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

by Thomas Carr Howe

Steve was momentarily tempted by the prospect of having a part in the undertaking. But when I told him there was a chance of his being included in a draft of officers scheduled for immediate redeployment, he decided that he’d had his share of packing. Maybe he’d come back in the spring, if there was work still to be done. His parting gift was the Mercedes-Benz, a temporary legacy, as it turned out: two weeks later the car was stolen from the motor pool where I had left it for minor repairs. Steve didn’t like the idea of having to wait at a processing center before proceeding to his port of embarkation. He cheered up when he learned that he was headed for one near Marburg. He went off in high spirits at the prospect of seeing his old friend Walker Hancock again.

Under Lamont’s skillful supervision, preparations for the shipment proceeded according to schedule. Lamont chose Captain Kelleher as his assistant. Together they located the cases from Captain Farmer’s records. Only a few of the Kaiser Friedrich pictures had been taken out of the cases in which they had been originally packed for removal from Berlin to the Merkers mine. The larger cases contained as many as a dozen pictures. It was slow work opening the cases and withdrawing a particular canvas for repacking. Seldom were any two of the specified two hundred paintings in a single case. When they were all finally assembled, each one was photographed. In the midst of the proceedings, the supply of film and paper ran out. The nearest replacements were at Mannheim. A day was lost in obtaining the necessary authorization to requisition fresh supplies. It took the better part of another day to make the trip to Mannheim and back. Thanks to Lamont’s careful calculations, maximum use was made of the original cases in repacking the two hundred paintings after a photographic record had been made of their condition.

While these operations were in progress, detailed plans for the actual shipment of the paintings had to be worked out. Colonel McBride and Bancel took up the matter of shipping space with General Ross, Chief of Transportation. Sailing schedules were consulted. An Army transport, the James Parker, was selected. As an alternative, temporary consideration was given to the idea of trucking the pictures to Bremen and sending them by a Naval vessel from there. But the Bremen sailing schedules were unsatisfactory. A special metal car was requisitioned to transport the cases from Frankfurt, by way of Paris, to Le Havre. A twenty-four-hour guard detail was appointed to accompany the car from Frankfurt to the ship. Trucks and escort vehicles were procured for the twenty-five-mile trip from Wiesbaden to the Frankfurt rail yards.

It was decided that Lamont should be responsible for delivering the pictures to the National Gallery in Washington where they were to be placed in storage. Bancel drafted the orders. He worked on them a full day. It took two more days to have them cut. They were unique in one respect: Lamont, a second lieutenant, was appointed officer-in-charge. His designated assistant was a commander in the Navy. This was Commander Keith Merrill, an old friend of Colonel McBride’s, who happened to be in Frankfurt. He offered his services to the colonel and subsequently crossed on the James Parker with Lamont and the pictures.

Lamont and Joe Kelleher finished the packing one day ahead of schedule. The forty-five cases, lined with waterproof paper, were delivered to the Frankfurt rail yards and loaded onto the car. From there the car was switched to the station and attached to the night train for Paris.

Bancel and I returned to the office to take up where we had left off. As usual, Edith Standen had taken care of everything while we had been preoccupied with the “Westward Ho” shipment. There had been no major crises. Judging from the weekly field reports, restitution to the Dutch and the French was proceeding without interruption. Edith produced a stack of miscellaneous notations: The Belgian representative had arrived in Munich. The Stockholm Museum had offered a supply of lumber to be used in repairing war-damaged German buildings of cultural importance. There had been two inquiries concerning a modification of Law 52 (the Military Government regulation which forbade trafficking in works of art). A report from Würzburg indicated that emergency repairs to the roof of the Residenz were nearing completion. Lieutenant Rorimer had called from Heidelberg about the books at Offenbach.

Of all the problems which confronted the MFA&A Section, none was more baffling than that of the books at Offenbach. There were more than two million of them. They had been assembled from Jewish libraries throughout Europe by the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage—Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question—at Frankfurt. At the close of the war, a small part of the collection was found in a large private house in Frankfurt. The rest was discovered in a repository to the north of the city, at Hungen. The house in Frankfurt had been bombed, leaving undamaged only the books stored in the cellar. One hundred and twenty thousand volumes were removed from the damp cellar to the Rothschild Library, which, though damaged, was still intact. Examination of this portion of the collection revealed that it contained more than sixty libraries looted from occupied countries. Subsequently, the rest of the collection was transferred from Hungen to an enormous warehouse at Offenbach, across the river from Frankfurt. The ultimate disposition of this library—probably the greatest of its kind in the world—was the subject of heated discussions, both written and oral. Several leading Jewish scholars had expressed the hope that it could be kept together and eventually established in some center of international study. Our immediate responsibility was the care of the books in their two present locations. That alone was exceedingly difficult. It would take months, perhaps years, to make an inventory.

Judge Samuel Rifkind, General Clay’s Adviser on Jewish Affairs, had requested that twenty-five thousand volumes be made available for distribution among the DP camps. I referred the request to the two archivists who had recently joined our staff, Paul Vanderbilt and Edgar Breitenbach. While I sympathized with the tragic plight of the Jewish DPs, there were the unidentified legal owners of the books to be taken into account. One of our archivists felt that we should accede to the judge’s request; the other disagreed. The matter was referred to Berlin for a decision. After several weeks, we received word from Berlin that no books were to be released. The judge persisted. Ten days later, Berlin reconsidered. The books could be released—that is, twenty-five thousand of them—on condition that no rare or irreplaceable volumes were included in the selection. Also, the volumes chosen were to be listed on a custody receipt. Up to the time of my departure from Frankfurt, no books had been released.

During the latter part of November, we concentrated on future personnel requirements for the MFA&A program in the American Zone. Current directives indicated that drastic reductions in Military Government installations throughout the Zone could be expected in the course of the next six or eight months. Already we had begun to feel the impact of the Army’s accelerated redeployment program. Bancel and I took stock of our present resources. We had lost four officers and three enlisted men since the first of the month. To offset them, we had gained two civilians; but they were archivists, urgently needed in a specialized field of our work. We couldn’t count on them as replacements.

We drew up a chart showing the principal MFA&A offices and depots in each of the three Länder. In Bavaria, for example, there were at Munich the Land office and the Central Collecting Point; a newly-established Archival Collecting Point at Oberammergau and the auxiliary collecting point at Bamberg; and two secondary offices, one in Upper Bavaria, another in Lower Bavaria. In Greater Hesse, there were the Land office and the Central Collecting Point at Wiesbaden; the offices at Frankfurt and Kassel; and the Collecting Points at Offenbach and Marburg. In Württemberg-Baden, the smallest of the three Länder, the Land office was at Stuttgart. There was a secondary one at Karlsruhe. The principal repositories, requiring MFA&A supervision, were the great mines at Heilbronn and Kochendorf.