The Monuments Men (55 page)

CHAPTER 54

Heroes of Civilization

Germany, Britain, France, America, and the World Then, Now, and Forever

T
he reconstruction of Europe after World War II was one of the most complicated and comprehensive international efforts of modern times. The identity and infrastructure of the nations of Europe had to be rebuilt, and the restitution of artwork was a vital component. To say the war was the greatest upheaval of cultural items in history would be a grave understatement. In the end, the Western Allies discovered more than one thousand repositories in southern Germany alone, containing millions of works of art and other cultural treasures, including church bells, stained glass, religious items, municipal records, manuscripts, books, libraries, wine, gold, diamonds, and even insect collections. The job of packing, transporting, cataloguing, photographing, archiving, and returning this plunder to its country of origin—the respective countries were then responsible for returning it to the individual owners—fell almost exclusively to the MFAA section. The job would take six long years.

Despite the best efforts of the men and women of the MFAA, hundreds of thousands of works of art, documents, and books have yet to be found. The most famous is perhaps Raphael’s
Portrait of a Young Man
, stolen from the Czartoryski Collection in Cracow, Poland, and last known to have been in the possession of the notorious Nazi governor-general Hans Frank. Tens of thousands were no doubt destroyed. These include the personal collection of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, which was burned by SS stormtroopers before British troops could intervene. The famed Amber Panels of Peter the Great, looted by the Nazis from Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), are likely another cultural victim of the war, in all probability destroyed during an artillery battle that took place at Königsberg but for the small portable mosaics, one of which surfaced in Bremen 1997. Thousands of paintings and other works of art have never been claimed, either because their provenance could not be determined or their owners were among the millions who died or were murdered in Hitler’s military and racial crusades. Sadly, not all museums, the interim custodians of some of these works of art, have demonstrated the determination of the Monuments Men to locate their rightful owner or heirs.

More than sixty years after the death of Adolf Hitler, we still live in a world altered by his legacy. His personal belongings are scattered, although many have made their way into public museums and collections. Most of his library books are in the U.S. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and eighty volumes may be found at Brown University in the John Hay Library’s Rare Book collection. Many of his paintings and watercolors are stored at the National Museum of the U.S. Army, Army Art Collection. The original duplicates of his last will and political testament are at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the Imperial War Museum in London. His beloved Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) still stands in Munich, although today as the Haus der Kunst, home to temporary exhibits of contemporary art. But the lasting impact of his bitter reign is best measured in more ephemeral ways: fifty million loved ones who never returned home from the war to rejoin their families or start one of their own; brilliant, creative contributions never made to our world because scientists, artists, and inventors lost their lives too early or were never born; cultures built over generations reduced to ashes and rubble because one human being judged groups of other human beings less worthy than his own.

The highest officials in Hitler’s government were prosecuted for crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials beginning in October 1945. Hitler’s would-be successor and rival for the cultural treasures of Europe, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, was arrested by American soldiers on May 9, 1945. Dressed in his most resplendent uniform and carrying his baton of state, he had been attempting to secure an audience with Allied Supreme Commander Eisenhower. He was taken to a prison cell in Augsburg instead. Like the other party leaders at Nuremberg, he at first denied his role in the Holocaust, proclaiming, “I revere women and I think it unsportsmanlike to kill children…. For myself I feel quite free of responsibility for the mass murders.”
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In the end, however, he was one of the few to acknowledge personal participation in the worst aspects of the Third Reich.

Göring saved his denials for accusations about his collection of art. “Of all the charges which have been leveled against me,” he is quoted as saying in the
Nuremberg Interviews
, “the so-called looting of art treasures by me has caused me the most anguish.”
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In another section of the
Nuremberg Interviews
, he explained his thinking: “They tried to paint a picture of me as a looter of art treasures. In the first place, during a war everybody loots a little bit. However, none of my so-called looting was illegal…. I always paid for them or they were delivered through the Hermann Göring Division, which, together with the Rosenberg Commission supplied me with my art collection. Perhaps one of my weaknesses has been that I love to be surrounded by luxury and that I am so artistic in my temperament that masterpieces make me feel alive and glowing inside. But always my intention was to contribute these art treasures… to a state museum after I had died or before, for the greater glory of German culture. Looking at it from that standpoint I can’t see that it was ethically wrong.”
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The harshest blow for the Reichsmarschall came when he was confronted in his jail cell by the fact that one of his prized possessions, Jan Vermeer’s
Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery
, for which he had traded 150 paintings, was a forgery. (The forger, Han van Meegeren, had been arrested in Holland for collaboration with the Nazis and plundering Dutch culture. When it was revealed he had duped the hated Reichsmarschall, he was hailed by some as a national hero.) Monuments Man Stewart Leonard delivered the news to Göring and said afterward that he “looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.”
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The Reichsmarschall had fancied himself a Renaissance man; in the end, he was revealed to be nothing more than an unsophisticated and greedy fool.

Hermann Göring did not appeal his death sentence at Nuremberg. He asked only to be executed with dignity, by firing squad, rather than hanged like a common criminal. His request was denied. On October 15, 1946, the night before his scheduled hanging, the broken-down Reichsmarschall committed suicide with a potassium cyanide capsule. It is still unclear how the poison found its way into his prison cell.

Alfred Rosenberg, leader of the ERR and Hitler’s chief racial theorist, proved completely unrepentant and denied complicity in any wrongdoing. He was found guilty and executed by hanging on October 16, 1946.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Gestapo leader, was found guilty at Nuremberg of the mass murder of civilians, selecting and executing racial and political undesirables, establishing concentration camps, the forced labor and execution of prisoners of war, and many other heinous and unfathomable crimes. He also was executed by hanging on October 16, 1946. Interceding to help save the artistic treasures at Altaussee turned out to be the only positive deed in an otherwise thoroughly miserable and rotten life.

Hans Frank, the notorious Nazi governor-general caught with stolen masterpieces near the end of the war, renewed his faith in Catholicism and expressed some remorse for his reign of terror in Poland. He expressed relief at being hanged with his fellow Nazi leaders, but never revealed the location of the missing Raphael painting.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect and friend who had almost managed to take a stand against the Führer’s Nero Decree, was the only other high-ranking Nazi to express remorse for his actions. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and, after a bitter split among the jurors, sentenced to twenty years in prison. After his release in 1966, he became an author. His three memoirs of life in Hitler’s government, and mostly notably his first book
Inside the Third Reich
, have become invaluable to historians. Albert Speer died of a stroke in 1981.

August Eigruber was arrested in May 1945 and prosecuted at the Mauthausen Trial in March 1946. He was found guilty of war crimes committed at the Mauthausen concentration camp, including the execution of prisoners of war. Much of the evidence used to convict him was from archives found in the salt mine at Altaussee, probably another reason he was so keen to destroy the mine. He went unrepentant to the gallows on May 28, 1947. His last words, just before the trapdoor opened, were “
Heil Hitler!
”

Hermann Bunjes, the art scholar who had sold his soul in Paris and tried to buy it back by telling Monuments Men Posey and Kirstein about Altaussee, hanged himself from the window of his prison cell on July 25, 1945. It was later reported by Lincoln Kirstein, and repeated in numerous history books, that Bunjes had not only killed himself, but shot his wife and children to death as well. That was not true. He left his family penniless, starving, and terrified in a broken Germany, but very much alive. His wife, Hildegard, in fact, lived until August 2005. She went to her grave declaring, “My husband was not an active Nazi; he was an idealist.”
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Bruno Lohse, Göring’s representative to the ERR in Paris, was arrested by James Rorimer on May 4, 1945. Rorimer had found his name in the registration book at Neuschwanstein and had been informed he was staying at a nursing home in the nearby village. When confronted, Lohse tried to pass himself off as a simple corporal in the Luftwaffe (which was his technical rank). Rorimer, warned by Valland that Lohse was “a most untrustworthy, double-crossing scoundrel,” wasn’t fooled.
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The “corporal” was placed under arrest.

Lohse admitted he had been involved with the ERR operation at the Jeu de Paume, but insisted he had done nothing wrong. He was a servant of Göring, he said, and thus his actions were legitimate. He became increasingly disillusioned as the interrogators described Göring’s dealings, especially the fact that the Reichsmarschall had never bothered to pay his debt to the ERR. Lohse had been a fervent admirer of Göring, and he was disconsolate to learn his boss was so cheap that he hadn’t even paid the absurdly low prices assigned to his looted art by the intimidated assessors of Paris.

In exchange for leniency, Bruno Lohse testified against his fellow looters and helped the French locate several caches of stolen art. (It helped that his coconspirators, Kurt von Behr and Hermann Bunjes, had both committed suicide.) He was released from prison in 1950, and soon after became a “legitimate” art dealer in Munich. By the mid-1950s, he was publicly denying having committed any crimes and was working diligently to rehabilitate his reputation. Much of this effort involved the intimidation and harassment of his chief accuser, Rose Valland. In a 1957 letter, Valland warned James Rorimer, with whom she had remained close friends, that “Lohse, who appears before you as a victim, assumes an entirely different personality when in Munich, judging from the conversations reported to me, and once again becomes the Nazi eager to avenge himself and to discredit the restitutions. For example, he regrets that he did not follow von Behr’s orders and did not order my disappearance (deportation and execution) according to von Behr’s plans. In Germany, he has become the champion of all these pitiful people who had been forced to obey the orders of the Nazi police and whose feelings we have hurt by asking them to be accountable for their actions.”
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Lohse died in March 2007 at age ninety-five, having lived his final decades in relative quiet and anonymity. In May 2007, a safety deposit box he controlled was discovered at a bank in Zu-rich, Switzerland. Inside was a Camille Pissarro painting stolen by the Gestapo in 1938, as well as paintings by Monet and Renoir. Records showed that at least fourteen other paintings had been removed from the box since 1983. An international investigation continues.

Then there were the lesser figures of Altaussee. These ordinary men, unknown to higher authorities, had to find their own way through the disorder of postwar Austria and Germany. This task was complicated by the fact that, to a man, they had been members of the Nazi Party. None, however, were active party members. In Austria and Germany in the 1930s, a person had to become a Nazi Party member to hold a professional position. Along with the scoundrels and villains, the “de-Nazification” of Germany in the postwar years swept up many innocent, even on occasion heroic, men.

One such man was Otto Högler, the mine foreman whose support and knowledge made possible Pöchmüller’s palsy at Altaussee. Högler was arrested on May 9, 1945, the day after the arrival of the Americans. Interestingly, a copy of the arrest report was sent to Dr. Michel, with a note assuring him that “the report was only signed by those clearly devoted to the cause.” Was Högler sent away so Michel could take credit for the rescue at Altaussee? Impossible to say. Nonetheless, Högler spent eight months in detention. He was released in December 1945, but rearrested three months later. Fired from the mine, he was working as a rat exterminator.

Högler was released from prison in 1947 and, after years of petitions, rehired by the mining company in 1951 on the condition he never mention anything about the rescue of the art treasures. After his retirement in 1963, however, he worked to set the record straight. He did not succeed. In 1971, he summarized the situation in a letter to a magazine that had recently run an erroneous account of the rescue. “One thing in your article is true—there was no gratitude toward the savior of the art treasures (possibly only for one or two impostors) and this might possibly be the reason why this thankworthy achievement had been misused for all sorts of gangster novels.” In 1972, he made one final attempt, compiling a report with the support of several miners on what had actually happened in April and May 1945. The report was politely accepted by the Austrian government but never examined. Otto Högler died in 1973.
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