To a Führer on the make the grandson of Budd Gunmakers had seemed a likely prospect; he was eager and alert, as well as polite and friendly. And then he had married Irma Barnes, heiress of twenty-three million dollars, so reported in the press. He brought her to visit Berchtesgaden, and Irma had listened to the Führer and declared outright, “I agree with every word you have said.” Lanny didn’t go that far, but had played the Moonlight Sonata for the Führer, and admired his taste in paintings, and been entirely agreeable company.
When Lanny’s old friend and employer, Professor Alston, had heard about this contact, what more natural than that he should tell Roosevelt about it, and that Roosevelt should propose that Lanny become a presidential agent, and bring the information to him? Laurel asked if he would be willing to do the same thing for Truman, and he told her no. He wanted to be a normal man for a while and say what he really thought. “I have a sort of psychosis on the subject of secrecy,” he declared. “I can’t bear to talk about what I have done, and I have a shrinking from any sort of publicity.”
Said the wife with a smile, “Wait till you start spending Emily’s million dollars!”
VI
They were driven to Unterstein. The Karinhall art works, so many of which Lanny had learned to know and to love, had been spread out in the forty rooms of the rest house. The colonel in charge of the outfit on duty had the bright idea of diverting the minds of his troops by getting up an exhibition. “You know,” he explained, “our boys were all keyed to the war, and now they have a let-down feeling; they don’t know what to do with themselves.” Laurel exchanged an amused glance with her husband; it was just what he had said about himself.
An art expert who was the stepson of a famous painter and had helped to get up art shows was the right person to be called upon. So husband and wife inspected the treasures and tagged those which they thought most likely to raise the cultural level of farm boys from the southern tip of Florida to the northern tip of Washington and points in between. It involved much shifting and carrying of paintings in heavy frames, and some conversation with the GIs who performed this labor—no gnomes from the salt mines here!
In the course of this experience an assimilated colonel and an assimilated lady captain came upon a curious discovery concerning the standards of propriety that prevailed in their native land. Castles and palaces, elegant furniture and gorgeous costumes, armor and weapons, lace and furs and jewels—all these things America had grown used to by way of the movies, and especially since the technicolor days. As for naked men, one saw plenty of those in the Army; but if ever you had seen naked women, it was at some place you did not mention in the presence of ladies. If you saw pictures of such, they were the “feelthy postcards” which were an industry in Europe, or in magazines which you called “cheesecake” and kept hidden from your mothers and sisters.
But here in this Göring collection of paintings was a sort of explosion of nakedness; the taste of the fat man had run to the buxom fleshiness of Rubens and the Flemish school and the delicate and graceful sensuality of Raphael and the other Florentines. There were even some that Lanny himself would have considered prurient, such as two panels by Boucher showing the rustic maidens of Marie Antoinette’s France submitting to the amorous advances of elegant courtiers. And boys from the very proper South and the Puritan Middle West had to carry these paintings about and wait while a lady and a gentleman, their military superiors, stood and discussed them from a strictly esthetic point of view. The GIs would stand silent and embarrassed, and if they were asked a question they would blush to the roots of their hair. When they were among themselves they called the Monuments crew “the Venus fixers.”
One amusing episode: there was a lifesize statue of the Magdalene, beautifully carved in fine wood and polychromed some four hundred years ago. Her bosom was covered by a flood of blond hair, but there was nothing to cover the rest of her. It happened that her features were identical with those of Emmy Sonnemann, German stage star who had become Göring’s wife, and whose picture had been widely published in newspapers and magazines both German and American. Just recently she had been arrested with her husband, and again more pictures; so now all the GIs at Unterstein took to calling the statue “Emmy.” They put her in the entrance hall, and that night when a cold wind was blowing from the snow-clad mountains Lanny observed that one of the sentries had put his overcoat over the figure. Lanny warned him, “You may get into trouble, soldier. You know you are forbidden to touch any of the art works.”
“Sorry, Doc,” said the man—he was young and really looked innocent. “I didn’t mean to break the regulations, but I thought that Emmy looked chilly.”
VII
From the rest house you could gaze across the valley to the Obersalzberg, site of the Berghof, and far above it, the top of the Kehlstein, where Hitler had built his solitary eyrie. It was a sight not to be missed, and Lanny borrowed a car and an Army driver who knew the road. Lanny himself had been taken there by the Führer, one of the two or three foreigners who had had that honor. It was perched right on the top of a mountain, built of stone hewed out in leveling the site. The road to it was terrific; in the village Lanny had recently been told that three thousand men had worked on it for several years. There were three tunnels on the way. Laurel held her breath and wished she hadn’t started, but there was no way to turn until you got to the end of the road, where there was a turnaround for cars and a parking space.
You left the car and entered the mountain by a tunnel with bronze doors. The American Army was on guard, and had put up a sign to the effect that the elevator was for field-grade officers only; that meant majors and those of higher rank, but nobody objected when a colonel took a captain, his wife. You went up seven hundred feet through solid rock, and when you came out there was a dwelling with all the comforts of home, though it looked like a fort. On the second floor was an immense eight-sided room, with windows so that you could look out over Germany, Austria, and Italy. Here this mountain-loving man had come to commune with his dreams of a Thousand-Year Reich and everlasting fame. On the stone-paved loggia outside he had sat with his American friend and revealed his belief that there was recorded in the entire world’s history only one man as great as Adi Schicklgruber, the onetime wastrel from a home for the shelterless in Vienna. That other great one was the camel driver Mohammed, who had known how to found a religion and make it stick for thirteen centuries. Adi was out to break that record, so he declared.
VIII
Hermann der Dicke had been taken to Augsburg, and Emmy—not the wooden but the real one—came to stay with her South American friend in the castle at Zell am See. Lanny went there with a T-force—one car and a “pickup”—to look for paintings. The Monuments asked him to take charge of the operation, since he knew her, and they didn’t want any scenes with a woman. The chatelaine of Karinhall had always been cordial to the elegant son of Budd-Erling, and once Robbie had warned his son not to be too cordial to her. Now she did her actress-best to be pathetic and touching, and to play sad melodies upon his heartstrings. Those paintings were her personal property and were all that stood between her and outright starvation, herself and her little girl, so sweet and innocent. She produced the little one, now seven years old, and the little one wept with her mother, having been frightened by the strange events of the last two weeks.
Lanny played a mean trick upon this former First Lady of Naziland. (She had been that because Hitler was supposed to have been a bachelor and a virgin.) Lanny said to her what all the Nazis had been saying to him, up and down and across Germany, “I am sorry, and very much embarrassed, but you must know I cannot help it; I am merely carrying out orders; I am an employee of the Army and have no say in the matter.” So she produced fifteen paintings, enormously valuable, of the Flemish school of five hundred years ago; they had been taken from the famous Renders collection in Brussels. Lanny appreciated them, and saw them carried out; then he said, “And now the rest, gnädige Frau.”
/> She protested that that was all, and they had a quite ugly scene. He didn’t really know, but he felt sure that she would not give up everything at the first try. She broke down and wept hysterically, and Lanny ordered the GIs to search the castle. Thereupon the child’s nurse went without a word to a closet in the room and from behind a lot of clothing drew forth a lightly framed canvas about two and a half feet square and handed it to Lanny. He took one glance, and his heart gave a jump; it was Göring’s famed “Vermeer,” which he had shown to Lanny at Karinhall and for which he had traded a hundred and thirty-seven other paintings, valued at more than a million and a half guilders.
Lanny said nothing but took it out and saw it packed carefully. Back at Unterstein he placed it before the Monuments men, and right away there started that controversy which had shaken all Holland. One of those present was Tom Howe, handsome and genial director of San Francisco’s municipal art museum; he was vehement in calling the work a fraud. “Look at the flat greens and blues and the lack of subtlety in the modeling of the flesh tones! It lacks that total visual effect which Vermeer so completely mastered.” Lanny, who didn’t feel so sure, pointed out that half the authorities in Holland, Vermeer’s native land, had pronounced the work genuine. At Karinhall Lanny had of course said the same thing; he might have ruined his career as a P.A. if he had done otherwise.
The painting, called “Christ and the Adulteress,” showed a half figure of a beardless Jesus, with hair falling over both shoulders. The woman taken in adultery, a subject eternally popular with painters, stood before him in profile, with head bowed and eyes cast down; two angry Jews stood behind the Christ, they being the ones who were ready to stone her. The painting would be taken back to Amsterdam, and before long would be proven to be the work of an obscure Dutch painter named van Meegeren, who had made a fortune out of painting and then “discovering” a number of “Vermeers”—a seventeenth-century old master whose known works were very scarce. Even when van Meegeren confessed, many of the authorities would refuse to accept his story, and he would have to do yet one more “Vermeer” in prison before they would give up.
IX
Next came a trip to Salzburg, and beyond it to Lake Fuschl, where the most odious of champagne salesmen in all Europe had a castle full of art works. What fun it had been to send armies into a foreign land and take possession of everything; to set yourself up in somebody else’s castle on the shore of a blue Alpine lake, in the shadow of mountains covered with fir trees, and then proceed to fill the establishment with the lovely and beautiful things that you and your agents could find in Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, France, Holland, and Belgium! It had been a popular form of diversion in Europe since the days of Greece and Rome, and some people had naïvely assumed that it was over for good—but Joachim von Ribbentrop had shown them, and now the armies had shown him!
His castle had become a recreation ground for American troops, and a string of Army trucks came and carted the treasures off to the Munich collecting point. After watching this operation, Lanny and his wife were driven back to Salzburg on a mild spring evening, a full moon lighting their way. They stopped in this small mountain city with the foaming river through the middle of it. This “Salt Castle’s” name was famous all over the world because of the music festival that had been held here every summer. Adi Schicklgruber had changed it into one of his Kraft durch Freude festivals; he was not keen for internationalism, and especially not the kind that gave jobs to Jewish musicians and conductors.
Sitting in the familiar Mirabell Gardens, having supper, Lanny told his wife what this place had meant to him. In the little town of Hallein, a few miles to the south, his first marriage had come to an end. Irma had quarreled with him because of his ideas and associates, and when he had put her in the position of having to help Trudi Schultz escape from Germany, that had been the last straw; at the railway station of Hallein she had said good-by to him and gone back to her mother on Long Island.
So then, feeling very desolate, he had driven up to Salzburg. (Those wonderful days when you could have a car of your own, and purchase fuel for it in any town or village!) Lanny had tried to drown his sorrows in music; and, sitting in these pleasant gardens, he had found himself in the company of another sorrow-smitten gentleman, who had poured out his domestic troubles to an entire stranger. Lanny hadn’t reciprocated; but now he remarked to Laurel that he often wondered whether the ruling-class reticence which had been impressed upon him since childhood wasn’t really a great strain upon the emotional life.
The music had been delightful, also the dramas and the music dramas; and after each performance the crowds had emerged, everybody excited and pouring out volumes of art gossip, more about the artists than about the works they performed. He had boarded for a couple of weeks with the family of a civic official—everybody took “paying guests” for the festival and lived the rest of the year on the proceeds. Here again were people who vented their emotions freely, and the sixteen-year-old daughter of the family had fallen head over heels in love with a cultivated and wealthy American gentleman, who was greatly embarrassed. He had escaped with his conscience intact—otherwise he surely wouldn’t have been telling the story to his wife. He could tell her everything except the physical dangers, which would have frightened her.
16
Sorrow’s Crown of Sorrow
I
This art-loving couple were having a pleasant holiday, living in Europe’s central playground and having a couple of million young American males to keep them safe and comfortable. The war had ended—“just like that,” instantly, really unbelievably. The Germans had gone on fighting for a few days against the Russians in Czechoslovakia, but that was all. There wasn’t any Alpine Redoubt, there weren’t any “werewolves,” and if there was a Nazi underground it dug in so deep that nobody knew about it. All the Germans suddenly became willing and obliging; a large part of them became anti-Nazi, and the rest non-Nazi, all at a few strokes of a pen in the hands of an admiral, a general, and an Air Force commander.
The old Germany had come back to life, and it was safe to go walking, to go driving, to go into any German’s home, or what was left of it, and ask him or her how things were and how they had been during the past six years. Back in America were millions of people curious about such details, and a practiced woman writer could sell all the copy she could turn out. As for an art expert, he couldn’t do business yet, but he could inspect and discuss and come to a gentlemen’s agreement as to what would be done as soon as the barriers against trade were lifted.
Lanny recalled the half-dozen Detaze landscapes in the villa called “Bechstein Haus” on the Berghof estate. He had sold them to the Führer at a proper price, so he had no claim upon them; but who did? Hitler was dead, or said to be, and surely his property should be in the hands of the American Army until such a time as the question was decided. Lanny led another task force, consisting of a car and a jeep, and took Laurel along because the Berghof would be “copy”—and also because she had a special and personal interest in this ogre’s den.
The once lovely chalet was a pitiful sight. It had been hit several times by six-ton bombs, and a few days later the SS had set fire to it on the approach of the American Seventh Army. Both its elaborate wings had been reduced to ashes, and the central part, which had contained the immense square living-room and Hitler’s study above, with the “largest window in the world” looking out over Austria—all that was burned-out shell. The GIs who stood guard reported that everyone who came to the site carried off a souvenir, and Laurel chose a bronze doorknob which she found in the ashes. She remarked that perhaps it was the one under which she had propped a chair to keep the door shut tight—there were no locks on any room in that strange establishment. It had been a true ogre’s castle to an American woman guest; it was the first and only time that a man had ever laid forcible hands upon her, and the experience was one never to be forgotten.
The barracks where the SS guards had lived ha
d been spared, and were useful to the Americans. (In the last days of the war General Eisenhower had issued an order against the bombing of any barracks, because they would be needed, and they were.) The Bechstein Haus still stood, and the lovely Detaze paintings were where Hitler had ordered them hung. They were landscapes and seascapes of the Riviera, and one of ruins in Greece. Each was a separate story for Lanny, who had watched them being painted and knew the places they represented. He had told his wife many stories of this gentle-minded Frenchman who had been Beauty’s lover for ten years or more, and whom she had married when he had got his dreadful wounds in World War I.
Marcel Detaze had been a French representational painter whom the Führer could tolerate. He had ordered these examples because he wanted to honor the French and make friends with them, so that they would trust him and let him take Poland; also, perhaps, because he wanted to bribe the reluctant Herr Budd and bind him to the Nazi cause. Marcel would have loathed Hitler beyond all the French bad language that he knew. He had painted awful caricatures of the Germans—but apparently the Führer’s agents in Paris had failed to inform him of that fact. Now the American government would turn these landscapes over to the French government, and they would be hung in the Luxembourg, along with Marcel’s indictments of the furor teutonicus.
II
Lanny had subscribed to a newspaper in Paris, and there was a radio set in the Unterstein rest house, where he and his wife were privileged to listen to broadcasts from Paris and London, and from a station which the Americans were using in Luxembourg. So the pair followed the fates of those evil persons whom they had hated and feared through so many years. Quisling was in jail in Norway, weeping and raging by turns. Edward Waiter, director of the horrors of Dachau, had fled to the château which was part of the prison system, and there put a bullet through his heart; when that didn’t kill him quickly enough he put another through his eye. Max Amann, head of the publishing house which printed Hitler’s works and paid him his fortune, poisoned himself, and so did Frau Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, head of the Nazi women’s movement. From that ardent soul at the outbreak of the war had come a proclamation: “Dear Führer, we German women give you the fruits of our fertility—our children—to do with as you wish.” Adi had taken them!