The Monuments Men (50 page)

It was the endlessness of the operation, the limitlessness of the robbery and the snobbery and the excuses. That’s what depressed him, even as he and Posey pushed toward the Alpine region that was home to most of the great Nazi storehouses of stolen art. As he summarized the situation in a letter home, “As you can tell my temper improves and my hair falls out, as each nameless and numberless day passes one-footedly by. I have hit the don’t care low of all time, as everything grows glamorouser and glamorouser…. I am not interested in lousy old Germany’s lousy old future.”
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CHAPTER 48

The Translator

Munich, Germany

May 7, 1945

While the Monuments Men in the field raced toward their destinations, Private Harry Ettlinger sat glumly in an enormous
Kaserne
, or German military barracks, on the outskirts of Munich. It was May 7, nearly four months since he’d been pulled off the troop truck in Belgium, and he hadn’t done a thing but eat and sleep. Harry’s thoughts drifted to an afternoon several weeks earlier at his last bivouac, a tent camp outside Worms, Germany, when he had climbed a nearby hill. The weather was finally warm, and the trees in bloom. Shadows fell over him, and Harry looked up expecting planes. It was only a flock of birds. Down on the road, he noticed a solitary figure. For twenty minutes, he watched the man climb. When he was a few steps away, Harry realized he had an artificial leg. Harry offered a hand, but the man shrugged him off. He was the priest of the chapel over the crest of the hill. He had lost his leg more than two years before on the Russian front. They said little, but Harry left feeling he had, for the first time in months, had a real conversation with another human being. So far, it had been his only contact with the enemy.

“I hear you speak German.” It was so unexpected, Harry looked up to see if the soldier was talking to him.

“Yes sir,” Private Harry Ettlinger said, almost saluting before noticing the soldier was a private.

“I’ve been translating for the last two days,” the man said. “It’s interesting work, but it’s not for me. I want to be in military intelligence. A German girl was raped by four American soldiers. I want to investigate it. Are you interested?”

“In the rape?”

“No, in the translation job.”

“Yes sir,” Harry said again, without even stopping to ask about the work.

The office the private directed him to was across the parade ground of the
Kaserne
, in what turned out to be the U.S. Seventh Army headquarters building. It was a small room on the second floor, full of desks and papers. Two men were working at the desks, while another stood in the middle giving orders.

“Are you the new translator?” the man snapped.

“Yes sir. Private Harry Ettlinger, sir.”

“You sound German, Ettlinger.”

“American, sir. But born a German Jew. From Karlsruhe.”

“Are you assigned to a unit, Ettlinger?”

“Not that I know of, sir.”

The man handed him a stack of papers. “Read these documents and tell us what’s in them. Just the gist, and anything specific: names, locations, works of art.”

“Works of art?”

Before Harry could even get the question out, the man had turned and left.
Now that’s a man who gets things done
, Harry thought. He knew if he did a good job on the translations that man would get him assigned to this division, whatever division it was, and because of that man he couldn’t imagine a better job. Only later did Harry Ettlinger discover that, before switching units, he had been assigned to the translation corps for the Nuremberg trials. That, apparently, was what he had been waiting for the past four months.

“What a wheeler-dealer,” Harry said, turning to one of the men in the office.

“You don’t know the half of it,” the man replied. “He’s trying to secure the two most sought-after buildings in Munich, Hitler’s office and the former Nazi Party headquarters. Patton wants them for his regional headquarters, but knowing our lieutenant they’ll soon be MFAA Collecting Points. We’ll have the building all to ourselves. Ourselves and the hundreds of thousands of things you’re going to read about in those documents, that is.”

Harry looked at the paper. “What am I going to read about?”

The man laughed. “Welcome to Monuments work. I’m Lieutenant Charles Parkhurst, from Princeton.”

“Harry Ettlinger, from Newark.” He waited, expecting more. “And who was that?” he asked finally.

“That was Lieutenant James Rorimer. Your new boss.”

New boss. Harry liked the sound of that. “Where’s he gone?”

“Salzburg. He’s going to mount an armed expedition to the salt mines at Altaussee.”

CHAPTER 49

The Sound of Music

Bernterode, Germany

May 7, 1945

A
t Bernterode, George Stout was taking his time. More than twenty people had been assigned to remove the treasures from the mine—including the ordnance unit that had found the shrine, a small group of engineers, and fourteen former French slave laborers who had worked there for the last few years—and every one of them wanted to be done as quickly as possible. The mine was dark and musty, dripping with water, and plagued by frequent power outages that lasted for hours. Even Walker Hancock, who by now had vast experience with the handling of art in war zones, felt anxious to finish. After all, the whole operation was being conducted on top of 400,000 tons of explosives.

George Stout would have none of it. What mattered in the outside world, where rumors swirled about the end of the war, didn’t have any bearing on what happened in the Thuringian forest eighteen hundred feet underground. Before anything was moved, a thorough inspection was needed. Fortunately, the ordnance unit had already checked most of the fifteen miles of tunnels. They didn’t find any more treasure, but they did locate several stores of German military supplies. Stout had the gas-proof boots cut into rubber padding to keep objects from rubbing against one another; gas-proof mantles were perfect for wrapping the paintings, especially important in the dripping mine. With the packing materials taken care of, the contents of the shrine were inventoried and organized for removal. Walker Hancock looked up one afternoon—he assumed it was afternoon anyway, since he had existed for two days in perpetual blackness—and noticed Stout frowning at him. Hancock realized he had been thinking of home, of Saima and the house they would buy together and one day, maybe, even the children they would have, and had been coiling a rope with the exaggerated swinging motion of the Massachusetts fishermen he had so often observed back home. Stout, on the other hand, was deliberately coiling the rope over his hand and elbow in precise, measured loops.

As soon as Stout turned away, the man next to Hancock whispered, “How long does he think we’re going to keep laying these ropes out in lengths of just twenty-three and one-half inches, all pointing one degree east of north?”
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The man was Steve Kovalyak, an infantry combat lieutenant who had been assigned to help after Walker Hancock delivered the coronation paraphernalia to the brass in Frankfurt. A jeepload of gold covered in jewels meant little to Hancock, who had seen so much already, but it was eye-popping for the boys back at headquarters. Hancock had simply borrowed Stout’s jeep to drive the regalia to headquarters at Weimar, but General Hodges wasn’t taking any chances. He ordered an escort of two motorcycles, three jeeps, two armored cars, a weapons carrier, and fifteen soldiers for Hancock and the treasures, even though the area between Weimar and Frankfurt had been cleared of enemy forces and was safer, Hancock felt, than the Merritt Parkway back in Connecticut. He wondered what the general would have thought of the first part of the journey, when Hancock had driven the jewels alone through the forests of Thuringia on a road where six convoys had been ambushed in the last week alone.

“Don’t worry,” Hancock told the young lieutenant, “George Stout knows what he’s doing.” He told Kovalyak and a few nearby ordnance officers about Büsbach, where Stout had taken the time to record everything about a painting even though shells were falling outside. “I’ve worked with that man a long time,” he said, “and I can tell you this: We’re all amateurs compared to George Stout.”

A few hours later, the power went out, plunging the mine into darkness. Again. Hancock turned on his flashlight. His beam flashed over books, gold, paintings, coffins, and, so suddenly it made him jump, George Stout’s face.

“I’ll send Kovalyak,” Hancock said. It was Stout’s standard operating procedure in a blackout to send Lieutenant Kovalyak to cajole the local
Bürgermeister
into keeping his generators operational, even though Kovalyak was one of the few officers present who didn’t speak a word of German. It was tedious work, more finesse than force, but years in the infantry had taught Kovalyak all the tricks of navigating local power plays, out-of-touch procedures, and bureaucratic red tape. Hancock had the impression he had skirted court-martial many times, sometimes for pleasure, but mostly to get the job done right.

Soon Hancock found himself alone in the darkness, and as he did in all his down moments, he thought of home. It all seemed so close now—the new house, the return to his sculpting, Saima’s embrace—but at the same time it had never felt farther away. He was in a hole, in a forest in Germany, in the dark. Even daylight seemed forever away. To heck with saving his batteries. He turned on his flashlight, pulled a box out to the middle of the room, and, using the wooden backing of a four-hundred-year-old Cranach painting as a table, wrote Saima a letter.
2

Precious Saima:

You could never imagine what strange circumstances this is being written under. I can’t tell you now, but I do want you to have a line actually written in one of the most unbelievable places…. Geo. Stout is working here to help me—and the rush of our work brought on by Germany’s sudden collapse is so great that letters have been out of the question…. No more till later—except that I love you more than I can ever say—but that’s not news. Some day soon I’ll be able to settle down to a room with a bed and a table and catch up on letter writing.

Devotedly,

Walker

The packing started on May 4, only to be interrupted again by a major power outage. Kovalyak left the mine to meet with the mayor of the nearest town; the 305th Combat Engineer Battalion rigged an emergency generator eighteen hundred feet underground; the French workers, former slave laborers, slipped quietly away down side passages, something they had been doing with increasing frequency; Hancock pulled out his flashlight and, using Feldmarschall von Hindenburg’s coffin as his table this time, wrote Saima that “these are very homesick days” despite the excitement of his work.
3
He loved the company of kindred souls, be they soldiers in the field or friends back in his sitting room in Massachusetts, and being on his own for months, without even an assistant to keep him company, had beaten him down. “Geo. Stout is here to give me an urgently needed boost,” he wrote. “He is really a friend in need.”
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By May 5, the packing crews were arranged in two shifts, one from 0800 to 1600 and the other from 1600 to 2200. This was no place for the claustrophobic, as the men and packing materials crowded the shrine and the corridor. By the end of the next day, most of the objects had been padded, wrapped, waterproofed, then loaded onto the elevator for the slow trip to the surface, where they were restacked in a shed at ground level—and where Steve Kovalyak had learned to appreciate the careful planning and his precise, pre-cut pieces of rope.

Another George Stout disciple
, Hancock thought.

The next day, it was time for the coffins. Frau von Hindenburg, the lightest, went first. It was a quarter mile from the shrine to the mineshaft. A couple of soldiers crossed themselves as she rose slowly to the surface in the rickety elevator. “She will never be buried deeper,” Stout said, by way of benediction.

Next went the Soldier King and then, with Walker Hancock riding on top of the coffin, Feldmarschall von Hindenburg. Now all that was left were the mortal remains of Frederick the Great and his massive steel coffin. The engineers had insisted the coffin wouldn’t fit on the elevator, but Stout reminded them that if it could make it down into the shaft, it could also make it back up. They measured again; wedged precisely into the elevator, it would fit with half an inch to spare.

Unfortunately, the coffin weighed, by their estimate, twelve hundred to fourteen hundred pounds. First, it had to be shifted so that a series of slings could be run underneath it. Then the crew of fifteen men had to lift it, squeeze it through the door of the shrine, and maneuver it around the corner into the dark, uneven, dripping-wet mineshaft. The funeral procession went slowly, the pallbearers groaning at their straps. It took the better part of an hour to fit the great steel beast onto the elevator, working it into position inch by inch. Finally, just before 2300 hours, they were ready for the ascent to the surface. It had taken the men all day to disinter the four coffins.

The elevator rose slowly a few feet, then stopped. George Stout and six of the crew climbed onto the lower rigging of the cage and, slowly, the elevator started rising. It took fourteen minutes to climb eighteen hundred feet, the men thinking of nothing more than their hope that the old elevator really could hold a ton of weight, because that’s nearly how much it was lifting. As they neared the top, the men began to hear music. Somewhere above them, a radio was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As the coffin emerged into the dark, clear night, another song followed: “God Save the King.” It was May 7, 1945, the Germans had unconditionally surrendered at Reims. The Allies had officially won the war.