Far more effective were the efforts of Dr. Hermann Michel, head of the Mineralogical Department of the Natural History Museum, Vienna. Michel, supposedly, sent the message alerting Major Pearson, who was leading an infantry unit in the spearhead of the U.S. Third Army advance, to the treasures hidden at Altaussee, including the Hungarian crown jewels. (The crown jewels were not in the mine. They were found in an oil barrel sunk in marshland near the village of Mattsee in Bavaria.) Despite Posey’s and Kirstein’s best efforts to alert the most forward U.S. troops to Hitler’s hoard, this was the first Pearson had heard of Altaussee. The message was real, but it is unclear if Michel was the person who sent it.
When Pearson arrived on May 8 with two jeeps and a truckload of infantrymen, Michel was there to greet him. Passing himself off as an expert, he gave the American commander a tour of the area, explaining that half a billion dollars’ worth of cultural treasures were inside the collapsed mine. He also implied, and later backed up with documents bullied from other participants, that he had been intimately involved in the plot to remove Eigruber’s bombs. Pearson believed Michel’s account for a simple reason: He was the only person at the mine who spoke English. In fact, Michel at best had a tangential role in what happened at Altaussee.
In 1938, Dr. Michel had been deposed from his position as director of the Natural History Museum Vienna, despite strenuous efforts to cozy up to the Nazi elite. 9 Under its new director, the museum became a propaganda tool for racial ideology. The chastened Michel, now head of the Mineralogy Department, vociferously supported its exhibits focusing on racial divisions among humans, the “racial and emotional” appearance of Jews, and the “ideal” man and woman—Nordic, of course. 10 He often spoke at public functions in support of Hitler, joined the Rotary Club “to weaken the Jewish influence,” 11 and was the public relations official for the local branch of the Nazi Party.
Michel was less a racist, though, than an amoral opportunist. 12 For years, he had cozied up to history’s worst murderers and racists, but he realized sooner than most that the new powers would be the liberators of places like Altaussee. The void of April to May 1945 was a period where past deeds could quickly be buried or mischaracterized, and today’s lie could become tomorrow’s truth. Those who stepped forward, Michel knew, could not only save their own necks, but become invaluable to the Allied conquerors.
This was happening all over Germany and Austria, as people from all walks of life—hardened Nazis and brave resisters alike—angled for the best possible position in the new world order. George Stout saw through their acts. “I am sick of all schemers,” he wrote, “of all the vain crawling toads who now edge into positions of advantage and look for selfish gain or selfish glory from all this suffering.” 13 Posey was equally suspicious, having most of the obvious Nazis at Altaussee arrested, but Michel’s story stuck. Soon, the mineralogist was being featured in American newspapers as the hero of Altaussee.
And then things went quiet. The story of Altaussee, so monumental in the world of art and culture, was quickly subsumed by larger stories—Auschwitz, the atomic bomb, and disintegrating relations with the Soviet Union that would define the new world order as the cold war. Kirstein had anticipated this when he wrote on May 13, 1945, that “by the time you get this you may have read about it [the find at Altaussee], but most of the correspondents are celebrating in Paris, and due to its unusual nature this may get no coverage at all.” Still, he had added, “Although I doubt it.” 14 After all, how could one of the most important and unbelievable moments in art history—not to mention the history of a world war—simply become a forgotten footnote?
But that’s exactly what happened. A few articles and books were written over the years, but soon even the art community forgot about the dramatic events at Altaussee. It wasn’t until the 1980s that an Austrian historian named Ernst Kubin located the source material—letters, orders, interviews, and first-person accounts—to determine what really happened at Altaussee. That source material, viewed again for this book, provides a surprising story with even more surprising heroes. It is also a near-perfect summary of what happens in the void of war and how history is more often than not a messy combination of intention, courage, preparation, and chance.
If Hitler’s orders created the momentum and opportunity to destroy history’s greatest works of art, as I believe, it was his loyal retainer Albert Speer who created the countermomentum to stop it. On March 30, 1945, Speer convinced Hitler to change his Nero Decree from the “total destruction” of nonindustrial sites to “crippling them lastingly.” Speer then issued secret orders on his own to scale back and undermine those guidelines. These orders gave mining officials at Altaussee the cover and courage they needed to stand up to Eigruber’s plan.
They had not learned of that plan by chance, as Kirstein believed. They were informed of it on April 13, 1945, by Dr. Helmut von Hummel who, as Martin Bormann’s secretary in the bunker with Hitler, was privy to most communiqués in the Third Reich. 15 Von Hummel’s intention was to stop Eigruber’s actions, but he would not publicly acknowledge his role—the last days of the Third Reich were dangerous, and von Hummel was a typical Nazi coward—leaving the mine director, Dr. Emmerich Pöchmüller, to confront Eigruber without high party backing. When Eigruber refused to accept Pöchmüller’s phone call, the mine director drove to Linz on April 17 in hopes of a face-to-face meeting. His plan, if he could not talk sense into the gauleiter, was to trick him. With the help of the mine’s technical director, Eberhard Mayerhoffer, Pöchmüller had devised a plan to blow up the mine entrances and seal the bombs inside, leaving Eigruber with no way to detonate them. They would sell the plan to the gauleiter as a way to strengthen the bomb blasts and guarantee destruction of the mine.
The busy Eigruber (his office, you’ll recall, was full of petitioners) agreed to the lesser explosions. But his assertion that he would “stay bullheaded” 16 on total destruction and a claim that he would “personally come and throw grenades into the mine” 17 if the Nazis lost the war, shocked Pöchmüller into an understanding of the seriousness of the situation. By April 19, he had worked out the specifics of the plan with his mining counselor (foreman) Otto Högler. It was a difficult and complicated job, necessitating hundreds of moving parts and careful planning to ensure, as much as possible, that the blasts wouldn’t cause unintended collapses inside the various mine chambers where the art was stored. On April 20, work began. Högler believed the job would take at least twelve days—until May 2—to complete.
On April 28, 1945, Pöchmüller signed what could have been his own death warrant when he ordered Högler to remove the bombs. The “agreed palsy” that would take place at a time “presented to you by myself personally” (see page 329 for the whole text) referred to the explosions that would collapse the entrances to the mine. 18 Pöchmüller must have been horrified when, two days later, Eigruber’s adjunct District Inspector Glinz overheard Högler discussing trucks for the removal of the bombs and discovered the order. By the end of the day, six armed guards loyal to Eigruber were stationed at the entrance to the mine.
By May 3, the situation was desperate. The Americans were stuck in Innsbruck, 150 miles away; Eigruber’s guards controlled entry into the mine; the bombs were still inside; and a demolition team had been spotted in a nearby valley. But all was not lost. The “palsy” charges were almost set and Karl Sieber, the art restorer and Pöchmüller confidant, had convinced two of Eigruber’s guards of the barbarity of the gauleiter’s plan. 19 Meanwhile, word was spreading among the miners that the crates contained bombs, not the sculpture advertised on the crate exteriors. A miner named Alois Raudaschl, an active Nazi, knew that Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a local boy who had risen to the top tier of the Nazi Party, was on his way to the area and suggested contacting the notorious SS deputy and leader of the Gestapo.
At 2:00 p.m. on May 3, 1945, Raudaschl met with Kalten-brunner in the home of a mutual friend. Soon after, Kaltenbrunner met with Högler and agreed neither t
he great artwork stolen by Hitler nor the livelihood of the miners should be needlessly destroyed. When Högler asked if he had Kaltenbrunner’s permission to remove the bombs, the SS officer replied, “Yes, do it.” 20
That night, the bombs were removed by the miners, with the implicit sanction of Eigruber’s guards. The work took four hours. The miners knew nothing of the three weeks of planning and courage that had created this opportunity; they thought they were sneaking the bombs out on their own initiative. This honest mistake, taken as fact, caused the Americans and history to misunderstand the situation entirely.
Around midnight, another of Eigruber’s loyal adjuncts, Tank Staff Sergeant Haider, arrived at Altaussee. If the bombs were removed, Haider warned, Högler would be held responsible and “ruthlessly eliminated.” 21 The bombs would stay in the mines at all costs. If this was not done the gauleiter would “come himself to Altaussee the following morning and hang each single one of them.” 22 (Thus the subsequent rumors the miners were threatened, when it was really the plotters who were in danger.) Kaltenbrunner was alerted to the threat and reached Eigruber by phone at 1:30 a.m. on the morning of May 4. After a vicious tongue-lashing, the gauleiter backed down. 23 He asked only that the bombs be left beside the road for his men to pick up, not dumped into a lake as Högler had intended.
One day later, at the crack of dawn on May 5, 1945, Emmerich Pöchmüller and Otto Högler, two of the true heroes of Altaussee, stood outside the entrance to the mine. The miners had worked twenty hours straight to finish the preparations for the palsy, which included not only the six tons of explosives but 386 detonators and 502 timing switches. On Pöchmüller’s orders, the switches were thrown and seventy-six bomb blasts echoed out of the mountain, sealing 137 tunnels in the ancient salt mines at Altaussee. 24
CHAPTER 52
Evacuation
Altaussee, Austria
May 1–July 10, 1945
When Monuments Men Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein arrived at Altaussee on May 16, 1945, the small mining village was being held by a handful of American infantry soldiers. There were also dozens of miners and several Austrian and German officials, and almost as many conflicting stories. According to Kirstein, “A hive of wild rumors buzzed about the entrance: the mine had been blown; we could see nothing; there was no use trying to enter.” 1 But enter the Monuments Men did, pushing through the cold mine to the huge sloping wall of dirt and rock brought down on Pöchmüller’s order. The blast was intended to create a barrier forty feet deep, but nobody was sure if that was actually the case. And nobody knew what they would find on the other side.
The miners estimated it would take two weeks to clear a space through the bomb-blasted rocks. Posey, with an architect’s training, felt sure combat engineers could clear it in less than a week. The miners, now under orders from the Americans, set to work with old-fashioned picks and shovels. By the next morning, they had cleared a small crevice at the top of the tunnel large enough for a man to squeeze through.
Robert Posey went through first, followed by Lincoln Kirstein. Another world awaited them beyond the wall: dusty, dark, and eerily silent. Their old-fashioned acetylene torches threw light a few yards down a main corridor filled with debris. The iron security doors, blasted apart by the force of the detonations, hung wildly from their hinges. The air was damp, suggesting broken sluices and flooded chambers. The first door they approached sheltered a dynamite magazine. Past the door, a narrow side passage branched off into the mountain. The second door was solid iron, and took two keys to open. Inside, silently reading a book, was Van Eyck’s Virgin Mary. Next to her, on four empty cardboard boxes, were seven more panels of the Ghent Altarpiece. “The miraculous jewels of the Crowned Virgin seemed to attract the light from our flickering acetylene lamps,” Kirstein later wrote. “Calm and beautiful, the altarpiece was, quite simply, there.” 2
The Monuments Men backtracked and, by way of half-hidden, pitch-black tunnels, were able to maneuver around the bomb blast. A guide led them deep into the cold heart of the mountain, past branching passageways, to a large rock-vaulted chamber. Their torchlight, swinging into the gloom, illuminated rack after rack of plain pine boxes filled with some of the world’s great artistic masterpieces before falling, finally, on the milky white surface of Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna. She was lying on her side on a filthy brown-and-white-striped mattress, almost assuredly the very same mattress onto which she had been pushed just days before British Monuments Man Ronald Balfour had arrived in Bruges eight months earlier. Monuments Man Thomas Carr Howe Jr. (who arrived in June) would later write, “the light of our lamps played over the soft folds of the Madonna’s robe, the delicate modeling of her face. Her grave eyes looked down, seemed only half aware of the sturdy Child nestling close against her, one hand firmly held in hers.” 3 A few days later, in a deep chamber, the Monuments Men discovered the remaining four panels of the Ghent Altarpiece, Vermeer’s The Artist’s Studio, and, farther into the dark recesses of the chamber, the Rothschild family’s Vermeer, The Astronomer.
On May 18, with the size of the find slowly coming into focus, Lincoln Kirstein was sent back to headquarters to pick up “an expert in air, humidity and paint chemistry so we could see what the pictures have been in for. The expert,” he wrote, “is always George Stout, who is perhaps the nicest man in the world.” 4
The indispensable Stout arrived at Altaussee on May 21. His first action was to dutifully record the known contents of the mine, which had been summarized in a report by mine personnel staff Karl Sieber and Max Eder and handed over to Stout by the solicitous Dr. Michel: 5
6577 paintings
230 drawings or watercolors
954 prints
137 pieces sculpture
129 pieces arms and armor
79 baskets of objects
484 cases objects thought to be archives
78 pieces furniture
122 tapestries
181 cases books
1200-1700 cases apparently books or similar
283 cases contents completely unknown
He then set about interviewing the mine personnel and inspecting the chambers. “It was fascinating,” Kirstein wrote, “to hear him compare American methods of determining absolute, or relative, or some kind of humidity with the Austrian methods used by the Professor of Mineralogy from the University of Vienna [the notorious Dr. Michel], who had always been at the depot, and who showed us his credentials from the Austrian Resistance Movement.” 6 After three days of study, Stout declared the artwork in the mine safe for another year. Then, leaving the mine in Posey’s command, he traveled to Third Army rear to press for a war crimes investigation of what had happened in the remote salt mine in the Austrian Alps. No investigation ever took place.
On June 14, George Stout returned to Altaussee with Lieutenant Steve Kovalyak, his new disciple from Bernterode. The mine passageways were finally cleared the next day and all “palsied” tunnels reopened. The effort had taken 253 work shifts by the miners, who had removed 879 cartloads of debris.
Ten days later, on June 25, Stout received grave news. President Harry Truman had knuckled under to Stalin. The Western Allies would not be holding their conquered territory, but instead falling back to the postwar boundaries determined by the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) at the Yalta Conference in February. Altaussee, as well as numerous other repositories, would be in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. Everything left in the mine, Stout realized, would be handed over to Stalin. The Allies would not have a year to remove the treasures from Altaussee, as Stout had assumed. They had until July 1. Four days.
Stout cracked the whip. Karl Sieber and Stout’s two new assistants, Monuments Men Thomas Carr Howe Jr. and Lamont Moore, were sent deep into the mine to select the most important pieces for priority removal. Stout had brought with him the German sheepskin coats he had used to wrap artwork at Merkers; they were now used for the same purpose at Altaussee. Once wrapped and crated, the artwork was
placed on the small trolley carts (referred to as “mine dogs”) that wound on narrow tracks throughout the mine. The miners walked beside the mine dogs as a small engine pulled them toward the surface. Outside, the artwork was loaded onto trucks and, accompanied by two half-tracks, driven down the hazardous mountain roads to an MFAA art collecting center, known as the Munich Collecting Point, established by James Rorimer. There, the trucks were unloaded and the sheepskin coats—as well as any crates or other packing material available—driven back to Altaussee to be used for the next shipment.
Conditions deteriorated quickly. Behind schedule, Stout implemented a sixteen-hour workday, from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Outside, it rained incessantly, complicating the loading of trucks and making even walking to the bunkhouse miserable. Inside, the mine’s electrical and lighting systems, knocked out by Pöchmüller’s explosions, still didn’t work. There weren’t enough places to sleep; food was scarce; communication with the outside world almost nonexistent. Stout scraped his knuckles on the salty mine walls and got an infection; every night, he had to soak his fingers for hours in a helmet filled with hot water to keep the swelling down. “All hands grumbling,” he wrote in his diary, in typical understated fashion. 7
They missed their July 1 deadline. Fortunately, there was disagreement in high political circles over whether the deadline applied only to Germany, or to Austria as well. The men kept working. At breakfast on July 10, George Stout announced, “This looks like a good day for the gold-seal products.” 8 He had spent several days with Steve Kovalyak wrapping the Bruges Madonna with coats, paper, and rope until it looked, in the words of Stout’s assistant Thomas Carr Howe Jr., “like a trussed ham.” 9 A one-ton trussed ham, that is, on which even a tiny scratch would be forever noticed by the world. But Stout was confident. Using a specially devised rope and pulley system, he carefully lifted the statue onto a waiting mine dog, declaring, “I think we could bounce her from Alp to Alp, all the way to Munich, without doing her any harm.” 10 He then proceeded to personally walk the mine dog and statue to the mine entrance.