The Monuments Men (51 page)

CHAPTER 50

End of the Road

Altaussee, Austria

May 12, 1945

T
he news came unexpectedly: U.S. Third Army had turned south. They, not U.S. Seventh Army, were moving into the Alps near Altaussee. James Rorimer, who had been planning an armed expedition to the salt mine, was diverted to Berchtesgaden, where the rumors of looting by displaced persons were running as hot as the rumors of stockpiled treasures. Altaussee was now, suddenly, the responsibility of Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein. Unfortunately, they were more than two hundred miles away on another assignment.

For once it didn’t take the Monuments Men long to obtain clearances and a vehicle, although information from the area was sketchy and reports from the mine itself nonexistent. Soon they were careening through the wasteland of southern Germany, where even the roads were bombed out and torn to bits. Lacking flags, German civilians hung white pillowcases from their houses in a sign of surrender, but despite the linens every window appeared sinister and black. There were numerous stories of soldiers gunned down in seemingly quiet villages; of Hitler Youth, fired by childish passion and ignorance, standing in the darkness of second-floor windows with their guns trained down on the narrow part of the street. The crowds of displaced persons were full of soldiers, mainly from the Eastern front, who had stripped off their uniforms to mix better with the civilians. Many crowds seemed filled both with despair and evil intention. At one point in their recent travels, Kirstein had made a wrong turn into the middle of a convoy of German soldiers. There was no place to turn around, so he and Posey spent a tense few minutes surrounded by the enemy, wondering if they had been taken prisoner or if it was the other way around. Eventually, they turned off without incident; the Germans simply kept going.

When the Monuments Men crossed the Austrian border, the horror seemed to lift, and for the first time they could breathe. Instead of pillowcases, the houses flew red-and-white flags, the sign of the Austrian Resistance. The roads began to wind, looping into the hills. In the distance rose snowcapped peaks, and the scattered Alpine villages were like gingerbread towns, with colorful chalets and candy-cut woodwork.

On the other side of Bad Ischl, they encountered the German Sixth Army, stretched out for what seemed like a mile “in charcoal burners, horse-drawn dead-motored ambulances and trucks. There were women and wounded, Hungarian Panzer units, on foot, without armor—thousands of beaten, home-going, and eminently cheerful soldiers.”
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They stopped briefly at an inn near the town of Altaussee, a tidy village tucked in the woods near a pristine alpine lake. Outside, trimly uniformed SS officers were offering their services to the liberators, who they were sure would soon be at war with the Soviets. No? Then the SS officers were happy to surrender, as long as they could keep their sidearms. They feared their own troops would shoot them in the back.

Inside, American troops were celebrating. Guided by Austrian mountaineers, some of their fellow soldiers had tracked Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the notorious commander of the Nazi security police, through the mountains for most of the night, finally catching up to him at dawn. The wily Nazi had thrown his medals into a lake and successfully passed himself off as a doctor. But he was identified when his mistress screamed out his name and waved to him as he passed with a group of German prisoners through a nearby town.

Posey and Kirstein hurried on. There was only one steep, winding ascent left to the mine, but the bleak, empty road made them feel they had left the safety of numbers behind. To their surprise, the buildings outside the salt mine—a nondescript guardhouse and a low office bunker beneath towering mountains—were swarming with activity. Two jeeps and one truckload of troops from the 80th Infantry Division had taken the few buildings without a fight, but what exactly they had taken was still up for debate. None of the enemy groups—miners, art men, guards, Nazis—seemed to agree on what had happened. And especially on who had done what.

After a quick conversation with the commanding officer, Major Ralph Pearson, who assured them the main shaft was not booby-trapped, Posey and Kirstein grabbed some acetylene lamps and headed into the mine. The tunnel went straight back into the side of the mountain. Instinctively, the two men ducked their heads, although the tunnel entrance was seven or eight feet tall. The light of their lanterns swung side to side as they hurried along, the darkness opening before them and then closing again in their wake. Kirstein touched the wall and felt a mild electric shock—live demolition wires, either damaged or cut, he couldn’t be sure. About a quarter of a mile down, or maybe a half mile—it was too hard to tell in the darkness—debris lay scattered on the floor. The men scrambled quickly over it. In the wall, Kirstein noticed a hole full of tubes, and he knew from his brief ordnance training that it was dynamite. Packed for destruction, but unlit. He scrambled over the slabs of rock and jumped down to the tamped-earth floor, following his captain deeper into the mountain. Their steps echoed now, rebounding off the scattered debris. Their lights swung forward and back. It was cold in the tunnel, but not nearly cold enough to produce the shiver Kirstein felt when Posey suddenly stopped and held up his acetylene torch. Before them, reflecting the lantern’s dim glow, was a solid wall of fallen stone. The mine had been blown.

SECTION

V

The Aftermath

We do not want to destroy unnecessarily what men spent so much time and care and skill in making… [for] these examples of craftsmanship tell us so much about our ancestors…. If these things are lost or broken or destroyed, we lose a valuable part of our knowledge about our forefathers. No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it.

—British Monuments Man Ronald Balfour, draft lecture for soldiers, 1944

All the works of art for whose fate we still tremble will return to us, bringing the light of their beauty to attract, as before, pilgrims from every country and to inspire thoughts of peace.

—Dr. Cesare Fasola, Uffizi librarian, The Florence Galleries and the War

CHAPTER 51

Understanding Altaussee

Altaussee, Austria

March 30–May 5, 1945

H
itler’s intentions for the treasure trove at Altaussee have long been debated. Yet it seems clear from his last will and testament, the last document he would sign, just hours before committing suicide, that he never intended for the artwork to be destroyed.

Somehow, the significance of his deliberate and clearly stated wish—that the “pictures” he collected for a great museum in Linz be given to the German state—has been all but ignored by historians examining that document. Seen in the full context of Adolf Hitler and his lifelong ambitions as an artist, the last will should quiet any discussion that he wanted the artwork destroyed. This does not redound to his credit, though, since it is equally clear his decisions while in power made the destruction of the mine at Altaussee nearly inevitable. By refusing to plan for defeat or to surrender when all was lost, he created a void in which rogue actors would determine the fate of tens of thousands of lives, buildings, and artistic treasures. He also failed to state, in no unequivocal terms, that the artwork was not to be destroyed.

But most importantly, his orders over the course of many years—including the burning of books; the destruction of “degenerate” art; the pillaging of personal property; the arrest, detention, and systematic annihilation of millions of human beings; and the willful and vengeful destruction of great cities—put the artwork, and everything else within reach of any Nazis anywhere in the world, at tremendous risk. Monuments Man S. Lane Faison Jr. once commented that Hitler “wrote a book called
Mein Kampf
. And if people had just read it carefully, every single thing that’s happened was already predicted… the whole Jewish situation is there in clear writing in ink.”
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The same is true for most of his other actions. Hitler’s Nero Decree of March 19, 1945, simply formalized everything he had preached and done over the previous two decades, empowering his followers to unleash the violence and fury of his reign. In the hands of a man like August Eigruber, it was a messianic calling.

But what exactly happened in those remote Austrian mountains during the void between Hitler’s loss of control and the arrival of the Monuments Men? Who was ultimately responsible for the actions taken there? And who should bear the credit and the blame for how things turned out? The broad outlines have long been known, but it took decades to piece together the actual sequence of events and the roles played by the mine officials, the miners, Nazi officials, resistance fighters, and Western Allied forces. Even today, delving into the original German documents reveals new insights into one of the great (if largely unknown) turning points in the history of man’s cultural achievements. As so often happens in life—and history—it’s not just what happened, but what might have occurred that bears analysis.

The basic facts are not in dispute.

Had it not been for the heroic action of several individuals, the Altaussee art repository would have been destroyed by the bombs placed there on the orders of August Eigruber. But it wasn’t destroyed, nor was any piece of artwork stored there irretrievably damaged. Instead, sometime between May 1 and May 7 (U.S. forces, led by Major Ralph Pearson, arrived on May 8), the eight massive bombs were removed and hidden alongside the road under a group of fir trees. The mine tunnels were packed with charges. The resulting explosions—the conspirators referred to them as a “palsy,” another word for paralysis
2
—collapsed the tunnels and sealed the mine, placing the artwork beyond Eigruber’s destructive intent. The question has always been: Who ordered and executed the palsy?

Writing in the magazine
Town and Country
in the fall of 1945, Lincoln Kirstein admitted that “so many witnesses told so many stories that the more information we accumulated the less truth it seemed to contain.”
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Nonetheless, he believed the heroes were the Austrian miners. In Kirstein’s scenario, which became the unofficial MFAA explanation, the miners accidentally discovered Eigruber’s crates containing bombs and secretly removed them from the chambers in the dead of night. They then sealed the mine entrances, knowing this was the best way to prevent more serious damage to the source of their livelihood. In a way, salt saved art. When Eigruber discovered the treason, he “ordered all the Austrians to be shot, but it was already too late; the Americans were on the other side of the mountain. It was May seventh.”
4

The miners confirmed this account in 1948, when in a report to the Austrian government signed “Freedom Fighters of Altaussee” they claimed to have acted alone to save the mine.
5
Their account overlooks the fact that, among other inconsistencies, the miners could never have prepared the complicated palsy (controlled explosions) without the technical expertise of engineers like Högler and Mayerhoffer. The government, however, never questioned their claims.

The Austrian government, in fact, was a most important source of misinformation about Altaussee. Kirstein’s opinion had no doubt been influenced by a common misconception: that the Austrians were innocent victims of the Nazis, not their willing accomplices. This was not the case, as film footage and documents from the period prove. The Austrian government, however, was quick to buttress this aura of innocence, and even produced a defense of its actions known as the
Red-White-Red-Book
(mocked by many as “The Viennese Masquerade”) in 1946.
6
In it, the self-described Austrian Resistance claimed it knew of the artistic treasures at Altaussee and had forced Kaltenbrunner at gunpoint to rescind Hitler’s order to destroy them. The claim was absurd. While the Austrian Resistance was active in the Aussee area, they had no knowledge of the artwork and no influence on activities at the mine. Their only real role was, weeks later, to supplement the meager American guard. Nonetheless, by 1948 the Resistance, with the support of the Austrian government, was claiming primary responsibility for saving Altaussee. Later writers even claimed the miners were members of the Austrian Resistance; in fact, many were members of the Nazi Party.