The Rape of Europa (54 page)

Vire: fall 1944

As in Italy, the Monuments officers sought out shell-shocked, distraught, and fearful local arts officials. In Coutances, Rorimer helped extract cases containing the collections of the local museums from a damp
basement in which they had been stored by the Germans four years previously, during which time the curators had been forbidden to see them. Shocked, the Americans watched as the now mold-covered objects were unpacked. Rorimer thought they “looked more like Camembert cheese than works of art.” This they hoped was an exception: everywhere in Normandy they had been told of the good intentions of the Kunstschutz, but no one really knew what they might find at the great national repositories still behind German lines.

And indeed the Kunstschutz, which continued to function until the very last, and was instrumental in ejecting numerous obstreperous retreating units from listed buildings, was under great pressure and often unable to control the destructive and acquisitive instincts of troops made vicious by the new experience of defeat. Italy was not the only place from which the retreating Nazi forces decided to take a few baubles. On June 18 Dr. von Tieschowitz, who had returned to France as Kunstschutz chief after setting up operations in Italy, received a telegram from his High Command: “The Reichsführer SS, in agreement with the French Minister of Education, wishes the Matilda [Bayeux] tapestry to be brought to Paris immediately for safety reasons.” SS transportation would be provided. Himmler, it seems, had expressed his fears for this “Germanic” treasure to Ambassador Abetz. (He was not apparently concerned about the great Medici series by Rubens, or the rest of the masterpieces in the same repository.) In the night of June 26—27 the tapestry was taken from Sourches to the Louvre. Von Tieschowitz wrote to a colleague in Angers that the Bayeux business was a terrible blow, but that he believed that now the tapestry “would probably stay in Paris, perhaps in a French bank.” He was mistaken. His own work, he understandably added, “becomes more and more problematical and difficult.”
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As the fifth year of the war had approached, in the western occupied countries the superficial politeness and
“korrektion”
which had served to disguise both the blatant desire for total control by the conquerors and the hatred of the oppressed had begun to wear very thin. Hunger and the exhaustions of a deprived daily life lived in cold houses and along darkened streets combined with the permeation of news of German defeats to consolidate resistance and bring hope. People no longer tried to disguise the looks of hatred “like scorpion bites,” which in Jünger’s words could only “bring us destruction and death.” It was clear to all that the West would soon again see active warfare. German defenses along the coasts were strengthened. More troops were moved into Italy and the south of France, where increased bombing forced many residents, including Henri Matisse,
whose daughter was a very active Resistance member, to move away from the coasts and up into the hills.

By the early spring of 1944 SS units had begun to wander about the countryside in the former Unoccupied Zone to seek out and punish re-sisters, and generally vent their rage at the turn the war had taken. They no longer bothered to consult their Vichy colleagues before striking. Early in the morning of March 30 they descended on the Château of Rastignac in the Dordogne, where, in 1940, the Bernheim-Jeune family had hidden their paintings. Unfortunately for the owners, M. and Mme Lauwick, the house was a replica of the White House in Washington, and the family had British connections. The residents were lined up outside for three hours. From the house they could plainly hear drawers crashing to the floor and the splintering of wood. They also could hear gunshots in the nearby village, marking the execution of the mayor. Next they too were taken to the town and lined up against a wall, within hearing of other executions.

Meanwhile, after five truckloads of loot had been removed from the château, it was set afire by a special team dressed in fireproof suits. Having completed this task, the Nazis moved on to the outbuildings, where silver from the house was distributed to the soldiers. The Lauwicks were eventually released; in the ashes of the house they found the twisted remains of many beloved objects, but no trace of the Bernheim-Jeune paintings. After the liberation they wrote sadly that all had been lost, as the Germans had not seemed to be “connoisseurs,” and had probably, in their ignorance, burned the pictures, if indeed they had ever found them. They did not know that the choice of Rastignac was far from random: only three weeks before the fire several members of the Bernheim-Jeune family had been arrested by the SS in Nice and relieved of their money, papers, address books, jewelry, a Manet, and a Pissarro before being lucky enough to be released.
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None of the Rastignac pictures have been found. The only clue to their existence is the recent tantalizing testimony of a woman who remembers as a child seeing rolled canvases being loaded into Nazi trucks.
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The last refuges of the French national collections were also now smack in the middle of an area of great Resistance activity. They had been moved, once again, from the pleasant town of Montauban after German forces had marched across the Tarn bridges in November 1942. The curators, gazing helplessly down on the moving columns from the windows of the Ingres Museum, could think only of what one Allied bomb aimed at this Army might do to the thirty-five hundred masterpieces in their care. Although the German troops themselves seemed more interested in taking pictures
of the beautiful city and the river than in war, it was clearly time to move on. Out came the packing cases again; but the choice of refuges was now much more difficult. From Pau and the Resistance came the word to choose places far from cities, railroads, bridges, and seacoasts.
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This did not leave much. A few of the most valuable things were moved to the smallish Château of Loubéjac, north of Montauban. Much more space was needed, for now the collections of many of the provincial museums of the north and the Rhone Valley were coming to join the others. By April 1943 the collections were redistributed in more than a dozen new places. The main Louvre collections were in the châteaux of Montal, Lanzac, and Latreyne near Souillac in the Dordogne; Bordeaux was at Hautefort, and Nancy at Cieurac, to mention only a few. Life became ever more bucolic for the custodians, but had certain compensations. At one refuge the local mayor put on an illegal pig roast for the meat-deprived art historians. At the Château of Latreyne they even bought a cow, named “MN” for Musées Nationaux, but, being inexpert in these matters, discovered too late that it was a beef cow, which soon stopped producing milk.

All these repositories had to be inspected regularly, a procedure that was not always straightforward. The collections from Narbonne and Carcassonne were stored in two Benedictine abbeys where the monks and nuns had taken the vow of silence. After an inspection at the Abbey of Calcat, curator André Chamson was led to the refectory to share the monks’ meal. He was not sure if they had understood all his instructions, but during the silent repast, as usual, one monk read a passage from the Bible, which Chamson remembered roughly as follows:

Then Caesar ordered him to come before him and said: Deliver unto me that which has been entrusted to you or I shall put you to death. And he replied: You may put me to death but I shall never surrender that which has been given unto my protection.

No further comment seemed necessary. At Saint-Scholastique, the neighboring convent, both the rule forbidding the presence of men and the vows of silence were waived for the sake of art. For an hour the nuns chattered away before retiring again from the world. But there were sometimes more than pictures at these remote and silent places. At Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert the cellars contained not only works from the museums of Nîmes and Montpellier but cases of machine guns and an agent recently parachuted in by the British. These the museum people required to be moved.
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The most important refuges were, in the summer of 1944, those grouped around Souillac in the Dordogne. Staff was not hard to find: the job of museum guard carried with it exemption from the increasingly frequent
forced-labor roundups, and for some it offered even more. Eleven of René Huyghe’s guards at Montal were Alsatians condemned to death in absentia by the Nazis. Through an arrangement with Vichy official and Resistance member Gérard André they were given false papers and jobs with the Musées. The Germans never thought to investigate these guards, assuming that jobs of such awesome responsibility would never be given to “criminals.”
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Huyghe (who held the rank of major), his Alsatian guards, and many others were actively involved in Resistance groups, in which they were known by false names. The repositories helped the clandestine efforts in many little ways such as sharing their precious gasoline supplies. At first this was all very patriotic and harmless, but after D-Day it became extremely dangerous for the collections. Roving troops bent on revenge might easily do to the refuges what they had done to Rastignac. At every depot Off Limits signs issued both by the Kunstschutz and the Resistance were kept ready for whichever fighting force might appear. René Huyghe kept a set in his hat.

Valençay, where the great Louvre sculptures were stored, was visited by elements of the SS division “Das Reich,” a tough bunch seasoned by months of action in the USSR, and fresh from their infamous massacre of civilians in the village of Oradour. They were looking for resisters who had skirmished with a German tank column a few days before in and around the stables of the vast château. The Louvre guards were marched out of the building and forced to lie down on the lawn while the SS fired at the windows. Director Gerald van der Kemp defiantly asked them if they wanted to be responsible for the loss of the
Venus de Milo.
When fire broke out in the château, the SS commander assured van der Kemp that the guards could go to put it out, but when they stood up they were sprayed with machine-gun fire, and one was killed. For weeks after this the château grounds were occupied by one or another force; when the Germans had finally retired, the Free French arrived. Musées director Jaujard had to appeal directly to their chief, General Koenig, to move his troops to another encampment before calm could be restored around the château.
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The weeks of suspense as the Allied forces moved toward Paris were anxious ones in the repositories. There was no longer any authority at all. The Vichy government was powerless. Allied planes flew over by the hundreds, heading east. Despite the chaos some things worked: the postal service miraculously continued to deliver paychecks to museum personnel, who could at least buy whatever sustenance was available. There was one last scare: from the Beaux-Arts offices in Paris came an order to calculate the cubic footage of all the stored objects belonging to the Musées Nationaux,
which like the Florentine treasures were to be evacuated for safety beyond the Maginot line, now apparently considered of some use by the Germans. To discourage such a move, the curators stalled and drew up hugely inflated estimates of their holdings. Of this initiative nothing more was heard. The last picture had gone to the Reich. In their châteaux the masterpieces awaited the liberation.

René Huyghe
(standing, second from right)
and his “troops” at Montal

In the first week of August 1944 the Allied armies finally breached the German defenses in Normandy and began the drive to Paris. This only increased the dangers of sporadic and uncontrolled action to the refuges. Chambord, its great white mass clearly visible from the air, was used as a rendezvous point for Allied bomber squadrons. This led to frequent aerial battles overhead, during one of which an English plane crashed on the lawn after skimming the tall chimneys of the château. In early August there was intermittent fighting in the neighborhood. Nervous Germans fired indiscriminately when suspicious of Resistance activity; on the twenty-first they blew up the bar where the museum guards usually gathered. Forty men were held as hostages while the huge château was
carefully searched for weapons or fugitives and all personnel were questioned. Four of the hostages were shot just four days before Chambord was liberated.

Other places were beginning to suffer from the liberators. On August 9 the American Monuments officer Robert Posey was finally able to get to Mont-Saint-Michel, which he had assumed to have been placed off limits. The signs were indeed in place, but this most famous of tourist attractions was not exactly empty. Still, Posey saw little damage, and reported that small groups of well-behaved American personnel were visiting the site “in charge of an officer in each case.” This was soon to change. By the time James Rorimer got there ten days later, total bedlam reigned. French bars and hotels eager for business had opened up as soon as they could. Drunken soldiers drove jeeps up and down the narrow and steeply stepped streets. A British general and his lady friend were cozily installed in one of the hotels. Each day, Rorimer reported, “more than a thousand soldiers came, drank as hard and as fast as they could, and feeling the effects, became boisterous beyond the power of local control.” Stocks of food and fuel were rapidly running out and rumor had it that large groups of Air Force men seeking rest and recreation were on their way. Rorimer, with the help of the mayor, managed to secure the abbey, post guards on its battlements,
ban the jeeps, and forbid the sale of liquor in the town. His new strict policy was so effective that he himself was arrested for several hours by MPs suspicious of his lack of transportation or connection to any recognizable unit.
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