We left this funerary chamber with a feeling of relief and continued our inspection of the castle. A winding ramp in one of the towers led to the floors above. From the top story we had a superb view of the broad Frankfurt plain spread out below. The caretaker told us he had watched the bombings from that vantage point. The great banqueting hall, with a musicians’ gallery at one end, had been emptied of its original furnishings and was now a jumble of papers stacked in piles of varying heights. These were part of the Frankfurt archives. Others were stored in two rooms on the ground floor. All of the rooms were dry and weatherproof, so there was nothing further to be done about them for the present. There was no place in Frankfurt as yet to which they could be moved. “Off Limits” signs had been posted. They would discourage souvenir hunters from unauthorized delving.
On our way back to the car the caretaker told us that the castle still belonged to Margarethe, Landgräfin of Hesse, the youngest sister of the last Kaiser. Although she was now in her seventies, she came every day to put fresh flowers beside the tombs of her husband and her two sons. She lived at a newer castle, Schloss Friedrichshof, only a few kilometers away. He apparently didn’t know that Schloss Friedrichshof had been taken over by the Army and was being used as an officers’ country club. The old Landgräfin was living modestly in one of the small houses on the property. Her scapegrace son, Prince Philip, as I learned later, had played an active role in the artistic depredations of the Nazi ringleaders. I was to hear more of the Hesse family before the end of the year.
A second excursion took us still farther afield. On an overcast morning two days later, Buchman, Charlie Kuhn, Captain Rudolph Vassalle (who was the Public Safety Officer of the detachment) and I set out in the little Opel sedan which had been assigned the MFA&A office. We struck out to the east of Frankfurt on the road to Gelnhausen. We stopped at this pleasant little town with its lovely, early Gothic church and went through the formality of obtaining clearance from the local Military Government Detachment to make an inspection in that area.
From there we continued by a winding secondary road which led us through increasingly hilly country to Bad Brückenau. Our mission there was twofold: Captain Vassalle wanted to track down a young Nazi officer, reportedly a member of the SS, and to find a warehouse said to contain valuable works of art. I had gathered from Buchman that many such reports petered out on investigation. Still, there was always the chance that the one you dismissed as of no importance would turn out to be something worth while.
The bronze coffin of Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was found in a mine near Bernterode.
Canova’s life-size marble statue of Napoleon’s sister was found at the monastery of Hohenfurth.
