The Rape of Europa (64 page)

There was no escort for the remains of the Prussian heroes as there had been for the gold; they were deposited very quietly in the Castle of Marburg. Their accoutrements fared better. Walker Hancock had taken the crown regalia to First Army headquarters in Weimar. Commanding General Courtney Hodges took one look and immediately ordered Hancock to drive them to Frankfurt to be stored with the gold. The route would be on the autobahn, which Hancock considered now “as safe as the Merritt Parkway.” General Hodges did not agree, and the treasure, jewel-less though it might be, was given two motorcycles, three jeeps with machine guns, two armored cars with antiaircraft guns, and a weapons carrier with two guards.
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While it was relatively easy to inspire front-line commanders to provide transportation and labor for glamorous evacuations such as Merkers and Bernterode (which Lamont Moore later described as “a very special technicolor project” and “an anti-nationalistic move prompted by the whim of
the General in the area,” respectively
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), there was markedly less enthusiasm for moving the cache at Siegen. The Eighth Division still proudly guarded the premises, which had become a military tourist attraction of sorts. Signs all over Aachen directed the curious to the mine. Soldiers were shown around and allowed to try on what they believed was Charlemagne’s crown, but was in fact a reproduction. The contents of the mine were suffering terribly in the dampness, which could not be controlled without electric power; but there seemed to be no other place to take them.

Things came to a head when trucks, rare as hen’s teeth, suddenly became available. Taking matters into his own hands, Walker Hancock loaded the convoy with items from Cologne and the Charlemagne relics from Aachen and sent them off to the vaults of the cathedrals of those two cities, virtually the only buildings left standing. Labor to load and unload was miraculously produced by the resourceful Kovalyak from local prisons and DP camps. This shipment violated every Army rule: no clearances for movement between different commands were obtained, and the objects were returned to the Germans. The trucks going to Aachen, surprisingly, had French drivers, reputed to be reckless. Hancock told them that they were transporting “Charlemagne himself … the robe of the Blessed Virgin, the swaddling clothes of the Enfant Jesus, the shroud of John the Baptist, and the bones of several other saints.” Thus imbued with the fear of divine retribution, the Frenchmen drove the trucks with infinite care.
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The rest of the contents of Siegen did not fare so well. Struggling with famished laborers and ever more difficult transportation problems, Lamont Moore and Stout did not get the objects out until the first week of June. At the Stadtsarchiv in Marburg the Siegen treasures joined the Bernterode paintings. The delay and waves made at various headquarters had not been all bad. On May 20 word finally came from SHAEF that in order to carry out earlier directives, commanders should “with the advice of MFAA specialist officers reserve and properly equip for use as collecting depots for works of art… buildings suitable for the purpose.”
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Marburg thus became the first official American “Collecting Point” operating in Germany.
Faute de mieux
the Army had become, as the Roberts Commission planners and John Nicholas Brown had foreseen, responsible for a staggering horde. And it was about to increase a hundredfold.

Just after the middle of April the American Third and Seventh Armies, joined by the French First Army, now all well within Germany, had turned southeast toward Bavaria and Austria. They reached Neuschwanstein on the twenty-eighth, Munich on the thirtieth, Berchtesgaden on May 4, and Alt Aussee on May 8. Rorimer, armed with Rose Valland’s information,
arrived at Neuschwanstein just a week later. On the way there the accuracy of her information had been confirmed at the Monastery of Buxheim, also on her list, where Rorimer got a foretaste of what was to come: here were seventy-two boxes marked “D-W”—for David-Weill—still bearing the French shipping labels. Rorimer’s reception was not friendly. The custodian had at first refused to open the doors. Inside, the corridors were stacked with beautiful furniture of all periods and nations, from French to Russian, and the chapel floor was covered with layers of rugs and tapestries a foot deep. In adjoining rooms he found a dormitory for a hundred evacuated children.
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Siegen, 1945: Eighth Infantry Division in the museum business

Leaving this “minor” deposit under guard, Rorimer went on to the incredible castle at Füssen. Neuschwanstein was intact and well guarded, though it was clear from gaps in certain rooms that the ERR had made great efforts to remove what they could at the last minute. Rorimer was amazed to find more than thirteen hundred paintings from the Bavarian museums mixed in with the confiscated French works. In a vault behind a hidden steel door were boxes containing the Rothschild jewels, other precious goldsmith’s work, and more than a thousand pieces of silver from the David-Weill collections. Best of all was a room containing all the meticulously kept ERR records: well over twenty thousand catalogue
cards, each representing a confiscated work or group of works, eight thousand negatives, shipping books, and even the rubber stamps with which the code names of the various collections had been marked on frames and boxes. Rorimer locked this chamber very carefully, and, using an antique Rothschild emblem, added wax seals to the door, which the guards were ordered to inspect regularly.

From the venerable custodian of the castle Rorimer learned that Bruno Lohse and a colleague were lodged in a nursing home in the town. The matron of the house, referring to the Nazis as “dogs and fiends,” took Rorimer, who had brought along Counter Intelligence officers, in to see the two ERR operatives. Lohse gave Rorimer the names of the other ERR repositories, but pretended to know nothing more; to improve his memory he was arrested and locked up in the local jail.

The Neuschwanstein deposits were impressive, but no one yet knew the location of the most important items, those which had been supplied to Goering and Hitler. Following the trail, Rorimer, now accompanied by Calvin Hathaway, cautiously entered the newly conquered country to the southeast, passing the road to Schliersee, where Hans Frank would shortly be arrested, and going on to the beautiful Chiemsee with its twin islands. On one was an ancient Benedictine abbey and on the other another of Ludwig II’s castles, Herrenchiemsee, an expensive reproduction of Versailles, which contained three hundred more crates of ERR loot, along with the furniture of the Residenz in Munich and a large number of sightseeing GIs.

From there they went on to Berchtesgaden. Here all was chaos. French troops had blocked the roads into the town and up to the ruins of Hitler’s Berghof so that American troops could not move in, and after raising the French flag over Hitler’s house had proceeded with great enthusiasm to loot it and all the other residences in the famous Nazi resort. Empty picture frames were scattered everywhere; two della Robbia tondi lay on the ground outside one of the tunnels which linked the houses. French officers were seen carrying off rugs and other objects. Order was only gradually being established by the crack American 101st Airborne Division under the command of General Maxwell Taylor.

A preliminary search of the vicinity turned up no major repository. Puzzled, Rorimer, after alerting the 101st to be on the lookout for a large cache, returned to his headquarters. On the way back he inspected and secured as best he could the Nazi party buildings in Munich, which had been looted and vandalized by the local citizenry before the entry of American troops, who were now joining in.
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Goering was worried about his collections too. The Reichsmarschall,
unlike many of his associates, had not swallowed poison, but had been arrested in some style, riding in his fancy car with Frau Emmy and much luggage, to what he had hoped would be a meeting with General Eisenhower himself at Schloss Fischhorn near Salzburg. In this he was disappointed; he was taken instead to a detention center at Augsburg.

Rorimer requested that Goering be interrogated about the location of his collections; meanwhile, further conversation with a now more cooperative Lohse confirmed that the probable site was Berchtesgaden, and that Hofer would probably be found wherever the art was. On May 14 Captain Zoller, a French interrogator who had sat up all night drinking wine with Goering, told Rorimer that the Reichsmarschall had announced that he was after all a “Renaissance type,” and had talked at length about his collection and his intention of leaving it all to the German people. He was therefore “anxious to have his things saved.” He himself had last seen them on his trains in the tunnel at Unterstein. Unlike Lohse, he doubted that Hofer would still be around.
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Rorimer and Hathaway rushed back to Berchtesgaden, where they learned that the day after Rorimer’s previous visit officers of the 101st had indeed found Hofer, who had told them about the train, and Goering’s housekeeper, who said that she had heard that things had been hidden in the passages under the houses. After some persuasion a German maintenance engineer had taken the officers to the walled-up bunker room, from which the dripping contents were taken to a small house at Unterstein. Then the 101st had started to unload the train. The news of these discoveries had never reached the MFAA officers.

While Rorimer was discussing the finds with Captain Harry Anderson, the officer in charge, Hofer and his wife (who had once worked in New York) walked up as if nothing in the world had happened, presented themselves, and asked about mutual acquaintances in America. After these politesses, they all examined the pictures gathered so far and then went on to the Goering villa. The della Robbias were still there, smashed to bits, as the Intelligence officer who had been instructed to put them in a safe place had disagreed with Met curator Rorimer’s attribution and left them on the ground.

Later, back at the little house to which the contents of the train had been taken, from Hofer began to flow the provenances of Goering’s acquisitions. Rorimer and Hathaway recognized one well-known collector or dealer’s name after another as Hofer unabashedly worked through the stacks of pictures. Here, in total disorder, were the Louvre’s fifteenth-century sculpture
La Belle Allemande;
a Rubens which had once belonged to Richelieu from the Koenigs collection; a Masolino bought from Contini
in Florence; and hundreds more. Inside and outside the train itself they found all Goering’s art records, rifled and in terrible confusion. Hathaway worked through the night to put them in some order, after which the 101st, overreacting to their custodial responsibilities, refused to let him take them to MFAA headquarters for analysis. In the National Archives today, the muddy footprints of World War II boots still adorn these documents of greed.

Taking care of Goering’s Berchtesgaden cache was a curator’s nightmare. More than a thousand paintings and sculptures were scattered in at least six different structures, and it was most urgent to consolidate them in one place which could be guarded. The town was deluged with the curious. With great reluctance Rorimer agreed to let the 101st, which had put up a sign reading, “Hermann Goering’s Art Collection Through the Courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division” over the door of the storage area, show a few items to the press. Hofer, who by now had been put under house arrest by Rorimer, but who was essential to the ordering of the collection, nearly stole the show, carelessly picking up and waving about Rembrandts and Rubens as he held forth to the media. When Rorimer warned him to be more careful, Hofer murmured, “If the Herr Leutnant will forgive me, I will be responsible for the Goering Treasures.” Rorimer, who knew rather more than the reporters of the unsavory background of the collection, unceremoniously corrected Hofer’s assumption. But the wily curator had had his little triumph. Marguerite Higgins of the
New York Herald Tribune
reported that Hofer, in showing off the $500 million worth of paintings, had insisted that every one had been “legally paid for.” He even boasted, she said, “with a twinkle in his eye,” about outbidding Hitler’s agent for a Rembrandt. There was no mention of confiscations.
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The story, complete with many photographs, made
Life
and
Time
the next week.
Time’s
correspondent had clearly talked a bit more to the MFAA men, for he did cast doubt on Hofer’s statements on legality, which included the extraordinarily blatant one that “everything taken from the Rothschild collection (which he said was ‘collected’) was later appraised by French experts and a price paid to the French state which of course was considerably in debt to Germany.” The reporter gave a number of details about forced and otherwise dubious sales, noting that “there is considerable mention of the ‘Task Force Rosenberg,’ which as far as I could figure out went around France, Holland and Belgium, confiscating art collections.”
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None of the articles mentioned the MFAA officers at all.