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

by Thomas Carr Howe

We woke up to faultless weather the following morning, and on the way down to the Königsplatz with Craig I was in an offensively optimistic frame of mind. All ten of my trucks were there. This was more like it—no tiresome mechanical delays. We were all set to go. Leclancher had even had the foresight to bring along an extra driver, just in case anything happened to one of the ten. That was a smart idea and I congratulated him for having thought of it.

It wasn’t till I started distributing the rations that I discovered our two packers were missing. But that shouldn’t take long to straighten out. Craig’s office was just across the way. I found them cooling their heels in the anteroom. They looked as though they had come right out of an Arthur Rackham illustration—stocky little fellows with gnarled hands and wizened faces as leathery as the Lederhosen they were wearing. Each wore a coal-scuttle hat with a jaunty feather, and each had a bulging bandanna attached to the end of a stick. There was much bowing and scraping. The hats were doffed and there was the familiar “Grüss Gott, Herr Kapitän,” when I walked in.

Craig appeared and explained the difficulty. Until the last minute, no one had thought to ask whether the men had obtained a Military Government permit to leave the area—and of course they hadn’t. With all due respect to the workings of Military Government, I knew that it would take hours, even days, to obtain the permits. So, what to do? I asked Craig what would happen if they went without them. He didn’t know. But if anyone found out about it, there would be trouble. I didn’t see any reason why anyone should find out about it. The men would be in my charge and I said I’d assume all responsibility.

Meanwhile the two Rackham characters were shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, looking first at Craig and then at me, without the faintest idea what the fuss was all about. Craig reluctantly left it up to me. Not wanting to waste any more time, I told the little fellows that everything was “in Ordnung” and bundled them off to the waiting trucks.

Again our way led out to the east, the same road we had taken two days before; and again I was perched up in the lead truck with Double Roger. The country was more beautiful than ever in the morning sunlight. We skirted the edge of Chiemsee and sped on through Traunstein. The mountains loomed closer, their crests gleaming with snow. Roger commented that it was “la neige éternelle,” and I was struck by the unconscious poetry of the phrase.

To save time we ate our midday rations en route, pulling off to one side of the Autobahn in the neighborhood of Bad Reichenhall. Farther on we came to a fork in the highway. A sign to the right pointed temptingly to Berchtesgaden, only thirty kilometers away. But our road was the one to the left—to Salzburg. In another few minutes we saw its picturesque fortress, outlined against the sky, high above the town.

I had to make some inquiries in Salzburg. Not knowing the exact location of the headquarters where I could obtain the information I needed, I thought it prudent to park the convoy on the outskirts and go on ahead with a single truck. It probably wasn’t going to be any too easy, even with exact directions, to get all ten of them through the narrow streets, across the river and out the other side. This was where a jeep would have come in handy. I had been a fool not to insist on having one for this trip.

Leclancher asked if he might go along with Roger and me. The three of us drove off, leaving the other nine drivers and the two little packers to take their ease in the warm meadow beside which we had halted. It was about three miles into the center of town and the road was full of confusing turns. But on the whole it was well marked with Army signs. Before the end of the summer I became reasonably proficient in translating the cabalistic symbols on these markers, but at that time I was hopelessly untutored and neither of my companions was any help. After driving through endless gray archways and being soundly rebuked by the MPs for going the wrong direction on several one-way streets, we found ourselves in a broad square paved with cobblestones. It was the Mozartplatz.

The lieutenant colonel I was supposed to see had his office in one of the dove-colored buildings facing the square. It was a big, high-ceilinged room with graceful rococo decorations along the walls and a delicate prism chandelier in the center. I asked the colonel for clearance to proceed to Linz with my convoy. After I had explained the purpose of my trip to Hohenfurth, he offered to expedite the additional clearance I would need beyond Linz.

He rang up the headquarters of the 65th Infantry Division which was stationed there. In a few minutes everything had been arranged. The colonel at the other end of the line said that he would send one of his officers to the outskirts of the city to conduct us to his headquarters on our arrival. There would be no difficulty about billets. He would also take care of our clearance across the Czechoslovakian border the following day. I thanked the colonel and hurried down to rejoin Leclancher and Roger.