The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel
CHAPTER 43
The Noose
Berlin, Germany, and Southern Germany
April 30, 1945
On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker underneath the Reichschancellery in the city of Berlin. He had suffered a nervous breakdown during a military situation conference on April 22, admitting in a hysterical attack on his commanders that Germany was doomed. His Nazi Party was broken. His new Berlin was being blasted apart by bombs and artillery. His friends and generals had betrayed him, or so he in his paranoia believed. He was capable of terrific fits of temper, when he would become livid at those who had abandoned him, insist victory was achievable, and vow to fight on, but he had also become increasingly brooding and consumed with hatred and a will to destroy: to kill as many Jews as possible; to throw his armies, including old men and young boys, into the enemy lines as cannon fodder; to smash every brick and gut every element of infrastructure in Germany until the country that had betrayed him, that in its cowardice had proven the weaker race, not the master race, was sent back to the Stone Age. Their failure stripped everything from him until, in those final days, in his bunker deep beneath the Reichschancellery in Berlin, with the sound of Soviet artillery shells exploding overhead, one of the few things that remained in his twisted heart—perhaps the one thing that made him human and therefore truly terrifying—was his love of art.
During the preceding months he spent hours alone or with his loyal aides—Gauleiter August Eigruber had been a regular visitor—contemplating his scale model of Linz in the cellar of the New Chancellery: its great arcades and byways, its towering cathedral of art. Sometimes he would gesture energetically, pointing out a brilliant design element or an essential truth. Sometimes he would lean slowly forward in his chair, involuntarily clutching the glove in his left hand tighter and tighter, his eyes popping under the brim of his military cap as he silently stared, perhaps for the last time, at the symbol of everything that ever was or might have been.
Now it was over. During evening supper on April 28, only hours before he would marry his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, Hitler looked at his secretary, Traudl Junge, and said, “Fräulein, you are needed at once; bring your stenographer pad and pencil. I wish to dictate to you my last will and testament.” 1
[Seal]
[ADOLF HITLER]
My Private Will and Testament
As I did not consider that I could take responsibility, during the years of struggle, of contracting a marriage, I have now decided, before the closing of my earthly career, to take as my wife that girl who, after many years of faithful friendship, entered, of her own free will, the practically besieged town in order to share her destiny with me. At her own desire she goes as my wife with me into death. It will compensate us for what we both lost through my work in the service of my people.
What I possess belongs—in so far as it has any value—to the Party. Should this no longer exist, to the State, should the State also be destroyed, no further decision of mine is necessary.
My pictures, in the collections which I have bought in the course of years, have never been collected for private purposes, but only for the extension of a gallery in my home town of Linz a.d. Donau.
It is my most sincere wish that this bequest may be duly executed.
I nominate as my Executor my most faithful Party comrade, Martin Bormann.
He is given full legal authority to make all decisions. He is permitted to take out everything that has a sentimental value or is necessary for the maintenance of a modest simple life, for my brothers and sisters, also above all for the mother of my wife and my faithful coworkers who are well known to him, principally my old Secretaries Frau Winter etc. who have for many years aided me by their work.
I myself and my wife—in order to escape the disgrace of deposition or capitulation—choose death. It is our wish to be burnt immediately on the spot where I have carried out the greatest part of my daily work in the course of a twelve years’ service to my people.
Given in Berlin, 29th April 1945, 4:00 o’clock.
(Sd.) A. Hitler
His family and loyal associates were practical considerations. The party, he understood, was doomed. His newly married wife, Eva Braun, was merely “that girl,” even though she was only hours away from killing herself with poison by his side. Everything he had worked for was gone, destroyed, but even at the end one of the worst madmen of the twentieth century saw one last chance at a legacy: the completion of a museum in Linz, his museum in Linz, full of the plundered treasures of Europe.
The following day, within hours of Hitler’s death, three motorcycle couriers left the Führerbunker, each carrying an original of Adolf Hitler’s last will and testament. 2 They were all headed in different directions, but each with one goal: to ensure that the dying wish of the leader of the Nazi Party would survive the complete destruction he himself had visited upon his people, his country, and the world.
And yet even at that moment, Hitler’s own followers—some out of confusion and misguided loyalty, some out of self-interest, some out of fear, and some out of a fundamental belief that the man who had asked them to annihilate millions of people and destroy entire cities would never ask them to save anything, especially something as decadent and meaningless as art—were working to thwart his wishes and destroy the stolen art collection he had held so dear.
And nowhere was this more true than in the Austrian Alps, where Gauleiter August Eigruber was as always “bullheaded” in his insistence on complete destruction of the salt mine at Altaussee. Even worse, he had discovered Pöchmüller’s attempt to thwart his plans. His adjutant, District Inspector Glinz, had overheard Högler, the mine foreman who had received Pöchmüller’s order, arranging for trucks to remove the gauleiter’s bombs. “The crates are staying were they are,” Glinz told Högler, drawing his gun. “I am completely in the picture and can see what’s happening here. If you dare touch those crates, I will kill you.” 3
Högler begged Glinz to talk to Pöchmüller, who was down the mountain at another salt mine in Bad Ischl. In a tense telephone conversation with Glinz, Pöchmüller insisted the Führer’s April 22 order—that at all costs they must keep the artwork from the enemy but by no means destroy it—was perfectly clear. The artwork was not to be harmed.
“The gauleiter considers the April 22 order outdated,” Glinz responded, “and therefore obsolete. He considers all orders since not clean since they did not come from the Führer himself.” 4
With Hitler dead, there seemed no way to dislodge the gauleiter from his course of action, but Helmut von Hummel was prevailed upon by the mine managers one last time. On May 1, von Hummel sent a letter to Karl Sieber, the art restorer at Altaussee, stating that “last week” the Führer reconfirmed that “the artwork in the Oberdonau area are not to be permitted to fall into the enemy’s hands, but shall by no means be finally destroyed.” 5
The telegram didn’t work. When Pöchmüller arrived back at the mine, he found that the gauleiter had posted six more heavily armed guards at the entrance. The bombs were still inside; all that was needed now were the detonators—and they were already in transit to the mine.
To Robert Posey, South Germany was the worst possible place: a world without rules. Society had collapsed, and with it the battlefield. The shattered towns and villages lay one after another, destroyed either by Western Allied forces, dead-end Nazi hardcases, or local gauleiters still bent on executing Hitler’s Nero Decree. Boats were sunk in the rivers; factories were on fire; bridges were severed. Civilians were wandering everywhere, searching for food and shelter. It was common to see a hundred or more ragged refugees in a group, walking nowhere in particular. They were coming from the local towns but also from the east, fleeing the vengeance of the Soviet advance.
Was he crossing the front lines? It was impossible to say. In many places, German soldiers were driving around in convoys, desperately hoping to surrender to Americans. Along the roads, Posey could see
Posey thought often of Buchenwald, even as the world around him deteriorated. In an abandoned office there, he had found a picture of a German officer. The man was standing at attention with an enormous smile on his face, holding up for the camera his prized possession: the noose he used to garrote prisoners to death. Posey kept the picture in his kit, and often looked at it before turning in for the night. The sight of that officer’s smile would alternately make him angrier than hell, then sad beyond tears. In so many German faces Posey now saw that terrible officer, even sometimes in the children that for so long had reminded him of his son. He felt numb to the destruction, but terribly troubled. One day, caught far from camp without rations, he and Kirstein met a company of infantrymen who had just decided to kill and cook a rabbit they had spotted in a hutch behind a country home. As they entered the yard, a woman opened the door and called out to them.
“Please,” she said in broken English, “that is my son’s rabbit.”
The soldiers were unmoved.
“Please,” she said again. “My husband was an SS officer. I know, terrible, but no doubt he is dead. He gave my son that rabbit before he left for war. My son is eight, that rabbit is the only thing he has left to remember his father.”
Robert Posey looked at the woman for a long time. Then he reached into his kit. He pulled out a piece of paper, but it wasn’t the photograph from Buchenwald. It was one of the “Off Limits” signs he had so often posted on protected monuments. He wrote at the bottom, “By Order of Captain Robert Posey, U.S. Third Army,” then hung the sign on the cage.
“No one will bother your boy’s rabbit,” he said, before marching off with the infantrymen. 6
“The story [in your last letter] of the two year old colored boy,” he wrote Alice a few days later, “somehow reminded me of the greatest horror I have seen. It was at the Nazi concentration camp near Weimar where I visited the day after its surrender. I still don’t believe what I saw. It was simply too fantastic. Nothing that I have read about the sadistic cruelty of the Nazis now seems far fetched. It is a fine tribute to Roosevelt that he almost alone stood against them when the rest of the world was defeated. The people of Weimar, only four miles away, claim they didn’t know what was going on, but he knew though four thousand miles away. But I wonder if our society is not a bit off-color when a tiny black boy is abandoned and left alone by his family. Perhaps I am just a softie. When I am billeted in a German home even for one night I go out and search for the chickens and rabbits or pets and give them water and food if possible. Generally the family has pulled out too rapidly to care for such things. I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it.” 7
CHAPTER 44
Discoveries
Thuringia, Germany, and Buxheim, Germany
May 1, 1945
George Stout arrived at Bernterode on May 1, 1945. Just as Walker Hancock had hinted in his phone call, the mine was in a rural area, with nothing to see but forests. Even the tiny village nearby had been evacuated by Nazi officials so that no one would know about the frantic activity at the mine. The only sight of civilization, if that’s what it could be called, was an internment camp for displaced persons, mostly French, Italian, and Russian slave laborers who had worked in the mine. The mineshaft was deep, eighteen hundred feet, and the tunnels spread almost fifteen miles underground. The slave laborers had primarily been used to load and unload ammunition, since Bernterode was one of the largest munitions production sites in central Germany. The American ordnance crew that had explored it estimated the mine contained 400,000 tons of explosives. “It was a flogging or worse if you even carried a match into the mine,” one of the French laborers had told Walker Hancock.
“The civilians were sent out six weeks ago,” Hancock commented to Stout as the two men took the long, slow, dark elevator ride to the bottom of the mine, “and the next day German soldiers started pouring in. They worked in complete secrecy. Two weeks later, the mine was sealed. It was April 2, George, the day we entered Siegen.”
The elevator stopped at the bottom of the shaft, and the men flipped on their flashlights. There were electric lamps in the ceiling, but the light was feeble and the power intermittent. “This way,” Hancock said, indicating the main corridor. They were more than a third of a mile underground, and there was no sound except their footsteps. Branching tunnels disappeared into the darkness, studded with chiseled rock chambers. Whenever Stout shone his flashlight beam into one of the rooms, it illuminated stacks of mortar shells and explosives. A quarter mile down was a newly mortared wall. There was no door—the Nazis hadn’t expected anyone to enter this repository—so an even newer hole had been smashed out of the middle. Across the corridor was an enormous cache of dynamite.
“After you,” Hancock said.
George Stout crawled through the wall opening and into a room even he, who had been at Siegen and Merkers, never imagined. There was a wide central passage, ablaze with light and lined with wooden racks and storage compartments. From the compartments hung 225 flags and banners, all unfurled and with decorative effects on their finials. They were German regimental banners dating from the early Prussian wars to World War I. Near the entrance to the chamber were boxes and paintings, and in the bays Stout could see carefully arranged tapestries and other decorative works. In a few of the bays, Stout noticed, were large caskets. 1 Three were unadorned; one bore a wreath, red ribbons, and a name: Adolf Hitler.
“It’s not him,” Hancock said over Stout’s shoulder. “The ordnance men thought it was, but it’s not.”
Stout walked into the bay that held the decorated casket. Above him the flags hung limply, some of the older ones in nets to hold them together. He saw steel ammunition boxes on the floor nearby and swastikas on the ribbons. Hancock was right; it wasn’t Hitler. A crude label, written in red crayon and held on with tape, read, “Friedrich Wilhelm Ier, der Soldaten König.” Frederick William I, the Soldier King, dead since 1740. The decorations, Stout realized, were Hitler’s tribute to the founder of the modern German state.
He examined the other coffins, each with its crude red crayon label held on with tape. There was Feldmarschall von Hindenburg, the greatest German hero of World War I, and beside him Frau von Hindenburg, his wife. The fourth coffin contained the remains of “Friedrich der Grosse”—Frederick the Great, the son of the Soldier King.
Where did Hitler get these coffins? Stout wondered. Did he rob their tombs?
“It’s a coronation chamber,” Hancock said. “They were going to crown Hitler the emperor of Europe.”
“Or the world,” Stout said, examining the photographs in a small metal box. They contained photographs and portraits of all the military leaders of the Prussian state from the Soldier King to Hitler. In the next three boxes were prizes of the Prussian monarchy: the Reich Sword of Prince Albrecht, forged in 1540; the scepter, orb, and crown used at the coronation of the Soldier King in 1713. The jewels had been removed from the crown, according to a label, “for honorable sale.” 2
Stout examined the rest of the room. The steel ammunition boxes held books and photographs from the library of Frederick the Great. The 271 paintings in the farthest holding bay were from his palaces in Berlin, and Sanssouci in Potsdam.
“This isn’t a coronation room,” Stout said. “It’s a reliquary. They were hiding the most precious artifacts of the German military state. This room wasn’t intended for Hitler; it was intended for the next Reich, so they could build upon his glory.”
Hancock laughed. “And it didn’t even stay hidden until the end of this one.”
Three hundred and fifty miles to the south, James Rorimer finally received the news he had been waiting for: U.S. Seventh Army was closing in on Neuschwanstein. He immediately raced to the transportation depot only to find that, since the command unit would be leaving soon for Augsburg or Munich, there were no vehicles available.
Wily and determined as ever, especially with his objective so close after all these months, he secured a jeep from a friend in the Red Cross and was soon on his way. Since Neuschwanstein was not yet liberated, he took a detour to Buxheim, where Rose Valland had reported the Nazis had been storing the overflow items from Neuschwanstein since as early as 1943. Without hesitation, a German policeman offered directions to the monastery a few miles outside of town, where everyone in the city knew the Nazi artwork was stored. The American soldiers there, however, seemed unaware of the cache. The outer rooms of the monastery had been broken into by thieves, and the Allied troops were busy protecting looted French dry goods from hungry displaced persons. In the back of one of the rooms, completely ignored by the American troops, Rorimer noticed cases containing statuary marked “D-W,” the personal symbol of Pierre David-Weill, one of the world’s great collectors. In the main section of the monastery even the corridors were stacked with looted Renaissance furniture. The rooms, which housed a priest, thirteen nuns, and twenty-two refugee children, were filled with pottery, paintings, and decorative works. The floor of the chapel was almost a foot thick with rugs and tapestries, many stolen directly from the walls and floors of the various Rothschild estates.