Bancel had told me to ask for Captain Robert de Vries. I was informed that the captain was in London. In his stead Nicolaes Vroom, his scholarly young deputy, received me. He had had no word of Colonel Vorenkamp’s impending arrival. Vroom transmitted the message immediately to Jonkheer Roel, director of the Rijksmuseum. Twenty minutes later, this distinguished gentleman appeared in Vroom’s office. With him were Lieutenant Colonel H. Polis and Captain ter Meer, both of whom were attached to the C.G.R. They were delighted to know about the plane which I told them was due at Schiphol Airport. Telephonic connections with Munich had not yet been re-established. They had to depend on the USFET Mission at The Hague for transmission of all messages from the American Zone. It often took days for a telegram to get through.
There was barely time enough to telephone for a truck to meet the plane. Also Mr. van Haagen, Permanent Secretary of Education and Science, must be notified at once. I was told that he would accompany us to the airport. In another hour we were all on our way to Schiphol.
We waited two hours at the field and still no sign of the plane from Munich. The weather was fine at the airport, but there were reports of heavy fog to the south. At two o’clock we returned to Amsterdam and lunched at the Dutch officers’ mess. My hosts apologized for the food. They said that they no longer received British Army rations. The menu was prepared from civilian supplies. It was a Spartan diet—cheese, bread and jam, and weak coffee. But they shared it so hospitably that only a graceless guest would have complained of the lack of variety. Captain ter Meer said that it was more palatable than the tulip bulbs he had lived on the winter before.
After lunch, Cassidy and I drove to the USFET Mission at The Hague. Colonel Ira W. Black, Chief of the Mission, arranged for me to see the American ambassador. The temporary offices of our embassy were located in a tall brick building on the edge of the city.
I presented Colonel Biddle’s letter to Mr. Stanley Hornbeck, the ambassador, who looked more like a successful businessman than a diplomat. He frowned as he read, and when he had finished, said gruffly, “Commander, Tony Biddle is a charming fellow and I am very fond of him. I’d like to be obliging, but we’ve had too damn many celebrations and ceremonies in this country already. We need more hard work instead of more holidays. It’s very nice about the pictures coming back, but steel mills and machinery would be a lot more welcome.”
I hadn’t expected this reaction and, having had little experience with ambassadors—irascible or otherwise—I hardly knew what to say. After an embarrassing pause, I ventured the remark that a very simple ceremony would be enough.
After his first outburst, the ambassador relented to the extent of saying he’d think it over. As I left his office, he called after me, “My bark’s worse than my bite.”
On my way back to Amsterdam, I concluded unhappily that as a diplomatic errand boy I was a washout. I’d better go back to loading trucks.
When I reached the hotel I found a message that the plane with Vorenkamp and the pictures had arrived. I met Phonse the following morning at the Goudstikker house. He introduced me to Lieutenant Hans Jaffé, a Dutch Monuments officer, who bore a striking resemblance to Robert Louis Stevenson. Several weeks later Jaffé was chosen as the Dutch representative for the Western District of the American Zone. His work at Seventh Army Headquarters in Heidelberg was comparable to that of Vorenkamp’s in Munich. He was intelligent and industrious. During the next few months he was as successful in his investigations of looted Dutch art works as Phonse was in Bavaria. Jaffé didn’t reap so rich a harvest, but that was only because there was less loot in his territory.
He and Phonse took me to the Rijksmuseum where the twenty-six paintings from Munich were being unpacked. They were a hand-picked group consisting mainly of seventeenth century Dutch masters, which included four Rembrandts. One of the Rembrandts was the Still Life with Dead Peacocks which Lamont and I had taken out of the mine at Alt Aussee. There was a twenty-seventh picture: it was the fraudulent Vermeer of the Göring collection. Phonse had brought it back to be used as evidence against its author, the notorious Van Meegeren.