On our arrival in Coburg, Lamont and I drove to the headquarters of the local MG Detachment, which were located in the Palais Edinburgh. This unpretentious building was once the residence of Queen Victoria’s son, the Duke of Edinburgh. There we arranged with Lieutenant Milton A. Pelz, the Monuments officer of the Coburg Detachment, to inspect the storage rooms at the castle.
Pelz was a big fellow who spoke German fluently. He welcomed us hospitably and took us up to the castle where we met Dr. Grundmann, who had the keys to the storage rooms. This silent, sour-faced German was curator of the Prince’s collections. He said that his employer was Prince Ludwig of Hesse, a cousin of Philip. The cases contained paintings and objets d’art which had been in the possession of the family for years. Grundmann had personally removed them from Ludwig’s estate in Silesia the day before the Russians occupied the area.
Ludwig’s most important treasure was the world-famous painting by Holbein known as the Madonna of Bürgermeister Meyer. Painted in 1526, it had hung for years in the palace at Darmstadt. The Dresden Gallery owned a seventeenth century replica. Early in the war, Prince Ludwig had sent the original to his Silesian castle for safekeeping. Grundmann had brought it back to Bavaria along with the ten cases now at Coburg. From Coburg he had taken the Holbein to Schloss Banz, a castle not far from Bamberg.
He said that the Prince was living at Wolfsgarten, a small country place near Darmstadt. Ludwig was eager to regain possession of the painting. Did we think that could be arranged? We told him he would have to obtain an authorization from Captain Rae at Munich.
Schloss Tambach was a ten-minute drive from Coburg. This great country house, built around three sides of a courtyard, belonged to the Countess of Ortenburg. She occupied the center section. A detachment of troops was billeted in one wing. The other was filled with the Stettin and Warsaw pictures. There were over two hundred from the Stettin Museum. Nineteenth century German paintings predominated, but I noticed two fine Hals portraits and a Van Gogh landscape among them.
The civilian custodian, answerable to the MG authorities at Coburg, was Dr. Wilhelm Eggebrecht. He had been curator of the Stettin Museum until thrown out by the Nazis because his wife was one-quarter Jewish. He was a mousy little fellow with a bald head and gold-rimmed spectacles. He asked apprehensively if we intended to send the paintings back to Russian-held Stettin. We said that we had come only to check on the physical security of the present storage place. So far as we knew, the paintings would remain where they were for the present. This inconclusive piece of information seemed to reassure him.
The paintings looted from Warsaw were the pièces de résistance of the treasures at Schloss Tambach—especially the nine great canvases by Bellotto, the eighteenth century Venetian master. Governor Frank had ruthlessly removed the pictures from their stretchers and rolled them up for shipment. As a result of this rough handling, the paint had flaked off in places, but the damage was not serious. When we examined the pictures, they were spread out on the floor. They filled two rooms, forty feet square. Later they were taken to the Munich Collecting Point and mounted on new stretchers, in preparation for their return to Warsaw.
When we got back to Munich, Steve had returned from Vienna. He had news for us. Charlie Kuhn had already left for Frankfurt. Colonel Dewald was coming to Munich in a few days to talk to Colonel Roy Dalferes, Rae’s Chief of Staff at Third Army, about reopening the Alt Aussee mine. Either Charlie or Bancel would come down from USFET Headquarters when Dewald arrived. A new man had joined the MFA&A Section at USFA—Andrew Ritchie, director of the Buffalo Museum. He had come over as a civilian. Steve thought that Ritchie would be the USFA representative at Munich. There was a lot of stuff at the Collecting Point which would eventually go back to Austria. It would have to be checked with the records there. That would be Ritchie’s job. Steve told us also that Lincoln Kirstein had gone home. His mother was seriously ill and Lincoln had left on emergency orders.
The three of us went to Captain Rae’s office. Lamont and I had to make a report on our trip to Coburg. Rae had a new assignment for us. He had just received orders from USFET Headquarters to prepare the Cracow altarpiece for shipment. It was to be sent back to Poland as a token restitution. This was the colossal carved altarpiece by Veit Stoss which the Nazis had stolen from the Church of St. Mary at Cracow. Veit Stoss had been commissioned by the King of Poland in 1477 to carve the great work. It had taken him ten years. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis had carted it off, lock, stock and barrel, to Nürnberg. They contended that, since Veit Stoss had been a native of Nürnberg, it belonged in the city of his birth.
The missing altarpiece was the first of her looted treasures for which Poland had registered a claim with the American authorities at the close of the war. After months of diligent investigation, it was found by American officers in an underground bunker across the street from the Albrecht Dürer house in Nürnberg. In addition to the dismantled figures of the central panel—painted and gilded figures of hollow wood ten feet high—the twelve ornate side panels, together with the statues and pinnacles surmounting the framework, had been crowded into the bunker.