The Monuments Men (47 page)

“Please,” she said in broken English, “that is my son’s rabbit.”

The soldiers were unmoved.

“Please,” she said again. “My husband was an SS officer. I know, terrible, but no doubt he is dead. He gave my son that rabbit before he left for war. My son is eight, that rabbit is the only thing he has left to remember his father.”

Robert Posey looked at the woman for a long time. Then he reached into his kit. He pulled out a piece of paper, but it wasn’t the photograph from Buchenwald. It was one of the “Off Limits” signs he had so often posted on protected monuments. He wrote at the bottom, “By Order of Captain Robert Posey, U.S. Third Army,” then hung the sign on the cage.

“No one will bother your boy’s rabbit,” he said, before marching off with the infantrymen.
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“The story [in your last letter] of the two year old colored boy,” he wrote Alice a few days later, “somehow reminded me of the greatest horror I have seen. It was at the Nazi concentration camp near Weimar where I visited the day after its surrender. I still don’t believe what I saw. It was simply too fantastic. Nothing that I have read about the sadistic cruelty of the Nazis now seems far fetched. It is a fine tribute to Roosevelt that he almost alone stood against them when the rest of the world was defeated. The people of Weimar, only four miles away, claim they didn’t know what was going on, but he knew though four thousand miles away. But I wonder if our society is not a bit off-color when a tiny black boy is abandoned and left alone by his family. Perhaps I am just a softie. When I am billeted in a German home even for one night I go out and search for the chickens and rabbits or pets and give them water and food if possible. Generally the family has pulled out too rapidly to care for such things. I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it.”
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CHAPTER 44

Discoveries

Thuringia, Germany, and Buxheim, Germany

May 1, 1945

G
eorge Stout arrived at Bernterode on May 1, 1945. Just as Walker Hancock had hinted in his phone call, the mine was in a rural area, with nothing to see but forests. Even the tiny village nearby had been evacuated by Nazi officials so that no one would know about the frantic activity at the mine. The only sight of civilization, if that’s what it could be called, was an internment camp for displaced persons, mostly French, Italian, and Russian slave laborers who had worked in the mine. The mineshaft was deep, eighteen hundred feet, and the tunnels spread almost fifteen miles underground. The slave laborers had primarily been used to load and unload ammunition, since Bernterode was one of the largest munitions production sites in central Germany. The American ordnance crew that had explored it estimated the mine contained 400,000 tons of explosives. “It was a flogging or worse if you even carried a match into the mine,” one of the French laborers had told Walker Hancock.

“The civilians were sent out six weeks ago,” Hancock commented to Stout as the two men took the long, slow, dark elevator ride to the bottom of the mine, “and the next day German soldiers started pouring in. They worked in complete secrecy. Two weeks later, the mine was sealed. It was April 2, George, the day we entered Siegen.”

The elevator stopped at the bottom of the shaft, and the men flipped on their flashlights. There were electric lamps in the ceiling, but the light was feeble and the power intermittent. “This way,” Hancock said, indicating the main corridor. They were more than a third of a mile underground, and there was no sound except their footsteps. Branching tunnels disappeared into the darkness, studded with chiseled rock chambers. Whenever Stout shone his flashlight beam into one of the rooms, it illuminated stacks of mortar shells and explosives. A quarter mile down was a newly mortared wall. There was no door—the Nazis hadn’t expected anyone to enter this repository—so an even newer hole had been smashed out of the middle. Across the corridor was an enormous cache of dynamite.

“After you,” Hancock said.

George Stout crawled through the wall opening and into a room even he, who had been at Siegen and Merkers, never imagined. There was a wide central passage, ablaze with light and lined with wooden racks and storage compartments. From the compartments hung 225 flags and banners, all unfurled and with decorative effects on their finials. They were German regimental banners dating from the early Prussian wars to World War I. Near the entrance to the chamber were boxes and paintings, and in the bays Stout could see carefully arranged tapestries and other decorative works. In a few of the bays, Stout noticed, were large caskets.
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Three were unadorned; one bore a wreath, red ribbons, and a name: Adolf Hitler.

“It’s not him,” Hancock said over Stout’s shoulder. “The ordnance men thought it was, but it’s not.”

Stout walked into the bay that held the decorated casket. Above him the flags hung limply, some of the older ones in nets to hold them together. He saw steel ammunition boxes on the floor nearby and swastikas on the ribbons. Hancock was right; it wasn’t Hitler. A crude label, written in red crayon and held on with tape, read, “
Friedrich Wilhelm Ier, der Soldaten König
.” Frederick William I, the Soldier King, dead since 1740. The decorations, Stout realized, were Hitler’s tribute to the founder of the modern German state.

He examined the other coffins, each with its crude red crayon label held on with tape. There was Feldmarschall von Hindenburg, the greatest German hero of World War I, and beside him Frau von Hindenburg, his wife. The fourth coffin contained the remains of “
Friedrich der Grosse
”—Frederick the Great, the son of the Soldier King.

Where did Hitler get these coffins? Stout wondered. Did he rob their tombs?

“It’s a coronation chamber,” Hancock said. “They were going to crown Hitler the emperor of Europe.”

“Or the world,” Stout said, examining the photographs in a small metal box. They contained photographs and portraits of all the military leaders of the Prussian state from the Soldier King to Hitler. In the next three boxes were prizes of the Prussian monarchy: the Reich Sword of Prince Albrecht, forged in 1540; the scepter, orb, and crown used at the coronation of the Soldier King in 1713. The jewels had been removed from the crown, according to a label, “for honorable sale.”
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Stout examined the rest of the room. The steel ammunition boxes held books and photographs from the library of Frederick the Great. The 271 paintings in the farthest holding bay were from his palaces in Berlin, and Sanssouci in Potsdam.

“This isn’t a coronation room,” Stout said. “It’s a reliquary. They were hiding the most precious artifacts of the German military state. This room wasn’t intended for Hitler; it was intended for the next Reich, so they could build upon his glory.”

Hancock laughed. “And it didn’t even stay hidden until the end of this one.”

Three hundred and fifty miles to the south, James Rorimer finally received the news he had been waiting for: U.S. Seventh Army was closing in on Neuschwanstein. He immediately raced to the transportation depot only to find that, since the command unit would be leaving soon for Augsburg or Munich, there were no vehicles available.

Wily and determined as ever, especially with his objective so close after all these months, he secured a jeep from a friend in the Red Cross and was soon on his way. Since Neuschwanstein was not yet liberated, he took a detour to Buxheim, where Rose Valland had reported the Nazis had been storing the overflow items from Neuschwanstein since as early as 1943. Without hesitation, a German policeman offered directions to the monastery a few miles outside of town, where everyone in the city knew the Nazi artwork was stored. The American soldiers there, however, seemed unaware of the cache. The outer rooms of the monastery had been broken into by thieves, and the Allied troops were busy protecting looted French dry goods from hungry displaced persons. In the back of one of the rooms, completely ignored by the American troops, Rorimer noticed cases containing statuary marked “D-W,” the personal symbol of Pierre David-Weill, one of the world’s great collectors. In the main section of the monastery even the corridors were stacked with looted Renaissance furniture. The rooms, which housed a priest, thirteen nuns, and twenty-two refugee children, were filled with pottery, paintings, and decorative works. The floor of the chapel was almost a foot thick with rugs and tapestries, many stolen directly from the walls and floors of the various Rothschild estates.

The German overseers of the monastery were willfully unhelpful, but Rorimer had better luck with Martha Klein, a restorer from Cologne and the superintendent of the repository. The monastery was, Rorimer discovered from Klein, the primary restoration studio for the items stolen from France by the ERR. Around her were the tools of her trade: cameras, brushes, paints, scrapers, lights, measuring tools, and milk, which was used to reline canvases. Rorimer noticed a small painting tossed casually onto one of the tables. Klein told him it was a Rembrandt, discovered by the Nazis in a bank vault in Munich. When Rorimer asked, she offered the list of paintings that she and others had restored in those small rooms over the last two years.

“There are few museums in the world that could boast a collection such as the one we found here [at Buxheim],” Rorimer later wrote. “Works of art could no longer be thought of in ordinary terms—a roomful, a carload, a castle full, were the quantities we had to reckon with.”
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And this was just the overflow. Neuschwanstein was still miles away.

CHAPTER 45

The Noose Tightens

Germany and Austria

May 2–3, 1945

T
he war, of course, was not just being fought by the Western Allies. In Italy, German forces officially surrendered on May 2. On the Eastern front, the more than two-million-man Soviet Red Army had ripped through Poland and was moving deep inside the Fatherland, leaving German troops and civilians fleeing west to avoid annihilation. On May 4, U.S. forces caught up with Hans Frank, the notorious Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland, at his home in Neuhaus on Lake Schliersee, just ten miles from the Austrian border.

Frank’s reign in Poland had been brutal and bloody. “We must not be squeamish when we learn that a total of 17,000 have been shot [in Poland],” he said in a speech to the party faithful in 1943. “We are now duty bound to hold together; we who are gathered together here figure on Mr. Roosevelt’s list of war criminals. I have the honor of being Number One.”
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Once, while visiting another territory, he noticed a sign proclaiming seven partisans had been executed; he would have to fell a whole forest, he boasted to his retinue, if he posted a sign every time he killed seven Poles.

So quick to condemn others, Frank proved too weak to face his own crimes. Powerless, and with no alternatives, the weak-willed Frank turned over forty-three volumes of his personal diaries to his captors. On his first night in captivity, he tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrists and throat. He failed even at that. Scouring his house, the soldiers found nine world-famous paintings, including two of the three masterpieces stolen from the Czartoryski Collection in Cracow: Rembrandt’s
Landscape with the Good Samaritan
and Leonardo da Vinci’s
Lady with an Ermine
. The third,
Portrait of a Young Man
by Raphael, was officially listed as missing.

In a prison cell near Trier, Hermann Bunjes fell into despondence as he contemplated his life. Monuments Men Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein had not returned to accept his offer of assistance; instead, Posey had sent an army interrogator to his small scholar’s hideaway outside Trier. Shortly thereafter, Bunjes was arrested by Allied forces.
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He had helped Göring pillage France; he had bullied Rose Valland at the Jeu de Paume; he had sold out every cultural, scholarly, and personal virtue in pursuit of Nazi power, and yet he had convinced himself he might somehow go free. Perhaps he imagined he could slip away in the confusion of the Allied advance, or that he could buy his freedom by telling Posey and Kirstein the location of Hitler’s treasure room at Altaussee. But he had sold his soul, and that is something you can never repurchase at any price. Hermann Bunjes had craved Nazi power, wealth, and prestige, but they had been nothing but a cruel illusion for a foolish man.