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

by Thomas Carr Howe

We walked up to the main entrance wondering if it could really be true that the crowning glory of the Residenz—the glorious ceiling by Tiepolo, representing Olympus and the Four Continents—was, as we had been told, still intact. With misgivings we turned left across the entrance hall to the Treppenhaus and mounted the grand staircase. We looked up and there it was—as dazzling and majestically beautiful as ever—that incomparable fresco, the masterpiece of the last great Italian painter. Someone with a far greater gift for words than I may be able to convey the exaltation one experiences on seeing that ceiling, not just for the first time but at any time. I can’t. It leaves artist and layman alike absolutely speechless. I think that, if I had to choose one great work of art, it would be this ceiling in the Residenz. You can have even the Sistine ceiling. I’ll take the Tiepolo.

For the next half hour we examined every corner of it. Aside from a few minor discolorations, the result of water having seeped through the lower side of the vault just above the cornice, the fresco was undamaged. Considering the destruction throughout the rest of the building, I could not understand how this portion of the palace could be in such a remarkable state of preservation. The explanation was an interesting example of how good can sometimes come out of evil. Some forty years ago, as I remember the story, there was a fire in the Residenz. The wooden roof over a large portion, if not all, of the building was burned away. When it came to replacing the roof, the city fathers decided it would be a prudent idea to cover the part above the Tiepolo with steel and concrete. This was done, and consequently, when the terrible conflagration of March 1945 swept Würzburg—following the single raid of twenty minutes which destroyed the city—the fresco was spared. As we wandered through other rooms of the Residenz—the Weisser Saal with its elaborate stucco ornamentation and the sumptuous Kaiser Saal facing the garden, once classic examples of the Rococo—I wished that those city fathers had gone a little farther with their steel and concrete.

We stopped briefly to examine the chapel in the south wing. Here, miraculously enough, there had been relatively little damage, but the caretaker expressed concern over the condition of the roof and said that if it weren’t repaired before the heavy rains the ceiling would be lost. Knowing how hard it was to obtain building materials for even the most historic monuments when people didn’t have a roof over their heads, we couldn’t reassure him with much conviction.

The spectacle of ruined Würzburg had a depressing effect upon us, so we weren’t very talkative on our way back to Frankfurt. We passed through only one town of any size, Aschaffenburg, which, like Würzburg, had suffered severe damage. Although I had not been long in Germany and had seen but few of her cities, I was beginning to realize that the reports of the Allied air attacks had not been exaggerated. I was ready to believe that there were only small towns and villages left in this ravaged country.

One morning Charlie Kuhn rang up to say that I should meet him at the Reichsbank early that afternoon. This was something I had been looking forward to for some time, the chance to look at the wonderful things from the Merkers mine which were temporarily stored there. With Charlie came two members of the MFA&A organization whom I had not seen since Versailles and then only briefly. They had been stationed at Barbizon, as part of the Allied Group Control Council for Germany (usually referred to simply as “Group CC”) the top level policy-making body as opposed to SHAEF, which dealt with the operational end of things. These two gentlemen were John Nicholas Brown, who had come over to Germany with the assimilated rank of colonel as General Eisenhower’s adviser on cultural affairs, and Major Mason Hammond, in civilian life professor of the Classics at Harvard.

It had been decided, now that we were about to acquire a permanent depot in which to store the treasures, to make one Monuments officer responsible for the entire collection. By this transfer of custody, the Property Control Officer in whose charge the things were at present, could be relieved of that responsibility. Major Hammond had with him a paper designating me as custodian. Knowing in a general way what was stored in the bank, I felt that I was on the point of being made a sort of director, pro tem, of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

The genial Property Control Officer, Captain William Dunn, was all smiles at the prospect of turning his burden over to someone else. But before this transfer could be made, a complete check of every item was necessary. Major Hammond knew just how he wanted this done. I was to have two assistants, who could come over the next morning from his office in Hoechst, twenty minutes from Frankfurt. The three of us, in company with Captain Dunn, would make the inventory.

We wandered through the series of rooms in which the things were stored. In the first room were something like four hundred pictures lined up against the wall in a series of rows. In two adjoining rooms were great wooden cases piled one above another. In a fourth were leather-bound boxes containing the priceless etchings, engravings and woodcuts from the Berlin Print Room. Still another room was filled with cases containing the renowned Egyptian collections. It was rumored that one of them held the world-famous head of Queen Nefertete, probably the best known and certainly the most beloved single piece of all Egyptian sculpture. It had occupied a place of special honor in the Berlin Museum, in a gallery all to itself.

Still other rooms were jammed with cases of paintings and sculpture of the various European schools. In a series of smaller alcoves were heaped huge piles of Oriental rugs and rare fabrics. And last, one enormous room with bookshelves was filled from floor to ceiling with some thirty thousand volumes from the Berlin Patent Office. Quite separate and apart from all these things was a unique collection of ecclesiastical vessels of gold and silver, the greater part of them looted from Poland. These extremely precious objects were kept in a special vault on the floor above.

Captain Dunn brought out a thick stack of papers. It was the complete inventory. Major Hammond said that the two officers who would help with the checking were a Captain Edwin Rae and a WAC lieutenant named Standen. Aside from having heard that Rae had been a student of Charlie Kuhn’s at Harvard, I knew nothing about him. But the name Standen rang a bell: was she, by any chance, Edith Standen who had been curator of the Widener Collection? Major Hammond smilingly replied, “The same.” I had known her years ago in Cambridge where we had taken Professor Sachs’ course in Museum Administration at the same time. I remembered her as a tall, dark, distinguished-looking English girl. To be exact, she was half English: her father had been a British Army officer, her mother a Bostonian. Recalling her very reserved manner and her scholarly tastes, I found it difficult to imagine her in uniform.