The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel
An opportunity didn’t present itself until November, when the personal valet of the governor of the French Occupied Zone came to stay at the Kronprinz Hotel. The valet, Jacques, was an automobile repair expert, and he had come to study the Mercedes motorworks in the nearby town of Stuttgart. Harry asked if he could facilitate a trip to Baden-Baden, which was in the French Zone. The valet readily agreed.
So on a sunny day in November 1945, Jacques, Private Harry Ettlinger, and his detachment’s “adopted” member Ike, the Holocaust survivor, set out in a jeep to find a collection of prints and bookplates representing the mementos of a common life well lived. The trip took just over an hour. They found the facility without difficulty. Pulling open the warehouse doors, Harry Ettlinger’s heart leapt almost like it had on that long-ago day in Belgium when the sergeant had called him off the convoy headed to the front. Here in this dark and dusty room were the wonders Harry had known since childhood—thousands of signed, original bookplates; hundreds of prints from turn-of-the-century German Impressionists; and the beautiful autographed print of an etching of the Rembrandt of Karlsruhe. They were just as Opa Oppenheimer had left them.
Clapping Harry on the back, the valet suggested they go out for a celebratory meal. He took them to a rural valley, where they dined on trout fished right out of a brook and drank toasts with the local specialty: cherry schnapps. By the time they dropped off the valet in Baden-Baden, Harry and Ike were feeling fine. Maybe too fine. Ike, who liked his liquor, missed a turn on the mountainous road back to Heilbronn and went into a ditch. It took ten men to lift the jeep back onto the road, at which point they discovered the brake line was snapped. Ike turned around and coasted three precarious miles back into Baden-Baden.
Harry was now AWOL (absent without leave, punishable by an army prison sentence), since he hadn’t bothered with an overnight pass. And even worse, at least at the moment, the two men had no place to sleep. They tracked down the only person they knew in town, Jacques the valet, who fortunately had a girlfriend who worked in the city’s finest hotel. She met them at the back door and slipped them up the backstairs to the one place no one at the front desk would think to look: the penthouse suite. That night, a Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz and a buck private in the U.S. Army—a former German Jew who had been forced out of his homeland by the ruthless Nazi purges—slept in beds reserved for the Kaiser of Germany. Even Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were never afforded such a luxury.
A few weeks later, while the public streamed into Strasbourg by the thousands to marvel at the newly reinstalled stained-glass windows of its world-famous cathedral, another shipment of precious objects arrived by truck at the Heilbronn mine. There, Harry Ettlinger and the two German miners carefully packed them in exactly the same way they had packaged the great cathedral windows and the Old Master paintings. These precious objects, however, went not to a European government or a great collector, but to an apartment on the third floor of an old house at 410 Clinton Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. The Oppenheimer-Ettlinger family treasure had come home from the war.
CHAPTER 54
Heroes of Civilization
Germany, Britain, France, America, and the World Then, Now, and Forever
The reconstruction of Europe after World War II was one of the most complicated and comprehensive international efforts of modern times. The identity and infrastructure of the nations of Europe had to be rebuilt, and the restitution of artwork was a vital component. To say the war was the greatest upheaval of cultural items in history would be a grave understatement. In the end, the Western Allies discovered more than one thousand repositories in southern Germany alone, containing millions of works of art and other cultural treasures, including church bells, stained glass, religious items, municipal records, manuscripts, books, libraries, wine, gold, diamonds, and even insect collections. The job of packing, transporting, cataloguing, photographing, archiving, and returning this plunder to its country of origin—the respective countries were then responsible for returning it to the individual owners—fell almost exclusively to the MFAA section. The job would take six long years.
Despite the best efforts of the men and women of the MFAA, hundreds of thousands of works of art, documents, and books have yet to be found. The most famous is perhaps Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, stolen from the Czartoryski Collection in Cracow, Poland, and last known to have been in the possession of the notorious Nazi governor-general Hans Frank. Tens of thousands were no doubt destroyed. These include the personal collection of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, which was burned by SS stormtroopers before British troops could intervene. The famed Amber Panels of Peter the Great, looted by the Nazis from Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), are likely another cultural victim of the war, in all probability destroyed during an artillery battle that took place at Königsberg but for the small portable mosaics, one of which surfaced in Bremen 1997. Thousands of paintings and other works of art have never been claimed, either because their provenance could not be determined or their owners were among the millions who died or were murdered in Hitler’s military and racial crusades. Sadly, not all museums, the interim custodians of some of these works of art, have demonstrated the determination of the Monuments Men to locate their rightful owner or heirs.
More than sixty years after the death of Adolf Hitler, we still live in a world altered by his legacy. His personal belongings are scattered, although many have made their way into public museums and collections. Most of his library books are in the U.S. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and eighty volumes may be found at Brown University in the John Hay Library’s Rare Book collection. Many of his paintings and watercolors are stored at the National Museum of the U.S. Army, Army Art Collection. The original duplicates of his last will and political testament are at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the Imperial War Museum in London. His beloved Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) still stands in Munich, although today as the Haus der Kunst, home to temporary exhibits of contemporary art. But the lasting impact of his bitter reign is best measured in more ephemeral ways: fifty million loved ones who never returned home from the war to rejoin their families or start one of their own; brilliant, creative contributions never made to our world because scientists, artists, and inventors lost their lives too early or were never born; cultures built over generations reduced to ashes and rubble because one human being judged groups of other human beings less worthy than his own.
The highest officials in Hitler’s government were prosecuted for crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials beginning in October 1945. Hitler’s would-be successor and rival for the cultural treasures of Europe, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, was arrested by American soldiers on May 9, 1945. Dressed in his most resplendent uniform and carrying his baton of state, he had been attempting to secure an audience with Allied Supreme Commander Eisenhower. He was taken to a prison cell in Augsburg instead. Like the other party leaders at Nuremberg, he at first denied his role in the Holocaust, proclaiming, “I revere women and I think it unsportsmanlike to kill children…. For myself I feel quite free of responsibility for the mass murders.” 1 In the end, however, he was one of the few to acknowledge personal participation in the worst aspects of the Third Reich.
Göring saved his denials for accusations about his collection of art. “Of all the charges which have been leveled against me,” he is quoted as saying in the Nuremberg Interviews, “the so-called looting of art treasures by me has caused me the most anguish.” 2
In another section of the Nuremberg Interviews, he explained his thinking: “They tried to paint a picture of me as a looter of art treasures. In the first place, during a war everybody loots a little bit. However, none of my so-called looting was illegal…. I always paid for them or they were delivered through the Hermann Göring Division, which, together with the Rosenberg Commission supplied me with my art collection. Perhaps one of my weaknesses has been that I lov
The harshest blow for the Reichsmarschall came when he was confronted in his jail cell by the fact that one of his prized possessions, Jan Vermeer’s Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, for which he had traded 150 paintings, was a forgery. (The forger, Han van Meegeren, had been arrested in Holland for collaboration with the Nazis and plundering Dutch culture. When it was revealed he had duped the hated Reichsmarschall, he was hailed by some as a national hero.) Monuments Man Stewart Leonard delivered the news to Göring and said afterward that he “looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.” 4 The Reichsmarschall had fancied himself a Renaissance man; in the end, he was revealed to be nothing more than an unsophisticated and greedy fool.
Hermann Göring did not appeal his death sentence at Nuremberg. He asked only to be executed with dignity, by firing squad, rather than hanged like a common criminal. His request was denied. On October 15, 1946, the night before his scheduled hanging, the broken-down Reichsmarschall committed suicide with a potassium cyanide capsule. It is still unclear how the poison found its way into his prison cell.
Alfred Rosenberg, leader of the ERR and Hitler’s chief racial theorist, proved completely unrepentant and denied complicity in any wrongdoing. He was found guilty and executed by hanging on October 16, 1946.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Gestapo leader, was found guilty at Nuremberg of the mass murder of civilians, selecting and executing racial and political undesirables, establishing concentration camps, the forced labor and execution of prisoners of war, and many other heinous and unfathomable crimes. He also was executed by hanging on October 16, 1946. Interceding to help save the artistic treasures at Altaussee turned out to be the only positive deed in an otherwise thoroughly miserable and rotten life.
Hans Frank, the notorious Nazi governor-general caught with stolen masterpieces near the end of the war, renewed his faith in Catholicism and expressed some remorse for his reign of terror in Poland. He expressed relief at being hanged with his fellow Nazi leaders, but never revealed the location of the missing Raphael painting.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect and friend who had almost managed to take a stand against the Führer’s Nero Decree, was the only other high-ranking Nazi to express remorse for his actions. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and, after a bitter split among the jurors, sentenced to twenty years in prison. After his release in 1966, he became an author. His three memoirs of life in Hitler’s government, and mostly notably his first book Inside the Third Reich, have become invaluable to historians. Albert Speer died of a stroke in 1981.
August Eigruber was arrested in May 1945 and prosecuted at the Mauthausen Trial in March 1946. He was found guilty of war crimes committed at the Mauthausen concentration camp, including the execution of prisoners of war. Much of the evidence used to convict him was from archives found in the salt mine at Altaussee, probably another reason he was so keen to destroy the mine. He went unrepentant to the gallows on May 28, 1947. His last words, just before the trapdoor opened, were “Heil Hitler!”
Hermann Bunjes, the art scholar who had sold his soul in Paris and tried to buy it back by telling Monuments Men Posey and Kirstein about Altaussee, hanged himself from the window of his prison cell on July 25, 1945. It was later reported by Lincoln Kirstein, and repeated in numerous history books, that Bunjes had not only killed himself, but shot his wife and children to death as well. That was not true. He left his family penniless, starving, and terrified in a broken Germany, but very much alive. His wife, Hildegard, in fact, lived until August 2005. She went to her grave declaring, “My husband was not an active Nazi; he was an idealist.” 5
Bruno Lohse, Göring’s representative to the ERR in Paris, was arrested by James Rorimer on May 4, 1945. Rorimer had found his name in the registration book at Neuschwanstein and had been informed he was staying at a nursing home in the nearby village. When confronted, Lohse tried to pass himself off as a simple corporal in the Luftwaffe (which was his technical rank). Rorimer, warned by Valland that Lohse was “a most untrustworthy, double-crossing scoundrel,” wasn’t fooled. 6 The “corporal” was placed under arrest.
Lohse admitted he had been involved with the ERR operation at the Jeu de Paume, but insisted he had done nothing wrong. He was a servant of Göring, he said, and thus his actions were legitimate. He became increasingly disillusioned as the interrogators described Göring’s dealings, especially the fact that the Reichsmarschall had never bothered to pay his debt to the ERR. Lohse had been a fervent admirer of Göring, and he was disconsolate to learn his boss was so cheap that he hadn’t even paid the absurdly low prices assigned to his looted art by the intimidated assessors of Paris.
In exchange for leniency, Bruno Lohse testified against his fellow looters and helped the French locate several caches of stolen art. (It helped that his coconspirators, Kurt von Behr and Hermann Bunjes, had both committed suicide.) He was released from prison in 1950, and soon after became a “legitimate” art dealer in Munich. By the mid-1950s, he was publicly denying having committed any crimes and was working diligently to rehabilitate his reputation. Much of this effort involved the intimidation and harassment of his chief accuser, Rose Valland. In a 1957 letter, Valland warned James Rorimer, with whom she had remained close friends, that “Lohse, who appears before you as a victim, assumes an entirely different personality when in Munich, judging from the conversations reported to me, and once again becomes the Nazi eager to avenge himself and to discredit the restitutions. For example, he regrets that he did not follow von Behr’s orders and did not order my disappearance (deportation and execution) according to von Behr’s plans. In Germany, he has become the champion of all these pitiful people who had been forced to obey the orders of the Nazi police and whose feelings we have hurt by asking them to be accountable for their actions.” 7
Lohse died in March 2007 at age ninety-five, having lived his final decades in relative quiet and anonymity. In May 2007, a safety deposit box he controlled was discovered at a bank in Zu-rich, Switzerland. Inside was a Camille Pissarro painting stolen by the Gestapo in 1938, as well as paintings by Monet and Renoir. Records showed that at least fourteen other paintings had been removed from the box since 1983. An international investigation continues.
Then there were the lesser figures of Altaussee. These ordinary men, unknown to higher authorities, had to find their own way through the disorder of postwar Austria and Germany. This task was complicated by the fact that, to a man, they had been members of the Nazi Party. None, however, were active party members. In Austria and Germany in the 1930s, a person had to become a Nazi Party member to hold a professional position. Along with the scoundrels and villains, the “de-Nazification” of Germany in the postwar years swept up many innocent, even on occasion heroic, men.
One such man was Otto Högler, the mine foreman whose support and knowledge made possible Pöchmüller’s palsy at Altaussee. Högler was arrested on May 9, 1945, the day after the arrival of the Americans. Interestingly, a copy of the arrest report was sent to Dr. Michel, with a note assuring him that “the report was only signed by those clearly devoted to the cause.” Was Högler sent away so Michel could take credit for the rescue at Altaussee? Impossible to say. Nonetheless, Högler spent eight months in detention. He was released in December 1945, but rearrested three months later. Fired from the mine, he was working as a rat exterminator.
Högler was released from prison in 1947 and, after years of petitions, rehired by the mining company in 1951 on the condition he never mention anything about the rescue of the art treasures. After his retirement in 1963, however, he worked to set the record straig
Dr. Herbert Seiberl, the Austrian art official who had been an early conspirator with Pöchmüller, lost his job and was banned from working in his field because of his registration in the Nazi Party. He tried working as a Christmas card maker, painter, restorer, and author, but without success. He died in 1952 at the age of forty-eight, leaving behind a widow and four children. His family was saved from destitution by gifts from a Mrs. Bondi and a Mr. Oppenheimer, both of whom had artwork rescued from Altaussee. 9
Karl Sieber, the restorer, remained at the mine and became a valuable source of information for the Americans. Although he never spoke publicly of his role, his descriptions of the preparations at the mine were related by George Stout’s assistant, Monuments officer Thomas Carr Howe Jr., in his book Salt Mines and Castles. The book became the source of later theories ascribing the rescue to the quiet restorer. The Americans helped him return home to Germany, and later got him released from house arrest, but Sieber never worked as a restorer again. He died in 1953. 10
The worst fate, unfortunately, was meted out to the unknown hero of Altaussee, mine director Dr. Emmerich Pöchmüller. He was arrested there on June 17, 1945, and charged with trying to blow up the treasures at Altaussee. During his interrogation, he was beaten so mercilessly by an American officer that he lost six teeth and was unable to stand for a day. In November 1945, his sister obtained an audience with the Austrian Ministry of Education. She showed them her brother’s diary, which detailed his actions at the mine. The answer from the court counselor was that “what your brother writes is all correct. We have checked it. But we cannot influence his discharge.” 11