View of the Treasure Room at the Central Collecting Point, Wiesbaden, showing treasures stolen from Polish churches.
The celebrated Egyptian sculpture, Queen Nefertete, formerly in the Berlin Museum, discovered in the Merkers salt mine.
A few days after our visit to Wiesbaden with Colonel Kluss, I received a letter from home enclosing a clipping from the December 7 edition of the New York Times. The clipping read as follows:
$80,000,000 PAINTINGS ARRIVE FROM EUROPE ON ARMY TRANSPORT
A valuable store of art, said to consist entirely of paintings worth upward of $80,000,000, arrived here last night from Europe in the holds of the Army transport James Parker.
Where the paintings came from and where they are going was a mystery, and no Army officer on the pier at Forty-fourth Street and North River, where the Parker docked with 2,483 service passengers, would discuss the shipment, or even admit it was on board. It was learned elsewhere that a special detail of Army officers was on the ship during the night to take charge of the consignment, which will be unloaded today.
Unusual precautions were taken to keep the arrival of the paintings secret. The canvases were included in more than forty crates and were left untouched during the night under lock and key.