The Monuments Men (43 page)

On April 12, 1945, the same day he toured Merkers and Ohrdruf, the Supreme Allied Commander told General Patton that U.S. Third Army would be turning south toward Nuremberg and Munich. Their primary job now was to secure southern Germany and rout the remaining Nazis from the Alps.

Patton vehemently disagreed. “We had better take Berlin and quick,” he argued, “and move on to the Oder”—Germany’s eastern border.
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Eager for the Americans to win the war’s great prize, Patton claimed U.S. Third Army could reach Berlin in forty-eight hours.

Eisenhower countered that it was true the Western Allies could take Berlin, but he doubted they could get there first. And if they did, who would want it? General Bradley estimated the effort to capture the city would result in 100,000 casualties—too steep a price for a “prestige objective.”
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So in April 1945, U.S. Third and Seventh armies found themselves heading not east toward Berlin, but south toward Austria and the Nazis’ last refuge, an area known in military parlance as the “Alpine Redoubt.” Only the Monuments Men—and in particular Robert Posey, Lincoln Kirstein, and James Rorimer, the men assigned to those armies—understood that Eisenhower’s decision had brought into their paths the two most important art repositories in the Fatherland: Neuschwanstein and Altaussee. But even they didn’t know the intentions of Gauleiter August Eigruber, or of Hitler’s retreating SS troops.

CHAPTER 38

Horror

Central and Southern Germany

Second Week of April 1945

W
alker Hancock felt, once again, as if he had entered another world. U.S. First Army was working its way east across central Germany through a sparsely populated area of deeply wooded forests. The German Wehrmacht had melted away, except for the occasional mortar attack or small firefight, and many of the villages seemed untouched. Actually, some were littered with military debris and even broken buildings and houses, but compared to what Hancock had seen near the German border, this world seemed whole. “We have outrun the region of total destruction,” he wrote Saima, “so that I missed my guess about
never
seeing an unruined city in Germany.”
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He lamented, however, that he had become emotionally and physically detached. “The army is moving so rapidly that our stands now are like the stands of an itinerate show company,” he wrote in another letter to his wife. “It
is
odd being present in a place like this and not being allowed to enter into the life of it in the least degree. Like being in a vaccum jar, looking at the outside world.”
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He seemed unaware that his numbness was perhaps not just the inevitable hardening of the fighting man, but a deliberate attempt to distance himself from the German world. The concentration camp at Buchenwald had been liberated by U.S. Third Army on April 12, 1945. Walker Hancock had been in the town of Weimar when word reached him of the horrors that had taken place only a few miles away. He heard for the first time descriptions of death camps and gas chambers, and was sickened by stories of emaciated survivors huddled under the bodies of their friends and loved ones. It was inhuman. Beyond comprehension. Hancock felt the sight of such horror would change him forever—this man who saw blossoms growing out of destruction—and made a deliberate decision not to visit the camp.

“A number of our officers went up to see the camp,” he wrote. “I did not go, because much of my work depended on friendly relations with German civilians, and I feared that after seeing the horrors of the camp my own feelings toward even these innocent people would be affected. (Numbers of our officers who did go could not eat for some time afterwards; some survived on whisky alone for days.)”
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A few days later, he had a chance meeting with his friend, a Jewish chaplain. The chaplain had recently been to Buchenwald to conduct a service for the survivors, their first since being interned. The story the chaplain told was “heartrending—emotional beyond description,” especially when he mentioned the anguish over the lack of a Torah.

“I have no idea where to get one,” he lamented. “They have all been destroyed.”

“Not all of them,” Hancock said. He had one in his office; it had been brought in that very day from the local SS headquarters.

“A miracle,” the chaplain said, before dashing off to Buchenwald with the scroll.

“He was soon in my office again,” Hancock wrote, “to tell me how it had been received—the people weeping, reaching for it, kissing it, overcome with joy at the sight of the symbol of their faith.”
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Walker Hancock had again found his rose in the ruins, but at what cost?

Fortunately, Monuments work kept him so busy he never had to contemplate that question. The army was moving quickly toward a rendezvous with the Red Army in Dresden and, still without an assistant, it was all Hancock could do to complete the basics of his assignment. His sixteen-hour days, he told Saima, were spent half in the “pain at seeing beauty needlessly destroyed by those we might have hoped would show more signs of being civilized” and half in the joy of spring days returning to rural German towns.
5
At night he lay awake thinking of his new wife, and of the home they would one day buy together, and of the monuments he simply couldn’t find time to visit, and of the ridiculous quantity of coffee he had consumed, but coffee was all that kept him going sometimes.

“How can I describe the strange, strange combination of experiences each day here in this beautiful place brings!” he wrote Saima. “The eyes have one continual feast. It is late in the spring. Flowering trees are everywhere and the charm of the romantic little towns and the fairy tale castled countryside is enhanced by all this freshness. And in the midst of it all—thousands of homeless foreigners wandering about in pathetic droves. Germans in uniform, mostly with arms and legs—or more—missing. Children who are friendly, older ones who hate you, crimes continually in the foreground of life. Plenty, misery, recriminations, sympathy. All such an
exaggerated
picture of the man-made way of life in a God-made world. If it all doesn’t prove the necessity of Heaven, I don’t know what it means. I believe that all this loveliness showing through the rubble and wreck are just foreshadowings of the joys we were made for.”
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Farther south, Lincoln Kirstein had fallen into one of his black moods. The energy and optimism he had felt before Merkers was gone. Like Hancock, he had avoided Buchenwald when Posey had visited it the day after its liberation. But there was no escaping the horror. It was in the air he breathed, the German soil over which he walked. In his mind, he could see the marks in the dirt where the survivors had been dragged away. Posey had seen men dying before his eyes from the effects of their treatment. They were so starved they couldn’t digest the meat the American soldiers gave them to eat. They simply collapsed, holding their stomachs in pain. Just to hear about it secondhand was to make a grown man want to clutch his own stomach and fall to the ground.

It didn’t help that he had entered “the void,” a world defined by anarchy, seemingly without reason or rules. The Nazi government was collapsing; the German army was splintered; there was no semblance of authority or societal structure. He knew it was a temporary situation, a time interval between the end of one reality and the beginning of another.
Götterdämmerung
, they called it in German, the period when the clash of the gods brings an end to the world. The villages were on fire, the civilians standing in the street hoping to be told what to do next. Often, they were joined there by German soldiers in uniform waiting to be captured or led, whatever the case might be. And yet the war ground on. Without a front line, without a way to tell friend from foe. Days passed without incident, then out of nowhere the Wehrmacht was entrenched at a bridge or the road was strafed by machine-gun fire. And everywhere, there was destruction.

“It’s always more of the same complete and total annihilation of the centre portions of any town that had any faint interest,” Kirstein wrote. “Most of the interior memorials have been given kunstschutz protection and will come out ok, but the baroque palaces and churches which were the real glories of southern sections [of Germany] are gutted and don’t even make romantic ruins. I wonder what they’ll figure out for the rebuilding of the towns, where the rubble is twenty feet deep packed, where they have no machinery or man power, and where they can’t move into the suburbs which are just as bad or worse.”
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He felt little pity. He had practically stopped trying to learn German, he admitted, because he didn’t want to have anything to do with the German people. He had no sympathy for them, and he resented every minute spent in their country. He knew the void was a time interval, the last phase of a long and painful tour of duty, but that didn’t mean he could see an end.

“The worst of it,” he wrote his sister, “is that there will be no even half-peace for five years, and even as far as Germany goes I think they’ll be fighting for some time. In spite of the collapse of the wehrmacht and the triumphant newspapers, there has been so far no place where a great many people were not killed winning it…. Hoping to see you before my retirement pay starts.”
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And yet, despite his disgust with the German people, Lincoln Kirstein was horrified by the destruction of German culture. The sight of the burned-out monuments, and especially the bits of edifice that somehow had survived, made him sick. “The horrid desolation of the German cities, should, I suppose, fill us with fierce pride,” he wrote:
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If ever the mosaic revenge was exacted, lo, here it is. The eyes and the teeth, winking and grinning in hypnotic catastrophe. But the builders of the Kurfürstliches Palais, of the Zwinger, of Schinkel’s great houses, and of the Market Places of the great German cities were not the executioners of Buchenwald or Dachau. No epoch in history has produced such precious ruins. To be sure, they are rather filigraine, and delicate in comparison to antiquity, but what they lack in romance and scale is made up by the extension of the area they cover.…

There is little use in trying to figure out now what can eventually be done,—should the cities be built again around the focus of surviving cathedrals, can the Church summon enough strength to restore. Where will the transport, the gasoline, the manpower, the materials come from to clear away the solid ruins, even before any work can be considered to rebuild?…

To make a loose summation: Probably the State and private collections of portable objects, have not suffered irreparably. But the fact that the Nazis always intended to win the war, counting neither on retaliation or defeat, is responsible for the destruction of the monumental face of urban Germany. Less grand than Italy, less noble than France, I would personally compare it to the loss of Wren’s London City churches, and that’s too much elegance to remove from the surface of the earth.

CHAPTER 39

The Gauleiter

Altaussee, Austria

April 14–17, 1945

A
ugust Eigruber’s office in Linz was packed with petitioners. As Dr. Emmerich Pöchmüller, the general director of the Altaussee mining operations, pushed his way through the crowd, he saw not only businessmen but army commanders and SS officers, all gesturing and clamoring for an audience with the gauleiter. One of them was an old friend, the director of the power plant at Oberdonau (Upper Danube district). The poor man, Pöchmüller noticed, looked sweaty and pale.

“He’s going to blow up the power plant,” the man said.

Pöchmüller’s heart sank. “You’re here to convince him otherwise, aren’t you?”

“I am. What about you?”

“I’m here to convince him not to blow up the salt mine.”
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On April 14, 1945, Pöchmüller had discovered that Eigruber’s crates contained bombs, not marble. He had called the gauleiter to complain, but no one would take his call. Two days later, Eigruber’s adjutant had called to say the gauleiter’s decision was final. The mines were to be destroyed.

On April 17, Pöchmüller decided to drive to Linz. After all, new orders from Albert Speer had stated that destruction wasn’t necessary if the facilities could be “disabled” and made unusable by the enemy. Then Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal assistant, confirmed by radiogram—after Pöchmüller appealed to his assistant Dr. Helmut von Hummel—the Führer’s wish that “the artwork was by no means to fall into the hands of the enemy, but in no event should it be destroyed.”
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Surely, this was reason enough for Eigruber to relent. But now that Pöchmüller was in the gauleiter’s office, he realized everyone in the Oberdonau district had a reason their particular facility should be saved. Which probably meant none of them would.