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

by Thomas Carr Howe

As soon as he had recovered from the surprise of finding me at Captain Posey’s desk, he explained the reason for his visit. Something had to be done right away about the building he was setting up as a collecting point. He had been promised a twenty-four-hour guard. He had been promised a barrier of barbed wire. So far, Third Army had failed to provide either one. A lot of valuable stuff had already been delivered to the building, and George was sending in more. He couldn’t wait any longer.

“Let’s have a talk with Colonel Hamilton,” I said. As we walked down to the Assistant Chief of Staff’s office, Craig told me that the buildings he had requisitioned were the ones Bancel La Farge had suggested when we saw him at Wiesbaden a month ago.

“Can’t this matter wait until Captain Posey returns?” the colonel asked.

“I am afraid it can’t, sir,” said Craig. “As you know, the two buildings were the headquarters of the Nazi party. The Nazis meant to destroy them before Munich fell. Having failed to do so, I think it quite possible that they may still attempt it. Both buildings are honeycombed with underground passageways. Only this morning we located the exit of one of them. It was half a block from the building. We hadn’t known of its existence before. The works of art stored in the building at present are worth millions of dollars. In the circumstances, I am not willing to accept the responsibility for what may happen to them. I must have guards or a barrier at once.”

The colonel reached for the telephone and gave orders that a cordon of guards was to be placed on the buildings immediately. He made a second call, this time about the barbed wire. When he had finished he told Craig that the guard detail would report that afternoon; the barbed wire would be strung around the building the next morning. We thanked the colonel and returned to Posey’s office.

We found two officers who had just come in from Dachau. They were waiting to see someone connected with Property Control. They had brought with them a flour sack filled with gold wedding rings; a large carton stuffed with gold teeth, bridgework, crowns and braces (in children’s sizes); a sack containing gold coins (for the most part Russian) and American greenbacks. As we looked at these mementos of the concentration camp, I thought of the atrocity film I had seen at Versailles and wondered how anyone could believe that those pictures had been an exaggeration.

I went back with Craig to his office at the Königsplatz. The damage to Munich was worse than I had realized. The great Deutsches Museum by the river was a hollow-eyed specter, but sufficiently intact to house DPs. Aside from its twin towers, little was left of the Frauenkirche. The buildings lining the Brienner-Strasse had been blasted and burned. Along the short block leading from the Carolinen Platz to the Königsplatz, the destruction was total: on the left stood the jagged remnants of the little villa Hitler had given D’Annunzio; on the right was a heap of rubble which had been the Braun Haus. But practically untouched were the two Ehrentempel—the memorials to the “martyrs” of the 1923 beer-hall “putsch.” The colonnades were draped with the same kind of green fishnet that had been used to camouflage the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. The classic façades of the museums on either side of the square—the Glyptothek and the Neue Staatsgalerie—were intact. The buildings themselves were a shambles.

I followed Craig up the broad flight of steps to the entrance of the Verwaltungsbau, or Administration Building. It was three stories high, built of stone, and occupied almost an entire block. True to the Nazi boast, it looked as though it had been built to “last a thousand years.” And it was so plain and massive that I didn’t see how it could change much in that time. There was nothing here that could “grow old gracefully.” The interior matched the exterior. There were two great central courts with marble stairs leading to the floor above.

Although the building had not been bombed, it had suffered severely from concussion. Craig said that when he had moved in two weeks ago the skylights over the courts had been open to the sky. On rainy days one could practically go boating on the first floor. There had been no glass in the windows. Now they had been boarded up or filled in with a translucent material as a substitute. All of the doors had been out of line and would not lock. But the repairs were already well under way and, according to Craig, the place would be shipshape in another month or six weeks. He said that his colleague, Hamilton Coulter, a former New York architect now a naval lieutenant, was directing the work and doing a magnificent job. Even under normal conditions it would have been a staggering task. With glass and lumber at a premium, to say nothing of the scarcity of skilled labor, a less resourceful man would have given up in despair.