The Monuments Men (49 page)

In the Kemenate, a part of the castle containing the fireplace room and reached by a separate door, the Nazis had burned uniforms and documents. Rorimer saw Hitler’s signature, still visible on a curled corner of burned paper, and feared the archives destroyed. But the next room was lined with filing cabinets containing photographs, catalogues, and records. There was a catalogue card for every confiscation undertaken by the ERR in France—more than 21,000 confiscations in all, including shipments that had gone to other repositories. It was evidence of much of what the Nazis had stolen from Western Europe; and as Rose Valland had understood when she told him about the importance of Neuschwanstein, it was absolutely essential to identifying and getting it all back home.

“No one comes in here,” Rorimer told the sergeant of the guard, who was trailing the inspection party. “Not even the guards. This building is off-limits.”

There was a trapdoor in the floor. Rorimer had it nailed shut, then a steel trunk was placed over the top. The heavy doors of the Kemenate were pulled shut and locked. Then James Rorimer, with the flair of a showman, took an ancient Rothschild seal he had discovered in the looted treasures—
SEMPER FIDELIS
, “always faithful,” it read—and emblazoned the crack between the doors with sealing wax.

CHAPTER 47

Final Days

Berlin, Germany, and Southern Germany

May 5–6, 1945

O
n May 2, Red Army troops entered the upper half of an area in the middle of Berlin that housed several famous German museums. German troops had fled the area, known as Museum Island, only hours before, after the curators responsible for the Pergamon altar had persuaded them not to use pieces of the famous ancient Greek altar as a protective barricade for the fighting.

With the city’s museums secure, Red Army art experts turned to the enormous flaktowers (-anti-aircraft towers) that held many of the large paintings and other works of art that could not be evacuated to Merkers and other German repositories. The Zoo Flaktower, the largest of the three, was 135 feet high and went six stories underground. The concrete walls were eight feet thick, the windows covered with steel shutters. In addition to a hospital, military barracks, national radio station, ammunitions stores, and museum storage, it could shelter 30,000 people.
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On May 1, Soviet troops had overrun the Zoo Flaktower, looking for gold, Hitler’s body, and other high-ranking Nazis. They had found only wounded soldiers and civilians, laid out by desperate doctors atop crates that contained carved reliefs from the Pergamon Altar, the treasures of ancient Troy (known collectively as Priam’s Gold), and countless other masterpieces. By May 4, the wounded had been evacuated and the flaktower was under the control of Stalin’s Trophy Brigades, which were in charge of transporting anything of value (from art to food and machinery) to the Soviet Union as unofficial restitutions in kind for the devastation incurred at the hands of the Nazis. The Trophy Brigades immediately began organizing the contents for transport east; within a month, the tower was largely empty.

The Friedrichshain Flaktower, which contained 434 large-scale and extremely important paintings, hundreds of sculptures, porcelain objects, and antiquities (treasures Rave had been unable to move to Merkers), met a different fate. Between May 3 and May 5 Soviet troops inspected the tower and noticed it had been broken into. There were 800,000 freed Eastern European slave laborers wandering throughout the city, and many more desperate Germans trying their best to survive in the void. Looting was rampant. The thieves at the flaktower had been drawn by the food stockpiled on the first floor; they hadn’t touched the valuable paintings stored nearby. But the treasures were by no means safe, for on the night of May 5 a fire broke out in the tower. The remaining foodstocks and artworks stored on the first floor were destroyed.

Was the fire set by common thieves? Was it the result of the burning torches so many carried since the city had no electricity? Or were Nazi fanatics and SS officials so desperate to keep the treasures of the German state out of Soviet hands that they extended the Nero Decree to these works of art?

The answer hardly mattered, at least not to those particular Soviet troops. They refused to post guards even though valuable artwork remained undamaged on the second and third floors. While the Trophy Brigades worked at the Zoo Flaktower, the Friedrichshain Flaktower was left to the usual assortment of desperate scavengers. It wasn’t long before a second fire broke out, more extensive than the first. The contents—sculpture, porcelain, books, and the 434 paintings, including one by Botticelli, one by van Dyck, three by Caravaggio, ten by Rubens, and five by Hermann Göring’s favorite artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder—were assumed destroyed, the latest victims of the void.

In Unterstein, the frantic and hungry townspeople, whipped up by rumors that the railcars contained schnapps, descended on Hermann Göring’s personal train. Some left with bread and wine—the Reichsmarschall had added extra boxcars of supplies to his train to support himself in exile—while, as Allied investigator and Monuments Man Bernard Taper later discovered, “those who came later had to be satisfied with things like a school of Rogier van der Weyden painting, a thirteenth century Limoges reliquary, four late Gothic wood statues, and other such baubles—whatever they could grab. It was a real mob scene. Three women laid hands on the same Aubusson carpet, and a heated struggle ensued until along came a local dignitary, who said to them, ‘Women, be civilized, divide it among you.’ So they did. Two of the women used their portions as bedspreads, but the third cut hers up to make window curtains.”
2

Each evening, Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein, the brilliantly matched Monuments Men for Third Army, looked at the big map tacked to the wall of their forward operating base. The map was covered in acetate, and each day’s advance was marked in red crayon. Every night, the lines were adjusted as rumors were sifted for fact. The Soviets had been met at Torgau in late April. Italy had surrendered. A warrant officer claimed he had gone to Bohemia and back with no resistance. Posey and Kirstein noticed only one constant: The area of German control always got smaller, but the land still outside the grasp of the Western Allies always managed to contain the salt mine at Altaussee.

Nor was that their only disappointment. As the Allied armies closed in on the Austrian Alps, another truth was becoming increasingly apparent: Altaussee was not going to fall into U.S. Third Army territory, as Posey and Kirstein had always hoped and believed, but into that of U.S. Seventh Army. James Rorimer was going to be the Monuments Man tasked with the mine; Posey and Kirstein were going to be left with battered towns and minor castles.

Robert Posey was bothered by the injustice, not so much for himself—like all the Monuments Men, he had always shared information as soon as he received it—but for Third Army. It seemed absurd to him that another army group would receive the honors of a find like Altaussee when, in the last few months, Third Army had destroyed an entire German army east of the Moselle River, jumped the Rhine, and broken the enemy’s spirit with its deep thrusts into the German heartland. Wasn’t it Third Army that had led the charge across France? That had broken the unbreakable citadel at Metz? That had scoured the industrial regions of south-central Germany? And wasn’t it he and Lincoln Kirstein, Third Army men, who had discovered not just the existence but the location of Hitler’s treasure room?

“I am sorry that it was not our army who was supposed to meet the Russians if you were looking forward to it with so much anxiety,” he wrote Alice, with typical Third Army pride. “I can assure you that this is the glamour army of all the Allied ones, and the part we are called upon to play is always the difficult one and so the important one. This outfit feels itself to be king pin pretty much as an ever winning football team does. The other armies are looked upon as all right but not brilliant and anyone back of the combat zone is simply too low to even be thought of. If they are as far back as England they are simply civilians in a sort of uniform. People who don’t feel that way gradually go out into some other kind of organization. Generally it is their own choice for to be in a club that vociferously declares itself to be the outstanding thing of all time would be too much for soldiers of less strong convictions.”
3

Kirstein, far from motivated by perceived slights or the camaraderie of Third Army, found this new world depressing. “If you work too long in the skeletons of fine buildings,” he wrote, “estimating the love and care of their creation, the irrelevance of their destruction, the energy needed for their approximate restoration—wondering even about the possibility of their restoration—your confusion settles into gloom. After seeing the spectacular corpses of Mainz and Frankfurt, Würzburg, Nuremberg and Munich, it was always a relief to come upon some small, untouched market town.”
4

A few days deeper into the southern German countryside, he was beyond even the comfort of small untouched towns. The German people—and especially the German aristocracy—were grinding him down as much as the destruction. On May 6, he wrote:
5

Recently mad activity has been given way to by mad activity. On our trail for loot we have uncovered the local aristocracy in a series of enormous castles spread all over this picturesque province filled with cases of the contents of all the museums, plus cases of personal belongings, books, and dealers who were invited into the schloss to save their lives from the advance of the russian-jewish-negro-american army. One lovely old countess received us in bed. She was ill, oh so ill and her house was a hospital for German (lightly) wounded. She only had one poor little room in this elegant old mansion, and almost broke her neck flying into bed no doubt, as we swept into the court. She was an ancient bitch, Italian, who married a great german name, and is harboring a whole slue of art dealers, young “sick” counts and barons… and my, have they had a terrible time. They almost didn’t get out of Paris in time, and them with their weak lungs…. She so hoped that her lovely boys (pictures brought out), and they were wildly pretty, her two adorable SS officers were privileged to surrender to the Americans all of whom are perfectly charming (where have I been all my life), rather than to the un-democratic and dirty awful Russian-jewish-polacks, who we MUST fight quickly, and besides she had only one little insignificant request to make. It seems some displaced Russian jewish polack american negroes had taken to shooting the deer in the animal-park, and it was not in season, and it was giving the chief Forester NIGHTMARES…. She clacked her false teeth. Her sister the maiden ladied princess about 58, was at least honest in her nastiness. She said that she would shake hands if it was allowed. Oh I laughed, you know in the war I don’t care who I shake hands with. Anyway the old countess was useful, and we uncovered what we wanted to uncover, and she gave us notes on her coronetted note paper to all her cousins in all the other castles each of whom is harboring a nest of itching vipers…. The [art] dealers were another little knot of grimness…. They had all gotten rich at the point of a pistol, and they never had bought stolen goods from expropriated jewish collections, unless the collections had been purified by passing through two or 3 intermediaries who took their cut. Surely the Americans would not force them to surrender properties thus perfectly in good faith acquired. As for what will ultimately happen to the materials, fine porcelains, good uninteresting minor masters, stamps, snuff boxes, furniture, etc. I do not in the slightest care of the original owners who are doubtless dead or the present owners who are doubtless charming people who love dogs and horses get them back or keep them or let them fade rot, or break in their cellars. I am interested in only one bit of art history. How do I get home.