Stealing the Mystic Lamb (37 page)

Grafl joined the Allies earlier than Gaiswinkler, but he was initially accepted by the Royal Air Force, not the SOE. In early 1942 he was driven by submarine from Greece to Alexandria, Egypt, for basic training, after which he received further pilot training in Haifa. Grafl was deployed against the Japanese and worked as crew member on a fighter plane in China and Burma, escorting bombers. After dozens of missions, Grafl began to feel that he was too far from where his heart was; he wanted to be fighting for the freedom of his native Austria. He requested a transfer, and it was then that he was interviewed for the SOE. In 1944 he was given the pseudonym Joseph Green and received the majority of his training in sabotage and parachuting in Hong Kong. He participated in thirty-four sabotage missions before he joined Operation Ebensburg.

The team’s training was complete by late January 1945. The agents were given aliases—false papers and identities. Drilled in the memorization of
their fraudulent biographies, and transferred to Bari in southern Italy, they received their assignments. The primary task was to investigate the Alt Aussee mine depot and to organize a local resistance movement. The secondary agenda, should their primary task be successful, was to lead the local Resistance, gathering intelligence on enemy units and activity in the area. They were to disrupt enemy operations through sabotage and guerrilla tactics, and attempt to secure the mine until the arrival of an Allied army division. And finally, when he arrived for his planned stay in Grundslee, they were to attempt the assassination of Josef Goebbels. They would liaise with the SOE branch based in Bari by radio transmitter, which they would carry with them when dropped by parachute into the Austrian Alps. The codeword communications with HQ in Bari was “Maryland.”

After delays due to inclement weather, the team set out on 8 April. Their equipment, including machine guns, grenades, explosives, detonators, and the radio transmitter, would be dropped in crates with automatic parachutes. They carried with them only handguns and survival knives. They would be met on the ground by members of the Austrian Resistance.

The pilot of the Halifax aircraft that would deliver the special agents, Bill Leckie of the Scottish Saltire Branch of the 148th Royal Air Force Special Duties Squadron, recalled the assignment:

The Halifax aircraft took off from the base at Brindisi in southern Italy at just before midnight, against a backdrop of bright moonlight, Leckie recalled. The seven-man aircraft crew knew only that they had to drop the four SOE agents at specified coordinates. They flew north along the Italian coastline, the moonlight reflecting off the stark mirror of the sea below them, the night clear and crisp. Leckie turned the plane northwest as they passed Ancona, and then wove between Venice and Trieste en route to the Austrian Alps.

Leckie later said:

At 2:50 AM, the dispatcher on the Halifax, Sergeant John Lennox, indicated to Gaiswinkler and his team, shivering and cramped in the unheated fuselage, that it was time to drop. The Halifax began its run at a height of eight hundred feet to drop the equipment containers first, the automatic parachutes billowing gently as the cargo floated down towards the mountain slopes, silhouetted sharply against the white moon and smothered in snow.

As the Halifax banked and circled for the second run, the parachutists prepared to jump. Against the biting wind high above the Austrian mountains, the four-man team jumped from their bomber transport. They
parachuted safely, despite the difficult landing in enormous snowdrifts in which they sank up to their armpits.

But when they landed they could not find the equipment crates, which had sunk into the deep snow. There was no one from the Resistance there to meet them. After a search, they located only the crate containing the radio transmitter. Their relief was cut quick—the radio had been irreparably damaged in the landing. They were without help and without means to contact Bari, with only sidearms and knives for weaponry.

The team suddenly realized that they had been dropped on the wrong slope. Instead of the Zielgebiet am Zinken Plateau, they had landed some kilometers away, on the ominously named Höllingebirge, “Hell Mountain.”

Then they heard the sounds of dogs and soldiers echoing in the distance around the pine-clad mountainside.

Patrols all around had certainly heard the bomber and perhaps saw the parachutes against the night sky. The team checked the roads down the mountain slope but found roadblocks, checkpoints, and patrols. Fortunately the snowbound woods were not patrolled. They made their way slowly through the drifts in the blue light of breaking dawn.

The team had to navigate to Gaiswinkler’s hometown, Bad Aussee, where his brother Max would house them. They arrived at the town of Steinkogl bei Ebensee at the foot of Hell Mountain. Stripping off their jumpsuits, they tried to appear as normal as possible in the civilian clothes they wore underneath.

They boarded a train to Bad Aussee. Onboard rumors circulated that some English soldiers had been spotted parachuting in. No one suspected that the English might have sent Austrian double agents. Gaiswinkler and his team also learned that the German Sixth Army under General Fabianku had been chased out of northwestern Italy and the northern Balkans by the Yugoslav Partizan Army and was encamped throughout the region.

Some kilometers before the Bad Aussee station, the team jumped from the moving train, rightly anticipating checkpoints at transit stations. They
hiked through the woods, avoiding roads, until they collapsed, exhausted, at the home of Max Gaiswinkler.

Without the radio, the team was cut off from headquarters, meaning that they had no way of learning of the travel plans of Joseph Goebbels, one of their two targets. They would have to find another radio, but by the time they did, they learned that Goebbels would not be visiting the area. The assassination plan, wild and unlikely as it had been, was off. Their sole focus was on salvation of the treasures of Alt Aussee.

Their adventures were about to begin.

The Austrian double agents were unaware that a parallel operation was under way. The Allied Third Army, under General Patton, raced towards Alt Aussee even as Gaiswinkler was trying to secure it. In this army were Monuments Men Robert K. Posey and Lincoln Kirstein.

Baby-faced Captain Robert Kelley Posey was an architect as a civilian, born in 1904 and raised in relative poverty by Alabama farmers. Fresh out of Auburn University, he became a liberal activist, speaking out at political rallies against Fascism and the Ku Klux Klan. He taught at Auburn briefly, before spending the body of his professional career at the prestigious New York architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. He left a rich archive of letters written to his wife, Alice, and his young son, Dennis (affectionately known as Woogie), while he was in Europe during the war.

Posey had grown up hard and poor. Giftless Christmases were the norm, as his family struggled to survive as farmers. His only playmate was the family goat, which died the same year as his father—when he was only eleven. From that tender age, he began working two jobs to help his family through the Depression: at the local grocery store and at a soda fountain. It was the ROTC that gave him hope for a brighter future. Even with the ROTC scholarship, he intended to attend university for only one year, to allow his brother a chance to study as well, as funds were too
tight for both of them to go. When he saw how strong a student Posey was, his brother deferred and encouraged him to finish his degree at Auburn.

Posey had military aspirations throughout his life. Much of his time at Auburn was spent in the company of the army ROTC, and he enlisted in the Army Reserves the moment he graduated. When Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, he felt a nationalistic pull and wanted to ship off immediately, but it was six frustrating months before he was called up from the Reserves. After training in the thick of a Louisiana summer, which Posey described as the most humid and uncomfortable experience of his life, he was shipped off for the coldest: a Canadian port on the Arctic Ocean in Churchill, Manitoba. There Posey’s skills as an architect were put to use, as part of a team designing Arctic runways that would permit planes to land safely, should the Nazis invade North America by that most unlikely of attack routes—the North Pole. From there, thanks to his architectural training, he was picked for the new Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the army—a role that would prove a good deal more dramatic than duty within the Arctic Circle.

Posey was a man of high morals, with a tender heart. While stationed in Germany during the war, he came across a group of American soldiers who had found a rabbit in a cage in the yard beside a German cottage. Having eaten nothing but K rations for weeks, the GIs planned to kill and cook it. But as they approached, a woman opened the door to the cottage and called out in halting, accented English that it was her son’s rabbit. Her husband had been an SS officer, but he was dead, and the rabbit was the only thing her eight-year-old son had left of his father. Posey walked over to the cage and hung one of his “Off Limits” signs on it, adding by hand “By Order of Captain Robert Posey, U.S. Third Army.” The soldiers slunk away. From that point on he made a habit of feeding lonely animals he encountered on his wanderings, animals abandoned by owners who were lost or dead or had fled. He wrote, “I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it.”

Posey was a practical joker. When he first joined the Third Army, he shaved either end of his moustache so it looked like Hitler’s—a gag that General George Patton found less than amusing. But his sense of humor was balanced by a pride in service; his family had been soldiers since the Revolutionary War. Intent on honoring his family and serving his country in combat, Posey volunteered as a grunt for the Battle of the Bulge. He survived the battle, though he injured his foot, and he never knew if he had inflicted any damage on the enemy—his eyesight was so poor he had been told simply to keep firing in the appropriate direction until he ran out of ammunition. But a sense of outrage also kept him going when his legs could barely keep up and sleep swelled his eyes. Upon visiting the recently liberated concentration camp of Buchenwald, Posey would take a souvenir he came across in an abandoned office and keep it with him for the rest of the war: a photograph of a Nazi concentration camp officer, beaming with pride as he holds aloft a noose.

Posey’s partner in the MFAA was already a cultural icon in the United States at the start of the war and would go on to a stellar career at the forefront of American arts. Born in 1907 in Rochester, New York, and raised in Boston, the physically towering Lincoln Kirstein was the son of a Jewish businessman who embodied the American dream, working his way up from a start without advantage to great success, counting President Roosevelt among his friends. Young Lincoln attended Harvard, where he founded the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, the precursor to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He also founded a literary magazine called
Hound and Horn
, which published the works of major writers like e. e. cummings as well as the first warning about Hitler’s stance on so-called degenerate art, authored pseudonymously by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. Kirstein worked as an artist and writer, having already published six books by his thirty-seventh year, and was one of the central figures of New York City culture in the years before the war. He married the artist Fidela Cadmus in 1941, though he was involved in same-sex relationships throughout his life. Kirstein was charismatic and driven, but he suffered from depression that may have been undiagnosed bipolar disorder.