The Monuments Men (34 page)

A final shipment would eventually take shape in early April, but even after those traincars were packed Carinhall wasn’t empty. Much of the heavier statuary and decorative works had been buried on the grounds. A few exceptionally large paintings and numerous pieces of ERR-looted furniture were still in the vast rooms. The body of Göring’s first wife, Carin, for whom the estate was named, was left buried in the nearby forest.
2
The artifacts were joined on the estate by several hundred pounds of explosives. On Göring’s orders, Luftwaffe experts had rigged the estate for destruction. The Reichsmarschall had no intention of letting his prized possessions fall into Soviet hands—even if that meant blowing up his imperial hall and everything left in it.

CHAPTER 29

Two Turning Points

Cleves, Germany

March 10, 1945

*

Paris, France

March 14, 1945

I
n Cleves, Germany, Ronald Balfour, the British Monuments officer attached to First Canadian Army on the northern flank of the Western Allied advance, inspected the packing and crating of the treasures of Christ the King Church, which had been heavily bombed and was in danger of collapse. Supplies were tight, as always, and the only transportation available in the city was a wooden handcart. Now four German civilians had to pull the loaded handcart to the Cleves train station for temporary evacuation.

This would be a lot easier with a truck
, Balfour thought. But since his truck accident in late November 1944, which knocked him out of commission for almost two months, things had gotten complicated. The two officers he knew at First Canadian Army headquarters had been replaced, and the new men always had an excuse. First they said the army didn’t have any spare vehicles. Then he was told he couldn’t get a new truck because he had lost the old one. He found the old truck in the camp lot, only to be told that locating the old truck wasn’t enough; he needed a “BLR certificate”—whatever that was!—to requisition a new one. The new officers, of course, refused to give him a BLR certificate. He finally received one, but he was never given a truck since the latest allocation of vehicles didn’t include any for the MFAA.

Meanwhile, he had heard nothing about the
Bruges Madonna
. This wasn’t surprising given the chaotic situation in Belgium. In some weird way, the absence of information merely added to the intrigue of this particular work. It seemed appropriate, as the statue had long been shrouded in secrecy. Michelangelo had insisted, as an item of the sale, that no one be allowed to view it without permission. In other words, it could not be simply placed out for public viewing. Some scholars thought this was out of shame at the quality of the finished product, but there’s a more likely explanation. The sculpture had been promised to the pope, but was sold secretly to a Flemish merchant family, the Mouscrons, when the young Michelangelo, only in his early twenties, received a financial offer he couldn’t refuse.
1

The Mouscrons spirited the sculpture out of Italy to their hometown of Bruges in 1506. In the 1400s, Bruges had been a center of commerce and the home of three of Belgium’s most celebrated artists—the Van Eyck brothers, creators of Hitler’s coveted Ghent Altarpiece, and Hans Memling, a Göring favorite. But by 1506 the city had begun a rapid decline in importance as its harbor, vital to commerce during that era, silted up and became impractical for shipping. Stuck in a floundering northern European city, where the city’s inhabitants had never even heard of a young artist named Michelangelo, the
Madonna
dropped into obscurity. The famous artist biographer Giorgio Vasari, writing in the mid-1500s, knew so little about the statue—the master’s only work located outside Italy during his lifetime—that he thought it was made of bronze, not white marble.

And yet to look at the
Madonna
—the beautiful face of the Virgin, the carved robes so reminiscent of Michelangelo’s contemporary masterpiece the
Pietà
, the Christ Child not cradled in his mother’s arms, but standing within the folds of her gown, still protected by her—was to know immediately you were in the presence of greatness. By the 1600s, with Michelangelo elevated to exalted status, the Belgians had come to regard the statue as a national treasure, and a century later the French had begun to covet its glory. In 1794, after conquering Belgium in the Napoleonic Wars, they demanded that the
Bruges Madonna
be shipped to Paris. It was returned only after the defeat of Napoleon two decades later. Would the
Madonna
, and the world, be as lucky this time?

The answer, Ronald Balfour had believed, lay in Flushing, Holland, a port city near the outlet of the Rhine. If evacuated by sea—and how else would it have gone with the Allies blocking the roads and rails and the piece too heavy for many airplanes?—the
Bruges Madonna
would have had to travel through Flushing. Balfour had been making enquiries all along the Rhine, with little success. Flushing, he felt, was his last good chance to generate a solid lead. But it took him until the last few days of February to reach the city, and by then the trail was cold. The Dutch knew nothing. Any German official high enough placed to know of the shipment had fled. The
Madonna
, moving east, had eluded his grasp again.

But the disappointment he felt in Flushing was relieved, to some extent, in Cleves. It was still cold, but the snows of early March made the historic town, the home of Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, more beautiful. He had a scholar’s appreciation for historic papers, and it was a personal honor to rescue the archives and treasures of Cleves. He looked across the street at the four Germans pulling the cartload of gold chalices, silk robes, and silver relics. The world might marvel at such grandeur, but Balfour would trade it all for the soft warmth of old paper.

Balfour looked up and noticed the train station was now only half a block ahead. “Hold on,” he called to Hachmann, the sexton of Christ the King Church, who was following the cartload on the other side of the street. “I’ll be right over.” Out of habit he looked both ways, although there was no traffic in the deserted town. And then, just as he stepped off the curb, the world exploded.

Across the street, the sexton staggered from the effect of the blast. A cloud of smoke engulfed him, and his ears rang like fire alarms. As the smoke cleared, the world came rushing back. The buildings stood as they always had, but he was alone in the street. The four Germans had lunged for shelter. A dozen yards away, Monuments officer Ronald Balfour was leaning against a railing, covered in blood.

On March 14, 1944, four days after the explosion in Cleves and the day after the second evacuation of Carinhall, recently promoted First Lieutenant James Rorimer rode his bicycle to Rose Valland’s apartment in the fifth
arrondissement
, an ancient section of Paris known as the Latin Quarter. The quarter had been popular with tourists before the war, but few tourists, Rorimer suspected, had ever visited Valland’s middle-class residential area, a lonely and secluded stretch just beyond the site of a massive fire started by German bombardment in August 1944. As he used his flashlight to navigate the dark stairwell—even seven months after liberation there was still no electricity in parts of Paris—Rorimer was reminded of how easy it would have been for the Nazis to make Rose Valland disappear.

He was heading to the front. Finally. He had discussed a transfer with his superior officers on December 28, 1944, just after his conversation with Valland over champagne. He had not been surprised to discover the French had already approached the Americans suggesting just such a transfer, especially as he recalled hearing that when Jaujard held a reunion of his staff at the Louvre on August 26, 1944, and described Rorimer’s early entry into Paris, tears were said to have flowed.
2
He was sure this long-hoped-for development was the behind-the-scenes work of Jacques Jaujard and Rose Valland. She had been telling him he was needed at the front, and he knew her well enough to know that, in her low-key, unobtrusive way, she had been advocating his transfer within her own bureaucracy as well. Still, it had taken more than two months, until March 1, 1945, for Rorimer to receive official word that he would be soon become the Monuments officer for U.S. Seventh Army.

Valland called him soon after, and invited him to her apartment. For the last few months, she had been ladling information to him in dribs and drabs. Rorimer had wanted to know everything, and Valland knew that. But as their relationship evolved, he accepted that she would provide him the information he wanted and needed, when needed, not sooner. The more he learned, the more excited he became. He had visited Lohse’s apartment in Paris with Valland, but it had been taken over by a French colonel who knew nothing of the previous tenant. Undaunted, he returned the next day and spent an hour outside the building trying to “fix” the flat tire of his bicycle, from which he had removed the air. But this wasn’t a movie, and no one suspicious entered or left the building.

This time, when he arrived at Rose Valland’s apartment he could sense a change in her demeanor. She knew about his assignment to U.S. Seventh Army; she was almost as excited as he was. She had all the information he needed.

“Here is Rosenberg,” she said, showing him the first photograph in a large stack, “the man Hitler selected to oversee the spiritual and philosophic training of the Nazis. In other words, the chief racist.”

He was sitting in her living room, which was lit only by the small fire and one dim bulb. There were flowers in a vase on the coffee table; a bottle of cognac on the bureau. As Valland showed him each photograph—Göring, Lohse, von Behr, and the other key Nazi and ERR figures—Rorimer tried to appear interested in the small cakes she had baked for his visit. But the ordinary nature of the scene could not diminish the extraordinary nature of the discoveries.

She showed him more photographs of Göring, inspecting artwork with Walter Andreas Hofer, Bruno Lohse, and Colonel von Behr at his side. In another he was manhandling a small landscape, a silk scarf around his neck and a cigar in his hand. There was Lohse handing his patron a painting; von Behr in uniform behind his enormous desk, his lackeys sitting on the nearby chairs. Usually, Rorimer recognized them before she even told him their names. He knew them, he realized, because Valland had spoken about them so descriptively many times before.

She’s grooming me
, he thought.
She’s been grooming me all along.
3

She disappeared and came back with more material. Receipts, copies of train manifestos, everything the Western Allies would need to prove which items had been stolen and shipped to Germany through the Jeu de Paume. She got up and returned with another stack: photographs of some of the works themselves, many stripped of their frames for ease of transport and hung carefully on the walls. Behind a curtain out of sight, another photograph showed artwork squeezed onto every inch of wall space and stuffed viewing stands.

“Vermeer’s
Astronomer
,” Valland said, stopping on one particularly important work. “Stolen by the ERR right off the wall of Edouard de Rothschild’s sitting room. Göring had a mania for paintings by Vermeer.”

Even after everything he had seen, Rorimer was stunned.
The Astronomer
was one of those rare works that had become an acknowledged masterpiece.

“This went into Göring’s private collection?”

“No. This one went to Hitler. They say he coveted it more than any work in France. So Göring sent it to him in November 1940, soon after he decided to assume control of the ERR operations from Rosenberg. Göring wanted to prove to Hitler the operation would redound to the glory of Germany, and that the very best works, those reserved for the Führer, were being located and transported home. Many others, though, went into Göring’s private collection.”

“And the rest?”

“They burned some of them,” she said. “In the summer of 1943. Mostly works by modern masters, considered by the Nazis degenerate for their depictions of the world. They kept several they thought could be sold. The ‘worthless’ pieces were slashed with knives and trucked to the Jeu de Paume, then burned in the adjacent gardens. I would estimate one military truck full, about five or six hundred works. Klee, Miró, Max Ernst, Picasso. The frames and stretchers crackled first. Then the paintings would explode into flame, burn hotly, and dwindle swiftly into ash. It was impossible to save anything.”
4

“Just like Berlin in 1938,” Rorimer said, remembering a bonfire of modern art that had, in those more innocent times, shocked the world. By now the world understood there was nothing the Nazis wouldn’t do.