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February 24, 2014 - November 17, 2019
incunabula,
The closer the Monuments Men got to the end of the war, and the more important their work became, the less time or freedom they had to tell their loved ones back home of their experiences.
As Kirstein wrote, “Due to the fact that the works of art… were discovered as an adjunct to the uncovering of the Reich’s gold-reserve, the story was given unusual press treatment.”
Much to the dismay of Stout and the Monuments Men, Bernstein was proceeding under the assumption that everything in the mine, including the artwork, was captured enemy loot. It would be months before he was disavowed of that notion.
Ohrdruf,
pulled themselves up on shriveled legs and saluted the generals as they passed.
Every American soldier, Eisenhower insisted, every man and woman not on the front lines, must see this. “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.”11 Patton put it more bluntly: “You’ll never believe how bastardly these Krauts can be, until you’ve seen this pesthole yourself.”12 It wasn’t until midnight that Patton, exhausted from two of the most remarkable and terrible tours in history, lay down to sleep. Before turning off the light, he noticed that his watch had stopped. Tuning in to BBC radio for the
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The collection of costumes from the State Opera had been ransacked. “Russian and Polish laborers,” one of his German guides grunted. Stout knew he meant forced laborers, and found it hard to blame them for their thievery.
Military necessity
General Patton was charging ahead, and he didn’t want to leave four battalions behind to guard a gold mine.
At the Yalta Conference in late February, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had partitioned the German state into zones of control. Merkers, and all its treasures, were in the Soviet zone.
The Soviets were in no mood for equanimity, and understandably so. They had suffered millions of casualties in the Nazis’ brutal and devastating invasion of their country, including more than 1.5 million dead in the siege of Stalingrad alone.
Soldiers were scurrying in all directions, carrying stacks of money, bags of gold, and ancient art,
after the rat race, I begin to remember that I am myself and not merely a set of functions. At
at the turn of the first millennium, salt was one of the foundations of civilization.
The early Germans, whose Visigoth ancestors sacked Rome and threw civilization into darkness, were economically dependent on their salt mines, and especially the taxes from their salt trading routes. The city of Munich, an early base of power for the Nazi Party, was founded in 1158 so the ruler of Bavaria could more easily collect a tax on the salt being transported from the city of Salzburg (German for “Salt Castle”).
Steinberg
Since the 1300s, this job had been performed by members of a small group of families, all living in the hills near the mine. Over the centuries humans grew larger, but the miners stayed the same size, until they eventually seemed dwarfed by the demands of the mine and their time underground (diet and inbreeding were more likely causes). Even in the early twentieth century, this small isolated community spoke a dialect last popular in the Middle Ages. They explored their tunnels with acetylene torches, and wore the white linen suits and peaked caps of medieval miners.
medieval salt miners in the 20th century
Dug straight into the side of a massive mountain, the horizontal mine was impregnable to aerial bombardment—even if the bombers could locate it in the vast Sandling mountain range. The salt in the walls absorbed excess moisture, leaving the humidity constant at 65 percent. The temperature varied only between 40 (in the summer, when the mine was coolest) and 47 degrees Fahrenheit (in the winter). The environment helped to preserve the paintings and prints,
Gauleiter Eigruber, a fanatical Austrian Nazi, was enthusiastic in his support of Adolf Hitler’s Nero Decree. The crates contained not artwork, but 500-kilogram bombs (approximately 1,100 pounds), each one large enough to comfortably seat six men. Eigruber was determined to destroy the mine… and its priceless contents.
Churchill, among others, was urging the Western Allies to consider postwar objectives, which in the short term meant above all else beating the Soviets to Berlin.
Only the Monuments Men—and in particular Robert Posey, Lincoln Kirstein, and James Rorimer, the men assigned to those armies—understood that Eisenhower’s decision had brought into their paths the two most important art repositories in the Fatherland: Neuschwanstein and Altaussee.
“It is odd being present in a place like this and not being allowed to enter into the life of it in the least degree. Like being in a vaccum jar, looking at the outside world.”
Hancock felt the sight of such horror would change him forever—this man who saw blossoms growing out of destruction—and made a deliberate decision not to visit the camp. “A number of
filigraine,
But the fact that the Nazis always intended to win the war, counting neither on retaliation or defeat, is responsible for the destruction of the monumental face of urban Germany.
Eigruber was suspicious of “unpure” orders from Speer or others who would soften the Führer’s Nero Decree.
Heilbronn was just another broken city, they figured, shattered by British air raids; a devastating raid in December 1944, in particular, had destroyed 62 percent of the infrastructure and killed seven thousand civilians, including a thousand children under the age of ten.
The sight of Adolf Hitler, late for his own celebration, did nothing to cheer his followers. Suddenly, he seemed an old man, ashen and gray. He dragged his left foot, and his left arm hung weakly at his side. His posture was so slumped that his head seemed to have sunk into his shoulders. He could still be aggressive with his subordinates, especially his generals, but instead of his former fire he now exhibited an icy rage.1 He believed he had been betrayed. He saw weakness everywhere. But at this party he could not even summon contempt. He was so depressed his doctors had to medicate him
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On April 23, Göring sent a radiogram to Hitler. Aware that Berlin was surrounded and the situation hopeless, the Reichsmarschall was prepared to step in and lead the Nazi Party. If he did not hear back by 10:00 p.m. that evening, he would assume the Führer was incapacitated and take command. Hitler did not respond until April 25, 1945, but his reaction was furious and determined: He ordered the SS to arrest his second in command.
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.
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.
“It’s a coronation chamber,” Hancock said. “They were going to crown Hitler the emperor of Europe.”
“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.”
Hermann Bunjes
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.
As the Nazi security chief, Kaltenbrunner outranked Eigruber. He had been in the bunker and knew Hitler’s mind. And he had many personal traits the gauleiter would doubtlessly admire. A native Austrian, he was well known for his violent adherence to Hitler’s most vile practices: the establishment of concentration camps, the execution of prisoners of war, and the disappearance of thousands of “undesirables” from German-occupied territories.
in residence amounted to a couple of shotguns. Thanks to Rose Valland’s information and Rorimer’s efforts, the unit had known the importance of the castle, and it had been sealed and placed off-limits immediately upon its capture. No one, of any rank, had entered the treasure rooms.
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.
why were the SS officers worried they'd be shot by their own men (in the back, no less)?
Ernst Kaltenbrunner,
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
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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 paralysis2—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?
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
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.
The void of April to May 1945 was a period where past deeds could quickly be buried or mischaracterized, and today’s lie could become tomorrow’s truth.
A few articles and books were written over the years, but soon even the art community forgot about the dramatic events at Altaussee. It wasn’t until the 1980s that an Austrian historian named Ernst Kubin located the source material—letters, orders, interviews, and first-person accounts—to determine what really happened at Altaussee.
If Hitler’s orders created the momentum and opportunity to destroy history’s greatest works of art, as I believe, it was his loyal retainer Albert Speer who created the countermomentum to stop it. On
Everything at Altaussee, Stout realized, could be handed over to Stalin. The Monuments Men would not have a year to remove the treasures from Altaussee, as Stout had assumed. They had until July 1. Four days.
MFAA art collecting center, known as the Munich Collecting Point, established by James Rorimer.
The MFAA was adding officers and enlisted men as quickly as possible—a vast majority of the almost 350 men and women who served in the multinational MFAA effort would join after the end of combat—but still only a handful of those mines and castles had been emptied.
