He seemed unaware that his numbness was perhaps not just the inevitable hardening of the fighting man, but a deliberate attempt to distance himself from the German world. The concentration camp at Buchenwald had been liberated by U.S. Third Army on April 12, 1945. Walker Hancock had been in the town of Weimar when word reached him of the horrors that had taken place only a few miles away. He heard for the first time descriptions of death camps and gas chambers, and was sickened by stories of emaciated survivors huddled under the bodies of their friends and loved ones. It was inhuman. Beyond comprehension. Hancock felt the sight of such horror would change him forever—this man who saw blossoms growing out of destruction—and made a deliberate decision not to visit the camp.
“A number of our officers went up to see the camp,” he wrote. “I did not go, because much of my work depended on friendly relations with German civilians, and I feared that after seeing the horrors of the camp my own feelings toward even these innocent people would be affected. (Numbers of our officers who did go could not eat for some time afterwards; some survived on whisky alone for days.)” 3
A few days later, he had a chance meeting with his friend, a Jewish chaplain. The chaplain had recently been to Buchenwald to conduct a service for the survivors, their first since being interned. The story the chaplain told was “heartrending—emotional beyond description,” especially when he mentioned the anguish over the lack of a Torah.
“I have no idea where to get one,” he lamented. “They have all been destroyed.”
“Not all of them,” Hancock said. He had one in his office; it had been brought in that very day from the local SS headquarters.
“A miracle,” the chaplain said, before dashing off to Buchenwald with the scroll.
“He was soon in my office again,” Hancock wrote, “to tell me how it had been received—the people weeping, reaching for it, kissing it, overcome with joy at the sight of the symbol of their faith.” 4 Walker Hancock had again found his rose in the ruins, but at what cost?
Fortunately, Monuments work kept him so busy he never had to contemplate that question. The army was moving quickly toward a rendezvous with the Red Army in Dresden and, still without an assistant, it was all Hancock could do to complete the basics of his assignment. His sixteen-hour days, he told Saima, were spent half in the “pain at seeing beauty needlessly destroyed by those we might have hoped would show more signs of being civilized” and half in the joy of spring days returning to rural German towns. 5 At night he lay awake thinking of his new wife, and of the home they would one day buy together, and of the monuments he simply couldn’t find time to visit, and of the ridiculous quantity of coffee he had consumed, but coffee was all that kept him going sometimes.
“How can I describe the strange, strange combination of experiences each day here in this beautiful place brings!” he wrote Saima. “The eyes have one continual feast. It is late in the spring. Flowering trees are everywhere and the charm of the romantic little towns and the fairy tale castled countryside is enhanced by all this freshness. And in the midst of it all—thousands of homeless foreigners wandering about in pathetic droves. Germans in uniform, mostly with arms and legs—or more—missing. Children who are friendly, older ones who hate you, crimes continually in the foreground of life. Plenty, misery, recriminations, sympathy. All such an exaggerated picture of the man-made way of life in a God-made world. If it all doesn’t prove the necessity of Heaven, I don’t know what it means. I believe that all this loveliness showing through the rubble and wreck are just foreshadowings of the joys we were made for.” 6
Farther south, Lincoln Kirstein had fallen into one of his black moods. The energy and optimism he had felt before Merkers was gone. Like Hancock, he had avoided Buchenwald when Posey had visited it the day after its liberation. But there was no escaping the horror. It was in the air he breathed, the German soil over which he walked. In his mind, he could see the marks in the dirt where the survivors had been dragged away. Posey had seen men dying before his eyes from the effects of their treatment. They were so starved they couldn’t digest the meat the American soldiers gave them to eat. They simply collapsed, holding their stomachs in pain. Just to hear about it secondhand was to make a grown man want to clutch his own stomach and fall to the ground.
It didn’t help that he had entered “the void,” a world defined by anarchy, seemingly without reason or rules. The Nazi government was collapsing; the German army was splintered; there was no semblance of authority or societal structure. He knew it was a temporary situation, a time interval between the end of one reality and the beginning of another. Götterdämmerung, they called it in German, the period when the clash of the gods brings an end to the world. The villages were on fire, the civilians standing in the street hoping to be told what to do next. Often, they were joined there by German soldiers in uniform waiting to be captured or led, whatever the case might be. And yet the war ground on. Without a front line, without a way to tell friend from foe. Days passed without incident, then out of nowhere the Wehrmacht was entrenched at a bridge or the road was strafed by machine-gun fire. And everywhere, there was destruction.
“It’s always more of the same complete and total annihilation of the centre portions of any town that had any faint interest,” Kirstein wrote. “Most of the interior memorials have been given kunstschutz protection and will come out ok, but the baroque palaces and churches which were the real glories of southern sections [of Germany] are gutted and don’t even make romantic ruins. I wonder what they’ll figure out for the rebuilding of the towns, where the rubble is twenty feet deep packed, where they have no machinery or man power, and where they can’t move into the suburbs which are just as bad or worse.” 7
He felt little pity. He had practically stopped trying to learn German, he admitted, because he didn’t want to have anything to do with the German people. He had no sympathy for them, and he resented every minute spent in their country. He knew the void was a time interval, the last phase of a long and painful tour of duty, but that didn’t mean he could see an end.
“The worst of it,” he wrote his sister, “is that there will be no even half-peace for five years, and even as far as Germany goes I think they’ll be fighting for some time. In spite of the collapse of the wehrmacht and the triumphant newspapers, there has been so far no place where a great many people were not killed winning it…. Hoping to see you before my retirement pay starts.” 8
And yet, despite his disgust with the German people, Lincoln Kirstein was horrified by the destruction of German culture. The sight of the burned-out monuments, and especially the bits of edifice that somehow had survived, made him sick. “The horrid desolation of the German cities, should, I suppose, fill us with fierce pride,” he wrote: 9
If ever the mosaic revenge was exacted, lo, here it is. The eyes and the teeth, winking and grinning in hypnotic catastrophe. But the builders of the Kurfürstliches Palais, of the Zwinger, of Schinkel’s great houses, and of the Market Places of the great German cities were not the executioners of Buchenwald or Dachau. No epoch in history has produced such precious ruins. To be sure, they are rather filigraine, and delicate in comparison to antiquity, but what they lack in romance and scale is made up by the extension of the area they cover.…
There is little use in trying to figure out now what can eventually be done,—should the cities be built again around the focus of surviving cathedrals, can the Church summon enough strength to restore. Where will the transport, the gasoline, the manpower, the materials come from to clear away the solid ruins, even before any work can be considered to rebuild?…
To make a loose summation: Probably the State and private collections of portable objects, have not suffered irreparably. But the fact that the Nazis always intended to win the war, counting neither on retaliation or defeat, is responsible for the destruction of the monumental face of urban Germany. Less grand than Italy, less noble than France, I would personally compare it to the loss of Wren’s London City chur
ches, and that’s too much elegance to remove from the surface of the earth.
CHAPTER 39
The Gauleiter
Altaussee, Austria
April 14–17, 1945
August Eigruber’s office in Linz was packed with petitioners. As Dr. Emmerich Pöchmüller, the general director of the Altaussee mining operations, pushed his way through the crowd, he saw not only businessmen but army commanders and SS officers, all gesturing and clamoring for an audience with the gauleiter. One of them was an old friend, the director of the power plant at Oberdonau (Upper Danube district). The poor man, Pöchmüller noticed, looked sweaty and pale.
“He’s going to blow up the power plant,” the man said.
Pöchmüller’s heart sank. “You’re here to convince him otherwise, aren’t you?”
“I am. What about you?”
“I’m here to convince him not to blow up the salt mine.” 1
On April 14, 1945, Pöchmüller had discovered that Eigruber’s crates contained bombs, not marble. He had called the gauleiter to complain, but no one would take his call. Two days later, Eigruber’s adjutant had called to say the gauleiter’s decision was final. The mines were to be destroyed.
On April 17, Pöchmüller decided to drive to Linz. After all, new orders from Albert Speer had stated that destruction wasn’t necessary if the facilities could be “disabled” and made unusable by the enemy. Then Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal assistant, confirmed by radiogram—after Pöchmüller appealed to his assistant Dr. Helmut von Hummel—the Führer’s wish that “the artwork was by no means to fall into the hands of the enemy, but in no event should it be destroyed.” 2 Surely, this was reason enough for Eigruber to relent. But now that Pöchmüller was in the gauleiter’s office, he realized everyone in the Oberdonau district had a reason their particular facility should be saved. Which probably meant none of them would.
In the end, he got five minutes. Eigruber did not offer him a seat. The gauleiter was an ironworker by training and a fierce party loyalist, having been a founding member of the Upper Austrian Hitler Youth. By age twenty-nine, he was the district leader. His loyalty lay with the Führer, or at least with the man he knew the Führer to be: a force for annihilation, without pity or remorse. Eigruber was suspicious of “unpure” orders from Speer or others who would soften the Führer’s Nero Decree. And it was inconceivable to him, a man who had pounded iron in the factories of rural Austria, that the Führer would have made exceptions, especially for the preservation of art. If orders from Berlin were confusing or contradictory, then it was August Eigruber’s right—no, his duty—to interpret them. And he knew the Führer’s mind. Hadn’t the great man preached his whole life about destruction: of the Jews, the Slavs, the gypsies, the sick, and the infirm? Hadn’t he courageously ordered their extermination, an order obeyed with enthusiasm by Eigruber at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and by thousands of others at camps scattered across Eastern Europe? Hadn’t he condemned the corrupting, degenerate nature of modern art? Hadn’t he burned artwork in a great pyre in the center of Berlin? Hadn’t he destroyed Warsaw and Rotterdam instead of letting them fall to the enemy? Hadn’t he scarred the face of art-rich Florence? But for that weak fool General von Choltitz, Paris would be a disease-ravaged ruin. Eigruber was determined that, in his domain at least, weakness would not prevail. Absolutely nothing of value, he swore, would fall into the hands of the enemy. He never doubted that his Führer would approve.
“Do what you think is absolutely necessary,” Eigruber said, as Pöchmüller prattled on about the blast area of bombs. “The main point is total destruction. We will stay bullheaded on this.” 3
CHAPTER 40
The Battered Mine
Heilbronn, Germany
April 16, 1945
James Rorimer finally arrived at the southern German town of Heilbronn, his first objective as Monuments officer for U.S. Seventh Army, on April 16, 1945. The journey had been, to put it mildly, a complete disaster. Seventh Army had hopped the Rhine River and was moving so rapidly that no one was sure where their headquarters was currently located. The Railroad Transportation Office routed him first to Lunéville, then an officer recommended he go to Sarrebourg, which was the end of the line. A sympathetic GI overheard his story and gave him a ride to Worms on his two-and-a-half-ton truck. From there he hitched a ride to Military Government headquarters, which informed him that Seventh Army was now south of Darmstadt, across the Rhine. “I’ve been expecting you for months,” Lieutenant Colonel Canby snapped when Rorimer reported for duty at Seventh Army headquarters. “I concurred with the order to assign you to this headquarters in January.”
“There’s no need for monuments work over here,” Canby told Rorimer bluntly, once he had settled in. “The Army Air Forces have completely destroyed every major city in southern Germany, and our ground troops are taking care of the rest. Your job, as far as I’m concerned, is to locate art looted from Western Allied countries. Third Army has come in for more than its share of publicity”—referring to Merkers, which was still making worldwide headlines—“and it’s time that Seventh Army had a salt mine or two of its own.” 1
Rorimer realized what Canby meant by complete destruction when he reached the outskirts of Heilbronn. Elements of VI Corps, Seventh Army, had arrived at the city on April 2, the day George Stout and Walker Hancock entered the mine at Siegen. They had been barreling through the industrial centers of south-central Germany on their way to Stuttgart, and they expected little resistance from this typical midsized town. Heilbronn was just another broken city, they figured, shattered by British air raids; a devastating raid in December 1944, in particular, had destroyed 62 percent of the infrastructure and killed seven thousand civilians, including a thousand children under the age of ten.
But looks could be deceiving, especially in the void of southern Germany. When Seventh Army tried to cross the Neckar River on the morning of April 3, the broken city exploded with life. The Neckar was a hundred meters wide and the Wehrmacht, hidden in the hills east of town, had perfect sightlines down on the plodding assault boats. Time and again the boats were sunk or driven back. When army engineers tried to launch a pontoon bridge, the Jerries took it out with mortar fire, sinking two tanks. Those who made it to the far bank were pinned down by enemy fire. The German mortars fired every three minutes, more frequently when targets showed themselves on the river or bank. When the soldiers crept into the streets, they discovered the angry citizens had formed the rubble of their homes and businesses into barricades, and crack German troops had taken up defensive positions along every line. For nine days the city was the site of one of the most brutal battles of the war, as Seventh Army fought block to block, then house to house, then room to room through the collapsing town.
James Rorimer, stuck in Paris for most of his time in Europe, hadn’t seen anything like what remained since his inspection of Saint-Lô in Normandy. “What you read in the newspapers is not exaggerated,” he would write his wife. “The ghost towns are fantastic. They are particularly bad just after they have surrendered.” 2
One route had been cleared; every other street looked impassable. Other than the Allied bulldozers working to clear the rubble, the city was deserted. Of the Germans, it seemed only the dead remained. The stench was overpowering.
According to captured German intelligence, the artwork could be found in the town’s salt mine, whose superstructure—a grid of metal that supported the lift mechanisms—was visible from a mile away. Rorimer scrambled down Salt Street, then Salt Works Square and finally Salt Ground Street, where he was able for the first time to glimpse the brick and concrete building that housed the mineshaft. The fighting had been savage; several buildings were still smoldering. But there were people on the street, huddled and beaten but still alive. Rorimer pulled up beside two men and asked about the mine.
They shook their heads. “Russo,” they said. They were Russian slave laborers.
“Deutsch?” he asked.
Did they know anyone who spoke German?
They shrugged. Who knew anything these days?
Rorimer finally located two terrified German women in an employee housing complex. The Nazis had wanted the mine destroyed, the women told him, but the miners refused. “We can live without the Nazis,” they said, “but we cannot live without salt.” There were twenty square miles of minable salt under Heilbronn, enough to provide work for generations. This was not something the miners were willing to destroy; the Nazis, fortunately, were too busy with other concerns. In the end, the fierceness of the battle saved the mine.
But there was still the water.
The mine, excavated to an average depth of six hundred feet, consisted of dozens of large chambers in two levels, one on top of the other. Much of the extensive tunnel system was beneath the Neckar River. Water seeped continuously down through cracks in the rocks. This seepage had to be pumped out eight hours a day to keep the mine from flooding, but because the power had been out, the pumps were not working. The lack of power had also knocked out the only elevator. No one had entered the mine, but the women assumed the lower level was full of water by now.
Rorimer had anticipated a quick stop. There were numerous repositories on the road to Neuschwanstein, and he couldn’t afford to spend time at each one. But Heilbronn, he realized, was a disaster in the making, and it was worth the investment of time. So he went immediately to Military Government headquarters with the mayor of Heilbronn to secure an engineering team. All the army would do was post a guard, so the next day he returned to headquarters in Darmstadt, where the colonel told him bluntly, “Nobody can be spared. The mine is your responsibility. Fix it yourself.” Seventh Army wanted the glory of a major repository, but they didn’t want to spare more than a single man—James Rorimer—to secure it.