The Monuments Men (39 page)

G
eorge Stout raised his fist and knocked on a locked door buried half a mile inside a hill. It had been a long walk, through a broken town, then down the wrong tunnel for half a mile, and finally down this lesser passage, but after months of anticipation it was well worth the trouble. As the door swung open, Stout almost expected to see artistic and cultural riches come flowing out into the tunnel. What he saw instead was a stern little man.

After what they had just been through, there was almost nothing that could have surprised the Monuments Men, but that was clearly not true of the guard. He looked in wonder at the American soldier, then the vicar of Aachen beside him, and then finally at the two other American soldiers accompanying them.

“Hello, Etzkorn,” the vicar said. The Monuments Men had wasted precious hours that morning doubling back at the request of headquarters to pick up a “guide,” but Vicar Stephany had turned out to be worth the trouble. He was none other than the man who had met Hancock at Aachen Cathedral and requested his help in freeing the cathedral’s fire brigade. He had been surprised to see his old visitor, and he was embarrassed to acknowledge that, yes, he had known about Siegen all along, even as he told Hancock he had no idea where the treasures of Aachen Cathedral had been sent.

“Welcome back, Vicar,” the little man known as Etzkorn replied gruffly, reluctantly stepping aside to allow the soldiers through. As he swung the door closed, a group of uniformed Germans, apparently guards, roused themselves to attention, but they too let the Monuments Men pass. Beyond them was a vault door. Herr Etzkorn arrived with the key before being asked.

As the door swung open, Hancock caught a glimpse, just visible in his flashlight beam, of a massive brick-vaulted gallery. Then he felt the air: warm and humid. The ventilation system had been damaged beyond repair by Allied bombs, and water was dripping from the ceiling. George Stout entered the room first, his flashlight beam falling on a series of enormous wooden racks. The racks, Hancock noticed, went all the way to the ceiling. And every nook was filled with art: sculpture, paintings, decorations, altarpieces, all packed as tightly as the townspeople had been in that terrible passageway outside. In the beam of his flashlight, Hancock recognized works by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cranach, Renoir, and especially Peter Paul Rubens, the great seventeenth century Flemish painter who had been born in Siegen. On some of the canvases he noticed mold, while the paint on several wood panels was noticeably bubbled and flaked.

“It’s still here!” the vicar cried from a dark corner.

Stout and Hancock hurried to the last of the fourteen giant wall bays. Inside were six enormous crates marked “Aachen Cathedral.”

“The seals haven’t been broken,” Stout observed.

“Two weeks ago the
Oberbürgermeister
of Aachen… ” the stern little guard known as Etzkorn began.

“Ex-mayor,” Vicar Stephany corrected.

Etzkorn seemed not to notice the vicar’s hostility toward a party functionary. “The
Ex-Oberbürgermeister
of Aachen,” he started again, “tried to remove the treasures when the Americans approached. The crates were too heavy.”

Hancock ran his hands over the wood. Inside were the silver-gilt bust of Charlemagne containing part of his skull, the Virgin Mary’s robe, Lothar’s processional cross set with the cameo of Augustus Caesar, numerous gilt and wrought metal shrines. Carefully, he slid the lid off an unmarked crate. Inside was the twelfth-century shrine of Saint Heribert of Deutz.

“Is that gold?” whispered an awed voice.

Hancock had forgotten about the enlisted soldier who had escorted them into the mine. The Monuments Men had known for months the repository was here. They had some idea of what to expect, but even for them the presence of all these vital connections to mankind’s past was hard to fathom, especially in such strange and lousy surroundings.

“Gold and enamel,” Hancock said, signaling for the soldier to help him with the large heavy lid.

“How much is it worth?”

“More than either of us could imagine.”

Etzkorn gave them a quick tour. Most of the bays held the works of western German museums, especially those in Bonn, Cologne, Essen, and Münster. Others contained the treasures of Rhineland churches. Much to their disappointment, the only foreign works at Siegen were from the French city of Metz, which they had already been told to expect. The stolen cultural heritage of the rest of Western Europe was hidden somewhere else, perhaps in some other mine, waiting to be found.

Etzkorn pointed to forty boxes. “From Beethoven’s house in Bonn. The original manuscript of the Sixth Symphony is in there somewhere.”

“I visited that house,” Hancock whispered, remembering the cherry blooms among the ruins.

Two enormous oak doors stood near the entrance. Hancock recognized the rough shallow relief of the numerous panels depicting the life of Christ. He wanted to put his sculptor’s hands on them, to feel the ancient chisel marks. The carvings were primitive, but they were also history, magic beyond words for the medieval people who originally beheld them.

“The doors of Sankt Maria im Kapitol in Cologne,” Etzkorn said, genuinely moved. “I know that parish well.”

Hancock nodded, but said nothing. Sankt Maria had been destroyed. These doors, he suspected, were all that remained.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Stout said to Hancock when their cursory examination was complete. “It seems foolish to leave it all here. The moisture, the stale air, the… unreliable guards. But we have no trucks, no packers, no movers. We don’t even have a better place to take it. We’ll post an armed guard from the infantry division, come back tomorrow and study what we’ve found. But we can’t take it out. Not until proper arrangements are made. But don’t worry, Walker, this much at least is safe. Nothing will harm it now.”

They left through an even shorter tunnel than the other two, which was apparently the main entrance to the repository. Like the first, it was filled with displaced persons who had taken shelter there from the Allied assault. Most of these displaced people, however, wore uniforms. There were all different styles and colors, most of which Walker Hancock didn’t recognize. As the Americans passed, many of them sprang to attention and saluted.

“
Quand pourrons-nous rentrer en France
?” someone cried.
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Hancock turned to find a group of French prisoners looking at him expectantly. Were the Allies coming to rescue them? Hancock didn’t know, so he told them only that for the past few weeks he had seen truckloads of former prisoners heading west. At the entrance, an old man grabbed Hancock’s sleeve, babbling about the cruelty of the Nazis. He became so agitated over the fate of his family that foam flew from the corners of his mouth. He tried to follow them, but he was too weak. Hancock left him at the foot of the hill with the others. When he looked back, the man was still standing there, watching them leave. Hancock felt terrible, but he was dead tired, and there was nothing he could do. He had been underground for an afternoon, and it seemed like a lifetime.

He looked back one last time. In the slanting evening light, the hill looked like any other in Germany, beaten and desolate and strewn with debris. There was nothing to indicate the marvels and the horrors inside.

CHAPTER 35

Lost

East of Aachen, Germany

April 4, 1945

N
orth of Essen and east of Aachen, in the area known as the Ruhr Pocket, Captain Walter “Hutch” Huchthausen and his assistant Sergeant Sheldon Keck, the Monuments Men for U.S. Ninth Army, drove toward the battle front to investigate reports of an altarpiece. Hutch was a gregarious bachelor, now fully recovered from the wounds he suffered during the bombing of London and at forty years old just starting to come into his own. Keck, a married conservator, had started his military service in 1942 when his son “Keckie” was only three weeks old. He hadn’t seen his child since, but his wife, Caroline, also an art conservator, never complained. She had been a student in Berlin during the 1930s, when food was scarce, employment nonexistent, and corruption endemic. At her university, fifteen students a month committed suicide until, finally, they closed the school. Twice she heard Hitler speak in person, and his words still shivered her bones. She wanted Sheldon back, but knew the importance of his mission. Besides, she reasoned at least for a few years little Keckie wouldn’t even realize his father was gone.

“Not much traffic out here,” Keck observed after twenty or thirty minutes on the road. The maps had proved useless, as usual, since so many of the roads were impassable because of damage or enemy combatants. The Monuments Men were used to being lost, but they were also used to passing jeeps, tanks, and trucks, the usual support vehicles for the front. Out here there was nothing.

“Let’s ask for directions,” Keck said.

There were no Allied military posts alongside the road, but a mile or two farther on Hutch spotted American soldiers peeking over the top of a highway embankment.

“Thank God,” he said, slowing down.

But as soon as he hit the brakes, the gunfire erupted. Sheldon Keck, in the passenger seat, heard the sudden explosion at almost the same instant he felt a hard force push him backward to the floor. He glimpsed American soldiers rising over the embankment, and then adrenaline took over, the world went black, and everything disappeared. The next thing he knew friendly hands were pulling him into a foxhole. The jeep was shot to hell in the road. The soldiers could only tell him that Hutch had been taken away in an ambulance, “bleeding from the ear, and that his face was snow white.”
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For two days, Sheldon Keck rushed frantically from field hospital to field hospital, searching for his senior officer. There was no news anywhere; no wounded soldiers who matched the dog tags of his friend. He found him eventually not in a field hospital, but on the rolls of the dead. Walter “Hutch” Huchthausen had been hit by gunfire and died instantly on the road east of Aachen. His body had been the force that knocked Keck to the floor of the jeep, shielding him from the bullets and saving his life. It was a moment Shelden Keck—and his son Keckie, who thanks to Hutch was raised by his loving father—would always remember.

Word of Hutch’s death, like that of Ronald Balfour’s, spread slowly through the MFAA ranks. Out of a force of nine officers on the front lines, they had lost their second good man. The reaction was one of quiet, of resignation, of a slow-moving contemplation that matched nothing so much as the slow walk of the officer who approached a small house in Dorchester, Massachusetts, to tell Walter Huchthausen’s elderly mother that her only son was dead.

“He was a wonderful chap,” Walker Hancock wrote his new wife, Saima, many months later, when he feared Hutch’s work would be forgotten, “and really believed in the fundamental goodness of everybody. Bill [Lesley] knew him better than I—was an old friend—but Hutch’s attitude toward his mission in the war was one of my best memories…. The buildings that he hoped, as a young architect, to build will never exist… but the few people who saw him at his job—friend and enemy—must think more of the human race because of him.”
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CHAPTER 36

A Week to Remember

Merkers, Germany

April 8–15, 1945

O
n April 6, 1945, two days after Walter Huchthausen’s death, an American jeep crept up behind two huddled figures walking slowly along the dusty road. “Good morning, ladies,” one of the MPs said, his finger on the trigger of his gun. “You know there’s a strict curfew, right? General Patton’s orders.” Then he noticed one of the women was pregnant.

They were French displaced persons, walking to the nearby town of Kieselbach to visit the midwife. After questioning at U.S. XII Corps Provost Marshal’s Office confirmed their story, the MPs offered to drive the women back to town. Just outside Merkers, the driver noticed the scars on the hillside and asked what kind of mine they were passing. One of the women pointed to a small door and said, “
Or
.” The French word for gold.

The MPs stopped. “
Or
? Are you sure?”

The woman nodded. “
Lingots d’or
.” Gold bars.

Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein, the Monuments Men for U.S. Third Army, arrived at the mine two days later, on the afternoon of April 8, 1945. They couldn’t have missed the entrance if they tried. Every few steps, they passed another group of soldiers standing guard, and anti-aircraft guns were positioned along the narrow road. Posey guessed a whole company was on duty (more than a hundred men), but as he passed more inspection posts and sentry points he decided it was half a battalion (at least two hundred men). In fact, Merkers was being guarded by two entire infantry battalions, supported by elements of two more tank battalions.

The elevator, stuffed with officers sent from headquarters in Frankfurt to assess the gold and currency, smelled like sulfur and creaked like the wooden planks of an old stairwell. Soon, Kirstein’s ears were aching from the pressure. “How deep is this mine?” he asked the operator.

“Twenty-one hundred feet, almost half a mile,” an officer said. “Operator’s a Kraut, by the way. Can’t understand a word.”

“I hope he’s not one of those stay-behind SS officers.”
1

“Don’t worry, Private. There are three-stars all over this place. He doesn’t give a damn about you.”

The elevator opened into a scene out of Dante’s Inferno: darkness, shadows, men running in every direction, steam, water, wires, sprawling insectlike metal equipment, officers barking orders, and every sound echoing over and over again off the stone. The lights, at least the ones operational, threw deformed images on the walls and revealed layers of white rime on the necks and arms of most of the men. Hoses were being used to spray down men and equipment, and the water was collecting in slushy puddles on the floor. Within seconds, it seemed, Kirstein was wet from the humidity. He reached up to wipe his brow, then massaged his aching throat.