The Monuments Men (45 page)

After shaking Hitler’s hand and explaining that he needed to join his staff, Hermann Göring left the building, knowing he would never return. Albert Speer observed that “[I] felt I was experiencing a historic moment. The leadership of the Reich was parting company.”
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The next day, April 21, Göring arrived in Berchtesgaden, the Nazi retreat in the center of the Alpine Redoubt. Waiting for him there was Walter Andreas Hofer, his personal curator. His art collection had left his estate at Veldenstein in early April and, after numerous delays in the faltering German rail system, arrived in Berchtesgaden on April 16. After a few days, the eight railcars containing the artwork were sent northwest to Unterstein. When Göring arrived, the only railcars remaining at Berchtesgaden were the two or three that contained his furniture, his records, and his library. Hofer was living in one of the cars.

The situation, Göring knew, was grim. The Führer was clearly ill; anyone with a shred of common sense knew the Führerbunker was soon to become his tomb. The war was lost; the personal bounty of all those years dispersed; the Nazi movement splintered. The Reichsmarschall, momentarily safe in the German Alps, believed himself the only man capable of pulling together the last of the Reich and successfully suing for peace. And, after all, he was Hitler’s designated successor.

On April 23, Göring sent a radiogram to Hitler. Aware that Berlin was surrounded and the situation hopeless, the Reichsmarschall was prepared to step in and lead the Nazi Party. If he did not hear back by 10:00 p.m. that evening, he would assume the Führer was incapacitated and take command. Hitler did not respond until April 25, 1945, but his reaction was furious and determined: He ordered the SS to arrest his second in command. The Third Reich was disintegrating.

Meanwhile, at Altaussee, the art restorer Karl Sieber ran his hands along the grain of his greatest work.
Here’s where the panel split
, he thought, running his fingers along the wood.
And here the paint bubbled
. Before the war, Sieber had been a modest but highly respected art restorer in Berlin, a man so quiet, patient, and in love with his work that opinions of him ranged from the last honest craftsman in Germany to a complete simpleton. He had joined the Nazi Party for business reasons on the advice of a Jewish friend, and as a consequence his practice had flourished. Artwork had been pouring into Berlin from the conquered territories, and even if it was stolen or acquired through shady means, it still needed to be cared for and restored. Maybe even more so, in fact, since the Nazi officials were less art lovers than greedy hoarders, and they often treated their possessions roughly. Sieber had worked on more world-class pieces in the last four years than most restorers see in a lifetime. But never had he imagined working on a piece of this magnitude, one of the wonders of Western civilization: the Ghent Altarpiece. And he never imagined working like this: a mile within a mountain, in a remote Austrian salt mine.

He circled the panel so that he could look into the face of Saint John. What humanity in those old eyes! What skill at invoking the most exacting details! Every hair was painted with a single brushstroke from a single bristle. He could almost feel the folds of the cloak, the vellum of the Bible, the sadness and awe in the old saint’s eyes. The only thing he couldn’t see anymore was the split in the wood panel that had occurred while the piece was in transit, the repair he had worked so many months to make utterly and completely invisible to even the most trained eye.

It was a shame Sieber had to leave it in this unsafe chamber. But the wooden panel was taller than he was, and far too heavy for him to carry. He needed help to move it to the chambers deeper in the mountain where he and a few others had been transporting the best pieces since yesterday. So he turned to
The Astronomer
, painted by Jan Vermeer in 1668, almost two hundred and fifty years after the Ghent Altarpiece, but still showing the same delicacy of brushwork and attention to the most precise detail.

But that’s where the similarities ended. The Ghent Altarpiece was an acknowledged, adored masterpiece from the moment of its creation, the centerpiece of the Dutch Renaissance. Vermeer was a provincial painter from Delft who died deeply in debt and completely unknown to the larger world. He had been rediscovered in the late 1800s, two hundred years after his death. Now he was considered a leader of the golden age of Dutch painting, the great master of light, the unsurpassed chronicler of domestic life. His
Girl with a Pearl Earring
was known as the “Dutch Mona Lisa,”
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but this painting,
The Astronomer
, was every bit as powerful and unknowable. It showed a scholar in his chamber, an observation book open before him, studying intently the object of his obsession: a globe of the universe. What tinkerer, what scientist or art restorer, hadn’t experienced such a moment, when the rest of the world disappeared and only the facts at your fingertips stood before you? Who hadn’t fallen in love with discovery or felt that thirst for knowledge?

But then who could ever say what a man in such a moment was thinking? The astronomer’s touch was delicate, almost shy. A natural light from the open window brushed the globe and the astronomer’s outstetched hand. Was he simply measuring another in an endless series of distances, or had he found what he had been looking for? Here was a man wrapped completely in his work, a moment universal and idiosyncratic, momentous and inconsequential.

And it was untrue. There was no untouched astronomer, no detached craftsman. The lead art restorer at Altaussee knew that better than anyone. Bury a man a mile within a mountain, hundreds of miles from civilization, give him the work of a lifetime and all the resources needed to do it, and he was still subject to the whims of the world.

With one last look at the scholar—looking now, he thought, almost fearful of his discoveries—Karl Sieber picked up Hitler’s favorite painting. Then, looking once over his shoulder, he disappeared into the dark passageway. He was headed back, farther into the mountain, to the Schoerckmayerwerk, one of the few mine chambers he believed—he hoped—would survive even the most cataclysmic bomb blast.

CHAPTER 42

Plans

Central Germany, Southern Germany, and Altaussee, Austria

April 27–28, 1945

O
n April 27, 1945, a young ordnance captain walked into the office of the chief of staff in the forward section of U.S. First Army. With a smile, he placed a small metal rod and ball on the desk. The commanding officer stared at them for a moment, then picked up the rod and looked at it from one end to the other. The intricately wrought, jewel-encrusted piece looked like a scepter made for a king. In fact, that’s exactly what it was. The soldier had brought him the coronation scepter and coronation orb of the eighteenth-century Prussian king known as Frederick the Great.

“Where did you find it, soldier?”

“In a munitions dump, sir.”

“Where?”

“In a hole in the forests in the middle of nowhere, sir.”

“Is there anything else?”

“Sir, you are not going to believe what is down there.”

A little more than a day later, on the morning of April 29, 1945, George Stout received a call from First Army Monuments Man Walker Hancock. Stout had just finished sending an urgent request to SHAEF headquarters in France, begging for supplies: trucks, jeeps, packing materials, at least 250 men to guard repositories. He had received no guarantees.

“I’m outside Bernterode, a small town in the northern Thuringian forest,” Hancock told him, almost tripping over his words. “There’s a mine here, George, with 400,000 tons of explosives in it.
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I can’t tell you what else is down there, not over the phone, but it’s important, George. Maybe even more important than Siegen.”

While Hancock was exploring the mine at Bernterode, Emmerich Pöchmüller, the director general of Altaussee, was sitting in his office at the salt mine. In his hand was an order he had just typed; at the bottom was his signature. Seeing his own name there, in his own hand, made him feel sick.

He didn’t want to send the order, but he could see no other option. After weeks of effort, he had been granted authority over the fate of the salt mine, but that authorization had not come from Eigruber. It had come from a minor museum official acting on thirdhand information purportedly from Martin Bormann’s assistant Helmut von Hummel in Berchtesgaden. It was hearsay at best, and probably an outright fabrication. If Pöchmüller’s order fell into Eigruber’s hands, the gauleiter would see it as insubordination, and it would mean his arrest—if not his immediate execution. But with the madman Eigruber in power, and no word from an ever more isolated Berlin, Altaussee was doomed. Something had to be done. As Pöchmüller walked toward the office of Otto Högler, the mine’s chief engineer, he couldn’t help but feel he was carrying his own death warrant.

“New orders,” Pöchmüller said, handing Högler a sheet of paper. “I’m off to Bad Ischl. Don’t wait for my return.”
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28 April 1945

Mr.

Mining Engineer Högler

Saltmine Altaussee

Regarding: Depository

You are hereby being instructed to remove all 8 crates of marble recently stored within the mines in agreement with Bergungsbeauftragter Dr. Seiberl and to deposit these in a shed which to you appears suitable as a temporary storage depot.

You are further being instructed to prepare the agreed palsy as soon as possible. The point in time when the palsy is supposed to take place will only be presented to you by myself personally.

The General Director,

Emmerich Pöchmüller