure Room, at Vienna. In 1938, the Nazis removed them to Nürnberg, basing their claim to possession on a fifteenth century decree of the Emperor Sigismund that they were to be kept in that city.

On the eve of the German collapse, two high officials of the city had spirited away these five pieces. The credit for recovering the treasures goes to an American officer of German birth, Lieutenant Walter Horn, professor of art at the University of California. The two officials at first disclaimed any knowledge of their whereabouts. After hours of relentless grilling by Lieutenant Horn, the men finally admitted their guilt. They were promptly tried, heavily fined and sent to prison. Three months later, at the request of the Austrian Government, the imperial treasures were flown back to Vienna. This historic shipment contained other relics which the Nazis had taken from the Schatzkammer—relics of the greatest religious significance. They included an alleged fragment of the True Cross, a section of the tablecloth said to have been used at the Last Supper, a lance venerated as the one which had touched the wounds of Christ, and links from the chains traditionally believed to have bound St. Peter, St. Paul and St. John.

On Captain Rae’s instructions, Steve and I went to Nürnberg to pack the Stoss altarpiece. (At that time the coronation regalia was still in the bunker, where, on the afternoon of our arrival, we had an opportunity to examine it.) We found that the heavy framework which supported the altar panels was not stored in the bunker. Because of its size—the upright pieces were thirty feet high—it had been taken to Schloss Wiesenthau, an old castle outside Forchheim, thirty miles away.

Leaving Steve to start packing the smaller figures and pinnacles, I got hold of a semitrailer, the only vehicle long enough to accommodate a load of such length. It was an hour’s drive to the castle. With a crew of twenty PWs, I finished loading the framework in two hours and returned to Nürnberg in time for supper.

That evening Steve and I figured out the number of trucks we would need for the altarpiece. Lamont had remained in Munich to make tentative arrangements, pending word from us. He was going to ask for ten trucks and we came to the conclusion that this would be about the right number—in addition, of course, to the semitrailer for the supporting framework. We got out our maps and studied our probable route to Cracow. One road would take us through Dresden and Breslau; another by way of Pilsen and Prague. Perhaps we could go one way and return the other. In either case we would have to pass through Russian-occupied territory. It would probably take some time to obtain the necessary clearances. We figured on taking enough gas for the round trip, since we doubted if there would be any to spare in Poland. Altogether it promised to be a complicated expedition, but already we had visions of a triumphal entry into Cracow.

Our ambitious plans collapsed the following morning. While Steve and I were at breakfast, I was called to the telephone. The corporal in Captain Rae’s office was on the wire. I was to return to Munich at once. Major La Farge was arriving from Frankfurt and wanted to see me that night. Plans for the trip to Cracow were indefinitely postponed. Internal conditions in Poland were too unsettled to risk returning the altarpiece.

Our plans had miscarried before, but this was our first major disappointment. We had begun to look on the Polish venture as the fitting climax of our work as a Special Evacuation Team. On the way back to Munich, Steve said he had a feeling that the team was going to be split up.

Steve’s misgivings were prophetic. At Craig’s apartment after dinner, Bancel La Farge outlined the plans he had for us. Colonel Dalferes had acceded to Colonel Dewald’s request. Lamont, Steve and a third officer—new to MFA&A work—were to resume the evacuation of the salt mine at Alt Aussee. If the snows held off, it would be possible to carry on operations there for another month or six weeks.

I was to return to USFET Headquarters at Frankfurt as Deputy Chief of the MFA&A Section, replacing Charlie Kuhn who had just received his orders to go home. I knew that Charlie would soon be eligible for release from active duty, but had no idea that his departure was so imminent.

We didn’t have much to say to one another on the way to our quarters that night. Steve had already made up his mind that he wasn’t going to like the new man. Lamont said that he thought it was going to be an awful anticlimax to reopen the mine. And for me, the prospect of routine administrative work at USFET was uninviting. After three months of strenuous and exciting field work, it wouldn’t be easy to settle down in an office. All three of us felt that the great days were over.

During our last week together in Munich we had little time to feel sorry for ourselves. Everyone was preoccupied with the restitution program. We had our full share of the work. Another important shipment was to be made to Belgium. It was to include the Michelangelo Madonna, the eleven paintings stolen from the church in Bruges when the statue was taken, and the four panels by Dirk Bouts from the famous altarpiece in the church of St. Pierre at Louvain. These panels, which formed the wings of the altarpiece, had been removed by the Germans in August 1942. Before the first World War one wing had been in the Berlin Gallery, the other in the Alte Pinakothek at Munich. As in the case of the Ghent altarpiece, they had been restored—unjustly, according to the Germans—to Belgium by the Versailles Treaty.

This shipment to Belgium represented the first practical application of the “come and get it” theory of restitution, evolved by Major La Farge. Belgium had already received the Ghent altarpiece as token restitution. Now it was up to the Belgians to carry on at their own expense. The special representatives who came down from Brussels to supervise this initial shipment were Dr. Paul Coremans, a great technical expert, and Lieutenant Pierre Longuy of the Ministry of Fine Arts. They had their own truck but had been unable to bring suitable packing materials. We had an ample supply of pads and blankets which we had stored at the Collecting Point after our evacuation of the Göring collection. We placed them at the disposal of the Belgians. But it was Saturday and no civilian packers were available. Dr. Coremans gratefully accepted the offer of our services. Steve, Lamont and I loaded the truck. It was the last operation of the Special Evacuation Team.

The Belgians had no sooner departed than the French and Dutch representatives arrived. Captain Hubert de Brye for France looked more like a sportsman than a scholar; but he was a man of wide cultivation and had a sense of humor which endeared him to his associates in Munich. He and Ham Coulter were kindred spirits and became great friends.

Ham, who had been responsible for the rehabilitation of both the Collecting Point and the Führerbau, now had two assistants—Captain George Lacy and Dietrich Sattler, the latter a German architect. Through this division of the work, Ham found time for new duties: he took the foreign representatives in tow, arranged for their billets, their mess cards, their PX rations and so on. It was an irritating but not a thankless job, for the recipients of his attentions were devoted to their “wet nurse.”

The Dutch representative was Lieutenant Colonel Alphonse Vorenkamp. He was a little man with gray hair, shrewd gray eyes and steel-rimmed spectacles. An eminent authority on Dutch painting, he had been for several years a member of the faculty at Smith College. He enjoyed the unusual distinction of having served in both the American and Dutch Armies during the present war.

I had met him in San Francisco in 1944, shortly after his discharge from the service. He had been a buck private; and I gathered from the story of his experiences that our Army had released him in self-defense. He told me that he often had difficulty in understanding the drill sergeant. Once, without thinking he had stepped out of formation and asked politely, “Sergeant, would you mind repeating that last order!” Vorenkamp said that he had paid dearly for his indiscretion, so dearly in fact that he had seriously considered changing his name from Alphonse to Latrinus. Alphonse, he said, was a ridiculous name for a Dutchman anyway. He preferred to be called Phonse.

Released from the Army, he had gone back to his teaching. Then, only a few months ago, the Dutch Government had requested his services in connection with the restitution of looted art. They had offered him a lieutenant-colonelcy and he had accepted.

The Dutch, as well as the British and French, had made a practice of conferring upon qualified civilians ranks consistent with the responsibilities of given jobs. Our government’s failure to do likewise—so far as the art program was concerned—resulted in a disparity in rank which frequently placed American MFA&A personnel at a great disadvantage.

Of all the foreign representatives, none served his country more zealously than Phonse Vorenkamp. Throughout the fall and winter months, his convoys shuttled back and forth between Munich and Amsterdam. When I last heard from him—in the late spring—he had restored to Holland more than nine hundred paintings, upward of two thousand pieces of sculpture, porcelain and glass, along with truckloads of tapestries, rugs and furniture.

I left Munich on a rainy morning at the end of September. Lamont and Steve were planning to depart for Alt Aussee at the same time. The three of us had agreed to meet in front of the Collecting Point at eight-thirty. I was a few minutes late and when I got there the guard at the entrance said they had already gone. I hadn’t felt so forlorn since the day Craig and I had parted in Bad Homburg months before. As I started down the steps to the command car, Phonse Vorenkamp called from the doorway. He had come to work a little earlier than usual, just to see me off. He was full of waspish good humor, joked about the magnificence of my new job in Frankfurt, and promised to look me up when he came through with his first convoy. The driver stepped on the starter and, as we rounded the corner into the Brienner-Strasse, Phonse waved us on our way.

(10)

_MISSION TO AMSTERDAM; THE WIESBADEN MANIFESTO_

I reported to Major La Farge upon arrival. Since my visit to Frankfurt with Lamont and Steve six weeks before, there had been several changes in the MFA&A Section. With the removal to Berlin of the Monuments officers attached to the U. S. Group Control Council, our office at USFET Headquarters in Frankfurt had been transferred to Höchst. The move was logical enough because we were part of the Restitution Control Branch of the Economics Division, which was located there. For all practical purposes, however, we would have been better off in Frankfurt, since our work involved daily contacts with other divisions—all located at the main headquarters.

The Höchst office was a barnlike room, some thirty feet square, on the second floor of the Exposition Building. It required considerable ingenuity to find the room, for it was tucked in behind a row of laboratories occupied by white-coated German civilians, former employees of I. G. Farben, who were now working for the American Military Government. At one end of the room were desks for the Chief and Deputy Chief. The rest of the furniture consisted of four long work tables and two small file cabinets. The staff was equally meager—Major La Farge, Lieutenant Edith Standen, Corporal James Reeds and a German civilian stenographer.

The first few days were a period of intensive indoctrination. The morning I arrived, Bancel defined the relationship between our office and the one at Berlin; and between us and the two districts of the American Zone—the Eastern District, which was under Third Army, and the Western District, under Seventh Army. He described the Berlin office as the final authority in determining policy. In theory, if not always in fact, a given policy was adopted only after an exchange of views between the Frankfurt-Höchst office and the one in Berlin. The activation of policy was our function. USFET—that is, our office—was an operational headquarters. Berlin was not.

And how did we activate policy? By means of directives. Directives to whom? To Third Army at Munich and Seventh Army at Heidelberg. That sounded simple enough, until Bancel explained that a directive was not exactly an imperial decree. Just as it was our prerogative to activate policies approved by Berlin, so it was the prerogative of the Armies to implement our directives as they deemed expedient. He reminded me that the two Armies were independent and autonomous within their respective areas. In other words, we could tell them _what_ to do, but not _how_ to do it. Bancel was an old hand at writing directives, knowing how to give each phrase just the right emphasis. At first the longer ones seemed stilted and occasionally ambiguous. But I was not accustomed to military jargon. Later I came to realize that Army communications always sounded stilted; and what I had mistaken for ambiguity was often deliberate circumlocution, calculated to soften the force of an unpalatable order.

Bancel said there were more important things to worry about than the composition of directives. One was the problem of token restitutions. He was sorry to postpone the one to Poland, but that couldn’t be helped. Now that France and Belgium had received theirs, Holland was next on the list. The ceremony in Brussels had made a great hit. He thought a similar affair might be arranged at The Hague. Vorenkamp was selecting a group of pictures at the Collecting Point. We would provide a plane to fly them to Amsterdam. Captain Rae was to notify our office as soon as Vorenkamp was ready to leave—probably within the next two days. In the meantime Bancel was having orders cut for me to go to Holland. I was to see the American ambassador, explain the idea of these token restitutions, and sound him out on the subject of planning a ceremony similar to the one our ambassador had arranged in Brussels. Colonel Anthony Biddle, Chief of the Allied Contacts Section at USFET Headquarters, had promised Bancel to write a letter of introduction for me to take to The Hague. Bancel suggested that I make tentative arrangements with the motor pool for a car and driver.

It was almost noon and Bancel had an appointment in Frankfurt at twelve-thirty. He just had time to catch the bus. After he left, Reeds and the stenographer went out to lunch, so Edith Standen and I had the office to ourselves. We had a lot to talk over, as I had not seen her since June when we worked together on the inventory of the Berlin Museum collections at the Reichsbank.

In the meantime, she had been stationed at Höchst. When the Group CC outfit—to which she was officially attached—moved to Berlin, she had preferred to remain with the USFET office. On the Organizational Chart of the MFA&A Section, Edith was listed as the “Officer in Charge of Technical Files.” Actually she was in charge of a great many other things as well. When the Chief and Deputy Chief were away from headquarters at the same time—and they often were—Edith took over the affairs of the Section. She must have been born with these remarkable administrative gifts, for she could have had little opportunity to develop them as the cloistered curator of the Widener Collection where, as she said herself, she was “accustomed to the silent padding of butlers and the spontaneous appearance of orchids and gardenias among the Rembrandts and the Raphaels.”

I asked her if there had been any new developments regarding the proposed removal of German-owned art to the United States. Yes, there had been. But nothing conclusive. There was a cable from General Clay to the War Department early in September.[3] The cable spoke of “holding German objects of art in trust for eventual return to the German people.” But it didn’t contain the clause “if and when the German nation had earned the right to their return” which had appeared in the original document. Besides the cable, there had been a communication from Berlin asking for an estimate of the cubic footage in art repositories of the American Zone. It was a question impossible to answer accurately. But Bancel and Charlie had figured out a reply, citing the approximate size of one of the repositories and leaving it up to Berlin to multiply the figures by the total number in the entire zone. Now that John Nicholas Brown and Charlie Kuhn were back in the United States, they might be able to discourage the projected removal. I had only one piece of information to contribute on the subject: a letter from George Stout saying that he had been asked by the Roberts Commission to give an opinion, based on purely technical grounds, of the risk involved in sending paintings to America. He did so, stating that to remove them would _cube_ the risk of leaving them in Germany.

When Corporal Reeds returned to the office, Edith and I went across the street to the Officers’ Mess. While we were at lunch, she told me that Jim Reeds had been a discovery of George’s. He had been with George and Bancel at their office in Wiesbaden. Jim was a tall, serious fellow with sandy hair and a turned-up nose. Edith said that he had been a medical student before the war and that he came from Missouri. There was so much paper work to do in the office that he never got caught up. The German typist was slow and inaccurate. Jim had to do over nearly half the letters he gave her to copy. But his patience was inexhaustible and he never complained.

Bancel didn’t get back from Frankfurt until late in the afternoon. The return of the Veit Stoss altarpiece had come up again and he had had a long talk about it with the Polish liaison officer at USFET, who was a nephew of the Archbishop of Cracow. After that he had had a session with Colonel A. J. de la Bretesche, the French liaison officer. And, for good measure, he had to take up the problem of clearance for the two Czech representatives who would be arriving in a few days. He said wearily that practically all of his days were like that, now that restitution was going full speed ahead. I told him that I had had an uneventful but profitable afternoon, going through the correspondence which had accumulated on his desk. There had been several telephone calls, among them one from Colonel Walter Kluss. Bancel said he would answer that one in person, as he wanted to introduce me to the colonel, who was chief of the Restitution Control Branch. Restitution involved settling the claims of the occupied countries for everything the Germans had taken from them. These claims covered every conceivable kind of property—factory equipment, vehicles, barges, machinery, racehorses, livestock, household furniture, etc.

The colonel’s office was at the end of the corridor. On our way down the hall, Bancel said that the Army could do with a few more officers like Colonel Kluss. This observation didn’t give me a very clear picture of the colonel, but when I met him I knew what Bancel meant. There was an unassuming friendliness and simplicity about him that I didn’t usually associate with full colonels. His interest in the activities of the MFA&A Section was genuine and personal. He was particularly fond of Bancel and Edith and, during our visit with him that afternoon, spoke admiringly of the work which they and Charlie Kuhn had done. While other sections of the Restitution Control Branch were still generalizing about restitution, the MFA&A Section had tackled the problem realistically. It wasn’t a question of mapping out a program which might work. The program _did_ work. The wisdom and foresight of Bancel’s planning appealed to the practical side of Colonel Kluss’ nature and, throughout the months of our association with him, he was never too busy to help us when we went to him with our troubles.

Bancel and I took the seven o’clock bus over to Frankfurt that evening. We had dinner at the Officers’ Mess in the Casino behind USFET Headquarters. We were joined there by Lieutenant William Lovegrove, the officer whom Bancel had selected as our representative at Paris in connection with the restitution of looted art works to the French. With the arrival of the French representative in Munich, regular shipments would soon be departing for France. Their destination in Paris was to be the Musée du Jeu de Paume, which was now the headquarters of the _Commission de Récupération Artistique_, the commission composed of officials from the French museums charged with the task of sorting and distributing the plundered treasures. Among the officials selected to assist in this work was Captain Rose Valland, the courageous Frenchwoman who, as I mentioned earlier, had spied on the Nazi thieves in that same museum during the Occupation.

We had roughly estimated that it would require from three to six months to send back the main bulk of the French loot from Germany. Mass evacuation, as I have mentioned before, had the advantage of accelerating restitution. It had the disadvantage of rendering difficult our procedure of evaluating and photographing objects before they were returned. It was our intention that Lieutenant Lovegrove should obtain the desired photographs and appraisals. American military establishments in France were being drastically reduced, but we planned to attach him to the USFET Mission to France. We had been told that the Mission would be withdrawn in the early spring. If Lovegrove’s work weren’t finished by that time, Bancel thought it might be possible to attach him to our Paris Embassy when the Mission folded.

When Bancel introduced me to Lovegrove that evening at the Casino, I thought he would be very much at home in an embassy. He was of medium height, bald, had a pink and white complexion and wore a small mustache. He was self-possessed without being blasé. Lovegrove was a sculptor and had lived in Paris for many years before the war. Bancel said that he spoke a more perfect French than most Frenchmen.

Subsequent developments proved the wisdom of Bancel’s choice. Lovegrove was exceedingly popular with his French associates at the Musée du Jeu de Paume. His extraordinary tact and his capacity for hard work were equally remarkable.

I particularly remember our last meeting. It was in February, when I was stopping briefly in Paris on my way home from Germany. By that time hundreds of carloads of stolen art had been received at the Jeu de Paume. There were one or two final matters which I wished to take up with M. Henraux and M. Dreyfus, members of the _Commission de Récupération Artistique_. When Lovegrove and I arrived at the museum, we found these two charming, elderly gentlemen in their office. With them was M. David-Weill. He was examining a fine gold snuffbox. The office was littered with gold and silver objects. They were part of the fabulous collection which Lamont, Steve and I had packed by candlelight in the Castle of Neuschwanstein six months before.

During the second week of October, I left for Amsterdam. It was a three-hundred-mile drive from Frankfurt. Cassidy, the driver of the jeep, was a New Jersey farm boy who, unlike most drivers, preferred long trips to short local runs. The foothills of the Taunus Mountains were bright with fall coloring along the back road to Limburg. From there we turned west to the Rhine. Then, skirting the east bank of the river, we crossed over into the British Zone at Cologne. From Cologne—where we lunched at a British mess—our road led through Duisburg, Wesel and the skeleton of Emerich.

We crossed the Dutch frontier at five and continued through battered Arnhem to Utrecht. Utrecht was full of exuberant Canadians. I stopped at the headquarters of the local Town Major to inquire about a mess for transient officers. A friendly lieutenant, a blonde Dutch girl on his arm, was on his way to supper and suggested that I join them. He said that Cassidy could eat at a Red Cross Club.

The dining room in the officers’ hotel was noisy and crowded. Most of the officers, the lieutenant explained, were going home in a few days. It was good to be in a city which, superficially at least, showed no scars of battle.

We reached Amsterdam about nine-thirty. At night the canals were confusing. Cassidy and I looked in vain for the Town Major. Finally we found a Canadian “leave hotel.” The enlisted man on duty at the desk dispensed with the formality of the billet permit I should have obtained from the Town Major, and assigned us rooms on the same floor. Cassidy decided that the Canadians were a democratic outfit.