The Monuments Men (40 page)

“It’s the mineral salts in the walls,” someone said, handing him a rag. “Take this to cover your nose. Use it to wipe down your boots when you’re back up top. That salt water will eat through the leather in a day.”

They passed more soldiers on guard, and a group hauling away a big pile of paper currency that had been dumped near the elevator. Nazi bank officials had tried to evacuate the currency the week before, but it was Easter Sunday and no one was on duty at the train station. Beyond the currency was a sandbagged artillery emplacement manned by a couple of silent GIs in flak helmets. Beyond them was a great steel bank vault door. Apparently nobody had a key, because a hole had been blasted in the three-foot-thick brick wall that surrounded it. Posey and Kirstein crawled through the opening. The first thing they saw was an American officer getting his picture taken. In his hands was a helmet overflowing with gold coins; behind him was Room #8, the great Nazi treasure room.

Lincoln Kirstein looked up. Above him, the massive stone ceiling gleamed with the reflection of a hundred lights. He estimated 150 feet long at least without a single support column, and another seventy-five feet across. How high? Maybe twenty feet, with a row of hanging lights down the center of the room. Beneath the lights ran a railroad track. A few carts were down at the far end of the room, being loaded with boxes. Posey thought the rows of boxes looked short and unimpressive; then he realized it was all perspective. They were taller than the soldiers loading the carts. In front of the boxes, covering most of the floor, were thousands of bags. They were all identical: plain brown, about the size of a loaf of bread, and tied off at the top. They were piled four high and five across, twenty rows per section, with a footpath between each section. Kirstein tried to count the sections, but it was impossible. The last sections were so far away he couldn’t see the paths or the individual bags. They just looked like dots in the distance. And every one of those bags, all thousand or ten thousand or one hundred thousand of them, was filled with gold.

The artwork, stored in a nearby room, was mostly paintings. Some were boxed; some were in marked containers with hinged covers and padlocks; others were wrapped only in brown paper. A large number were stacked upright in wooden holding pens like posters at a five-and-dime. Kirstein flipped through them. A lovely Caspar David Friedrich painting of a distant schooner had a nasty rip in the sky, but the others appeared unharmed.

“Not much, considering,” Posey said.

“Oh, that’s not all of it,” a passing officer said with a laugh. “There are miles of tunnels down here.”

The outside passages were less spectacular than Room #8. There was also less activity, and one could experience for the first time the claustrophobia of being in a small stone tube half a mile underground. Kirstein imagined hidden detonators, the Jerries waiting for the art experts to arrive so they could blow the tunnels and trap them in an underground tomb. Luring their victims underground, like the villain with his cask of amontillado in that old story by Edgar Allan Poe.

“I wonder how many tons of dirt are above us right now?” Kirstein said as he squeezed through a narrow passage. He was thinking of Caspar David Friedrich’s little schooner under the massive sky.

“The only thing worse than being a soldier in these tunnels,” Posey said, “is being the miner who dug them.” He had no way of knowing there was something worse: All those tons of gold and artwork had been brought underground by conscripted labor, mostly Eastern European Jews and prisoners of war.

Slowly, the Monuments Men began to realize just how much was hidden in the Merkers mines. Crated sculpture, hastily packed, with photographs clipped from museum catalogues to show what was inside. Ancient Egyptian papyri in metal cases, which the salt in the mine had reduced to the consistency of wet cardboard. There was no time to examine the priceless antiquities inside, for in other rooms there were ancient Greek and Roman decorative works, Byzantine mosaics, Islamic rugs, leather and buckram portfolio boxes. Hidden in an inconspicuous side room, they found the original woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer’s famous
Apocalypse
series of 1498. And then more crates of paintings—a Rubens, a Goya, a Cranach packed together with minor works.

“There’s no order,” Kirstein said. “Time periods and styles mixed together, masterpieces alongside novelties, boxes from different museums. What happened here?”

“They were packed by size,” Posey said, pointing out the uniformity of the paintings in one of the crates.

They left the mine in the evening and drove back to Frankfurt to report their findings. With them was Major Perera, an officer sent by Third Army to examine the gold and currency. Perera reported an initial count of 8,198 gold bars, 711 bags of American twenty-dollar gold pieces, over 1,300 bags of other gold coins, hundreds of bags of foreign currency, and $2.76 billion in Reichsmarks, along with various foreign currencies, silver and platinum, and the stamping plates the German government used to print money.
2
A bank official found in the mine, Herr Veick, had confirmed that it represented most of the reserves of Germany’s national treasury.

Posey reported that, from preliminary evaluation, the artwork had also come from Berlin. The packing was sloppy, hurried, probably a case of simply grabbing what was portable. Nonetheless, the mine held thousands of works of art. None of it appeared to have been looted from other countries.

The next morning, Robert Posey called George Stout. MFAA commanding officer Geoffrey Webb, the British scholar, happened to be in Verdun meeting with Stout, and Posey suggested they both come down immediately. Then he and Kirstein left for the nearby town of Hungen, which had been recently overrun by Third Army. A few hours later, in Schloss Braunfels, a castle erected in 1246 as a fortress, they discovered enough incunabula, ancient manuscripts, and sacred Jewish texts to fill a museum. The looted material had been destined for ERR mastermind Alfred Rosenberg’s Racial Institutes, whose purpose was to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race.

“I presume it is better to write a short dull letter than to not write,” Posey wrote his wife, Alice, that night. “The situation is that I am so busy that my work drives me each day until I am exhausted and too tired to exercise a few thoughts in a letter. About sixteen hours a day seven days a week doesn’t leave one much spare time.”
3

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.

George Stout arrived at Merkers on April 11, 1945. Fresh from his tour of the repository at Siegen, where he had prevailed upon the Eighth Infantry Division to post a sufficient guard, he expected to find a half-forgotten mine. Instead, Merkers was crawling with Western Allied officers, German guides, and experts from all branches of Civil Affairs. The guards now totaled almost four battalions (more than 2,000 men), including an infantry battalion called back from the front, and still it seemed the soldiers were outnumbered by the war correspondents. 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.”
4
In other words, the reporters didn’t care much about Germany’s great works of art—in fact, they kept getting the information wrong, such as referring to a famous sculpture of the head of Queen Nefertiti as a mummy—but a mine full of Nazi gold was an irresistible headline. Patton was so furious that word of the find had leaked to the press, he fired the responsible censor, even though he had no authority to do so. But the damage was done.
Stars and Stripes
ran a story on Merkers every day for a week, and newspapers around the world followed suit. Three days later, an even larger, more spectacular discovery made international headlines, at least until someone realized the new “Mercedes” mine was actually a misspelling of Merkers.

Stout had been told to arrive at 1500 hours, without the higher-ranking (but British) Geoffrey Webb. Webb had been denied permission to enter by the financial branch of Civil Affairs. Stout arrived at 1445 in a jeep provided by Third Army and was immediately ushered into the presence of a lieutenant colonel, who assigned him to a billet and told him he couldn’t leave until further notice. The billet was filled with financial staff. At 2115, Colonel Bernstein, Ike’s financial advisor for civil affairs and military government, arrived to inform Stout he had been designated the MFAA officer for this operation. When Stout complained about the exclusion of his boss Geoffrey Webb, Bernstein showed him a letter from Patton stating that Bernstein was in charge of the mine area. No arguments, and no mistaking the message: This was an American operation—with apologies to Webb, no British officers allowed. And it was an American
financial
operation as well. The artwork was secondary. A glum Stout, having dispatched Lincoln Kirstein to give Webb the bad news that Patton wanted “no damn limeys” in the mine,
5
spent the rest of the evening interviewing Dr. Schawe, a German librarian he found “clumsy and unnecessarily vindictive.”
6

The next morning, Stout met Dr. Paul Ortwin Rave, a German art expert who had been living on the premises since April 3 with his family, his personal library, and his prized collection of rugs. The press had reported that Rave was the assistant director of the Prussian state museums; in fact, he was the assistant to the director. But he was no mere underling. A dedicated and professional museum man, his career had been stymied by his refusal to join the Nazi Party.

At the beginning of the war, Rave explained, the treasures of the German state museums had been removed from their galleries and placed in bank vaults and anti-aircraft towers in and around Berlin. In 1943, Rave suggested evacuating the collections from the Berlin area, which was beginning to come under Allied aerial bombardment. He was told this was dangerously defeatist thinking… perhaps fatally so. Nonetheless, he tried again the next year; he was again dismissed, and his life once again threatened. It wasn’t until Soviet long-range ground artillery started battering the city that authorization was obtained to remove the artwork to Merkers. Four hundred of the largest paintings—including works by Caravaggio and Rubens—were to be left in the Berlin towers, along with numerous sculptures and various antiquities. Rave had estimated it would take eight weeks to move everything else; he was given two. The final shipment arrived on March 31, 1945. Five days later, Third Army overran the area.

“Two weeks to move this massive amount of art,” Stout commented at the end of Rave’s tale. “What a luxury. We’ve been given six days.”

The generals—Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander in the European theater; Omar Bradley, commander of U.S. Twelfth Army Group; Manton Eddy, commander of XII Corps; and George Patton, the irrepressible titan of Third Army—flew to Merkers late in the morning of April 12. Brigadier General Otto Weyland, commander of XIX Tactical Air Command for Ninth Army, met the other generals there. Together with a few staff members and a German elevator operator, the generals rode the ancient elevator down twenty-one hundred feet into the main Merkers mine. The slow trip, undertaken in complete darkness, lasted several minutes. Halfway down, with only the groaning of the solitary elevator cable for company, Patton joked, “If that clothesline should part, promotions in the United States Army would be greatly stimulated.”
7

“OK, George, that’s enough,” came Eisenhower’s voice out of the darkness. “No more cracks until we are above ground again.”

Going into a potassium mine—or a copper mine, or a salt mine, or any other type of German mine—was an uncomfortable experience. These were working mines, not tourist sites, and the passageways were rough, narrow, and cramped. Much of the equipment was old and, because the war had drawn away men and materials, poorly maintained. The Germans had chosen the safety of deep mines for their repositories, so the soldiers often traveled a quarter mile into the ground, and another quarter mile laterally at the bottom. To exist in perpetual darkness, far below the earth, without a map of the mine or assurance the next passageway wasn’t booby-trapped or the next holding bay not full of dynamite, was a nerve-jangling experience. Even worse, most of the mines were in areas that had been bombed or shelled, knocking out their power supplies. They were dark, cold, and damp.