The Monuments Men (21 page)

This must suffice for tonight. I have not received word from any of you for a month and am trying hard to trace the letters. What APO do you write to? Please check the new address and don’t fail me.

Love,

James

CHAPTER 16

Entering Germany

Aachen, Germany

October–November 1944

F
or two weeks, Walker Hancock watched the bombs fall on Aachen, the westernmost major city in Germany. It was mid-October 1944, but already cold. He huddled into his jacket and stared at the horizon. Where had the sun of September gone? Smoke curled into a gray sky. The city was on fire. Behind him, the radio crackled as information passed back and forth from the front line.

Hancock had met his colleague George Stout at Verviers, U.S. First Army’s advanced headquarters, just as the Western Allied war machine ran low on fuel and ammunition. The armies had raced hundreds of miles in two months, almost unopposed, to the German border. They found there not an enemy in retreat, as they had expected, but a line of pillboxes, barbed wire, minefields, and antitank barriers known as the Siegfried Line. The pillboxes were rusty with age, and most of the 700,000 troops that manned them were green recruits plucked from the decimated German population, many too young or too old to have fought in previous campaigns. Nonetheless, the Siegfried Line was a defensive bulwark the overstretched Allies couldn’t charge through. At Normandy, the Allies had crashed into the German lines in overpowering waves; at the Siegfried Line, they rolled to a stop in staggered units, their supplies and momentum spent. General Bernard Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group (which included the First Canadian Army in which Monuments Man Ronald Balfour served), was turned back in the Netherlands attempting to cross the Rhine. Patton’s U.S. Third Army was halted near Metz, France. Hancock and First Army met their first stiff resistance since Normandy at Aachen.

The plan was to bypass Aachen altogether, surging by to the north and south and reuniting on the ridge east of town. Aachen, a city of nearly 165,000 whose population had dropped to six thousand as the Allies advanced, promised the kind of protracted fight the Allies wanted to avoid, especially since the city had little heavy industry or tactical value. What it possessed instead was history. Aachen was the seat of power of the Holy Roman Empire, which Hitler referred to as the First Reich. It was at Aachen that Charlemagne consolidated his power and united central Europe under his rule. In the year 800, in Aachen Cathedral—the cathedral he built as a crowning monument to his achievements—Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III, the first such ruler in Europe since the collapse of Rome. Beginning in 936, Charlemagne’s prayer hall, the Palatine Chapel, was the coronation hall of the German kings and queens. It would serve in that capacity for the next six hundred years. Aachen Cathedral and the surrounding old quarter were undisputed historic treasures. The Allies had every reason to leave the city untouched.

Unfortunately, Aachen held major symbolic value for Adolf Hitler, not just as the birthplace of the First German Reich (and perhaps one of the inspirations for his Führermuseum at Linz) but as the first German city threatened by Allied troops. As retreating German soldiers mustered in the city, the local citizens cheered. But when the Allies appeared on the horizon, the local Nazi officials commandeered the last train out of town, loaded it with personal possessions, and abandoned the citizens to their fate. Hitler didn’t care about the citizens—to give your life for Germany, after all, was considered a high honor by those not yet asked to do so—but he was so irate that the local Nazi officials had abandoned a major German city that he ordered them to the Eastern front as privates, a virtual death sentence. He then sent in a five-thousand-man division with orders to fight until Aachen lay about them in ruins and the last man was dead.

The Allies faltered. Having flanked the city and conquered the high ground beyond, the commanders decided that leaving five thousand soldiers behind the front near their supply lines was too risky. On October 10, 1944, they demanded a German surrender. The Germans refused. On October 13, First Army attacked. It was fairly easy to justify the need to spare the monuments of conquered countries like France and Belgium. But what about Germany? To Hancock, the aerial bombardment already seemed more intense. The men, he knew, were not entering with mercy on their minds. The motto of one battalion said it all: “Knock ’em all down.” The Allies seemed eager to level Aachen.

The battle raged for eight days. The Allies had superior forces, but the Germans were hidden everywhere, including the sewer system, and the struggle quickly devolved into a chaotic, building-to-building fight. Bombers called in by spotters on the ridge dropped long-fuse bombs that detonated not on roofs but several floors into buildings, blowing them to smithereens. Artillery and tank fire knocked the city down block by block. The ancient stone buildings in the city center proved too well-built for tanks, so the Americans wheeled in their largest artillery piece and aimed it point-blank into walls. A bulldozer cleared the rubble for the advancing troops, who took a savage joy in the destruction. A few miles back the Allies had crossed an invisible line. This wasn’t France; it was Germany. From Hancock’s perspective, it seemed the prevailing attitude was that Aachen deserved everything the Allies could throw at her and more.

On October 21, despite Hitler’s order to die for the Reich, the surviving Germans surrendered. As soldiers and civilians were rounded up and marched out, Walker Hancock and his colleagues headed into Germany. They passed through the minefields of the Siegfried Line, marked with white tape by army engineers. Behind the minefields were the dragon’s teeth, staggered concrete pylons lined up row after row like the white military tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery, but too thick and heavy for a tank to drive over or through. Then barbed wire, followed by more minefields, gun pits, and the heavy concrete pillboxes that had proved impervious to aerial assault.

Before them, Aachen was smoldering. Two weeks earlier, Hancock had thought the Dutch repository at Maastricht unworldly, but here was a true alternate universe, the “weirdest and most fantastic” sight of his life.
1
Windows were blown into the streets; trolley tracks reared up from the pavement like wicked metal fingers; piles of debris were all that remained of many homes. At a point where the destruction widened out, leaving a vast field of broken lintels and cornerstones, some GIs had posted a sign with a quote from Hitler: “
Gebt mir fünf Jahre und Ihr werdet Deutschland nicht wiedererkennen
.” Below was the English translation: “Give me five years & you will not recognize Germany again.”
2

Hancock turned away from the main line of advance, where tanks rolled and patrols still scrambled back and forth with supplies and orders, and walked toward the city center. Around the first corner, the world closed in on him and he was utterly alone. “One can read all kinds of descriptions of the destruction caused by air raids, and see any number of pictures, but the sensation of being in one of these dead cities just can’t be imagined.”
3
The rubble was twenty feet high, the side streets long claustrophobic corridors of broken, gap-toothed facades. Occasional phantoms flashed by—a group of marauding Belgians, an American soldier on horseback wearing a full Native American headdress taken from the city opera company.
Did I really see that?
Hancock wondered, as the smoky world swallowed the rider. The city disintegrated, great chunks of concrete falling down around him. He looked through the face of a building, roofless and empty, showing in broken concrete frames little pieces of the sky. The windows were shattered, the floors inside collapsed. “A skeleton city,” he would later comment, “is more terrible than one the bombs have completely flattened. Aachen was a skeleton.”
4

Near the city center, Hancock was forced to scramble over a succession of putrid rubble. Occasionally he would glimpse the cathedral dome, miraculously untouched, rising above the flattened buildings. Then he would turn a corner and it would be gone. The only sound was the whistle of artillery shells, still being lobbed by both sides. The bombardment intensified. For twenty blocks, down the narrow winding streets of the ancient city, Hancock had to scramble for cover from doorway to rubble pile, rushing forward each time a shell exploded.

The doors of the cathedral were open. He crossed the courtyard on a dead run and entered the Palatine Chapel. The octagonal structure had for hundreds of years swallowed each entrant, be they worshipper or pilgrim, cutting them off from the outside world and delivering them into the hands of God. It was no different for Walker Hancock. Inside, he felt safe. All the windows were blasted to bits, but even that did not disturb the profound sense of peace and security. Around him, the great choir hall was filled with shards of glass and chunks of masonry. Beneath the rubble, he could see mattresses and dirty blankets. He walked slowly down the central aisle, glass crunching underfoot. Unfinished meals sat on chairs, coffee still in the cups. A makeshift altar had been placed at the far end of the hall against a temporary screen. As he moved into the Gothic Choir Hall, he saw that an Allied bomb had pierced the apse and demolished the high altar. Hancock could see its smooth gray fins cradled in the shattered wood. Amazingly, it hadn’t exploded, saving hundreds of lives and a thousand years of history.

Hancock turned back to the ghost city of blankets and cups. He stared up through the holes where the stained glass had once been. The delicate stone window frames crisscrossed the sky. It reminded him of the sight of the great empty windows of Chartres Cathedral. Then several shells exploded in rapid succession; smoke blew across the sky, dropping the cathedral into shadow. He looked down at the blasted refugee camp around him; a broken statue caught his eye, staring at him from the gloom. This was nothing like Chartres.

“For more than eleven hundred years,” Hancock mused, “these massive walls have stood. That I should have arrived just in time to be the sole witness to their destruction is inconceivable but, somehow, reassuring.”
5

He was back in the Palatine Chapel, examining the damage more closely, when a figure stepped out of the darkness. It was less frightening, Hancock realized with surprise, than extraordinary. He had felt alone in another world. “
Hier
,” the figure said, motioning Hancock toward him.
6
It was the vicar of Aachen Cathedral, slight and worn, a lantern trembling in his hand. He led Hancock silently up a narrow staircase, stepping carefully around the debris. The passage at the top was tight, hardly more than a shoulder width, and Hancock realized they were inside one of the great stone walls. The vicar had set up a few chairs in a small den, and he motioned Hancock into one of them. Only then did Hancock notice how badly the man was shaking.

“Six boys,” the vicar said in trembling, broken English. “Age fifteen to twenty. Our fire brigade. Eight times they put out fires on the roof and saved the dome. They have been taken by your soldiers to the camp at Brand. There is no one for the pumps and hoses. One shell, and the cathedral could be lost.”

The feeble lantern threw shadows across the man’s tired face. In a corner, Hancock noticed the old mattress and the remnants of the food on which the vicar had lived since the bombardment began more than six weeks before. “They are good boys,” the vicar said. “Yes, they belonged to the Hitler Youth, but”—he motioned to his heart—“they did not feel it here. You must bring them back before it is too late.”
7

Hancock didn’t know whether he meant too late for the boys or for the cathedral, but either way the vicar was right. He took down their names: Helmuth, Hans, Georg, Willi, Carl, Niklaus, Germans all.
8
But Hancock was smart enough to know the Germans weren’t all Nazis or all bad.

“How will you care for them?” he asked. The city was without food, electricity, running water, or basic supplies.

“They will sleep here. We have water and basic supplies. As for food… ”

“I might be able to get you some,” Hancock said.

“We have a cellar that will keep it fresh.”

The mention of the cellar brought another thought to Hancock’s mind. Aachen Cathedral was famed for its relics—the gold and silver-gilt bust of Charlemagne, containing a piece of his skull; the tenth-century, jewel-encrusted processional cross of Lothar II, set with the ancient cameo of Augustus Caesar; and other Gothic reliquaries. He hadn’t seen any of them.

“Where are the treasures, Vicar? Are they in the crypts?”

The vicar shook his head. “The Nazis took them. For safeguarding.”

Hancock had heard enough about Nazi “safeguarding” to shudder at those words. “Where?” he asked.

The vicar shrugged. “East.”

CHAPTER 17

A Field Trip

East of Aachen, Germany

Late November 1944

T
he enclosed staff car bounced over a muddy, cratered road, Monuments Man Walker Hancock at the wheel. It was late November 1944, almost a month since Hancock had entered Aachen and discovered the condition of its cathedral. At their former rate of advance, U.S. First Army would have been halfway to Berlin by now, but they had bogged down in the dense, foggy forests east of Aachen. They were making yards per day now, not miles, against a hidden, entrenched enemy. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the chill of what would be forever remembered as the coldest winter in the recent history of northern Europe had settled in. Even on the best of roads, and this certainly wasn’t one of them, ice filled the ruts and clung dangerously to the edges of the curves.