The Monuments Men (42 page)

It had been a remarkable few weeks, but no Monuments Men were celebrating. If the Western Allied forces could stumble on Merkers, they could easily stumble on something just as extraordinary and unexpected, as Monuments Man Walker Hancock would discover. And still out there, somewhere in Nazi hands, were known to be two great treasures troves of looted European art: the cream of the French artistic patrimony, according to Rose Valland stored in the castle at Neuschwanstein; and Hitler’s treasure chamber deep at Altaussee, in the Austrian Alps, which contained many of the greatest works of art in the world.

SECTION

IV

The Void

CHAPTER 37

Salt

Altaussee, Austria

1100–1945

T
he Alps, the tallest and most rugged mountain range in Europe, rise about a mile above sea level along the German-Austrian border. They form a land of steep rocky peaks, full of snowcapped mountains and picturesque chalets. The road from Salzburg, the most important entry point from the north, winds like hairpins up the mountains and down into deep green forested valleys, each one seemingly more remote than the next. For miles, the forests are so thick there is nothing to see but trees. Then, suddenly, an alpine lake will appear, and across it a gingerbread town of steep roofs and carved decorations wedged against a mountain slope. About forty-four miles from Salzburg lies the Pötschen Pass. The road over it is so steep, twisting, and precarious that it is almost unfit for driving, but the pass eventually levels out into a high alpine valley, at the end of which is the tiny village of Bad Aussee and finally, a few miles beyond, tucked against the banks of another spectacular alpine lake, the even smaller village of Altaussee.

From there, the road begins a climb so steep that the Pötschen Pass seems a mild slope by comparison. Along the road runs a clear, crashing alpine stream, and beyond are the immense and breathtaking mountains. They are limestone deposits, formed in the depths of an ancient sea, and even on the sunniest day they are pale gray beneath their caps of snow. A bleak stone building, perched precariously above a thousand-foot precipice, marks the beginning of the end. Beyond is only a low irregular building and a wall of rock, the steep side of the Sandling Mountain. Bored into the mountain is a small tunnel, the main entrance to an ancient salt mine. Local legend holds that salt had been mined here for three thousand years—before the founding of Rome, at the height of the ancient Egyptian empire. Local written records, however, only date back to the 1100s.

In those days, at the turn of the first millennium, salt was one of the foundations of civilization. Without it, food couldn’t be preserved or transported, so whole societies survived because of salt. Roman legionnaires were sometimes paid in salt (the basis of the English word “salary”), and merchants trod the salt roads in large caravans, linking the Western world of Europe with the Eastern world of Asia and Arabia. In Tibet, Marco Polo noticed that salt was pressed into wafers, imprinted with the image of the Grand Khan, and used as money. Timbuktu, the great lost civilization of Africa, valued salt as highly as gold. The early Germans, whose Visigoth ancestors sacked Rome and threw civilization into darkness, were economically dependent on their salt mines, and especially the taxes from their salt trading routes. The city of Munich, an early base of power for the Nazi Party, was founded in 1158 so the ruler of Bavaria could more easily collect a tax on the salt being transported from the city of Salzburg (German for “Salt Castle”).

And throughout the centuries, as cities and empires rose and fell, the Steinberg mine in the Sandling Mountain of Austria, just above the village and lake known as Altaussee, continued to produce salt. The salt was not mined with picks and shovels, but dissolved by the flow of water through special pipes and sluices. The water came from the mountain above, especially during the spring snowmelt, and descended by gravitational force through the mine. There it was inundated with rock salt, then sent down the mountain to Bad Ischl, more than seventeen miles away, where the brine was evaporated to form pure crystal salt. It was left to 125 miners to maintain the pipes and sluices, shore up the catacombs against the pressure of the mountain, and make sure the vast labyrinth of rooms and tunnels didn’t merge together and destabilize the entire structure.

Since the 1300s, this job had been performed by members of a small group of families, all living in the hills near the mine. Over the centuries humans grew larger, but the miners stayed the same size, until they eventually seemed dwarfed by the demands of the mine and their time underground (diet and inbreeding were more likely causes). Even in the early twentieth century, this small isolated community spoke a dialect last popular in the Middle Ages. They explored their tunnels with acetylene torches, and wore the white linen suits and peaked caps of medieval miners.

But in the winter of 1943–1944, the salt mine at Altaussee was assaulted by the modern world. First came the tracked vehicles necessary for maneuvering over the roads in the winter, when the five meters of snow were almost level with the treetops. They were followed by supply jeeps, and eventually a seemingly endless line of trucks going back and forth through the steep mountain passes. Nazi officers descended on the mine as guards. Workers arrived, expanding catacombs and building wooden floors, walls, and ceilings in dozens of salt chambers. Giant wooden racks were assembled in workrooms deep within the mountain and hammered into position, in some places three stories high. Experts and clerks moved in; a shop was built deep inside the mine where technicians could work and even live for days at a time. And it was all done for art.

Viennese museums had been the first to store their art treasures at Altaussee, but the mine was soon requisitioned by Hitler for his personal use. Worried by increasing Allied air raids, the Führer ordered all the treasures destined for his great museum at Linz, scattered until that time in several locations, sent deep into seclusion. It wasn’t just the remoteness, or the relative convenience to Linz, which was only about a hundred miles away, that made Altaussee ideal. Dug straight into the side of a massive mountain, the horizontal mine was impregnable to aerial bombardment—even if the bombers could locate it in the vast Sandling mountain range. The salt in the walls absorbed excess moisture, leaving the humidity constant at 65 percent. The temperature varied only between 40 (in the summer, when the mine was coolest) and 47 degrees Fahrenheit (in the winter). The environment helped to preserve the paintings and prints, and metal objects such as armor could easily be protected against its corrosive effect by a thin layer of grease or gelatin. No one, not even Hitler, could have devised a more ideal natural hideaway for tons of stolen loot.

And still, the miners mined as they had for a thousand years, diverting water into empty corridors, washing their rock salt down the mountain to Bad Ischl. Even as artwork continued to arrive through 1944 and into 1945, the miners worked. Often they were called upon to help unload shipments, many stamped “A.H., Linz.” From May 1944 to April 1945, more than 1,687 paintings arrived from the Führerbau, Hitler’s office in Munich. In the fall of 1944, the Ghent Altarpiece was transferred from Neuschwanstein. Michelangelo’s
Bruges Madonna
arrived soon after, having been transported out of Belgium by boat, in October 1944.

On April 10, 1945, and again three days later on April 13, eight more crates were moved into the mine. They were the property not of the Nazi leaders in Berlin but of August Eigruber, the local Nazi gauleiter (governor). The crates were marked “
Vorsicht—Marmor—nicht stürtzen.
” Attention—Marble—Do Not Drop.
1
But they didn’t contain statues, as the miners who moved them deep into the mine assumed. Gauleiter Eigruber, a fanatical Austrian Nazi, was enthusiastic in his support of Adolf Hitler’s Nero Decree. The crates contained not artwork, but 500-kilogram bombs (approximately 1,100 pounds), each one large enough to comfortably seat six men. Eigruber was determined to destroy the mine… and its priceless contents.

Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower looked at the map of Germany with trepidation. The crossing of the Rhine by Western Allied forces, combined with the Red Army advance to the Oder River, had sealed Germany’s fate. Churchill, among others, was urging the Western Allies to consider postwar objectives, which in the short term meant above all else beating the Soviets to Berlin. Eisenhower had at first agreed, but circumstances on the ground were leading him to reevaluate the wisdom of a march on Berlin. At a March 27 news conference, Eisenhower was asked if he thought such a march could even be accomplished. The Western Allies were still two hundred miles from the German capital; the Soviets were just over thirty miles away. “Well,” Eisenhower admitted, “I think mileage alone ought to make [the Soviets] do it.”
2

But it wasn’t the Red Army he was worried about. The Germans, while perhaps doomed, were far from defeated. The Wehrmacht was still fighting on all fronts, with a strong fortress at their back: the Alps.

For months, many Western Allied war planners had assumed the German-Austrian borderland—the area from Salzburg in the north, Linz in the east, and the Brenner Pass near the Italian border in the west—would be the last stronghold of Nazism. The region, Hitler’s home territority, was known to contain stockpiles of weapons and food, and it was believed to be rife with fortified, entrenched defensive positions. As one SHAEF report had summarized the situation, “The area is, by virtue of its terrain, almost impregnable.”
3

Eisenhower’s fear, and that of his top advisors like General Bradley, was that Hitler would slip out of Berlin and take refuge in the mountains. Intelligence agents confirmed that for weeks crack SS divisions had been moving south from Berlin, west from the Russian front, and north from the Italian theater. They seemed to be converging on Berchtesgaden, the small mountain town where Hitler and his top aides had summer homes and often conducted government business. With Hitler at the helm—or even without him—Eisenhower feared even a modest number of well-trained, die-hard troops holed up in the nearby mountains could hold off Allied forces for years.

Eisenhower despised the Germans. He blamed them for the war, and for its often inhuman destructiveness. And he was still smoldering about the Ohrdruf work camp, which he visited with some of his generals the same day as Merkers. “The things I saw beggar description,” he wrote to his boss, General Marshall. “While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room where they [had] piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give
first-hand
evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’ ”
4
He wrote more simply to his wife, Mamie, “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could exist in this world! It was horrible.”
5
Eisenhower had no intention of allowing the Nazis any refuge or scrap of hope.