The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel
At 0800, an hour before the first convoy left, Stout started on the uncrated paintings. He planned to move them to a building above ground for temporary storage, but even with twenty-five men, the work proved impossible. By noon, the crew had reached fifty, and Stout had decided to crate the paintings underground. Unfortunately, the large crates were awkward to handle, especially in the confusion of the mineshafts. Jeeps had been brought down to help transport the gold, blocking some passages. Their exhaust fouled the air, and the occasional backfire of an engine echoed ominously in the rocky corridors. The gold was being sprayed with water to remove the corrosive salt of the mine, and the main shaft to the elevator was ankle-deep with the runoff. Soldiers were scurrying in all directions, carrying stacks of money, bags of gold, and ancient art, and it was all Stout could do to keep his men from wandering off in the confusion and not returning to work.
At 0005, five minutes past midnight on April 16, Stout reported “all paintings on ground level, in 3 places. All print boxes on ground level in 2 places. Cased works below ground somewhat rearranged and piled in part ready to load at elevator shaft.” 18 The loading at Ransbach started at 0830; the loading at Merkers a half hour later with seventy-five men and five officers. At 1300, prisoners of war were brought in to assist the operation. By 2100 all the paintings were loaded. Stout went to the Dietlas mine, reached by an underground passage from the main shaft at Merkers, and found photographic equipment, modern paintings, and racks of archives. One set from Weimar was marked 933–1931, a thousand years of municipal history. “Inspection finished 2300,” he wrote. “Returned Merkers, ate supper, reported.” 19
The art convoy—thirty-two ten-ton trucks with a motorized infantry escort and air cover—left for Frankfurt at 0830. It arrived at 1400. Stout noted only “complicated unloading. L. Kirstein a great help. All handled by 105 PWs [prisoners of war] in poor health. Storage in temporary arrangement 8 rooms basement level, one large room underground.” Stout’s inventory listed 393 paintings (uncrated), 2,091 print boxes, 1,214 cases, and 140 textiles, representing most of the Prussian state art collection. “Job finished and area secured 2330.” 20
“The last time I saw them,” Lincoln Kirstein wrote in his account of the operation, “Lieutenant Stout was gravely whirling a swing aerometer in all corners of their new home, determining the humidity.” 21 He had been up for almost four straight days, but as always with George Stout the job got done—and done right.
“I felt badly that I could not get to write to you during those five days,” Stout wrote Margie on April 19 with his usual understatement. “It was really busy… a queer job and outlandish—in and around some salt mines from 1200 to 2500 feet below ground. You’ve read about some of it in the papers. A mistake that it ever got there, and could have been a very serious mistake. The publicity was naturally clamped down on and I can’t tell you more now.
“It was really warm here today, and I walked for an hour and a half. The sun is fine and, after the rat race, I begin to remember that I am myself and not merely a set of functions. At times it is good to be only a piece of machinery, for then you do not dream of home or wish for delights that you cannot have. But I’m not morbid. The job is interesting. And it has got to be done. And I am very well.” 22 He ended by telling her of his prize acquisition from Merkers: two fur-lined coats from the Russian front he could use as bedrolls. Those coats and a paratrooper’s knife were his only souvenirs.
Robert Posey, who had worked with Stout on and off at Merkers, was even more matter-of-fact about the operation. “At the gold mine they filled my helmet with twenty dollar American gold pieces and said I could have it,” he wrote Alice on April 20, a few days after emerging from the mine. “I couldn’t lift it off the ground—it contained $35,000—so we poured it back in the sacks and left it. I seem to have absolutely no greed for money for I felt no thrill at seeing so much of the stuff. Your poem means more to me.” 23
It had been a remarkable few weeks, but no Monuments Men were celebrating. If the Western Allied forces could stumble on Merkers, they could easily stumble on something just as extraordinary and unexpected, as Monuments Man Walker Hancock would discover. And still out there, somewhere in Nazi hands, were known to be two great treasures troves of looted European art: the cream of the French artistic patrimony, according to Rose Valland stored in the castle at Neuschwanstein; and Hitler’s treasure chamber deep at Altaussee, in the Austrian Alps, which contained many of the greatest works of art in the world.
SECTION IV
The Void
CHAPTER 37
Salt
Altaussee, Austria
1100–1945
The Alps, the tallest and most rugged mountain range in Europe, rise about a mile above sea level along the German-Austrian border. They form a land of steep rocky peaks, full of snowcapped mountains and picturesque chalets. The road from Salzburg, the most important entry point from the north, winds like hairpins up the mountains and down into deep green forested valleys, each one seemingly more remote than the next. For miles, the forests are so thick there is nothing to see but trees. Then, suddenly, an alpine lake will appear, and across it a gingerbread town of steep roofs and carved decorations wedged against a mountain slope. About forty-four miles from Salzburg lies the Pötschen Pass. The road over it is so steep, twisting, and precarious that it is almost unfit for driving, but the pass eventually levels out into a high alpine valley, at the end of which is the tiny village of Bad Aussee and finally, a few miles beyond, tucked against the banks of another spectacular alpine lake, the even smaller village of Altaussee.
From there, the road begins a climb so steep that the Pötschen Pass seems a mild slope by comparison. Along the road runs a clear, crashing alpine stream, and beyond are the immense and breathtaking mountains. They are limestone deposits, formed in the depths of an ancient sea, and even on the sunniest day they are pale gray beneath their caps of snow. A bleak stone building, perched precariously above a thousand-foot precipice, marks the beginning of the end. Beyond is only a low irregular building and a wall of rock, the steep side of the Sandling Mountain. Bored into the mountain is a small tunnel, the main entrance to an ancient salt mine. Local legend holds that salt had been mined here for three thousand years—before the founding of Rome, at the height of the ancient Egyptian empire. Local written records, however, only date back to the 1100s.
In those days, at the turn of the first millennium, salt was one of the foundations of civilization. Without it, food couldn’t be preserved or transported, so whole societies survived because of salt. Roman legionnaires were sometimes paid in salt (the basis of the English word “salary”), and merchants trod the salt roads in large caravans, linking the Western world of Europe with the Eastern world of Asia and Arabia. In Tibet, Marco Polo noticed that salt was pressed into wafers, imprinted with the image of the Grand Khan, and used as money. Timbuktu, the great lost civilization of Africa, valued salt as highly as gold. The early Germans, whose Visigoth ancestors sacked Rome and threw civilization into darkness, were economically dependent on their salt mines, and especially the taxes from their salt trading routes. The city of Munich, an early base of power for the Nazi Party, was founded in 1158 so the ruler of Bavaria could more easily collect a tax on the salt being transported from the city of Salzburg (German for “Salt Castle”).
And throughout the centuries, as cities and empires rose and fell, the Steinberg mine in the Sandling Mountain of Austria, just above the village and lake known as Altaussee, continued to produce salt. The salt was not mined with picks and shovels, but dissolved by the flow of water through special pipes and sluices. The water came from the mountain above, especially during the spring snowmelt, and descended by gravitational force through the mine. There it was inundated with rock salt, then sent down the mountain to Bad Ischl, more than seventeen miles away, where the brine was evaporated to form pure crystal salt. It was left to 125 miners to maintain the pipes and sluices, shore up the catacombs
Since the 1300s, this job had been performed by members of a small group of families, all living in the hills near the mine. Over the centuries humans grew larger, but the miners stayed the same size, until they eventually seemed dwarfed by the demands of the mine and their time underground (diet and inbreeding were more likely causes). Even in the early twentieth century, this small isolated community spoke a dialect last popular in the Middle Ages. They explored their tunnels with acetylene torches, and wore the white linen suits and peaked caps of medieval miners.
But in the winter of 1943–1944, the salt mine at Altaussee was assaulted by the modern world. First came the tracked vehicles necessary for maneuvering over the roads in the winter, when the five meters of snow were almost level with the treetops. They were followed by supply jeeps, and eventually a seemingly endless line of trucks going back and forth through the steep mountain passes. Nazi officers descended on the mine as guards. Workers arrived, expanding catacombs and building wooden floors, walls, and ceilings in dozens of salt chambers. Giant wooden racks were assembled in workrooms deep within the mountain and hammered into position, in some places three stories high. Experts and clerks moved in; a shop was built deep inside the mine where technicians could work and even live for days at a time. And it was all done for art.
Viennese museums had been the first to store their art treasures at Altaussee, but the mine was soon requisitioned by Hitler for his personal use. Worried by increasing Allied air raids, the Führer ordered all the treasures destined for his great museum at Linz, scattered until that time in several locations, sent deep into seclusion. It wasn’t just the remoteness, or the relative convenience to Linz, which was only about a hundred miles away, that made Altaussee ideal. Dug straight into the side of a massive mountain, the horizontal mine was impregnable to aerial bombardment—even if the bombers could locate it in the vast Sandling mountain range. The salt in the walls absorbed excess moisture, leaving the humidity constant at 65 percent. The temperature varied only between 40 (in the summer, when the mine was coolest) and 47 degrees Fahrenheit (in the winter). The environment helped to preserve the paintings and prints, and metal objects such as armor could easily be protected against its corrosive effect by a thin layer of grease or gelatin. No one, not even Hitler, could have devised a more ideal natural hideaway for tons of stolen loot.
And still, the miners mined as they had for a thousand years, diverting water into empty corridors, washing their rock salt down the mountain to Bad Ischl. Even as artwork continued to arrive through 1944 and into 1945, the miners worked. Often they were called upon to help unload shipments, many stamped “A.H., Linz.” From May 1944 to April 1945, more than 1,687 paintings arrived from the Führerbau, Hitler’s office in Munich. In the fall of 1944, the Ghent Altarpiece was transferred from Neuschwanstein. Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna arrived soon after, having been transported out of Belgium by boat, in October 1944.
On April 10, 1945, and again three days later on April 13, eight more crates were moved into the mine. They were the property not of the Nazi leaders in Berlin but of August Eigruber, the local Nazi gauleiter (governor). The crates were marked “Vorsicht—Marmor—nicht stürtzen.” Attention—Marble—Do Not Drop. 1 But they didn’t contain statues, as the miners who moved them deep into the mine assumed. Gauleiter Eigruber, a fanatical Austrian Nazi, was enthusiastic in his support of Adolf Hitler’s Nero Decree. The crates contained not artwork, but 500-kilogram bombs (approximately 1,100 pounds), each one large enough to comfortably seat six men. Eigruber was determined to destroy the mine… and its priceless contents.
Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower looked at the map of Germany with trepidation. The crossing of the Rhine by Western Allied forces, combined with the Red Army advance to the Oder River, had sealed Germany’s fate. Churchill, among others, was urging the Western Allies to consider postwar objectives, which in the short term meant above all else beating the Soviets to Berlin. Eisenhower had at first agreed, but circumstances on the ground were leading him to reevaluate the wisdom of a march on Berlin. At a March 27 news conference, Eisenhower was asked if he thought such a march could even be accomplished. The Western Allies were still two hundred miles from the German capital; the Soviets were just over thirty miles away. “Well,” Eisenhower admitted, “I think mileage alone ought to make [the Soviets] do it.” 2
But it wasn’t the Red Army he was worried about. The Germans, while perhaps doomed, were far from defeated. The Wehrmacht was still fighting on all fronts, with a strong fortress at their back: the Alps.
For months, many Western Allied war planners had assumed the German-Austrian borderland—the area from Salzburg in the north, Linz in the east, and the Brenner Pass near the Italian border in the west—would be the last stronghold of Nazism. The region, Hitler’s home territority, was known to contain stockpiles of weapons and food, and it was believed to be rife with fortified, entrenched defensive positions. As one SHAEF report had summarized the situation, “The area is, by virtue of its terrain, almost impregnable.” 3
Eisenhower’s fear, and that of his top advisors like General Bradley, was that Hitler would slip out of Berlin and take refuge in the mountains. Intelligence agents confirmed that for weeks crack SS divisions had been moving south from Berlin, west from the Russian front, and north from the Italian theater. They seemed to be converging on Berchtesgaden, the small mountain town where Hitler and his top aides had summer homes and often conducted government business. With Hitler at the helm—or even without him—Eisenhower feared even a modest number of well-trained, die-hard troops holed up in the nearby mountains could hold off Allied forces for years.
Eisenhower despised the Germans. He blamed them for the war, and for its often inhuman destructiveness. And he was still smoldering about the Ohrdruf work camp, which he visited with some of his generals the same day as Merkers. “The things I saw beggar description,” he wrote to his boss, General Marshall. “While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room where they [had] piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’ ” 4 He wrote more simply to his wife, Mamie, “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could exist in this world! It was horrible.” 5 Eisenhower had no intention of allowing the Nazis any refuge or scrap of hope.
On April 12, 1945, the same day he toured Merkers and Ohrdruf, the Supreme Allied Commander told General Patton that U.S. Third Army would be turning south toward Nuremberg and Munich. Their primary job now was to secure southern Germany and rout the remaining Nazis from the Alps.
Patton vehemently disagreed. “We had better take Berlin and quick,” he argued, “and move on to the Oder”—Germany’s eastern border. 6 Eager for the Americans to win the war’s great prize, Patton claimed U.S. Third Army could reach Berlin in forty-eight hours.
Eisenhower countered that it was true the Western Allies could take Berlin, but he doubted they could get there first. And if they did, who would want it? General Bradley estimated the effort to capture the city would result in 100,000 casualties—too steep a price for a “prestige objective.” 7
So in April 1945, U.S. Third and Seventh armies found themselves heading not east toward Berlin, but south toward Austria and the Nazis’ last refuge, an area known in military parlance as the “Alpine Redoubt.” Only the Monuments Men—and in particular Robert Posey, Lincoln Kirstein, and Jam
CHAPTER 38
Horror
Central and Southern Germany
Second Week of April 1945
Walker Hancock felt, once again, as if he had entered another world. U.S. First Army was working its way east across central Germany through a sparsely populated area of deeply wooded forests. The German Wehrmacht had melted away, except for the occasional mortar attack or small firefight, and many of the villages seemed untouched. Actually, some were littered with military debris and even broken buildings and houses, but compared to what Hancock had seen near the German border, this world seemed whole. “We have outrun the region of total destruction,” he wrote Saima, “so that I missed my guess about never seeing an unruined city in Germany.” 1
He lamented, however, that he had become emotionally and physically detached. “The army is moving so rapidly that our stands now are like the stands of an itinerate show company,” he wrote in another letter to his wife. “It is odd being present in a place like this and not being allowed to enter into the life of it in the least degree. Like being in a vaccum jar, looking at the outside world.” 2