Kirstein enlisted with the Naval Reserves in 1942. He was turned down for reasons that most Americans fail to remember: Until the war grew so extensive that more troops were needed and restrictions loosened, one had to be a third-generation American citizen in order to serve as an officer in the U.S. armed forces. Kirstein did not fit the bill. America, too, at this time had its own racial profiling system, and many Jews, blacks, Asians, and immigrants were not permitted to serve as officers. Adding insult to injury, Kirstein was next rejected from the Coast Guard because of his poor vision. So the wildly accomplished Lincoln Kirstein, already a prominent artist and intellectual, had to enlist as a private, which he did in February 1943.
Even after having completed basic training, Kirstein was rejected by three different departments in which he sought to serve: counterespionage, army intelligence, and the Signal Corps. He finally found a post as a combat engineer, writing instructional manuals while posted in safe but thumb-twiddling Fort Belvoir, Virginia. To occupy his time, he worked with other members of the art community on the War Art Project, in which known artists donated works for display and sometimes sale to raise funds for the war. Thanks to his involvement, this project shifted from being an independent fund-raiser to an army-supported endeavor. Kirstein selected nine artworks to be featured in an issue of
Life
magazine, then to be exhibited with others in the American Battle Art exhibits, held at the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in an effort to support the war effort.
Noting his service, and his outstanding qualifications and connections, the Roberts Commission tapped Kirstein to join the MFAA division even though he was not an officer. In June 1944 Kirstein arrived in Shrivenham, England, to join the other MFAA recruits. But when he arrived, he found the division in disarray. There was no organization to speak of, and the Civilian Affairs officers in charge at Shrivenham had never even heard of the MFAA. Kirstein and the other recruits were told to wait until the situation could be clarified. The commission wanted Kirstein to serve as MFAA representative to one of the Allied armies, but a legal clause in
the military bureaucracy prevented a private from serving in the MFAA. By October 1944, Kirstein was depressed and dismayed, writing, “I, for one, think the behavior of the [Roberts] Commission has been, to put it mildly, callous and insulting.” It was not until December 1944, after six months in bureaucratic Limbo, that Kirstein was assigned to the Allied Third Army to assist Robert K. Posey.
Posey had already been active with the MFAA for months, and he trained Kirstein at an army base in Metz, Germany. They were a decidedly odd couple. Posey, the Alabama farm boy, was a true soldier and knowledgeable architect but lacked any knowledge of foreign languages or fine arts background. Kirstein was an erudite Jewish artist and intellectual celebrity in New York, fluent in French and with passable German.
Posey instructed Kirstein in the role of Monuments Men. At this stage, gathering information was key, as were locating local artworks and rigging damaged buildings and monuments in the wake of the fighting. The extent of the Nazi art looting plan was as yet unknown to the MFAA, and their days were spent interviewing locals, piecing together possible locations of missing art, securing that which remained, and writing reports on their progress—or lack thereof. Van Eyck’s
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
had been specifically named as one of the most important works to seek and protect.
As the Third Army entered France, the first rumors filtered in regarding the wholesale Nazi looting of art and antiquities, thanks in large part to the individual efforts of the spy Rose Valland. Before this time none of the Allies knew of Hitler’s planned supermuseum or of the Nazis’ widespread proactive hunting of artworks. The rumors were disturbing indeed.
Posey and Kirstein gathered frustratingly contradictory tidbits of information on the location of
The Lamb
. It was often singled out as the subject of gossip, but the rumors served only to tease. Their best source, at first, was Dr. Edward Ewing, an archivist whom they interviewed in Metz. He told them that Goebbels’s Nazi propaganda division had long been claiming that the Allies intended to steal Europe’s artworks and that
the Nazis should therefore confiscate all they could to keep it from thieving Allied hands. A similar deception had occurred in 1941, when Italian propagandists published a pamphlet to incite anti-British sentiment. It was entitled “What the English Have Done in Cyrenaica” and showed photographs of looted antiquities, broken statuary, and graffiti-covered walls at the ancient Greco-Roman city in modern-day Libya. What no one realized was that the damage supposedly done by the English had actually occurred centuries ago—the entire site was a ruin. What was left had been looted by the Italians themselves, and the Italians had added graffiti, all in a setup to frame the Allies as vandals and thieves.
Posey and Kirstein asked about major works they knew had disappeared, focusing on
The Ghent Altarpiece
. Ewing had heard rumors that it was in Germany, in a bunker at the Rhine fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, near Coblenz. Another rumor suggested that it had been taken by Göring to Carinhall. It was at Berghof, Hitler’s villa in the Austrian Alps, or at Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. Was it in a vault at Berlin’s Reichsbank? At Buchner’s office in Munich? In Sweden, in Switzerland, in Spain? Or perhaps, as some sources suggested, it was in a salt mine in Austria. Which of the rumors, if any, were true?
On 29 March 1945 the Third Army was camped at Trier, an ancient German town full of Roman antiquities and the birthplace of Karl Marx. Trier had been decimated by Allied bombs. Kirstein wrote of the once-glorious city:
The desolation is frozen, as if the moment of combustion was suddenly arrested, and the air had lost its power to hold atoms together and various centers of gravity had a dogfight for matter, and matter lost. For some unknown reason one intact bridge remained. . . . The town was practically empty. Out of 90,000 [inhabitants] about 2,000 were there, living in a system of wine cellars. They looked very chipper, women in slacks, men in regular working suits. The convention is to look right through them. Some of the houses have white sheets or pillow cases hanging out. Hardly
a whole thing left. 15th century fragments of water spouts, Baroque pediments and Gothic turrets in superb disarray mixed up with new meat cutters, champagne bottles, travel posters, fresh purple and yellow crocuses, and a lovely day, gas and decomposition, enamel signs and silver-gilt candelabra, and appalling, appalling shivered, subsided blank waste. Certainly Saint Lô [a French city likewise demolished by fighting] was worse, but it didn’t have anything of importance. Here everything was early Christian, or Roman, or Romanesque, or marvelous Baroque.
In an effort to instill in their fellow soldiers a level of respect for their surroundings, Posey and Kirstein had developed a habit of writing up a short history of the towns that the Third Army was occupying. Their hope was to educate the troops and minimize looting and defacement. This strategy had been successful in the French towns of Nancy and Metz, and so, when the immediate work was done, the Monuments Men set about putting together an introduction to Trier.
Captain Posey had been nursing a pain in one of his wisdom teeth for months, which finally became too much to bear. The army dentists were stationed nearly one hundred miles away. So Kirstein walked into town to see if he could find a local dentist. He encountered a teenage boy in the street who seemed friendly and eager to interact with an American soldier. Kirstein barely spoke German, and the boy no English, but Kirstein thought the boy might be willing to help. He offered the boy some Pep-o-Mint chewing gum, and a bond was established. Kirstein then mimed a toothache, puffing up his cheek and wincing in pain. The boy seemed to understand. He led Kirstein by the hand through town and pointed to the office of a local dentist.
Kirstein went back for Posey and brought him to the dentist’s office. To their surprise, the dentist spoke some English. As the dentist went to work in Posey’s gaping mouth, he began to chat with Kirstein, who sat waiting beside them.
What was their role in the U.S. Army?
They explained that they were there to protect art and monuments.
The dentist looked up suddenly. His son-in-law, he explained, was a former major in the German army and had the same job. Would they like to meet him? He lived in a village nearby.
Posey and Kirstein jumped at the offer to meet the dentist’s son-in-law. Perhaps he had information that could clarify the conflicting rumors about the location of the Nazi stolen art. It was this sort of happenstance detective work on which the Monuments Men relied. The dentist climbed into their jeep and directed them out of Trier, into the countryside.
But something seemed wrong. The dentist kept asking for them to stop along the way, with various suspicious excuses. Could they stop at this farm so he could buy vegetables? Would they stop at this house so he could pick up two bottles of wine to bring to his son-in-law and daughter? Could they make one more stop, at the inn up ahead, where he wanted to get a piece of news? As the town thinned to village and on to countryside, signs of welcome to the Allies waned. In Trier, every house flew a white flag, symbolizing that the inhabitants welcomed the Allied army. Wherever the dentist was leading them, there were no flags to be seen. Posey and Kirstein began to suspect a trap.
Then the dentist indicated a forest cottage up ahead at the foot of a hill, some distance outside of the nearest village. Wary, Kirstein and Posey sent the dentist into the weathered wooden cottage first. They heard the sounds of joyous greeting and a baby’s coo, and they decided it was safe to join him.
Inside the small, dark cottage the dentist introduced them to his son-in-law, Hermann Bunjes; his wife, Hildegard; his mother; his daughter, Eva; and Hermann and Eva’s infant son, Dietrich. The cottage was a fascinating tranquil oasis compared to the chaos of the war’s endgame, the disintegration of the German army playing out mere kilometers away. Kirstein described the cottage as having “the agreeable atmosphere of a scholar’s cultivated life, a long way from war.” Kirstein and Posey studied its walls, which were covered in prints of French Gothic art and architecture: Notre Dame de Paris, Cluny, La Sainte Chapelle, Chartres—places
that the American GIs had seen for the first time in their lives as officers during the war. Chartres had mesmerized Posey, who rhapsodized about it in one of his many letters home to his wife. He had souvenir cards in his rucksack of many of the French Gothic monuments that he had seen, which he would give to his son, Woogie, on his return.
Hermann Bunjes spoke with them in French, Kirstein translating for Posey. He explained that he was a former SS officer, having been dismissed from duty by Count Wolff-Metternich after working as an art advisor to both Rosenberg and Göring himself. The Allied postwar report on ERR activity noted that, while Bunjes was never a member of the ERR, he was present in Paris as director of the German Art Historical Institute, and he acted initially as an advisor to Göring as an attaché to the ERR. He was a scholar, unsurprisingly, of French Gothic sculpture. Bunjes had been educated at the University of Bonn before doing postgraduate work at Harvard. He’d begun his book at Cluny in Paris, writing with the famous Harvard professor Arthur Kingsley Porter. His great passion was a book he had been writing for years on the twelfth-century sculpture of Île-de-France on Paris.
Kirstein described his feelings in meeting Bunjes:
It was an odd and somehow symbolic entrance into contemporary German culture. Here, in the cold Spring, far above the murder of the cities, worked a German scholar in love with France, passionately in love, in that hopeless frustrated fatalism described by the German poet Rilke. When and how did he think he could go back? Yet his one desire was to finish his book. . . . It was hard to believe that this man had, for six years, been the confidant of Göring, the intimate of Hitler’s closest guards, that he had been in the SS.
Bunjes had information—lots of information. But there would be a price for what he knew. He wanted a promise of protection for himself and his family. From whom? Kirstein and Posey asked. As a former SS officer, Bunjes was a trained killer, the elite of Hitler’s army.
Bunjes needed protection from other Germans. The SS were so hated and feared by their fellow countrymen that he was in greatest danger of falling victim to their vigilante justice. Kirstein and Posey were not in a position to be able to guarantee protection and safe conduct for his family. But Bunjes agreed to talk anyway. Though once an enthusiast, he had sickened of Nazism—or so he claimed. He had certainly been complicit in art looting and cronying up to Göring. Did he truly regret what he had done, or was he simply currying favor with the powers at his doorstep?
As Bunjes spoke, new and critical information came to light. He had records of what art had been stolen by the Nazis from France. He seems to have acted as a sort of art agent, dealing with the ERR on Göring’s behalf. In March 1941 Bunjes had traveled to Berlin with a large portfolio containing photographs of ERR material, which he presented for Göring’s approval. He had also met with Alfred Rosenberg to discuss the availability of stolen art items for Göring’s personal acquisition. Bunjes knew the contents of that portfolio and more. He knew where the looted art described within was being stored.
Kirstein wrote of the encounter, “As we spoke in French, information tumbled out, incredible information, lavish answers to questions we had been sweating over for nine months, all told in ten minutes.” For the first time, Bunjes gave the Monuments Men a sense of what they were up against, of Hitler’s plans, of the fate of thousands of the world’s most important and beautiful works of art.