Salt mines and castles: The discovery and restitution of looted European art

by Thomas Carr Howe

And how did we activate policy? By means of directives. Directives to whom? To Third Army at Munich and Seventh Army at Heidelberg. That sounded simple enough, until Bancel explained that a directive was not exactly an imperial decree. Just as it was our prerogative to activate policies approved by Berlin, so it was the prerogative of the Armies to implement our directives as they deemed expedient. He reminded me that the two Armies were independent and autonomous within their respective areas. In other words, we could tell them what to do, but not how to do it. Bancel was an old hand at writing directives, knowing how to give each phrase just the right emphasis. At first the longer ones seemed stilted and occasionally ambiguous. But I was not accustomed to military jargon. Later I came to realize that Army communications always sounded stilted; and what I had mistaken for ambiguity was often deliberate circumlocution, calculated to soften the force of an unpalatable order.

Bancel said there were more important things to worry about than the composition of directives. One was the problem of token restitutions. He was sorry to postpone the one to Poland, but that couldn’t be helped. Now that France and Belgium had received theirs, Holland was next on the list. The ceremony in Brussels had made a great hit. He thought a similar affair might be arranged at The Hague. Vorenkamp was selecting a group of pictures at the Collecting Point. We would provide a plane to fly them to Amsterdam. Captain Rae was to notify our office as soon as Vorenkamp was ready to leave—probably within the next two days. In the meantime Bancel was having orders cut for me to go to Holland. I was to see the American ambassador, explain the idea of these token restitutions, and sound him out on the subject of planning a ceremony similar to the one our ambassador had arranged in Brussels. Colonel Anthony Biddle, Chief of the Allied Contacts Section at USFET Headquarters, had promised Bancel to write a letter of introduction for me to take to The Hague. Bancel suggested that I make tentative arrangements with the motor pool for a car and driver.

It was almost noon and Bancel had an appointment in Frankfurt at twelve-thirty. He just had time to catch the bus. After he left, Reeds and the stenographer went out to lunch, so Edith Standen and I had the office to ourselves. We had a lot to talk over, as I had not seen her since June when we worked together on the inventory of the Berlin Museum collections at the Reichsbank.

In the meantime, she had been stationed at Höchst. When the Group CC outfit—to which she was officially attached—moved to Berlin, she had preferred to remain with the USFET office. On the Organizational Chart of the MFA&A Section, Edith was listed as the “Officer in Charge of Technical Files.” Actually she was in charge of a great many other things as well. When the Chief and Deputy Chief were away from headquarters at the same time—and they often were—Edith took over the affairs of the Section. She must have been born with these remarkable administrative gifts, for she could have had little opportunity to develop them as the cloistered curator of the Widener Collection where, as she said herself, she was “accustomed to the silent padding of butlers and the spontaneous appearance of orchids and gardenias among the Rembrandts and the Raphaels.”

I asked her if there had been any new developments regarding the proposed removal of German-owned art to the United States. Yes, there had been. But nothing conclusive. There was a cable from General Clay to the War Department early in September.[3] The cable spoke of “holding German objects of art in trust for eventual return to the German people.” But it didn’t contain the clause “if and when the German nation had earned the right to their return” which had appeared in the original document. Besides the cable, there had been a communication from Berlin asking for an estimate of the cubic footage in art repositories of the American Zone. It was a question impossible to answer accurately. But Bancel and Charlie had figured out a reply, citing the approximate size of one of the repositories and leaving it up to Berlin to multiply the figures by the total number in the entire zone. Now that John Nicholas Brown and Charlie Kuhn were back in the United States, they might be able to discourage the projected removal. I had only one piece of information to contribute on the subject: a letter from George Stout saying that he had been asked by the Roberts Commission to give an opinion, based on purely technical grounds, of the risk involved in sending paintings to America. He did so, stating that to remove them would cube the risk of leaving them in Germany.

When Corporal Reeds returned to the office, Edith and I went across the street to the Officers’ Mess. While we were at lunch, she told me that Jim Reeds had been a discovery of George’s. He had been with George and Bancel at their office in Wiesbaden. Jim was a tall, serious fellow with sandy hair and a turned-up nose. Edith said that he had been a medical student before the war and that he came from Missouri. There was so much paper work to do in the office that he never got caught up. The German typist was slow and inaccurate. Jim had to do over nearly half the letters he gave her to copy. But his patience was inexhaustible and he never complained.

Bancel didn’t get back from Frankfurt until late in the afternoon. The return of the Veit Stoss altarpiece had come up again and he had had a long talk about it with the Polish liaison officer at USFET, who was a nephew of the Archbishop of Cracow. After that he had had a session with Colonel A. J. de la Bretesche, the French liaison officer. And, for good measure, he had to take up the problem of clearance for the two Czech representatives who would be arriving in a few days. He said wearily that practically all of his days were like that, now that restitution was going full speed ahead. I told him that I had had an uneventful but profitable afternoon, going through the correspondence which had accumulated on his desk. There had been several telephone calls, among them one from Colonel Walter Kluss. Bancel said he would answer that one in person, as he wanted to introduce me to the colonel, who was chief of the Restitution Control Branch. Restitution involved settling the claims of the occupied countries for everything the Germans had taken from them. These claims covered every conceivable kind of property—factory equipment, vehicles, barges, machinery, racehorses, livestock, household furniture, etc.

The colonel’s office was at the end of the corridor. On our way down the hall, Bancel said that the Army could do with a few more officers like Colonel Kluss. This observation didn’t give me a very clear picture of the colonel, but when I met him I knew what Bancel meant. There was an unassuming friendliness and simplicity about him that I didn’t usually associate with full colonels. His interest in the activities of the MFA&A Section was genuine and personal. He was particularly fond of Bancel and Edith and, during our visit with him that afternoon, spoke admiringly of the work which they and Charlie Kuhn had done. While other sections of the Restitution Control Branch were still generalizing about restitution, the MFA&A Section had tackled the problem realistically. It wasn’t a question of mapping out a program which might work. The program did work. The wisdom and foresight of Bancel’s planning appealed to the practical side of Colonel Kluss’ nature and, throughout the months of our association with him, he was never too busy to help us when we went to him with our troubles.