The Monuments Men (46 page)

The same day—April 28, 1945—
Stars and Stripes
reported that U.S. Seventh Army had reached Kempten, a town close to the castle at Neuschwanstein. It was the news James Rorimer had been waiting for since leaving Paris. He immediately phoned ahead for confirmation, only to be told by the major in charge that
Stars and Stripes
was incorrect. “But if there’s any truth to it at all,” Rorimer insisted, “our troops ought to be at Neuschwanstein pretty soon. That castle contains invaluable caches of looted works of art from France. I’ve been on the trail for months. I must get there at the earliest possible time. You must get there as soon as you can.”
3

“We’re doing what we can, sir.”

If there was a hint of desperation in his appeal, it was because in the week since leaving the mine at Heilbronn, Rorimer had received a crash course in the realities of Monuments work. On one hand, he had discovered the great Riemenschneider Altarpiece undamaged in a damp basement in Rothenburg, the most famous medieval walled city in Germany. He had even convinced the Military Government officer to move the altarpiece from the damp cellar where it had been stored. With great satisfaction, he had assured the press the damage to the town had been greatly exaggerated.

A few days later, he received misinformation of a more dangerous kind when, on a mission to an ERR repository, he discovered the bridge over the Kocher River had been blown up. The area was partially in German control, but that didn’t stop Rorimer from trying to find another way across. Unfortunately, his driver soon became hopelessly lost in the thick German forests. As night approached, the men realized they couldn’t even find their way back to the main road. Twice they drove through the same smoldering village, the embers the only light in a pitch-black night. Around dawn, they spotted two Allied soldiers walking alongside the road.

“Jesus,” the soldiers said, after directing the two men to their encampment. “Have you been driving all night? There are Germans all through these woods.”

In the late morning, after a brief nap, Rorimer and his driver forded a shallow point in the Kocher River in the company of an Allied truck. Later in the day, they finally reached their destination: a local castle. It was, as promised by Rose Valland, another Jeu de Paume way station full of priceless art.

But it wasn’t the near misses that frightened Rorimer, or even the successes that inspired him. It was the big prize that had gotten away. While still headquartered at Darmstadt, Rorimer had received word that Baron Kurt von Behr, the scourge of the Jeu de Paume, was in residence at his castle in Lichtenfels, an area that had just fallen under American control. Too busy to make the long trip to Lichtenfels himself, Rorimer dispatched a telegram to Supreme Headquarters requesting that someone be sent immediately to apprehend the Nazi who knew more than anyone else about ERR looting operations in France. Days later, he discovered the telegram was being held in Heidelberg, pending his instruction on whether it should be marked “Priority” or “Routine.” By the time American troops reached the castle at Lichtenfels, Colonel von Behr was gone. Aristocrats to the end, he and his wife had killed themselves in their library by drinking glasses of poisoned champagne.

CHAPTER 43

The Noose

Berlin, Germany, and Southern Germany

April 30, 1945

O
n April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker underneath the Reichschancellery in the city of Berlin. He had suffered a nervous breakdown during a military situation conference on April 22, admitting in a hysterical attack on his commanders that Germany was doomed. His Nazi Party was broken. His new Berlin was being blasted apart by bombs and artillery. His friends and generals had betrayed him, or so he in his paranoia believed. He was capable of terrific fits of temper, when he would become livid at those who had abandoned him, insist victory was achievable, and vow to fight on, but he had also become increasingly brooding and consumed with hatred and a will to destroy: to kill as many Jews as possible; to throw his armies, including old men and young boys, into the enemy lines as cannon fodder; to smash every brick and gut every element of infrastructure in Germany until the country that had betrayed him, that in its cowardice had proven the weaker race, not the master race, was sent back to the Stone Age. Their failure stripped everything from him until, in those final days, in his bunker deep beneath the Reichschancellery in Berlin, with the sound of Soviet artillery shells exploding overhead, one of the few things that remained in his twisted heart—perhaps the one thing that made him human and therefore truly terrifying—was his love of art.

During the preceding months he spent hours alone or with his loyal aides—Gauleiter August Eigruber had been a regular visitor—contemplating his scale model of Linz in the cellar of the New Chancellery: its great arcades and byways, its towering cathedral of art. Sometimes he would gesture energetically, pointing out a brilliant design element or an essential truth. Sometimes he would lean slowly forward in his chair, involuntarily clutching the glove in his left hand tighter and tighter, his eyes popping under the brim of his military cap as he silently stared, perhaps for the last time, at the symbol of everything that ever was or might have been.

Now it was over. During evening supper on April 28, only hours before he would marry his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, Hitler looked at his secretary, Traudl Junge, and said, “Fräulein, you are needed at once; bring your stenographer pad and pencil. I wish to dictate to you my last will and testament.”
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[Seal]

[ADOLF HITLER]

My Private Will and Testament

As I did not consider that I could take responsibility, during the years of struggle, of contracting a marriage, I have now decided, before the closing of my earthly career, to take as my wife that girl who, after many years of faithful friendship, entered, of her own free will, the practically besieged town in order to share her destiny with me. At her own desire she goes as my wife with me into death. It will compensate us for what we both lost through my work in the service of my people.

What I possess belongs—in so far as it has any value—to the Party. Should this no longer exist, to the State, should the State also be destroyed, no further decision of mine is necessary.

My pictures, in the collections which I have bought in the course of years, have never been collected for private purposes, but only for the extension of a gallery in my home town of Linz a.d. Donau.

It is my most sincere wish that this bequest may be duly executed.

I nominate as my Executor my most faithful Party comrade, Martin Bormann.

He is given full legal authority to make all decisions. He is permitted to take out everything that has a sentimental value or is necessary for the maintenance of a modest simple life, for my brothers and sisters, also above all for the mother of my wife and my faithful coworkers who are well known to him, principally my old Secretaries Frau Winter etc. who have for many years aided me by their work.

I myself and my wife—in order to escape the disgrace of deposition or capitulation—choose death. It is our wish to be burnt immediately on the spot where I have carried out the greatest part of my daily work in the course of a twelve years’ service to my people.

Given in Berlin, 29th April 1945, 4:00 o’clock.

(Sd.) A. Hitler

His family and loyal associates were practical considerations. The party, he understood, was doomed. His newly married wife, Eva Braun, was merely “that girl,” even though she was only hours away from killing herself with poison by his side. Everything he had worked for was gone, destroyed, but even at the end one of the worst madmen of the twentieth century saw one last chance at a legacy: the completion of a museum in Linz,
his
museum in Linz, full of the plundered treasures of Europe.

The following day, within hours of Hitler’s death, three motorcycle couriers left the Führerbunker, each carrying an original of Adolf Hitler’s last will and testament.
2
They were all headed in different directions, but each with one goal: to ensure that the dying wish of the leader of the Nazi Party would survive the complete destruction he himself had visited upon his people, his country, and the world.

And yet even at that moment, Hitler’s own followers—some out of confusion and misguided loyalty, some out of self-interest, some out of fear, and some out of a fundamental belief that the man who had asked them to annihilate millions of people and destroy entire cities would never ask them to save anything, especially something as decadent and meaningless as art—were working to thwart his wishes and destroy the stolen art collection he had held so dear.

And nowhere was this more true than in the Austrian Alps, where Gauleiter August Eigruber was as always “bullheaded” in his insistence on complete destruction of the salt mine at Altaussee. Even worse, he had discovered Pöchmüller’s attempt to thwart his plans. His adjutant, District Inspector Glinz, had overheard Högler, the mine foreman who had received Pöchmüller’s order, arranging for trucks to remove the gauleiter’s bombs. “The crates are staying were they are,” Glinz told Högler, drawing his gun. “I am completely in the picture and can see what’s happening here. If you dare touch those crates, I will kill you.”
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Högler begged Glinz to talk to Pöchmüller, who was down the mountain at another salt mine in Bad Ischl. In a tense telephone conversation with Glinz, Pöchmüller insisted the Führer’s April 22 order—that at all costs they must keep the artwork from the enemy but by no means destroy it—was perfectly clear. The artwork was not to be harmed.

“The gauleiter considers the April 22 order outdated,” Glinz responded, “and therefore obsolete. He considers all orders since not clean since they did not come from the Führer himself.”
4

With Hitler dead, there seemed no way to dislodge the gauleiter from his course of action, but Helmut von Hummel was prevailed upon by the mine managers one last time. On May 1, von Hummel sent a letter to Karl Sieber, the art restorer at Altaussee, stating that “last week” the Führer reconfirmed that “the artwork in the Oberdonau area are not to be permitted to fall into the enemy’s hands, but shall by no means be finally destroyed.”
5

The telegram didn’t work. When Pöchmüller arrived back at the mine, he found that the gauleiter had posted six more heavily armed guards at the entrance. The bombs were still inside; all that was needed now were the detonators—and they were already in transit to the mine.

To Robert Posey, South Germany was the worst possible place: a world without rules. Society had collapsed, and with it the battlefield. The shattered towns and villages lay one after another, destroyed either by Western Allied forces, dead-end Nazi hardcases, or local gauleiters still bent on executing Hitler’s Nero Decree. Boats were sunk in the rivers; factories were on fire; bridges were severed. Civilians were wandering everywhere, searching for food and shelter. It was common to see a hundred or more ragged refugees in a group, walking nowhere in particular. They were coming from the local towns but also from the east, fleeing the vengeance of the Soviet advance.

Was he crossing the front lines? It was impossible to say. In many places, German soldiers were driving around in convoys, desperately hoping to surrender to Americans. Along the roads, Posey could see their faces behind barbed wire, most of them smiling now that their war was over. But oftentimes in the next town, German forces would be dug in, fighting to the last man. An abandoned village would erupt with sniper fire from dark windows. Unseen machine-gun emplacements would strafe the road. Some American units experienced little or no fighting; others lost more men during the void than they had in the previous six months. Both violence and peace were random and chaotic. The maps were useless. Sometimes Posey wondered if his compass still pointed north. There was no magnetism here, he figured, no force holding things together. It seemed the laws of nature, all laws in fact, were suspended. The best advice the army could give its soldiers was to stick close to their units and never wander alone. But what if you had no unit? What if your job by its very nature was defined by wandering nearly alone through this burned-out land?

Posey thought often of Buchenwald, even as the world around him deteriorated. In an abandoned office there, he had found a picture of a German officer. The man was standing at attention with an enormous smile on his face, holding up for the camera his prized possession: the noose he used to garrote prisoners to death. Posey kept the picture in his kit, and often looked at it before turning in for the night. The sight of that officer’s smile would alternately make him angrier than hell, then sad beyond tears. In so many German faces Posey now saw that terrible officer, even sometimes in the children that for so long had reminded him of his son. He felt numb to the destruction, but terribly troubled. One day, caught far from camp without rations, he and Kirstein met a company of infantrymen who had just decided to kill and cook a rabbit they had spotted in a hutch behind a country home. As they entered the yard, a woman opened the door and called out to them.