The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel

  The Ghent Altarpiece, each panel already carefully loaded into its own crate, came next. The truck was prepared in a similar manner to the dozens that had already carried other priceless cultural artifacts from the mine. First, the bed was lined with waterproof paper, which had been intended as protection for the Wehrmacht against gas attacks. A strip of felt was laid over the paper, then “sausages” placed on the felt. These were essentially eighteen-inch-wide pillows fashioned by George Stout from ecru curtain material found in the mine. In the case of the altarpiece, the crates were then lashed upright on the sausages, with stowing cases on either side for balance and shock absorption. When all twelve panels were standing parallel to each other on the truck, more felt and waterproof paper was layered over the top, and the whole load lashed firmly to the sides.

  The packing of the Bruges Madonna and the Ghent Altarpiece, undertaken with extraordinary care, consumed an entire day. The next morning, with George Stout in the lead and half-tracks following behind, two of Europe’s great masterpieces wound their way 150 miles down the steep Alpine mountains to Munich. Their journey home had begun.

  Less than a month later, on August 6, 1945, George Stout left Europe. He too was on his way home: forty-seven years old, tired, but none the worse for wear. In a little more than thirteen months, he had discovered, analyzed, and packed tens of thousands of pieces of artwork, including eighty truckloads from Altaussee alone. He had organized the MFAA field officers at Normandy, pushed SHAEF to expand and support the monuments effort, mentored the other Monuments Men across France and Germany, interrogated many of the important Nazi art officials, and inspected most of the Nazi repositories south of Berlin and east of the Rhine. It would be no exaggeration to guess he put 50,000 miles on his old captured VW and visited nearly every area of action in U.S. Twelfth Army Group territory. And during his entire tour of duty on the continent, he had taken exactly one and a half days off. 11

  Letter from James Rorimer To his wife, Katherine

  May 17, 1945

  You may indeed complain about not having heard from me these past days. I have never in my life worked at a more exciting pace and with more results than during these past two or three weeks where I have covered our area which has taken me to Salzburg and Füssen [the closest town to Neuschwanstein Castle] twice each, battered Munich, Worms, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Heidelberg, and dozens of smaller places. By now you will guess that we are permitted to mention locations as has not been possible since I left home over a year ago, and more. I am stationed at Augsburg for the moment, but have scarcely had a chance to see the town as I have been very much on the run when I was not actually doing things at Headquarters. I have run down the most exciting Information and documents on the wholesale looting of art in Europe by the Nazis and have been working with the Nazi big-wigs of the past and checking clues and finding art treasures such as I have rarely expected to find. [Monuments Men] Kuhn and Lt. Col. McDonnell were here again to see some of the things I have discovered. I have found some of the key culprits in the racket, and information which is making the headlines of the world press if I am not mistaken. Go to the News Reels and see for yourself. My contact with the world press will have to be through you.

  Göring’s art collector, his private train, his house in Berchtesgaden as well as Hitler’s and the Braunhaus in Munich and the castles at Füssen [Neuschwanstein] and the Monasteries which were used for hiding things have been the scenes of my work. I am way behind in my reporting, but my diary is up to date. What exciting stories I can now write in the book I hope to publish. Now I really can say that I have played my part in the war effort. I had a pleasant interview with Maj-Gen. Taylor of the 101 Airborne who sent for me the other day. I go to see him again on Sunday. Harry Anderson of the Amer. Institute is taking charge of the Göring things under my supervision so to speak. He is a captain. I expect to have another officer to help me in a few days. [Monuments Man] Calvin Hathaway is still here and he is a great help. Skilton is also here and certain enlisted personnel will no doubt help—what a life for a first Lt. I think that I was finally released from Paris after the non-concurrence of 2 generals. I am glad indeed to be here. Train loads of art are being reported all the time. I just cannot collect my thoughts these days.…

  I have not as yet seen news announcements of my activity which has included getting the backbone people, information and works of art of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg. That was my personal ambition when I joined the army, when I went into Civil Affairs, when I told the board at the American School Center at Shrivenham and when I worked at other matters during eight months in Paris. I almost didn’t get to Germany. I cannot explain how I was so lucky as to have our army go to these places which with two important exceptions are the most important…. Now my fervent desires are to finish up my military career and get back to civilian life.

  Do not bother to send me anything…. At the moment nothing is much use to me as I am living out of a barracks bag. Where we go next I do not know, but I have to keep on the move all the time.

  Now I must go back to work. Love and more when things quiet down.

  Jim

  CHAPTER 53

  The Journey Home

  Heilbronn, Germany

  September–November 1945

  The end of active hostilities was not the end of the Monuments Men’s work. Not by far. As the situation at Altaussee demonstrated, finding looted Nazi treasures was just the first step of a very long process. The treasures had to be inspected and catalogued, then packed and shipped out of the mines, castles, monasteries, or simple holes in the ground where they had been stored. Almost every site contained Nazi archives, which also had to be transported so that researchers could determine where the artwork had come from and who was the rightful owner. The archives inevitably led to the discovery of other repositories, as did interviews with the Nazis now being rounded up in the collapsed German-Austrian state. And almost every day, army units stumbled upon unfathomable treasures hidden in basements, traincars, food caches, and oil barrels.

  By June 4, less than a month since the end of hostilities, 175 repositories had been found in U.S. Seventh Army territory alone. The MFAA was adding officers and enlisted men as quickly as possible—a vast majority of the almost 350 men and women who served in the multinational MFAA effort would join after the end of combat—but still only a handful of those mines and castles had been emptied. And every piece that was brought out of a hole had to be taken somewhere. Fortunately, the industrious and insightful James Rorimer had managed to secure the most coveted buildings in Munich: the former Nazi Party headquarters complex. Soon, artwork and other stolen cultural items were pouring into the buildings, now known as the Munich Collecting Point, from all over southern Germany and Austria. By July, the usable space was almost full, so Rorimer secured another building of almost equal size in Wiesbaden. A few weeks later, a building at Marburg University was requisitioned for the collection of archives. Walker Hancock, the optimistic Monuments Man for U.S. First Army, was placed in charge.

  James Rorimer, meanwhile, never stayed in one place long. And soon he was bringing along Harry Ettlinger, the German-Jewish-American private from Karlsruhe who had wandered into his office the day before Germany’s surrender, as his personal translator. Suddenly, Harry’s tour of duty was as breakneck and interesting as his previous four months of service had been plodding and dull.

  In mid-May, Rorimer took him to a Munich jail for a four-hour interrogation of a German national. Rorimer had been working on the man for days: befriending him, giving him cigarettes, feigning sympathy. The Nazi had finally opened up, and now Rorimer needed Harry to take down specific information on his art collection. The man was Heinrich Hoffman, Adolf Hitler’s close friend and personal photographer. How must it have felt for a persecuted German Jew to stand that close to a man who had dined regularly with the Führer, and had been his staunch supporter and confidant for more than twenty years? Hoffman, of course, insisted he was
a bystander. He had taken propaganda photographs of Hitler only because he received royalties every time one was reprinted, even on German stamps. He had bought artwork of dubious origin from “reputable” dealers only so he could make reproduction photographs. He had grown rich off Nazism, but he had never been a… believer, only an economic opportunist. Wasn’t this the American way?

  Soon after, Harry accompanied Rorimer to Berchtesgaden. While Rorimer dealt with the art treasures in the village—the Reichsmarschall wasn’t the only high Nazi official who had hidden his stolen loot near the former Nazi stronghold—Harry went up the mountain to Hitler’s chalet, known as the Berghof. He stood alone in the Führer’s living room and stared through the enormous window (the glass long gone) out of which Adolf Hitler had so often surveyed his empire. How did it feel for a German Jew, whose friends and relatives had died in the Holocaust, to stand among the conquerors in the halls of the defeated dictator? It felt good. The house had been picked over by visiting troops, but Harry managed to scrounge a few epaulettes and some paper bearing the letterhead of a high SS general. He looked out over Germany, now free, and thought those three simple words. “It feels good.”

  Near the end of May, Captain Rorimer took Private Ettlinger to Neuschwanstein. Neuschwanstein! Harry Ettlinger saw it rise before him out of the alpine valley almost exactly as James Rorimer had seen it weeks before, with its towers soaring against an enormous sky. Only Altaussee could rival it both in setting and quality of stolen artwork. But Altaussee didn’t have the history. Like many German children, Ettlinger had grown up with stories of this castle and its vast riches; passing through its gates was like stepping into a fairy tale from his childhood. Here was the Germany of legend, with its famous golden throne room. But it was also the Germany of the present, filled room after room with stolen artwork. At the entrance, Ettlinger had watched Rorimer turn away a British two-star general. The American captain was adamant: no one allowed inside. But here was Harry Ettlinger, a buck private, gazing at the kind of art and gold and treasure—Rothschild treasure!—not even dreamed of during his days growing up in Karlsruhe. He had been translating documents for weeks, but those were simply words and numbers. To see actual paintings by artists like Rembrandt piled up as booty was another thing entirely. “My knowledge of the Holocaust,” Harry would later say, “started really with the realization that it was not only the taking of lives—that I learned much later in my experience—but the taking of all of their belongings…. [For me] Neuschwanstein was the start of really opening up that part of history that should never be forgotten.” 1

  In September 1945, James Rorimer sent Harry Ettlinger to Heilbronn, to the mine he had saved from flooding back in April. The sounds of war had retreated into the past, but the echoes had not. The Kronprinz Hotel where Harry lived with twenty other enlisted men was the only building standing on a block formerly full of stone buildings. The streets were empty of people, but full of rubble, and nothing had been done to clear them. The devastated center of town showed little sign of life. Harry’s main landmark as he walked to the salt mine was the Bockingen railroad station, also completely destroyed. Across from the station a large concrete block marked the site of an air raid shelter. The entrance had been sealed after the devastating Allied bombing runs of December 4, 1944. The air raid shelter had somehow caught fire; inside were the remains of the two thousand Germans who had sought safety there. If he needed a more personal reminder of the horrors of war, Harry need only look at Ike, a seventy-pound survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau who had been “adopted” by their detachment.

  But thanks to James Rorimer, the Heilbronn mine had been brought back into production, seemingly the only beast awake in that slumbering land. The pumps had been repaired and were cycling the seepage from the Neckar River out of the underground chambers. The skips were carrying large quantities of salty rocks to the surface. From there, the rocks were transferred to a massive furnace, where they were liquefied at 1200 degrees Fahrenheit so the salt crystals could be skimmed off. The furnace was powered by coke, a coal product, and since there was an excess of coke at the mine, the nearby glass factory was up and running, too. Amid all the destruction and sorrow, where even a scrap of food or decent bed was difficult for most people to come by, the factory was churning out thousands of Coca-Cola bottles.

  At Heilbronn, Private Harry Ettlinger felt for the first time the immensity of the MFAA task. There were only two Monuments Men in Heilbronn, but they were expected to remove from underground literally tons of artwork. At the surface worked the operation’s commander, Monuments Man Lieutenant Dale Ford, an interior designer recently pulled by the Roberts Commission from a camouflage unit in North Africa. Ford and three Germans—an art historian, an administrator, and a former junior ERR staff member assigned during the war to Paris (and possibly the Jeu de Paume, it was never clear)—spent their days in a small office next to the mine elevator, searching the ERR archives. Their primary job was to find the world-class pieces hidden in the dross.

  Harry’s job was to transport them to the surface. Each morning, after passing the air raid crypt and the Coca-Cola bottle plant, he was handed a list of objects and their location. He would then descend seven hundred feet into the darkness with two German miners. Two mines had actually been used (the second, located nearby, was known as Kochendorf) and together they had miles of chambers. Inside those chambers were more than 40,000 cases, from which Harry was supposed to pluck dozens of pieces a day. It was a daunting task, but Harry had two things working to his advantage. First, the ERR records were excellent, describing down to the number of the crate on the shelf of the wall bin exactly where each piece was located. Second, as the mine’s chief engineer had assured Rorimer in April, the artwork was all stored in a series of smaller chambers on the upper level of the mine. The larger bottom levels, many flooded during or shortly after the battle for Heilbronn, contained factory equipment.

  Still, the mine was dark and cold. Tunnels branched off in numerous directions, and once out of the main shaft it was easy to get lost. The number of chambers was intimidating, but nothing compared to the fact that each chamber held hundreds of similar-looking brown crates, any of which could contain cultural treasures, gold coins, bombs, booby traps… or something as common as personal photographs. The task was unpredictable. Harry had learned this a few weeks into the job when he noticed a chamber walled up with bricks. No one knew what was behind it, so he ordered the wall taken down. Inside were long tables piled with bottles. Each bottle contained a thin liquid separated from a thicker sludge. The miners recognized it immediately: nitroglycerin. The alarm was sounded, and everyone raced from the mine. Then experts were sent to very carefully bring the bottles to the surface. The separating of the liquids, the miners told Harry, made the solution volatile. One more month and the thinner liquid would have exploded. There seemed little doubt that this “accident” was exactly what the person who built the wall had in mind.

  Despite the danger, the recovery effort plowed forward. As the fighting neared its conclusion, there had been some discussion of what exactly to do with the treasures discovered in Germany and Austria. Eventually, the decision was made that all cultural objects, even those that belonged to Germany, would be returned to their country of origin. Once that decision was made, the Western Allies were determined to return the treasures as quickly as possible. The army couldn’t afford the manpower, for one thing. And restitution on this scale was unprecedented; the world was rightfully dubious. The Western Allies had sacrificed their national fortunes and a generation of young men; would they really hand back the spoils of their victory?

  In late summer, General Eisenhower answered that question in resounding fashion. Ever mindful of the importance of his Western Allies, Ike ordered the immediate return of the most important works of art to each respective country until the more systematic process of returns could be implemented. First to be returned was the Ghent Altarpiece. Soon others followed, including the famou
s stained-glass windows from Strasbourg Cathedral, which the French considered a national treasure. The message went down the line from commander to commander and, finally, seven hundred feet underground to Private Harry Ettlinger. The windows weren’t difficult to find, even in Heilbronn—they were very large—but extracting such delicate masterpieces from a working salt mine was nerve-jangling work. Then came the packing: seventy-three cases in all. By mid-October, the windows were inventoried, packed, and ready for transport. Instead of traveling to an MFAA collecting point, the stained-glass windows were taken by convoy directly from the mine to Strasbourg. On November 4, 1945, their return was celebrated in an elaborate ceremony, during which James Rorimer received the French Legion of Honor, becoming the first Monuments Man bestowed with such a high honor.

  Meanwhile, Harry had received another important assignment. The story of Nazi looting, after all, wasn’t merely the robbing of nations of their treasures and the human race of its historical and cultural touchstones. More than anything, the Nazis robbed families: of their livelihoods, their opportunities, their heirlooms, their mementos, of the things that identified them and defined them as human beings. This was brought home to Harry Ettlinger in the form of a letter from his grandfather, Opa Oppenheimer, in October 1945. Just before he fled Germany in 1939, Opa had been forced to stash in a storage facility near Baden-Baden his beloved collection of ex libris bookplates and art prints. He kept with him the name of the facility, the warehouse number, the combination to the locks, and the hope that his personal treasure would survive the war and somehow find its way back into his hands. Now, six years later, his grandson was stationed in central Germany, as a Monuments Man recovering art. Opa Oppenheimer hoped Harry could facilitate the return of his collection—if it still existed.