By the spring of 1945 the liberation of concentration camps revealed the horrors of Nazi atrocities. After U.S. forces liberated Buchenwald in Germany on 11 April 1945, many GIs had visited the camp. Emaciated bodies were still strewn around the camp, unburied and fly-swarmed. Posey had gone to see the camp, returning with the aforementioned chilling photograph he’d found in an abandoned office there, of a bright young Nazi camp officer smiling with pride as he held a noose in his hand. Kirstein did not visit the camp, feeling that it would be too upsetting. He had every reason to stay away—when tough-as-nails General George Patton toured Buchenwald with Eisenhower and other generals, he vomited in the midst of the horrors and couldn’t sleep for days afterwards.
Despite his hatred for Nazism, Kirstein still loved Germanic culture and its artistic legacy. That had nothing to do with the current, crumbling, diabolical regime. He wrote:
The horrid desolation of the German cities should, I suppose, fill us with fierce pride. If ever the mosaic revenge was exacted, lo, here it is. The eyes and the teeth, winking and grinning in hypnotic catastrophe. But the builders of the Kurfürstliches Palais, of the Zwinger, of Schinkel’s great houses, and of the Market Places of the great German cities were not the executioners of Buchenwald or Dachau. No epoch in history has produced such precious ruins. To be sure, they are rather filigraine, and delicate in comparison to antiquity, but what they lack in romance and scale is made up by the extension of the area they cover. . . .
To make a loose summation: Probably the State and private collections of portable objects have not suffered irreparably. But the fact that the Nazis always intended to win the war, counting neither on retaliation nor defeat, is responsible for the destruction of the monumental face of urban Germany. Less grand than Italy, less noble than France, I would personally compare it to the loss of Wren’s London City churches, and that’s too much elegance to remove from the face of the earth.
The destruction in Germany was not at the hand of the Allies alone. Hitler’s Nero Decree had debilitated his own people’s livelihood. Boats were sunk in rivers to make passage impossible. Bridges and tunnels were destroyed, roads mined, factories dynamited. Destruction surged across the German landscape. In view of all that had been lost, it was that much more critical to save what could still be saved.
Gaiswinkler’s Resistance fought on. In the end, no reinforcement was needed. Fabianku had not anticipated the strength and determination of the Resistance defenders, and they held strong. The German attack force was sent into retreat.
The next day, 7 May, the Germans surrendered unconditionally at Reims. The war was over, and the Allies had won.
On 8 May, the first American troops crested the mountainside and arrived at the mine. The Eightieth U.S. Infantry, under the command of Major Ralph Pearson, took over the protection of the mine. Gaiswinkler and the Resistance had protected the mine and its precious contents, and Eigruber had never made good on his promise to destroy its treasures forever.
Despite Posey and Kirstein’s efforts to inform the forward-most Allied units, which would be certain to reach the mine before them, Major Pearson had been unaware of the treasures at Alt Aussee until he received a message. It remains a mystery as to who sent this message. According to Michel’s own report, it was he who notified Major Pearson. Michel also claimed responsibility for having ordered the removal of the bombs from
the marble crates. His statements were backed up by some, but he may have coerced support from them. At the war’s end, collaborating with the Allies, and sometimes inventing stories of resistance to one’s Nazi colleagues, was a good strategy to avoid imprisonment or execution. Therefore the statements made by Nazi staff are suspect.
Michel’s version of the Alt Aussee story was the first to be heard by an American, as Michel greeted Major Pearson upon his arrival at the mine. He even gave the major a guided tour, pointing out the demolished mine entrance. At the time, there was no reason to doubt Michel’s story, with no contradictory versions forthcoming. And, after all, Michel was the only man present who spoke English.
Gaiswinkler was not present at the mine when the Americans arrived. According to his own account, although not seconded by other sources, he and his team spearheaded a stealth counterattack that very night. They crept through the snow-hung pine forest and sprung on General Fabianku’s headquarters. The raid caught the general and his bodyguard completely by surprise, and, quite miraculously, Gaiswinkler’s hard-nosed Resistance fighters actually captured General Fabianku himself.
While waiting on tenterhooks to learn the fate of the mine’s contents, Posey and Kirstein sat at the window of an inn, mere kilometers away from the salt mine. From out the window came a surprising sight. An armed SS unit approached, only to turn themselves in. Kirstein described the scene: “Now from our window at the inn in Alt Aussee we watched the stupefying spectacle of the surrender of an SS unit. The trimly uniformed professional murderers wished to volunteer to fight the Russians, from whom they were sure the Americans would protect them. They wanted to keep their weapons until they could get into the safety of the POW cage, since they thought their own men might shoot them.”
As Kirstein and Posey watched, a cheer came from upstairs at the inn. They ran up to learn the cause. A cluster of officers listened to the radio, celebrating and cheering. Over the wire came the news: Austrian mountaineers
had guided U.S. soldiers on an all-night manhunt. As 12 May dawned on the horizon, they caught their quarry. They had arrested Karl Kaltenbrunner. He had thrown his uniform and identification into a lake and assumed a civilian disguise as a doctor. It was only when his mistress saw him marching with a cluster of German prisoners and called out his name that he was recognized and captured. He would be the highest-ranking SS leader to face trial at Nuremberg, for which he was executed on 16 October 1946.
Then word reached Posey and Kirstein that the mine had been secured by the Allies and the Resistance. They rushed to the scene, arriving hours after Gaiswinkler had left to chase down and capture General Fabianku. They would never meet their Austrian counterpart.
Only when they reached the mine’s entrance did Posey and Kirstein learn that six dynamite charges had been set off at the main entrance to the storerooms deep inside the mine shaft. The result was a wall of stone and earth blocking access to the art. At first, they thought they had arrived too late. Had explosives gone off inside the mine as well?
Did this destruction extend beyond the entrance shaft? The contents of Hitler’s looted museum waited on the other side of a wall of rubble, if there was another side to it. What if the entire mine had been demolished, the roof caved in, the passages flooded?
They finally found an interpreter who explained the situation. The shaft was demolished as a defensive measure, to prevent the destruction of the mine’s contents. But it would take time to clear the debris that blocked the tunnel, as the Austrian miners were unsure as to how much rubble blocked the tunnel. At first the miners said it might take seven to fifteen days to clear it away. Posey and Kirstein hoped it could be done in two or three days. The miners set to work, and the debris was cleared the next day. Posey and Kirstein would be the first to set foot inside.
With one of the miners as their guide, Posey and Kirstein moved through the darkness of the shaft, the dim light of their acetylene lamps revealing the red rock glittering with salt crystals.
A half mile into the shaft beyond the rubble, Posey and Kirstein reached an iron door. Beyond it was a shocking expanse and the stolen jewels of the Nazi art theft program.
As they explored cavern after cavern, the extent of the hoard came quickly to light. Three-quarters of a mile into the mine, a cavern referred to as the Kammergraf housed multiple galleries of art storage, each one three stories tall. Another of the caverns, known as the Springerwerke, was only fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, yet contained 2,000 paintings stashed in two-story storage racks along three walls and in a column down the center of the chamber. The lamplight seemed dim against the vast darkness inside the caverns. Blades of light exposed gilded frames, marble arms, the weft of canvas, painted faces in the dark.
Then they came upon the Chapel of Saint Barbara, where Michel had hidden a few of the most treasured pieces.
There, unwrapped on four empty cardboard boxes one foot off the mine’s clay floor lay eight panels of Jan van Eyck’s
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
. Someone, just before the mine’s entrance was sealed, had looked lovingly and admiringly on this greatest treasure. How close it had come to being forever buried alive. How close to complete destruction.
There was evidence of fond and mournful farewells. Also in the chapel, on an old brown-and-white-striped mattress, they found the
Madonna and Child
marble sculpture by Michelangelo that had been looted from the church of Notre Dame in Bruges, Jan van Eyck’s hometown. It had remained in Bruges throughout the war until 8 September 1944, when the Germans removed it, claiming that they wanted to protect it from falling into the hands of the barbarous Americans. It had been smuggled out of Bruges in a confiscated Red Cross truck only eight days before British soldiers had recaptured the city. And now here it was, lying on a mattress on the floor of a subterranean chapel. Had Michel taken one last look at beloved works before fleeing?
The fifty-three finest objects in the mine, those that would be the trophy pieces of any museum in the world, bore the label “A. H. Linz”—artworks reserved for Adolf Hitler’s supermuseum.
The soldiers and miners, led by Posey and Kirstein, spent four days cataloguing the stolen hoard. In all, the Alt Aussee treasure consisted of the following objects:
• 6,577 oil paintings
• 2,030 works on paper (watercolors and drawings)
• 954 prints (etchings and engravings)
• 137 statues
• 128 pieces of arms and armor
• 79 containers full of decorative arts
• 78 pieces of furniture
• 122 tapestries
• 1,500 cases of rare books
These objects included works by most of the greatest artists in history: van Eyck, Michelangelo, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hals, Reynolds, Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto, Brueghel, and on. There were hundreds of nineteenth-century German paintings of the sort Hitler prized, as well as Egyptian tomb statuary, Greek and Roman busts and marble sculptures, bronzes, porcelain, inlaid wood furniture, ornate tapestries—the finest content of the looted museums, galleries, and private collections of Nazi-occupied Europe.
There is a lingering debate among historians as to whether or not Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa
, perhaps the only painting more famous than
The Ghent Altarpiece
(although nowhere near as influential), was successfully stolen by the Nazis and stored at Alt Aussee.
Mona Lisa
is not mentioned as having ever been in the mine in any extant wartime document, Nazi or Allied. Whether it might have been at Alt Aussee was a question only raised when scholars examined the postwar SOE report on the activities of Albrecht Gaiswinkler. This report states that Gaiswinkler and his team “saved such priceless objects as the Louvre’s
Mona Lisa.
” A second document, from an Austrian museum near Alt Aussee, dated 12 December 1945, states that “the
Mona Lisa
from Paris” was among “80 wagons of art
and cultural objects from across Europe” that had been taken into the mine.
For its part, the Louvre museum has remained surprisingly silent regarding the whereabouts of its treasures during the war. After years of refusing to respond to inquiring scholars, the Louvre finally admitted that the
Mona Lisa
had indeed been in the Alt Aussee mine. But why, then, was there no record of it, either at the Munich Collection Point or in any extant document from either the Allies or the Axis, for that matter?
The Louvre now states that a sixteenth-century copy of the
Mona Lisa
had been found at Alt Aussee and was on a list of several thousand works assembled at the Musées Nationaux de la Recuperation—works whose owner could not be traced. This
Mona Lisa
copy was marked MNR 265 on the list. After five years had passed, with no proven owner coming to light, the copy was presented to the Louvre for indefinite safekeeping. From 1950 to the present, it has been hanging outside the office of the museum’s director.
An intriguing story of what might have happened to the
Mona Lisa
during the Second World War emerges if one pieces together the known facts. The
Mona Lisa
would certainly have been an important target for the ERR, Göring, and Hitler. Nazis would have sought the
Mona Lisa
without rest, demanding that it be handed to them upon their entry into Paris and hunting it down if it were not. A nearly identical contemporary copy of the painting had been placed in the specially marked wooden crate labeled “Mona Lisa” and shipped for storage with the rest of the national museum collections, while the original was craftily hidden away. The ERR then chased what they believed to be the original
Mona Lisa
and, upon capturing it, sent it to Alt Aussee for storage. All the while, the original lay in hiding, officially resurfacing only on 16 June 1945—the very day that the first of the Alt Aussee treasures were carried up out of the mine. This explains how the
Mona Lisa
did return from Alt Aussee: restitution number MNR 265, which now hangs in the Louvre’s administrative offices. It also explains why the
Mona Lisa
was not noted in any of
the records related to Alt Aussee—some officers recognized that the Alt Aussee painting was a copy, while others, and evidently the ERR, thought it was the original.
Posey and Kirstein learned the story of
The Ghent Altarpiece
from Karl Sieber, the German art conservator who had been in charge of caring for the Alt Aussee hoard. After Buchner had driven
The Lamb
from Pau to Paris, it had been taken to Neuschwanstein, the fairy-tale palace in Bavaria that served as the model for the Disneyland castle. Neuschwanstein was originally meant to be the main storage depot for all of the Nazi stolen art. The first trainload of art arrived there in April 1941. An alternative had only been sought and found in Alt Aussee when Neuschwanstein, a monastery, and five other castles all became overfilled with loot. Alt Aussee, having already been converted into a covert art depot, began to fill from February 1944 on, as Allied air attacks threatened the existing castle storage centers.