The Rape of Europa (66 page)

Not until June did rumors begin to circulate indicating that something might be missing. Eberhard Lutze, director of the German Museum, was taken to Ellingen for interrogation and mentioned the SS removal. The same story had been heard from the notorious SS General Josef Spacil, who was being questioned by the Allies in connection with the money caches being found in Austria. Conversations between SS officials reported by the interrogators revealed that the missing crown jewels “were slated by the chief of the German security service to become the symbols of the future German resistance movement.” This was not considered to be a good thing.

Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-speaking MFAA officer reserved for special investigations, was sent to Nuremberg. Liebl’s assistant Friese swore that the copper boxes had been taken off in a car by unknown SS men. Horn was not convinced. Friese was arrested and taken to the theater interrogation center, not a cheery place, in order to confront Spacil. Before the meeting Horn questioned Friese a bit more and “under the effect of a night of solitary confinement and the pressure of a short interrogation which preceded the confrontation,” Friese’s Nazi loyalty evaporated and he confessed. A few days later he led a little party to the hiding place in a small room in the tunnels eighty feet below the surface of the Panier Platz. The missing objects were unearthed and put together with the rest, which had been found intact in the main storage area.
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Dealing with the gigantic finds of Alt Aussee, Berchtesgaden, and Siegen was only part of a field officer’s endless day. In Würzburg, Monuments officer John Skilton performed one of the miracles of the occupation when he managed to build a protective roof over the shattered central vault of the baroque Residenz palace. The vault, one of the world’s biggest, decorated with Tiepolo’s
Olympus and the Four Continents
, had been open to the elements since a twenty-three-minute bombing raid by the Allies in March. By the time Skilton arrived in June, rain was rapidly dissolving the elaborate white rococo plaster decoration of the palace. For weeks he and his assistant scoured the countryside for wood and tar paper. By purest chance Skilton found hundreds of newly cut logs stuck in a tributary of the Main
River at Ochsenfurt, and, turning lumberjack, managed to float them down to Würzburg. Later he was called upon to retrieve a barge full of medieval manuscripts which had been seen floating down the Rhine. This was found just downriver from Castle Rothenfels, which was being used to quarantine typhus cases. Giving the castle a wide berth, Skilton secured the barge. In it was the largest number of books he had ever seen in one place, which required two weeks of effort to bring to safety.
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Monuments officers in Austria examine returned Holy Roman regalia.
Left to right:
unidentified officer, Andrew Ritchie, Perry Cott, Ernest De Wald

In general the Monuments officers in Germany had little time to become involved in such long-term projects. They travelled incessantly and usually alone. In the course of these peregrinations they gradually discovered more than two thousand caches in everything from castles to cowsheds, in which were hidden, often with great ingenuity, not only superb works of art but the records and artifacts of the maddest Nazi undertakings and most hideous experiments. The owners of the castles or the assigned guardians of the valuables greeted the Monuments men with attitudes ranging from
nasty and suspicious, through arrogant or obsequious, to cooperative and welcoming. There were few signs of guilt or compunction. A certain number complained about their deprivations. After five years of war, the low-ranking MFAA officers, who were often not so low-ranking at home, and who frequently arrived in muddy field uniforms after hours of travel by jeep only to be received with condescension by elegantly dressed schloss owners, were sometimes hard put to be polite. One officer, confronted by an arrogant German noblewoman who complained that Polish DPs were making a mess of her schloss, sharply retorted that it was not his compatriots who had brought the Poles to Germany. There were frequent complaints about the “inconvenience” caused by the Allied occupation. The gentle sculptor Walker Hancock remarked later that it seemed not to occur to many Germans just how much “inconvenience” Hitler had caused the rest of the world.

Daunting prospect: Five thousand bells looted from all over Europe await sorting in Hamburg.

But the MFAA men were moving too fast to brood over these slights. An excerpt from Calvin Hathaway’s diary, tantalizing in its suggestive detail, gives us a little idea of the pace and variety of discoveries, all of which had to be dealt with, cross-indexed (which accounts for the strange use of capitalization), or reported to other authorities:

Friday, 1 June. At Schloss HIRSCHBERG, conversation with major domo, CORINTH (relation of the painter)…. Cellar passageway lined with furniture brought from ITALY and installed in Schloss…. Two rooms in cellar, said to contain property of Baronin von HIRSCHBERG, are locked (Corinth says that the Baronin keeps the keys with her at GOSSENHOFEN) and sealed with warning prohibitions posted by chief of MUNCHEN Gestapo. Schwimmbad in cellar has furniture and draperies said to belong to BLEICHRODER and HIRSCHBERG. Boxes of books in passageway, part of library brought from Prinz Karl Palace in MUNCHEN, and are Party property. No action had been taken following my suggestion three weeks earlier that works of art belonging to Bavarian State collections be assembled in one room, which would then be posted off limits; Corinth asserts that succeeding military commanders (American) preferred to keep pictures on walls of rooms where they would look well… a chest of Party owned silver stored in one of the rooms of the cellar was taken away…. Departed Schloss HIRSCHBERG 1000 hours…. Schloss BERNRIED, formerly owned by Baron WENDLAND, now used for clinic operated by Swiss Legation; no works of art there. Mrs. BUSCH, an American citizen enjoying the proceeds of Anheuser-Busch beer, said to own several miles of lake frontage north of BERNRIED, and to have been in Germany during the entire war, had moved all her valuable furniture from her large house north of BERNRIED, which she had offered to Lt. Gen. PATCH for his accommodation. She is said to be in Switzerland at the moment, where she is staying with the U.S. Minister…. Proceeded to Schloss EURASBURG … owner, Kurt WOLF, owner of textile mill in Saxony, in neighborhood and being a nuisance. Furnishings of Schloss thoroughly second-rate, and not disturbed by present occupants…. Schloss a deposit for approximately 280 packing cases containing books and archival material evacuated from MUNCHEN; slight tendency evident to extract material from cases and leave it lying about. In carriage house off SW corner of Schloss are about 2500 bundles of archival material from MUNCHEN, stacked against walls behind rifled packing cases of evacuated personal belongings of
various individuals. Bundles most easily accessible seem to belong to HEERESARCHIV…. Arrival at 2055 hrs at AUGSBURG. 112 mi.
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And so to bed.

The German schloss owner’s suspicions were not completely unwarranted, for there were of course lapses of honesty within the Allied ranks. While the few available Monuments officers were working on the major finds and the excited Army command was surrounding potential gold hoards with tank battalions, the guarding of smaller refuges and individual finds was less certain. Even more difficult to control was the discovery of works of art in the rubble of bombed buildings. For many who had fought across Europe or lost relatives to the Nazis, “Thou shalt not steal” simply did not apply when it came to Germany. Cases of looting by American forces in Germany began immediately and ran the gamut from well-intentioned if misguided preservation attempts to blatant thievery and arrogant intimidation of the defeated. Reports of stealing were seriously investigated by all agencies. Some became causes célebres.

Most spectacular among these was the affair of the Hesse jewels. The gems in question had been buried in October 1944 under ancient flagstones in the subbasement of Kronberg Castle (near Frankfurt) by family retainers of Princess Margaret of Hesse, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and mother of Prince Philip of Hesse, the art procurer. It was a very considerable quantity, as several members of this large family, fearful of what would happen at war’s end, had withdrawn their belongings from bank vaults in order to entrust them to the earth. The jewels were packed in a lead case which was put inside a wooden box. The hole was sealed and disguised by a stonemason. The family unfortunately did not limit itself to hiding jewels: the mason was also asked to seal up sixteen hundred bottles of fine old wine, construction work much harder to conceal. Eighteen hundred less-fine bottles were left in the open.

In April 1945 Patton’s Third Army arrived, gave the Hesse family four hours to move out, and requisitioned the castle as a headquarters. The eighteen hundred bottles quickly vanished. When the HQ moved on, the castle became an officers’ club and rest house. The staff soon found the sealed-up wine and, while looking for more, the newly mortared stone under which the jewels were hidden. The sergeant who found them turned them in to the commander of the rest house, a WAC officer named Katherine Nash, who assured him she would turn them over to the proper authorities. This she did not do. A few months later Princess Sophie of Hesse, who was about to get married and who had heard from a castle employee of the discovery of the jewels, asked Captain Nash if she could use
some of them for her wedding. Captain Nash said she could, but when the Princess came back to get the jewels she was told they had been stolen. This was reported to the Criminal Investigation Division of the Army, but before any action had been taken Captain Nash returned to the United States to be demobilized. The Army, suspicious of her and of her lover, a Colonel Durant, who had also left, held up both demobilizations in order to keep the pair under military jurisdiction. The by now newlywed couple, but not the jewels, were found in a hotel in Chicago. After interrogation they confessed and were arrested along with the sergeant who had found the cache, and who had been promised a cut of the take. The gems were found in a locker in the train station where they had been left by the fence, who had lost his nerve and abandoned them. They had, for the most part, been pried out of their priceless original settings.

After the arrest the Army put on a full-fledged press conference in the Pentagon. The press ogled such impressive items as a “12 carat canary yellow diamond” and “stacks of pearls, star sapphires and rubies.” It seemed that Mrs. Durant had not limited herself to the jewels, but had found plenty of other goodies in the castle. She had sent home a whole service of vermeil flatware with stone-studded handles, several volumes of letters to Queen Victoria; a Bible, tenderly inscribed in Victoria’s own hand, which the British monarch had given to her daughter when she married Emperor-to-be Friedrich in 1858; and numerous other books, medals, golden fans, and watches, the whole estimated at first to be worth $1.5 million, a figure later revised to $3 million. The Army, seemingly unabashed by the scandal, called it the “greatest theft of modern times.” The Durants were taken back to Germany for a trial described as “stormy.” Testimony was given by many members of the Hesse family and their retainers. The defense said that the Hesses had “abandoned” the jewels when they buried them and that their claims were invalid as certain family members had been Nazis. Mrs. Durant said she had been questioned under duress in an insane asylum and would have made any statement just to get out, and that the Army had promised not to prosecute her. She even appealed to the Supreme Court. It was of no avail; she got five years, and her husband fifteen.
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