The Monuments Men (41 page)

Understandably, the generals moved quickly. In Room #8, now evacuated of all but essential personnel, they looked over rows and rows of gold bars and banknotes worth hundred of millions of dollars. In the next room, they flipped through the paintings. Patton thought they were “worth about $2.50 and best suited for saloons”;
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in actuality, he was looking at pieces from the collection of the world-famous Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Other rooms, reserved for the SS, were crammed with gold and silver platters and vases, all flattened with hammer blows to make them easier to store. Entire trunks were filled with jewelry, watches, silverware, clothing, eyeglasses, and gold cigarette cases, the last vestiges of an enormous hoard the SS had not yet been able to smelt. There were eight bags of gold rings, many of them wedding bands. A soldier opened another bag and lifted out a handful of gold fillings. They had been pulled from the teeth of Holocaust victims.

“What would you do with all that loot?” Eisenhower asked over lunch, referring to Germany’s bullion and paper currency.

Patton replied, in his usual gruff fashion, that he’d spend it on weapons or a gold medallion “for every son of a bitch in Third Army.”
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The generals laughed, but the question was far from academic. Much to the dismay of Stout and the Monuments Men, Bernstein was proceeding under the assumption that everything in the mine, including the artwork, was captured enemy loot. It would be months before he was disavowed of that notion.

The lightheartedness stopped for good that afternoon when the generals visited Ohrdruf, the first Nazi work camp liberated by American troops. Ohrdruf was not a death camp, like Auschwitz, where “undesirables” were sent for extermination, but a place where human beings were systematically worked to death. In silence, the generals and their staff officers walked the camp. “The smell of death overwhelmed us,” General Bradley wrote, “even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung in shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. Lice crawled over the yellow skin of their sharp, bony frames. A[n Allied] guard showed us how the blood had congealed in coarse black scabs where the starving prisoners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food…. I was too revolted to speak. For here death had been so fouled by degradation that it both stunned and numbed us.”
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Several survivors, shrunken to mere skeletons, pulled themselves up on shriveled legs and saluted the generals as they passed. The generals walked on in stony silence, their lips drawn tight. Several members of their staff, all of them hardened by war, openly wept. The hard-nosed Patton, “Old Blood and Guts,” ducked behind a building and threw up.

Every American soldier, Eisenhower insisted, every man and woman not on the front lines, must see this. “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.”
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Patton put it more bluntly: “You’ll never believe how bastardly these Krauts can be, until you’ve seen this pesthole yourself.”
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It wasn’t until midnight that Patton, exhausted from two of the most remarkable and terrible tours in history, lay down to sleep. Before turning off the light, he noticed that his watch had stopped. Tuning in to BBC radio for the correct time, he heard one last bit of news: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died.

While the generals toured the main chambers of Merkers, Stout toured the nearby mines. The Merkers complex included more than thirty-five miles of tunnels and a dozen entrances.
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There was no inventory of the works in the mines, but Dr. Rave had a list of the museums and collections from which they had come. The Berlin museum collections were the first to arrive and had been stored in the Ransbach mine. Rave had found the mine unsatisfactory and subsequent shipments had gone to Merkers. This worried Stout since the damp, salty Merkers was a less than ideal place for art, but the elevator was out of service at Ransbach so he couldn’t inspect its contents.

No matter, there was plenty to do. Descending into the Philippstal mine, he found reference books and maps. Lincoln Kirstein descended into the Menzengraben mine, only to have the power fail, leaving him trapped in complete darkness and silence thousands of feet under the earth. “Rather than walk up to the height of two Empire State buildings,” he wrote home, “I explored a vast Luftwaffe uniform depot and chose a parachute knife as a souvenir.”
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On the morning of April 13, George Stout worked out the materials needed to pack all the artwork for shipment: boxes, crates, files, tape, thousands of feet of packing materials. His conclusion: “No chance of getting them.”
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With the elevator back in service, he descended into the Ransbach mine with the disagreeable Dr. Schawe. The mine was almost twice as deep as the main shaft at Merkers, and significantly more cramped. The books alone took up most of the space. Stout estimated a million volumes, maybe two. The forty-five cases of artwork from the Berlin museum sat where Rave had left them. Seven had been rifled, but major pieces by Dürer and Holbein had not been touched. The collection of costumes from the State Opera had been ransacked. “Russian and Polish laborers,” one of his German guides grunted. Stout knew he meant
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laborers, and found it hard to blame them for their thievery.

Back at Merkers, Stout learned from Bernstein the plans had changed. Instead of evacuating on April 17, they would be leaving on April 15. “A rash procedure,” Stout noted in his diary, “and ascribed to military necessity.”
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Military necessity was too strong. Military convenience, the thing Eisenhower warned against in his initial orders on cultural preservation, was probably more apt. General Patton was charging ahead, and he didn’t want to leave four battalions behind to guard a gold mine. Bernstein, meanwhile, had his own reasons for haste. At the Yalta Conference in late February, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had partitioned the German state into zones of control. Merkers, and all its treasures, were in the Russian zone. If Russian troops arrived before the mine was evacuated—and there were persistent rumors of contact between American and Russian advanced patrols in the “no-man’s land” of central Germany—its contents would disappear into the hands of the Red Army. The Soviets were in no mood for equanimity, and understandably so. They had suffered millions of casualties in the Nazis’ brutal and devastating invasion of their country, including more than 1.5 million dead in the siege of Stalingrad alone. Their forces, currently hacking and slashing their way into German territory, included Trophy Brigades: art and finance officials whose job it was to find and seize enemy assets, looted or otherwise. Stalin expected to be restituted in kind in gold, silver, carved marble, and works of art for what his people had lost.

Thirty minutes after midnight on April 15, George Stout finished his plans for the evacuation of Merkers. Unable to secure packing materials, he had requisitioned from the Luftwaffe uniform depot Kirstein found in the Menzengraben mine a thousand sheepskin coats, the kind German officers used on the Russian front. Most of the forty tons of artwork would be wrapped in the coats, recrated with similar works, then organized into appropriate collections. He met with Colonel Bernstein. The gold was too heavy to be loaded to the tops of the trucks, so crates of paintings would be mixed in to maximize the load. Loading would start in an hour, at 0200, thirty-six hours ahead of the original schedule. By 0430 the artwork already in crates or boxes was brought to the surface and loaded. “No time to sleep,” Stout wrote.
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He had to prepare invoices and detailed instructions for the unloading and storage of the artwork in Frankfurt.

At 0800, an hour before the first convoy left, Stout started on the uncrated paintings. He planned to move them to a building above ground for temporary storage, but even with twenty-five men, the work proved impossible. By noon, the crew had reached fifty, and Stout had decided to crate the paintings underground. Unfortunately, the large crates were awkward to handle, especially in the confusion of the mineshafts. Jeeps had been brought down to help transport the gold, blocking some passages. Their exhaust fouled the air, and the occasional backfire of an engine echoed ominously in the rocky corridors. The gold was being sprayed with water to remove the corrosive salt of the mine, and the main shaft to the elevator was ankle-deep with the runoff. Soldiers were scurrying in all directions, carrying stacks of money, bags of gold, and ancient art, and it was all Stout could do to keep his men from wandering off in the confusion and not returning to work.

At 0005, five minutes past midnight on April 16, Stout reported “all paintings on ground level, in 3 places. All print boxes on ground level in 2 places. Cased works below ground somewhat rearranged and piled in part ready to load at elevator shaft.”
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The loading at Ransbach started at 0830; the loading at Merkers a half hour later with seventy-five men and five officers. At 1300, prisoners of war were brought in to assist the operation. By 2100 all the paintings were loaded. Stout went to the Dietlas mine, reached by an underground passage from the main shaft at Merkers, and found photographic equipment, modern paintings, and racks of archives. One set from Weimar was marked 933–1931, a thousand years of municipal history. “Inspection finished 2300,” he wrote. “Returned Merkers, ate supper, reported.”
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The art convoy—thirty-two ten-ton trucks with a motorized infantry escort and air cover—left for Frankfurt at 0830. It arrived at 1400. Stout noted only “complicated unloading. L. Kirstein a great help. All handled by 105 PWs [prisoners of war] in poor health. Storage in temporary arrangement 8 rooms basement level, one large room underground.” Stout’s inventory listed 393 paintings (uncrated), 2,091 print boxes, 1,214 cases, and 140 textiles, representing most of the Prussian state art collection. “Job finished and area secured 2330.”
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“The last time I saw them,” Lincoln Kirstein wrote in his account of the operation, “Lieutenant Stout was gravely whirling a swing aerometer in all corners of their new home, determining the humidity.”
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He had been up for almost four straight days, but as always with George Stout the job got done—and done right.

“I felt badly that I could not get to write to you during those five days,” Stout wrote Margie on April 19 with his usual understatement. “It was really busy… a queer job and outlandish—in and around some salt mines from 1200 to 2500 feet below ground. You’ve read about some of it in the papers. A mistake that it ever got there, and could have been a very serious mistake. The publicity was naturally clamped down on and I can’t tell you more now.

“It was really warm here today, and I walked for an hour and a half. The sun is fine and, after the rat race, I begin to remember that I am myself and not merely a set of functions. At times it is good to be only a piece of machinery, for then you do not dream of home or wish for delights that you cannot have. But I’m not morbid. The job is interesting. And it has got to be done. And I am very well.”
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He ended by telling her of his prize acquisition from Merkers: two fur-lined coats from the Russian front he could use as bedrolls. Those coats and a paratrooper’s knife were his only souvenirs.

Robert Posey, who had worked with Stout on and off at Merkers, was even more matter-of-fact about the operation. “At the gold mine they filled my helmet with twenty dollar American gold pieces and said I could have it,” he wrote Alice on April 20, a few days after emerging from the mine. “I couldn’t lift it off the ground—it contained $35,000—so we poured it back in the sacks and left it. I seem to have absolutely no greed for money for I felt no thrill at seeing so much of the stuff. Your poem means more to me.”
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