“I won’t lie to you,” he said. “I knew Göring in Paris. And Rosenberg. I worked with them. As a scholar, you understand, no one important, but I observed them and their operation. I was there when Göring hauled away his first trainload of art. I told him his treatment of the confiscated Jewish art treasures was in contradiction to the Hague Rules of Land Warfare and the army’s interpretation of Hitler’s orders. He asked for an explanation. When I concluded he said simply, ‘First, it is my orders that you have to follow. You will act directly according to my orders.’ 11
“When I told him the military command in France and the Juristen—meaning the legal representatives of the Reich—would probably be of a different opinion, he told me, ‘Dear Bunjes, let me worry about that; I am the highest Jurist in the State.’
“He told me that directly, gentlemen. Word for word, on February 5, 1941. What was a simple art scholar to do? And besides, the art was safer in the hands of Göring than spread through the hands of the thousand lesser Nazi officials clamoring to obtain it. You see, I acted to protect the art. It was conservation by acquisition.”
His wife entered with the cognac. “Ich danke Dir Darling,” he said, pouring a glass for himself and Kirstein. Posey demurred, lighting a cigarette instead. Both men needed the distraction. It was all they could do to keep their mouths from hanging open. This man, this country scholar, had been in Paris. He knew the angles. He might provide answers to questions they had been sweating over for months.
“I have knowledge,” the scholar said after a few swirls of the snifter, “but I also have a price: safe passage out of Germany for myself and my family. I want nothing more than to complete my book, to live in peace. In return, I will tell you not only what was taken, but where it is.”
“Why do you need safe passage?” Kirstein asked.
“I was an SS captain. For five years. Yes, it’s true. Only for professional purposes, you understand, always in the service of art. But if the citizens of this valley knew… they wouldn’t understand. They’d probably have me shot. They blame us for… all of this.”
Posey and Kirstein looked at each other. They had interviewed many art officials, but never an SS officer. What kind of scholar was this?
“I don’t have the authority to offer deals,” Posey said, as Kirstein translated. The German sighed. He drank cognac, seemed to consider his options, then abruptly rose and left the room. He came back minutes later with a bound booklet. It was a catalogue of artwork stolen from France: title, size, exchange rate, price, original owner. He explained it to them, translating from the German text. Then he told them to spread their maps on the table, and he began to show where the objects could be found. He seemed to know it all from memory, right down to the smallest detail. “Göring’s collection is no longer at Carinhall,” the scholar said confidently. “It is in Veldenstein. Here. But I cannot be sure if it is going to stay there for long.”
He told them the inside works of the German art world. How the treasures of Poland and Russia had been distributed to various German museums. Which art dealers in Berlin were actively trading in looted works. Which stolen French masterpieces were hidden in Switzerland, and which had made it farther into Germany itself.
“What about the Ghent Altarpiece?” Posey asked.
“Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb?” the scholar said, picking up the name of the work despite Posey’s English. “The panels are in Hitler’s extensive collection of artistic masterpieces.” He moved his finger southwest into the deepest part of the Austrian Alps, not far from Hitler’s boyhood home of Linz. “Here, in the salt mine at Altaussee.”
Hitler’s collection? Posey and Kirstein didn’t say anything. They didn’t even look at each other. All those miles driving, all those fruitless interviews, all those months of painstakingly fitting information together piece by piece, and suddenly they were being given everything they had always hoped for and more. They hadn’t just been given information; they had been given a map to the treasure room of the Führer. And until that moment, nobody on the Allied side had even known the Führer had a treasure room.
“The Nazis are boors,” the scholar said. “Complete frauds. They don’t understand the beauty of art, only that it is somehow valuable. They robbed the silver service from the Rothschilds, then used it like ordinary flatware in their Aeroclub in Berlin. To see them dribbling food off those priceless forks made me sick.”
The scholar rose and poured himself another cognac. When he returned, he began to talk about his own work, about Paris and cathedrals and the twelfth century and its remarkable funereal statuary, about how much had been lost since then to the ravages of time and the senselessness of war. “Here,” Kirstein would write, “in the cold Moselle spring, far from the murder of the cities, worked a German scholar in love with France, passionately in love, with that hopeless, frustrated fatalism” so characteristic of the Germans. 12 Kirstein couldn’t help but like the man.
“I offer you my services, gentlemen,” the scholar said finally. “Anything you ask. All I want is for my family to return to Paris.” As if waiting for their moment, his wife and baby suddenly appeared in the doorway.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Posey said, as he and Kirstein stood up to leave. They appeared calm, but inside they were buzzing. They had learned more in the last twenty minutes than they had in the last twenty weeks. And they had a mission now; a big one: to find and recover Hitler’s secret hoard of masterpieces.
The German scholar smiled, extended his hand. If he was disappointed at the lack of safe passage, he didn’t show it. “It has been a pleasure, my friends,” he said genially. “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you, Dr. Bunjes. You have been a great help.” They had no idea that they had spent the afternoon speaking with Göring’s corrupt Kunstschutz official, and one of the top men in the notorious looting operation at the Jeu de Paume.
CHAPTER 33
Frustration
Northern European Theater
March 30–31, 1945
Private First Class Richard Courtney was frustrated. Like most of his fellow soldiers in U.S. First Army, he had been slugging it out on the ground since Normandy. He had been through the German ring of fire around the beaches, and he had survived the Siegfried Line. He had fought to take Aachen in September, then fought to take it again after the Battle of the Bulge. Now he was searching a country estate—what the army called “clearing”—on the other side of the Rhine, near the small town of Breidenbach, and even after nine months of fighting he couldn’t believe his eyes. The house, the soldiers had been told, belonged to a Nazi Party leader, and as they moved from room to room they stared in awe at the extraordinary collection of paintings, crystal, silverware, and statuary. Art collecting was in vogue among the Nazi elite, no doubt fueled by their desire to curry favor with the Führer and the Reichsmarschall. This particular Nazi had clearly been “collecting” from all over Europe.
But Private Courtney wasn’t truly mad until he entered the cellar and saw, stacked floor to ceiling, Red Cross care packages intended for American prisoners of war. Why were they here? What did a high Nazi official need with hardtack biscuits and Band-Aids? The longer he looked at those packages, the more he became enraged. Finally, he picked up a crowbar and started smashing things: boxes, mirrors, china, artwork, chandeliers. He was so mad, he even knocked the light switches off the wall. Nobody tried to stop him.
“What was that about?” a fellow soldier asked once the swinging had stopped.
Private Courtney threw down the crowbar and looked at the destruction around him. “That was for our boys in the camps,” he said.
Meanwhile, in a “repple depple” in Liège, Belgium, Private Harry Ettlinger played craps. He had resisted for a month, but there was nothing else to do. During the first week, he won $1,500 with funds from his $60 monthly army salary. A day later, he lost it all. He went outside and looked at the night sky. Everything seemed a million miles away. It had b
een two months of nothing. He wasn’t eager to be at the front, but the long-termers in the “repple depple” were depressing. One soldier had bought perfume while stationed in Paris, and was now selling it at marked-up prices. The perfume stunk up the whole camp, but all the man could think about was getting back to Paris to replenish his supply. Harry Ettlinger didn’t want to be that kind of soldier. Somewhere out east, the war was grinding on without him. He felt sure he had a part to play—he must—but he still had no idea why they’d pulled him off that truck on his nineteenth birthday. No one had told him a thing.
In Paris, James Rorimer received his notice to report to the front as Monuments Man for the U.S. Seventh Army, which had thus far been without the services of a Monuments officer. Seventh Army territory in Germany alone stretched 280 miles with an average width of eighty miles. He would be the only Monuments Man in those 22,400 square miles. But he had something no other Monuments Man had ever possessed: the information Rose Valland had given him two weeks earlier, and the knowledge she had imparted to him during the last few months. Thanks to Valland, he knew exactly where to go: the fairytale castle at Neuschwanstein. For months, the name would echo in his dreams. Exactly what he should find, and how exactly to get there quickly… that was something as yet unknown.
“General Rogers came out of his way at my dinner last night in Paris to tell me what a fine job I had done,” Rorimer wrote his wife. “My boss Lt. Col. Hamilton gave cocktails to our group and all but wept when I was taken from his staff for Germany. Yes, I made my place and now must build a new under very different conditions.” 1
He had no doubts. This was the important mission; this was the one he wanted more than anything to be given. As he prepared his gear for departure, he no doubt looked back fondly on his days in the City of Light, but looked ahead even more eagerly to the adventures ahead: the great ERR repositories, the Nazi villains, the chance to save the patrimony of France. And despite his excitement—or perhaps because of it—he wondered about Rose Valland. Jacques Jaujard was right. She was a hero. Perhaps the hero of French culture. But what would she do now? She had turned over to her protégé the work for which she had risked her life. What does the teacher do once the student is gone?
Rorimer thought more deeply about it and realized he knew the answer. Rose Valland, often underestimated but never deterred, was angling for a commission in the French army. She was convinced she had found the right man in James Rorimer, but the importance of rescuing France’s patrimony was too great to rely on any one person to do the work. Rose Valland was no timid art official or wilting flower; she was a fighter hiding behind a façade. And she had every desire and intention of making it to the front and finding France’s precious art.
In Berlin, Albert Speer stood once more before his Führer. Soviet artillery and Western Allied bombers were pounding the city, and Adolf Hitler, the indispensable man, had descended into his vast, impenetrable bunker beneath the Reichschancellery. He had cut himself off from the world, from even the catalogues of artwork destined for Linz that in better times had brightened his dark days. He could no longer, for instance, gaze at the photograph of Vermeer’s The Astronomer, his most cherished painting, with its image of a great man of intellect, turned slightly away from the viewer with the light streaming in through his window, reaching a hand to his globe as if grasping the world. But Hitler still had his building plans for Linz, which had descended with him into the bunker. (The scale model of Linz was nearby in a cellar of the New Chancellery.) He still had his vision. He may have been pale and drained, but he was still iron-willed, a man aware of his predicament but not yet capable of grasping that his empire was doomed.
He was not one to delay. He had been informed by his personal secretary, Martin Bormann, that Speer had been to the Ruhr to convince the gauleiters to disobey Hitler’s Nero Decree and leave intact the infrastructure of Germany.
Speer did not deny it. Hitler, a man of lethal anger but not yet debilitating paranoia, suggested his friend and minister of armaments take a sick leave. “Speer,” he said, “if you can convince yourself the war is not lost, you can continue to run your office.”
“I cannot,” Speer replied, “with the best will in the world. And after all I do not want to be one of the swine in your entourage who tell you they believe in victory without believing in it.”
“You have twenty-four hours to think over your answer,” Hitler said, turning on his heel. “Tomorrow let me know whether you hope that the war can still be won.” 2
As soon as Speer left, Hitler ordered his chief of transportation to issue a teletype reaffirming the “Nero Decree.” “Included in the list of facilities slated for destruction,” Speer wrote, “were, once again, all types of bridges, tracks, roundhouses, all technical installations in the freight depots, workshop equipment, and sluices and locks in our canals. Along with this all locomotives, passenger cars, freight cars, cargo vessels, and barges were to be completely destroyed and the canals and rivers blocked by sinking ships into them.” 3 Hitler was asking for nothing less than the complete destruction of the Reich.
That night, Speer wrote Hitler a letter. “I can no longer believe in the success of our good cause,” it said in part, “if during these decisive months we simultaneously and systematically destroy the foundations of our national existence. That is so great an injustice to our people that should it be done, Fate can no longer wish us well…. I therefore beg you not to carry out this measure so harmful to the people. If you could revise your policy on this question, I would once more recover the faith and the courage to continue working with the greatest energy. It no longer lies in our hands to decide how Fate will turn. Only a higher Providence can still change our future. We can only make our contribution by a strong posture and unshakable faith in the eternal future of our nation…. May God Protect Germany.” 4
Hitler refused to accept the letter and demanded a verbal answer. On March 30, 1945, standing before the Führer he had loved and served so well, Albert Speer lost his resolve. “Mein Führer,” he said. “I stand unreservedly behind you.” 5
Three days later, 350 miles west of Berlin, Monuments Men Walker Hancock and George Stout approached the town that for months had tantalized them with its mystery and its promise of artistic treasures: Siegen, Germany.
Letter from Walker Hancock
To his wife, Saima
April 4, 1945
Dearest Saima:
The last few days have been the most incredible of my whole life. For instance, the other day I made a long trip with George Stout and the vicar from Aachen to see a place where the greatest art treasures of western Germany are hidden. We entered the town the same day that it was taken. Only one road into it could be used as there were still “pockets of resistance” in the surrounding hills. Shelling and machine gun fire were heard intermittently. (No real danger, but it all added to the excitement.) The town had been solidly bombed for three months, and for two weeks battles had raged in the streets, so you can (or can’t) imagine how the place looked. An occasional civilian ventured out of hiding, but mostly it was empty desolation—a pool of blood with an American helmet beside it told a story—the ruin that we know so well was everywhere.
Our priest-guide found us the entrance to the tunnels where the works of art were hidden. In contrast to the deserted town, here all was teeming with wretched humanity. We entered the narrow passage into the dark, suffocating mine. People were packed in so tightly that survival under such conditions for a day seemed a miracle. None of them had left the place for a fortnight. We went deeper and deeper into the hillside and when our eyes became accustomed to the darkness, and our ears to the hushed words we became somewhat aware of the drama of the situation. (Our noses did not become accustomed to the sickening smells.) We were the first Americans these people had seen. There were gasps—“Amerikaner! Amerikaner! Sie kommen!” Mothers called their children to them in fear.
But some others were not afraid. One little tot took
George by the hand and held him for a long part of the way. Some tried to talk in English. There were the old, and young, and the sick of the city, piled on bunks or huddled together. We walked on and on—more than a quarter of a mile into the hill.
Walker
Letter from George Stout
To his wife, Margie
April 4, 1945
Dear Margie:
I’ve not written for four days—a field trip and every hour used up… [but] there was an occurrence day before yesterday which was of such a character that it deserves better than the poor sketchy account that I am now able to give of it. I cannot tell you the name of the city—it is well east of the Rhine—because as yet the fact of what it holds is not allowed out. We had known about a storage depot there from information we got last November [in Aachen] and since then more had come in. We knew it was somewhere in an iron mine at the edge of the city. We found a German priest, a really dauntless fellow, who had been there and offered to go as our guide.
An armored force had been in, and elements of an infantry regiment had followed. There was fighting during the day, but most of the German troops had pulled out. We came in at 4:30 (1630), Walker Hancock, two enlisted men, the priest and I. The streets were not very safe for a vehicle because of debris and fallen trolley lines. There was very little artillery shelling, sporadic and weak. The German soldiers were being round up with no evident resistance. We saw three civilians, two German nurses, and a man who walked with a limp, a young man. He said he was trying to find his sister on the other side of town and wanted to know if it was dangerous to go there. All this was commonplace and had happened many times before.