The Monuments Men (37 page)

The scholar was handsome and surprisingly young, probably in his mid-thirties. He should have been fresh and enthusiastic, at the start of his career, but something about him was stooped and worn. The war had poisoned everyone, Kirstein thought, even this country scholar. Nonetheless, the young man smiled at the sight of the Allied art officials. “
Entrez
,” he said enthusiastically in French. “I have been eagerly awaiting you. I have spoken with no one since I left Paris twenty-four hours before your army arrived. I have missed that great city every day.”

He beckoned to two seats, then turned to introduce the other occupants of the cottage. “This is my mother. And my wife, Hildegard.” He glanced nervously at her father the dentist. “My daughter, Eva. And my son, Dietrich,” the scholar said proudly, indicating the baby in his wife’s arms.

Posey reached out a finger for the child to grasp, but the baby shrank back. He didn’t look anything like Woogie, but every child reminded him of the boy he had left behind.

“My father-in-law tells me you are art scholars in the service of the American army,” the man said, taking a seat. “You must find Trier a marvel. I understand the Paulinerkirche was unharmed, thank God. The ceiling is one of a kind, a true work of art, though only two hundred years old. My own area of study is the Middle Ages: the end of the old world, the birth of our own. Or perhaps that is too dramatic. I am only an art scholar, after all, a figure of some authority on medieval French sculpture. I am completing a book on the twelfth-century sculpture of the Île-de-France. I began writing it with Arthur Kingsley Porter, an Englishman, you may have heard of him?”

“Of course,” Kirstein replied, picturing the old professor who had taught him art history as an undergraduate. “I remember him from Harvard.”

“As do I,” the German scholar said. “Graduate work. I have fond memories still of his wife. The cleverest mad woman I’ve ever met.”
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He turned suddenly to his wife. “
Kognak
,” he said. When she, the children, and the dentist had left the room, the scholar’s tone changed. He bent forward and, talking swiftly, began to tell them a bit of his history.

“I won’t lie to you,” he said. “I knew Göring in Paris. And Rosenberg. I worked with them. As a scholar, you understand, no one important, but I observed them and their operation. I was there when Göring hauled away his first trainload of art. I told him his treatment of the confiscated Jewish art treasures was in contradiction to the Hague Rules of Land Warfare and the army’s interpretation of Hitler’s orders. He asked for an explanation. When I concluded he said simply, ‘First, it is my orders that you have to follow. You will act directly according to my orders.’
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“When I told him the military command in France and the Juristen—meaning the legal representatives of the Reich—would probably be of a different opinion, he told me, ‘Dear Bunjes, let me worry about that; I am the highest Jurist in the State.’

“He told me that directly, gentlemen. Word for word, on February 5, 1941. What was a simple art scholar to do? And besides, the art was safer in the hands of Göring than spread through the hands of the thousand lesser Nazi officials clamoring to obtain it. You see, I acted to protect the art. It was conservation by acquisition.”

His wife entered with the cognac. “
Ich danke Dir Darling
,” he said, pouring a glass for himself and Kirstein. Posey demurred, lighting a cigarette instead. Both men needed the distraction. It was all they could do to keep their mouths from hanging open. This man, this country scholar, had been in Paris. He knew the angles. He might provide answers to questions they had been sweating over for months.

“I have knowledge,” the scholar said after a few swirls of the snifter, “but I also have a price: safe passage out of Germany for myself and my family. I want nothing more than to complete my book, to live in peace. In return, I will tell you not only what was taken, but where it is.”

“Why do you need safe passage?” Kirstein asked.

“I was an SS captain. For five years. Yes, it’s true. Only for professional purposes, you understand, always in the service of art. But if the citizens of this valley knew… they wouldn’t understand. They’d probably have me shot. They blame us for… all of this.”

Posey and Kirstein looked at each other. They had interviewed many art officials, but never an SS officer. What kind of scholar was this?

“I don’t have the authority to offer deals,” Posey said, as Kirstein translated. The German sighed. He drank cognac, seemed to consider his options, then abruptly rose and left the room. He came back minutes later with a bound booklet. It was a catalogue of artwork stolen from France: title, size, exchange rate, price, original owner. He explained it to them, translating from the German text. Then he told them to spread their maps on the table, and he began to show where the objects could be found. He seemed to know it all from memory, right down to the smallest detail. “Göring’s collection is no longer at Carinhall,” the scholar said confidently. “It is in Veldenstein. Here. But I cannot be sure if it is going to stay there for long.”

He told them the inside works of the German art world. How the treasures of Poland and Russia had been distributed to various German museums. Which art dealers in Berlin were actively trading in looted works. Which stolen French masterpieces were hidden in Switzerland, and which had made it farther into Germany itself.

“What about the Ghent Altarpiece?” Posey asked.

“Van Eyck’s
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
?” the scholar said, picking up the name of the work despite Posey’s English. “The panels are in Hitler’s extensive collection of artistic masterpieces.” He moved his finger southwest into the deepest part of the Austrian Alps, not far from Hitler’s boyhood home of Linz. “Here, in the salt mine at Altaussee.”

Hitler’s collection? Posey and Kirstein didn’t say anything. They didn’t even look at each other. All those miles driving, all those fruitless interviews, all those months of painstakingly fitting information together piece by piece, and suddenly they were being given everything they had always hoped for and more. They hadn’t just been given information; they had been given a map to the treasure room of the Führer. And until that moment, nobody on the Allied side had even known the Führer had a treasure room.

“The Nazis are boors,” the scholar said. “Complete frauds. They don’t understand the beauty of art, only that it is somehow valuable. They robbed the silver service from the Rothschilds, then used it like ordinary flatware in their Aeroclub in Berlin. To see them dribbling food off those priceless forks made me sick.”

The scholar rose and poured himself another cognac. When he returned, he began to talk about his own work, about Paris and cathedrals and the twelfth century and its remarkable funereal statuary, about how much had been lost since then to the ravages of time and the senselessness of war. “Here,” Kirstein would write, “in the cold Moselle spring, far from the murder of the cities, worked a German scholar in love with France, passionately in love, with that hopeless, frustrated fatalism” so characteristic of the Germans.
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Kirstein couldn’t help but like the man.

“I offer you my services, gentlemen,” the scholar said finally. “Anything you ask. All I want is for my family to return to Paris.” As if waiting for their moment, his wife and baby suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Posey said, as he and Kirstein stood up to leave. They appeared calm, but inside they were buzzing. They had learned more in the last twenty minutes than they had in the last twenty weeks. And they had a mission now; a big one: to find and recover Hitler’s secret hoard of masterpieces.

The German scholar smiled, extended his hand. If he was disappointed at the lack of safe passage, he didn’t show it. “It has been a pleasure, my friends,” he said genially. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you, Dr. Bunjes. You have been a great help.” They had no idea that they had spent the afternoon speaking with Göring’s corrupt Kunstschutz official, and one of the top men in the notorious looting operation at the Jeu de Paume.

CHAPTER 33

Frustration

Northern European Theater

March 30–31, 1945

P
rivate First Class Richard Courtney was frustrated. Like most of his fellow soldiers in U.S. First Army, he had been slugging it out on the ground since Normandy. He had been through the German ring of fire around the beaches, and he had survived the Siegfried Line. He had fought to take Aachen in September, then fought to take it again after the Battle of the Bulge. Now he was searching a country estate—what the army called “clearing”—on the other side of the Rhine, near the small town of Breidenbach, and even after nine months of fighting he couldn’t believe his eyes. The house, the soldiers had been told, belonged to a Nazi Party leader, and as they moved from room to room they stared in awe at the extraordinary collection of paintings, crystal, silverware, and statuary. Art collecting was in vogue among the Nazi elite, no doubt fueled by their desire to curry favor with the Führer and the Reichsmarschall. This particular Nazi had clearly been “collecting” from all over Europe.

But Private Courtney wasn’t truly mad until he entered the cellar and saw, stacked floor to ceiling, Red Cross care packages intended for American prisoners of war. Why were they here? What did a high Nazi official need with hardtack biscuits and Band-Aids? The longer he looked at those packages, the more he became enraged. Finally, he picked up a crowbar and started smashing things: boxes, mirrors, china, artwork, chandeliers. He was so mad, he even knocked the light switches off the wall. Nobody tried to stop him.

“What was that about?” a fellow soldier asked once the swinging had stopped.

Private Courtney threw down the crowbar and looked at the destruction around him. “That was for our boys in the camps,” he said.

Meanwhile, in a “repple depple” in Liège, Belgium, Private Harry Ettlinger played craps. He had resisted for a month, but there was nothing else to do. During the first week, he won $1,500 with funds from his $60 monthly army salary. A day later, he lost it all. He went outside and looked at the night sky. Everything seemed a million miles away. It had been two months of nothing. He wasn’t eager to be at the front, but the long-termers in the “repple depple” were depressing. One soldier had bought perfume while stationed in Paris, and was now selling it at marked-up prices. The perfume stunk up the whole camp, but all the man could think about was getting back to Paris to replenish his supply. Harry Ettlinger didn’t want to be that kind of soldier. Somewhere out east, the war was grinding on without him. He felt sure he had a part to play—he must—but he still had no idea why they’d pulled him off that truck on his nineteenth birthday. No one had told him a thing.

In Paris, James Rorimer received his notice to report to the front as Monuments Man for the U.S. Seventh Army, which had thus far been without the services of a Monuments officer. Seventh Army territory in Germany alone stretched 280 miles with an average width of eighty miles. He would be the only Monuments Man in those 22,400 square miles. But he had something no other Monuments Man had ever possessed: the information Rose Valland had given him two weeks earlier, and the knowledge she had imparted to him during the last few months. Thanks to Valland, he knew exactly where to go: the fairytale castle at Neuschwanstein. For months, the name would echo in his dreams. Exactly what he should find, and how exactly to get there quickly… that was something as yet unknown.

“General Rogers came out of his way at my dinner last night in Paris to tell me what a fine job I had done,” Rorimer wrote his wife. “My boss Lt. Col. Hamilton gave cocktails to our group and all but wept when I was taken from his staff for Germany. Yes, I made my place and now must build a new under very different conditions.”
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