Stealing the Mystic Lamb (44 page)

Sepp Plieseis mentions Gaiswinkler in his book only once, describing him as the leader of the “best group” among the resistance fighters. However, he later changed his statement, saying, “We freedom fighters at that time had no connection with the parachutists [Gaiswinkler and his team], and they had no idea of the art that lay in the mine shafts. They parachuted in only a few days earlier, and sought shelter for themselves.”

Most likely these are all variations on fact. The core events took place, but they were much more of a collective effort, the combined forces of many smaller heroes, rather than the genius of one. Various members of those left standing at the war’s end claimed shares of the glory that may have been disproportionate to the reality—but we may never know the whole truth of the mine’s salvation.

The greatest measure of credit should go to the unsung miners. It was almost certainly the miner Alois Raudaschl, or Gaiswinkler with the help
of Raudaschl, who contacted Kaltenbrunner in order to convince him to intervene with Eigruber to prevent the mine’s destruction. It is also probable that the eighty miners in the Resistance were responsible for the slow and steady placement of the palsy charges, whether at their own impetus or under orders from a group leader. Pöchmüller claimed to have been the man to order the removal of the bombs hidden in the crates disguised as marble; again, it might have been him, but in truth the miners were the ones who took the greatest risk in planting the palsy charges and removing the bombs from the crates. In a 1948 report to the Austrian government, signed collectively and anonymously as the “Freedom Fighters of Alt Aussee,” the miners claimed to have acted at their own discretion, having discovered the bombs inside the marble crates accidentally, then moving the bombs into the woods and out of harm’s way. Yet the same report claims that they planted the palsy charges, when logic tells us that such an enterprise would require a knowledge of engineering and demolitions that the miners alone might not have possessed.

Thus it remains a mystery whom we have to thank for the preservation of
The Ghent Altarpiece
among more than 7,000 masterpieces that were so nearly lost forever. Lincoln Kirstein himself wrote in
Town and Country
magazine in the autumn of 1945 that “so many witnesses told so many stories that the more information we accumulated, the less truth it seemed to contain.” There is a tendency to want to raise one person on the plinth because history and memory is easier to sort out if we can account for individual heroes. Often the badge of hero is pinned on the man who gives the order, not the nameless workers who carry those orders out, at greatest personal risk. In the end, it was certainly a collective effort, with bold and prominent heroes among Austrians and Allies. Particular credit should go to those unable or unwilling to vaunt their roles in the salvation of the mine treasures—the local miners who worked with the Resistance, whether at their own discretion or under orders from Pöchmüller, Michel, or the man with the most dramatic story to tell, the swashbuckling Albrecht Gaiswinkler.

Whatever myriad of brave men helped to preserve Europe’s treasures, it should suffice that we thank them, be they Austrian or Ally, whoever they were, and in whatever capacity they served.

On 21 August 1945 Robert Posey was the only passenger in a chartered cargo plane bound for Brussels. Trussed beside him in the cold, gaping cargo bay were wooden crates containing
The Ghent Altarpiece
. He would see them home, on Eisenhower’s orders. But the trip would not be a smooth one.

During the flight back to Brussels, a sudden and violent storm struck. The chartered plane and its precious cargo were rocked by relentless turbulence, high winds, and bullets of rain. The pilot told Posey that he couldn’t land safely in Brussels: The city was locked in with clouds. After they flew another hour, the storm had cleared slightly but was still heavy over Brussels itself. The pilot located a small military airfield about an hour outside of Brussels. The landing was treacherous, the plane tossing in gusts of wind. It was 2 AM when they landed. There was no one on hand at the airfield to welcome them, least of all to help with their most precious cargo.

Through the curtain of rain, Posey ran from the plane to the airfield office. He called the operator and asked her to patch in an emergency call to the U.S. embassy in Brussels. There was no answer. Desperate, Posey convinced the operator to call around to different residences in the Brussels area in which American soldiers were billeted. Finally, she reached an American officer. Posey recalled:

This motley convoy brought
The Lamb
to the Royal Palace in Brussels, after a hair-raising forty-five-minute drive through the torrential rain. It was now 3:30 AM. After a moment of confusion, the night staff let them into the palace, realizing that this soaked group of GIs had the van Eyck that had been expected to land hours ago. They laid out the panels on the long table in the dining room of the palace.

Posey needed nothing more than a soft, dry bed, but he wasn’t going to leave his charge until he got a written receipt.
The Lamb
had slipped through too many fingers too often. Posey wrote, “I needed a receipt so that if someone asked me what happened to the panels, I would have it on paper.” A Belgian official on night duty provided. A suite was offered to Captain Posey, one normally reserved for visiting royalty. He collapsed into bed. Posey returned the next day to join his Third Army, stationed in Paris.

After the war, Robert Posey resumed life with his wife, Alice, and son, Woogie. As an architect with the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, he worked on such prominent buildings as the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Lever House in New York. Lincoln Kirstein returned to the New York arts scene of which he was already a prominent member and fell in love with ballet. He cofounded and ran the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine and cofounded with him the School of American Ballet. He went on to direct the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and published over five hundred books, articles, and monographs. Today he is considered one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American arts.

Days after its dramatic flight to Brussels, the U.S. ambassador officially presented the rescued
Lamb
to the Prince Regent of Belgium, on behalf of General Eisenhower. There was rejoicing throughout the country. This painting symbolized much more than a merely marvelous work of art. It
represented the defeat of Hitler’s plan to steal the world’s art—it signified the defeat of Hitler himself.

The Belgians remembered the last time
The Lamb
came home from exile, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Then, as now, speeches were made, and parades were held. Belgium welcomed home its greatest treasure, like a kidnapped and rescued prince. Jan van Eyck’s
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
was displayed for one month at the Royal Museum in Brussels, as it had been in 1919. In November 1945,
The Lamb
was returned to Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent.

Beginning in late March 1945, the various Allied armies began to discover repositories of art. The largest was Alt Aussee. But in Germany alone, Allied soldiers uncovered approximately 1,500 caches of stolen art. It is likely that countless others remain still buried and hidden throughout Germany and Europe. A few other examples of hidden depots of stolen art, found at the end of the war, offer a glimpse of the extent of the Nazi thefts.

In a jail in the northern Italian town of San Leonardo, Monuments Men discovered much of the contents of the Uffizi Museum, which had been hurriedly stashed by Nazi soldiers during their retreat from Florence.

Castle Neuschwanstein was still brimming with treasures at the war’s end. The most significant of these was not an artwork but the complete files of the ERR. It was an exceptional discovery to find the documents of this important department almost completely intact.

With the help of Hermann Bunjes during the last weeks of his life, and with support from OSS intelligence, other salt mines were identified and secured by Allied armies. On 28 April 1945, at a munitions factory depot called Bernterode in the German region of Thuringia, 40,000 tons of ammunition were found. Inside the mine, investigating American officers noticed what looked like a brick wall painted over to match the color
of the mineshaft. The wall turned out to be five feet thick, the mortar between the bricks not yet fully hardened. Breaking through with pickaxes and hammers, the officers uncovered several vaults containing a wealth of Nazi regalia, including a long hall hung with Nazi banners and filled with uniforms, as well as hundreds of stolen artworks: tapestries, books, paintings, and decorative arts, most of it looted from the nearby Hohenzollern Museum. In a separate chamber, they came upon a ghoulish spectacle: three monumental coffins, containing the skeletons of the seventeenth-century Prussian king Frederick the Great, Field Marshall von Hindenburg, and his wife. The Nazis had also seized human relics of deceased Teutonic warlords.

At Siegen near the city of Aachen, a mine contained paintings by van Gogh, Gauguin, van Dyck, Renoir, Cranach, Rembrandt, and Rubens (who had been born in Siegen), as well as the treasures of Aachen Cathedral, including the silver and gold reliquary bust of Charlemagne, which contained a fragment of his skull.

Two hundred miles southwest of Berlin, the Kaiseroda mine might have escaped Allied attention. But as fate would have it, in April 1945 Allied military police picked up two French women who had been driving illegally, at a time when civilian movement was restricted. As they passed the mine in the police jeep, the women mentioned that a large amount of gold was buried there. The military police radioed in the report, and soldiers were sent to investigate. After descending 2,100 feet in a rusty elevator, they were confronted with the shock of their lives.

Five hundred wooden crates, containing a total of 1 billion reichsmarks, was just the start. After dynamiting open a locked steel door, they found 8,527 gold ingots, thousands of gold coins, currency, and further crates full of gold and silver bars. Artworks and rare books were found as well, including Botticelli’s
Virgin with a Choir of Angels
. They would later learn that this was the largest part of the reserve of the Reichsbank, the official bank of the Third Reich. The officers then made a horrifying discovery: countless containers full of precious stones and gold dental fillings, all taken from concentration camp victims.

The mine that attained the greatest notoriety was at Merkers, and it was Posey and Kirstein who oversaw inventory, on 8 April 1945—the same day that Gaiswinkler and his team parachuted onto snowbound Hell Mountain. The mineshaft ran 2,100 feet into the earth and included a steel bank vault door that the Nazis had installed that had to be dynamited open—a risky business when an explosion takes place a half mile underground. Room Eight alone was 150 feet long by 75 feet across and at least 20 feet high. It contained thousands of what looked like brown paper bag lunches, laid out in neat rows. In actuality these were filled with gold: approximately 8,198 gold bars, 1,300 bags of mixed gold coins, 711 bags of American twenty-dollar gold pieces, printing plates used by the Reich to stamp its currency, and $2.76 billion reichsmarks—most of the reserve of Germany’s national treasury. It also contained art and antiquities, including Albrecht Dürer’s
Apocalypse
woodcuts, paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, Byzantine mosaics, Islamic carpets, and between 1 and 2 million books. Most of the contents of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, in forty-five cases, was stored at Merkers. The museum had not been looted, but its contents were sent there from Berlin for safekeeping. The final MFAA inventory listed 393 uncrated paintings, 1,214 cases of art, 140 textiles, and 2,091 boxes of prints.