During our last week together in Munich we had little time to feel sorry for ourselves. Everyone was preoccupied with the restitution program. We had our full share of the work. Another important shipment was to be made to Belgium. It was to include the Michelangelo Madonna, the eleven paintings stolen from the church in Bruges when the statue was taken, and the four panels by Dirk Bouts from the famous altarpiece in the church of St. Pierre at Louvain. These panels, which formed the wings of the altarpiece, had been removed by the Germans in August 1942. Before the first World War one wing had been in the Berlin Gallery, the other in the Alte Pinakothek at Munich. As in the case of the Ghent altarpiece, they had been restored—unjustly, according to the Germans—to Belgium by the Versailles Treaty.
This shipment to Belgium represented the first practical application of the “come and get it” theory of restitution, evolved by Major La Farge. Belgium had already received the Ghent altarpiece as token restitution. Now it was up to the Belgians to carry on at their own expense. The special representatives who came down from Brussels to supervise this initial shipment were Dr. Paul Coremans, a great technical expert, and Lieutenant Pierre Longuy of the Ministry of Fine Arts. They had their own truck but had been unable to bring suitable packing materials. We had an ample supply of pads and blankets which we had stored at the Collecting Point after our evacuation of the Göring collection. We placed them at the disposal of the Belgians. But it was Saturday and no civilian packers were available. Dr. Coremans gratefully accepted the offer of our services. Steve, Lamont and I loaded the truck. It was the last operation of the Special Evacuation Team.
The Belgians had no sooner departed than the French and Dutch representatives arrived. Captain Hubert de Brye for France looked more like a sportsman than a scholar; but he was a man of wide cultivation and had a sense of humor which endeared him to his associates in Munich. He and Ham Coulter were kindred spirits and became great friends.
Ham, who had been responsible for the rehabilitation of both the Collecting Point and the Führerbau, now had two assistants—Captain George Lacy and Dietrich Sattler, the latter a German architect. Through this division of the work, Ham found time for new duties: he took the foreign representatives in tow, arranged for their billets, their mess cards, their PX rations and so on. It was an irritating but not a thankless job, for the recipients of his attentions were devoted to their “wet nurse.”
The Albrecht Dürer house at Nürnberg—before and after the German collapse. In an underground bunker across the street were stored the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire and the famous Veit Stoss altarpiece.
The Veit Stoss altarpiece from the Church of Our Lady in Cracow, which was carried off by the Nazis at the beginning of the war, has been returned to Poland. Left, open; right, closed.
The Dutch representative was Lieutenant Colonel Alphonse Vorenkamp. He was a little man with gray hair, shrewd gray eyes and steel-rimmed spectacles. An eminent authority on Dutch painting, he had been for several years a member of the faculty at Smith College. He enjoyed the unusual distinction of having served in both the American and Dutch Armies during the present war.
I had met him in San Francisco in 1944, shortly after his discharge from the service. He had been a buck private; and I gathered from the story of his experiences that our Army had released him in self-defense. He told me that he often had difficulty in understanding the drill sergeant. Once, without thinking he had stepped out of formation and asked politely, “Sergeant, would you mind repeating that last order!” Vorenkamp said that he had paid dearly for his indiscretion, so dearly in fact that he had seriously considered changing his name from Alphonse to Latrinus. Alphonse, he said, was a ridiculous name for a Dutchman anyway. He preferred to be called Phonse.