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

by Thomas Carr Howe

During the next two hours we covered a lot of territory. First of all, I wanted to know why he was an enlisted man chained to a typewriter. With his extraordinary intelligence and wide knowledge of the Fine Arts, he could have been more useful as an officer. He said that he had applied for a commission and had been turned down. I was sorry I had brought up the subject, but knowing Lincoln’s fondness for the dramatic I thought it quite possible that he had wanted to be able to say in later years that he had gone through the war as an enlisted man. He agreed that he could have been of greater service to the Fine Arts project as an officer.

Then I asked him what his “boss”—he was to be mine too—was like. He said that Captain Posey, an architect in civilian life, had had a spectacular career during combat. In the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, such as lack of personnel and transportation and especially the lack of any real co-operation from the higher-ups, he had accomplished miracles. Now that the press was devoting more and more space to the work the Monuments officers were doing—the discovery of treasures in salt mines and so on—they were beginning to pay loving attention to Captain Posey around the headquarters.

I gathered from Lincoln that the present phase of our activities appealed to the captain less than the protection and repair of historic monuments under fire. If true, this was understandable enough. He was an architect. Why would he, except as a matter of general cultural interest, find work that lay essentially in the domain of a museum man particularly absorbing? It seemed reasonable to assume that Captain Posey would welcome museum men to shoulder a part of the burden. But I was to learn later that my assumption was not altogether correct.

Eventually I had to interrupt our conversation. It was getting late, and still no word about the escort vehicles. Lincoln told me where I would find the officer who was to have called George. He was Captain Blyth, a rough-and-ready kind of fellow, an ex-trooper from the state of Virginia. The outlook was not encouraging. No vehicles were as yet available. Finally, at six o’clock, he rang up to say that he wouldn’t know anything before morning.

Lincoln returned from chow, I gave him the message in case George called while I was out and went down to eat. It was after eight when George telephoned. The connection from Salzburg was bad, and so was his temper when I told him I had nothing to report.

Lincoln usually spent his evenings at the office. That night we stayed till after eleven. Here and there he had picked up some fascinating German art books and magazines, all of them Nazi publications lavishly illustrated. They bore eloquent testimony to Hitler’s patronage of the arts. The banality of the contemporary work in painting was stultifying—dozens of rosy-cheeked, buxom maidens and stalwart, brown-limbed youths reeking with “strength through joy,” and acres of idyllic landscapes. The sculpture was better, though too often the tendency toward the colossal was tiresomely in evidence. It was in recording the art of the past, notably in the monographs dealing with the great monuments of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, that admirable progress had been made. I asked Lincoln enviously how he had got hold of these things. He answered laconically that he had “liberated” them.

Captain Blyth had good news for me the next morning. Two armored vehicles had left Munich for the mine. I gave the message to George when he called just before noon.

“They’re a little late,” he said. “Thanks to the fine co-operation of the 11th Armored Division, I am being taken care of from this end of the line. I’ll try to catch your fellows in Salzburg and tell them to go back where they came from. I am sending you a letter by the next convoy. It’s about a repository which ought to be evacuated right away. I can’t give you any of the details over the phone without violating security regulations. As soon as Posey gets back, you ought to go to work on it. After that I want you to help me here.”

After George had hung up, I asked Lincoln if he had any idea what repository George had in mind. Lincoln said it might be the monastery at Hohenfurth. It was in Czechoslovakia, just over the border from Austria. While we were discussing this possibility, Craig Smyth walked in.