The Monuments Men (54 page)

James Rorimer, meanwhile, never stayed in one place long. And soon he was bringing along Harry Ettlinger, the German-Jewish-American private from Karlsruhe who had wandered into his office the day before Germany’s surrender, as his personal translator. Suddenly, Harry’s tour of duty was as breakneck and interesting as his previous four months of service had been plodding and dull.

In mid-May, Rorimer took him to a Munich jail for a four-hour interrogation of a German national. Rorimer had been working on the man for days: befriending him, giving him cigarettes, feigning sympathy. The Nazi had finally opened up, and now Rorimer needed Harry to take down specific information on his art collection. The man was Heinrich Hoffman, Adolf Hitler’s close friend and personal photographer. How must it have felt for a persecuted German Jew to stand that close to a man who had dined regularly with the Führer, and had been his staunch supporter and confidant for more than twenty years? Hoffman, of course, insisted he was a bystander. He had taken propaganda photographs of Hitler only because he received royalties every time one was reprinted, even on German stamps. He had bought artwork of dubious origin from “reputable” dealers only so he could make reproduction photographs. He had grown rich off Nazism, but he had never been a… believer, only an economic opportunist. Wasn’t this the American way?

Soon after, Harry accompanied Rorimer to Berchtesgaden. While Rorimer dealt with the art treasures in the village—the Reichsmarschall wasn’t the only high Nazi official who had hidden his stolen loot near the former Nazi stronghold—Harry went up the mountain to Hitler’s chalet, known as the Berghof. He stood alone in the Führer’s living room and stared through the enormous window (the glass long gone) out of which Adolf Hitler had so often surveyed his empire. How did it feel for a German Jew, whose friends and relatives had died in the Holocaust, to stand among the conquerors in the halls of the defeated dictator? It felt good. The house had been picked over by visiting troops, but Harry managed to scrounge a few epaulettes and some paper bearing the letterhead of a high SS general. He looked out over Germany, now free, and thought those three simple words. “It feels good.”

Near the end of May, Captain Rorimer took Private Ettlinger to Neuschwanstein. Neuschwanstein! Harry Ettlinger saw it rise before him out of the alpine valley almost exactly as James Rorimer had seen it weeks before, with its towers soaring against an enormous sky. Only Altaussee could rival it both in setting and quality of stolen artwork. But Altaussee didn’t have the history. Like many German children, Ettlinger had grown up with stories of this castle and its vast riches; passing through its gates was like stepping into a fairy tale from his childhood. Here was the Germany of legend, with its famous golden throne room. But it was also the Germany of the present, filled room after room with stolen artwork. At the entrance, Ettlinger had watched Rorimer turn away a British two-star general. The American captain was adamant: no one allowed inside. But here was Harry Ettlinger, a buck private, gazing at the kind of art and gold and treasure—Rothschild treasure!—not even dreamed of during his days growing up in Karlsruhe. He had been translating documents for weeks, but those were simply words and numbers. To see actual paintings by artists like Rembrandt piled up as booty was another thing entirely. “My knowledge of the Holocaust,” Harry would later say, “started really with the realization that it was not only the taking of lives—that I learned much later in my experience—but the taking of all of their belongings…. [For me] Neuschwanstein was the start of really opening up that part of history that should never be forgotten.”
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In September 1945, James Rorimer sent Harry Ettlinger to Heilbronn, to the mine he had saved from flooding back in April. The sounds of war had retreated into the past, but the echoes had not. The Kronprinz Hotel where Harry lived with twenty other enlisted men was the only building standing on a block formerly full of stone buildings. The streets were empty of people, but full of rubble, and nothing had been done to clear them. The devastated center of town showed little sign of life. Harry’s main landmark as he walked to the salt mine was the Bockingen railroad station, also completely destroyed. Across from the station a large concrete block marked the site of an air raid shelter. The entrance had been sealed after the devastating Allied bombing runs of December 4, 1944. The air raid shelter had somehow caught fire; inside were the remains of the two thousand Germans who had sought safety there. If he needed a more personal reminder of the horrors of war, Harry need only look at Ike, a seventy-pound survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau who had been “adopted” by their detachment.

But thanks to James Rorimer, the Heilbronn mine had been brought back into production, seemingly the only beast awake in that slumbering land. The pumps had been repaired and were cycling the seepage from the Neckar River out of the underground chambers. The skips were carrying large quantities of salty rocks to the surface. From there, the rocks were transferred to a massive furnace, where they were liquefied at 1200 degrees Fahrenheit so the salt crystals could be skimmed off. The furnace was powered by coke, a coal product, and since there was an excess of coke at the mine, the nearby glass factory was up and running, too. Amid all the destruction and sorrow, where even a scrap of food or decent bed was difficult for most people to come by, the factory was churning out thousands of Coca-Cola bottles.

At Heilbronn, Private Harry Ettlinger felt for the first time the immensity of the MFAA task. There were only two Monuments Men in Heilbronn, but they were expected to remove from underground literally tons of artwork. At the surface worked the operation’s commander, Monuments Man Lieutenant Dale Ford, an interior designer recently pulled by the Roberts Commission from a camouflage unit in North Africa. Ford and three Germans—an art historian, an administrator, and a former junior ERR staff member assigned during the war to Paris (and possibly the Jeu de Paume, it was never clear)—spent their days in a small office next to the mine elevator, searching the ERR archives. Their primary job was to find the world-class pieces hidden in the dross.

Harry’s job was to transport them to the surface. Each morning, after passing the air raid crypt and the Coca-Cola bottle plant, he was handed a list of objects and their location. He would then descend seven hundred feet into the darkness with two German miners. Two mines had actually been used (the second, located nearby, was known as Kochendorf) and together they had miles of chambers. Inside those chambers were more than 40,000 cases, from which Harry was supposed to pluck dozens of pieces a day. It was a daunting task, but Harry had two things working to his advantage. First, the ERR records were excellent, describing down to the number of the crate on the shelf of the wall bin exactly where each piece was located. Second, as the mine’s chief engineer had assured Rorimer in April, the artwork was all stored in a series of smaller chambers on the upper level of the mine. The larger bottom levels, many flooded during or shortly after the battle for Heilbronn, contained factory equipment.

Still, the mine was dark and cold. Tunnels branched off in numerous directions, and once out of the main shaft it was easy to get lost. The number of chambers was intimidating, but nothing compared to the fact that each chamber held hundreds of similar-looking brown crates, any of which could contain cultural treasures, gold coins, bombs, booby traps… or something as common as personal photographs. The task was unpredictable. Harry had learned this a few weeks into the job when he noticed a chamber walled up with bricks. No one knew what was behind it, so he ordered the wall taken down. Inside were long tables piled with bottles. Each bottle contained a thin liquid separated from a thicker sludge. The miners recognized it immediately: nitroglycerin. The alarm was sounded, and everyone raced from the mine. Then experts were sent to very carefully bring the bottles to the surface. The separating of the liquids, the miners told Harry, made the solution volatile. One more month and the thinner liquid would have exploded. There seemed little doubt that this “accident” was exactly what the person who built the wall had in mind.

Despite the danger, the recovery effort plowed forward. As the fighting neared its conclusion, there had been some discussion of what exactly to do with the treasures discovered in Germany and Austria. Eventually, the decision was made that all cultural objects,
even those that belonged to Germany
, would be returned to their country of origin. Once that decision was made, the Western Allies were determined to return the treasures as quickly as possible. The army couldn’t afford the manpower, for one thing. And restitution on this scale was unprecedented; the world was rightfully dubious. The Western Allies had sacrificed their national fortunes and a generation of young men; would they really hand back the spoils of their victory?

In late summer, General Eisenhower answered that question in resounding fashion. Ever mindful of the importance of his Western Allies, Ike ordered the immediate return of the most important works of art to each respective country until the more systematic process of returns could be implemented. First to be returned was the Ghent Altarpiece. Soon others followed, including the famous stained-glass windows from Strasbourg Cathedral, which the French considered a national treasure. The message went down the line from commander to commander and, finally, seven hundred feet underground to Private Harry Ettlinger. The windows weren’t difficult to find, even in Heilbronn—they were very large—but extracting such delicate masterpieces from a working salt mine was nerve-jangling work. Then came the packing: seventy-three cases in all. By mid-October, the windows were inventoried, packed, and ready for transport. Instead of traveling to an MFAA collecting point, the stained-glass windows were taken by convoy directly from the mine to Strasbourg. On November 4, 1945, their return was celebrated in an elaborate ceremony, during which James Rorimer received the French Legion of Honor, becoming the first Monuments Man bestowed with such a high honor.

Meanwhile, Harry had received another important assignment. The story of Nazi looting, after all, wasn’t merely the robbing of nations of their treasures and the human race of its historical and cultural touchstones. More than anything, the Nazis robbed families: of their livelihoods, their opportunities, their heirlooms, their mementos, of the things that identified them and defined them as human beings. This was brought home to Harry Ettlinger in the form of a letter from his grandfather, Opa Oppenheimer, in October 1945. Just before he fled Germany in 1939, Opa had been forced to stash in a storage facility near Baden-Baden his beloved collection of ex libris bookplates and art prints. He kept with him the name of the facility, the warehouse number, the combination to the locks, and the hope that his personal treasure would survive the war and somehow find its way back into his hands. Now, six years later, his grandson was stationed in central Germany, as a Monuments Man recovering art. Opa Oppenheimer hoped Harry could facilitate the return of his collection—if it still existed.

An opportunity didn’t present itself until November, when the personal valet of the governor of the French Occupied Zone came to stay at the Kronprinz Hotel. The valet, Jacques, was an automobile repair expert, and he had come to study the Mercedes motorworks in the nearby town of Stuttgart. Harry asked if he could facilitate a trip to Baden-Baden, which was in the French Zone. The valet readily agreed.

So on a sunny day in November 1945, Jacques, Private Harry Ettlinger, and his detachment’s “adopted” member Ike, the Holocaust survivor, set out in a jeep to find a collection of prints and bookplates representing the mementos of a common life well lived. The trip took just over an hour. They found the facility without difficulty. Pulling open the warehouse doors, Harry Ettlinger’s heart leapt almost like it had on that long-ago day in Belgium when the sergeant had called him off the convoy headed to the front. Here in this dark and dusty room were the wonders Harry had known since childhood—thousands of signed, original bookplates; hundreds of prints from turn-of-the-century German Impressionists; and the beautiful autographed print of an etching of the Rembrandt of Karlsruhe. They were just as Opa Oppenheimer had left them.

Clapping Harry on the back, the valet suggested they go out for a celebratory meal. He took them to a rural valley, where they dined on trout fished right out of a brook and drank toasts with the local specialty: cherry schnapps. By the time they dropped off the valet in Baden-Baden, Harry and Ike were feeling fine. Maybe too fine. Ike, who liked his liquor, missed a turn on the mountainous road back to Heilbronn and went into a ditch. It took ten men to lift the jeep back onto the road, at which point they discovered the brake line was snapped. Ike turned around and coasted three precarious miles back into Baden-Baden.

Harry was now AWOL (absent without leave, punishable by an army prison sentence), since he hadn’t bothered with an overnight pass. And even worse, at least at the moment, the two men had no place to sleep. They tracked down the only person they knew in town, Jacques the valet, who fortunately had a girlfriend who worked in the city’s finest hotel. She met them at the back door and slipped them up the backstairs to the one place no one at the front desk would think to look: the penthouse suite. That night, a Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz and a buck private in the U.S. Army—a former German Jew who had been forced out of his homeland by the ruthless Nazi purges—slept in beds reserved for the Kaiser of Germany. Even Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were never afforded such a luxury.

A few weeks later, while the public streamed into Strasbourg by the thousands to marvel at the newly reinstalled stained-glass windows of its world-famous cathedral, another shipment of precious objects arrived by truck at the Heilbronn mine. There, Harry Ettlinger and the two German miners carefully packed them in exactly the same way they had packaged the great cathedral windows and the Old Master paintings. These precious objects, however, went not to a European government or a great collector, but to an apartment on the third floor of an old house at 410 Clinton Avenue in Newark, New Jersey. The Oppenheimer-Ettlinger family treasure had come home from the war.