The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel
The Friedrichshain Flaktower, which contained 434 large-scale and extremely important paintings, hundreds of sculptures, porcelain objects, and antiquities (treasures Rave had been unable to move to Merkers), met a different fate. Between May 3 and May 5 Soviet troops inspected the tower and noticed it had been broken into. There were 800,000 freed Eastern European slave laborers wandering throughout the city, and many more desperate Germans trying their best to survive in the void. Looting was rampant. The thieves at the flaktower had been drawn by the food stockpiled on the first floor; they hadn’t touched the valuable paintings stored nearby. But the treasures were by no means safe, for on the night of May 5 a fire broke out in the tower. The remaining foodstocks and artworks stored on the first floor were destroyed.
Was the fire set by common thieves? Was it the result of the burning torches so many carried since the city had no electricity? Or were Nazi fanatics and SS officials so desperate to keep the treasures of the German state out of Soviet hands that they extended the Nero Decree to these works of art?
The answer hardly mattered, at least not to those particular Soviet troops. They refused to post guards even though valuable artwork remained undamaged on the second and third floors. While the Trophy Brigades worked at the Zoo Flaktower, the Friedrichshain Flaktower was left to the usual assortment of desperate scavengers. It wasn’t long before a second fire broke out, more extensive than the first. The contents—sculpture, porcelain, books, and the 434 paintings, including one by Botticelli, one by van Dyck, three by Caravaggio, ten by Rubens, and five by Hermann Göring’s favorite artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder—were assumed destroyed, the latest victims of the void.
In Unterstein, the frantic and hungry townspeople, whipped up by rumors that the railcars contained schnapps, descended on Hermann Göring’s personal train. Some left with bread and wine—the Reichsmarschall had added extra boxcars of supplies to his train to support himself in exile—while, as Allied investigator and Monuments Man Bernard Taper later discovered, “those who came later had to be satisfied with things like a school of Rogier van der Weyden painting, a thirteenth century Limoges reliquary, four late Gothic wood statues, and other such baubles—whatever they could grab. It was a real mob scene. Three women laid hands on the same Aubusson carpet, and a heated struggle ensued until along came a local dignitary, who said to them, ‘Women, be civilized, divide it among you.’ So they did. Two of the women used their portions as bedspreads, but the third cut hers up to make window curtains.” 2
Each evening, Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein, the brilliantly matched Monuments Men for Third Army, looked at the big map tacked to the wall of their forward operating base. The map was covered in acetate, and each day’s advance was marked in red crayon. Every night, the lines were adjusted as rumors were sifted for fact. The Soviets had been met at Torgau in late April. Italy had surrendered. A warrant officer claimed he had gone to Bohemia and back with no resistance. Posey and Kirstein noticed only one constant: The area of German control always got smaller, but the land still outside the grasp of the Western Allies always managed to contain the salt mine at Altaussee.
Nor was that their only disappointment. As the Allied armies closed in on the Austrian Alps, another truth was becoming increasingly apparent: Altaussee was not going to fall into U.S. Third Army territory, as Posey and Kirstein had always hoped and believed, but into that of U.S. Seventh Army. James Rorimer was going to be the Monuments Man tasked with the mine; Posey and Kirstein were going to be left with battered towns and minor castles.
Robert Posey was bothered by the injustice, not so much for himself—like all the Monuments Men, he had always shared information as soon as he received it—but for Third Army. It seemed absurd to him that another army group would receive the honors of a find like Altaussee when, in the last few months, Third Army had destroyed an entire German army east of the Moselle River, jumped the Rhine, and broken the enemy’s spirit with its deep thrusts into the German heartland. Wasn’t it Third Army that had led the charge across France? That had broken the unbreakable citadel at Metz? That had scoured the industrial regions of south-central Germany? And wasn’t it he and Lincoln Kirstein, Third Army men, who had discovered not just the existence but the location of Hitler’s treasure room?
“I am sorry that it was not our army who was supposed to meet the Russians if you were looking forward to it with so much anxiety,” he wrote Alice, with typical Third Army pride. “I can assure you that this is the glamour army of all the Allied ones, and the part we are called upon to play is always the difficult one and so the important one. This outfit feels itself to be king pin pretty much as an ever winning football team does. The other armies are looked upon as all right but not brilliant and anyone back of the combat zone is simply too low to even be thought of. If they are as far back as England they are simply civilians in a sort of uniform. People who don’t feel that way gradually go out into some other kind of organization. Generally it is their own choice for to be in a club that vociferously declares itself to be the outstanding thing of all time would be too much for soldiers of less strong convictions.” 3
Kirstein, far from motivated by perceived slights or the camaraderie of Third Army, found this new world depressing. “If you work too long in the skeletons of fine buildings,” he wrote, “estimating the love and care of their creation, the irrelevance of their destruction, the energy needed for their approximate restoration—wondering even about the possibility of their restoration—your confusion settles into gloom. After seeing the spectacular corpses of Mainz and Frankfurt, Würzburg, Nuremberg and Munich, it was always a relief to come upon some small, untouched market town.” 4
A few days deeper into the southern German countryside, he was beyond even the comfort of small untouched towns. The German people—and especially the German aristocracy—were grinding him down as much as the destruction. On May 6, he wrote: 5
Recently mad activity has been given way to by mad activity. On our trail for loot we have uncovered the local aristocracy in a series of enormous castles spread all over this picturesque province filled with cases of the contents of all the museums, plus cases of personal belongings, books, and dealers who were invited into the schloss to save their lives from the advance of the russian-jewish-negro-american army. One lovely old countess received us in bed. She was ill, oh so ill and her house was a hospital for German (lightly) wounded. She only had one poor little room in this elegant old mansion, and almost broke her neck flying into bed no doubt, as we swept into the court. She was an ancient bitch, Italian, who married a great german name, and is harboring a whole slue of art dealers, young “sick” counts and barons… and my, have they had a terrible time. They almost didn’t get out of Paris in time, and them with their weak lungs…. She so hoped that her lovely boys (pictures brought out), and they were wildly pretty, her two adorable SS officers were privileged to surrender to the Americans all of whom are perfectly charming (where have I been all my life), rather than to the un-democratic and dirty awful Russian-jewish-polacks, who we MUST fight quickly, and besides she had only one little insignificant request to make. It seems some displaced Russian jewish polack american negroes had taken to shooting the deer in the animal-park, and it was not in season, and it was giving the chief Forester NIGHTMARES…. She clacked her false teeth. Her sister the maiden ladied princess about 58, was at least honest in her nastiness. She said that she would shake hands if it was allowed. Oh I laughed, you know in the war I don’t care who I shake hands with. Anyway the old countess was useful, and we uncovered what we wanted to uncover, and she gave us notes on her coronetted note paper to all her cousins in all the other castles each of whom is harboring a nest of itching vipers…. The [art] dealers were another little knot of grimness…. They had all gotten rich at the point of a pistol, and they never had bought stolen goods from expropriated jewish collections, unless the collections had been purified by passing through two or 3 intermediaries who took their cut. Surely t
It was the endlessness of the operation, the limitlessness of the robbery and the snobbery and the excuses. That’s what depressed him, even as he and Posey pushed toward the Alpine region that was home to most of the great Nazi storehouses of stolen art. As he summarized the situation in a letter home, “As you can tell my temper improves and my hair falls out, as each nameless and numberless day passes one-footedly by. I have hit the don’t care low of all time, as everything grows glamorouser and glamorouser…. I am not interested in lousy old Germany’s lousy old future.” 6
CHAPTER 48
The Translator
Munich, Germany
May 7, 1945
While the Monuments Men in the field raced toward their destinations, Private Harry Ettlinger sat glumly in an enormous Kaserne, or German military barracks, on the outskirts of Munich. It was May 7, nearly four months since he’d been pulled off the troop truck in Belgium, and he hadn’t done a thing but eat and sleep. Harry’s thoughts drifted to an afternoon several weeks earlier at his last bivouac, a tent camp outside Worms, Germany, when he had climbed a nearby hill. The weather was finally warm, and the trees in bloom. Shadows fell over him, and Harry looked up expecting planes. It was only a flock of birds. Down on the road, he noticed a solitary figure. For twenty minutes, he watched the man climb. When he was a few steps away, Harry realized he had an artificial leg. Harry offered a hand, but the man shrugged him off. He was the priest of the chapel over the crest of the hill. He had lost his leg more than two years before on the Russian front. They said little, but Harry left feeling he had, for the first time in months, had a real conversation with another human being. So far, it had been his only contact with the enemy.
“I hear you speak German.” It was so unexpected, Harry looked up to see if the soldier was talking to him.
“Yes sir,” Private Harry Ettlinger said, almost saluting before noticing the soldier was a private.
“I’ve been translating for the last two days,” the man said. “It’s interesting work, but it’s not for me. I want to be in military intelligence. A German girl was raped by four American soldiers. I want to investigate it. Are you interested?”
“In the rape?”
“No, in the translation job.”
“Yes sir,” Harry said again, without even stopping to ask about the work.
The office the private directed him to was across the parade ground of the Kaserne, in what turned out to be the U.S. Seventh Army headquarters building. It was a small room on the second floor, full of desks and papers. Two men were working at the desks, while another stood in the middle giving orders.
“Are you the new translator?” the man snapped.
“Yes sir. Private Harry Ettlinger, sir.”
“You sound German, Ettlinger.”
“American, sir. But born a German Jew. From Karlsruhe.”
“Are you assigned to a unit, Ettlinger?”
“Not that I know of, sir.”
The man handed him a stack of papers. “Read these documents and tell us what’s in them. Just the gist, and anything specific: names, locations, works of art.”
“Works of art?”
Before Harry could even get the question out, the man had turned and left. Now that’s a man who gets things done, Harry thought. He knew if he did a good job on the translations that man would get him assigned to this division, whatever division it was, and because of that man he couldn’t imagine a better job. Only later did Harry Ettlinger discover that, before switching units, he had been assigned to the translation corps for the Nuremberg trials. That, apparently, was what he had been waiting for the past four months.
“What a wheeler-dealer,” Harry said, turning to one of the men in the office.
“You don’t know the half of it,” the man replied. “He’s trying to secure the two most sought-after buildings in Munich, Hitler’s office and the former Nazi Party headquarters. Patton wants them for his regional headquarters, but knowing our lieutenant they’ll soon be MFAA Collecting Points. We’ll have the building all to ourselves. Ourselves and the hundreds of thousands of things you’re going to read about in those documents, that is.”
Harry looked at the paper. “What am I going to read about?”
The man laughed. “Welcome to Monuments work. I’m Lieutenant Charles Parkhurst, from Princeton.”
“Harry Ettlinger, from Newark.” He waited, expecting more. “And who was that?” he asked finally.
“That was Lieutenant James Rorimer. Your new boss.”
New boss. Harry liked the sound of that. “Where’s he gone?”
“Salzburg. He’s going to mount an armed expedition to the salt mines at Altaussee.”
CHAPTER 49
The Sound of Music
Bernterode, Germany
May 7, 1945
At Bernterode, George Stout was taking his time. More than twenty people had been assigned to remove the treasures from the mine—including the ordnance unit that had found the shrine, a small group of engineers, and fourteen former French slave laborers who had worked there for the last few years—and every one of them wanted to be done as quickly as possible. The mine was dark and musty, dripping with water, and plagued by frequent power outages that lasted for hours. Even Walker Hancock, who by now had vast experience with the handling of art in war zones, felt anxious to finish. After all, the whole operation was being conducted on top of 400,000 tons of explosives.
George Stout would have none of it. What mattered in the outside world, where rumors swirled about the end of the war, didn’t have any bearing on what happened in the Thuringian forest eighteen hundred feet underground. Before anything was moved, a thorough inspection was needed. Fortunately, the ordnance unit had already checked most of the fifteen miles of tunnels. They didn’t find any more treasure, but they did locate several stores of German military supplies. Stout had the gas-proof boots cut into rubber padding to keep objects from rubbing against one another; gas-proof mantles were perfect for wrapping the paintings, especially important in the dripping mine. With the packing materials taken care of, the contents of the shrine were inventoried and organized for removal. Walker Hancock looked up one afternoon—he assumed it was afternoon anyway, since he had existed for two days in perpetual blackness—and noticed Stout frowning at him. Hancock realized he had been thinking of home, of Saima and the house they would buy together and one day, maybe, even the children they would have, and had been coiling a rope with the exaggerated swinging motion of the Massachusetts fishermen he had so often observed back home. Stout, on the other hand, was deliberately coiling the rope over his hand and elbow in precise, measured loops.
As soon as Stout turned away, the man next to Hancock whispered, “How long does he think we’re going to keep laying these ropes out in lengths of just twenty-three and one-half inches, all pointing one degree east of north?” 1
The man was Steve Kovalyak, an infantry combat lieutenant who had been assigned to help after Walker Hancock delivered the coronation paraphernalia to the brass in Frankfurt. A jeepload of gold covered in jewels meant little to Hancock, who had seen so much already, but it was eye-popping for the boys back at headquarters. Hancock had simply borrowed Stout’s jeep to drive the regalia to headquarters at Weimar, but General Hodges wasn’t taking any chances. He ordered an escort of two motorcycles, three jeeps, two armored cars, a weapons carrier, and fifteen soldiers for Hancock and the treasures, even though the area between Weimar and Frankfurt had been cleared of enemy forces
“Don’t worry,” Hancock told the young lieutenant, “George Stout knows what he’s doing.” He told Kovalyak and a few nearby ordnance officers about Büsbach, where Stout had taken the time to record everything about a painting even though shells were falling outside. “I’ve worked with that man a long time,” he said, “and I can tell you this: We’re all amateurs compared to George Stout.”
A few hours later, the power went out, plunging the mine into darkness. Again. Hancock turned on his flashlight. His beam flashed over books, gold, paintings, coffins, and, so suddenly it made him jump, George Stout’s face.
“I’ll send Kovalyak,” Hancock said. It was Stout’s standard operating procedure in a blackout to send Lieutenant Kovalyak to cajole the local Bürgermeister into keeping his generators operational, even though Kovalyak was one of the few officers present who didn’t speak a word of German. It was tedious work, more finesse than force, but years in the infantry had taught Kovalyak all the tricks of navigating local power plays, out-of-touch procedures, and bureaucratic red tape. Hancock had the impression he had skirted court-martial many times, sometimes for pleasure, but mostly to get the job done right.