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

by Thomas Carr Howe

Since the proposed Autobahn to Linz had never been finished, we had to take a secondary highway east of Salzburg. Our road led through gently rolling country with mountains in the distance. I was grateful for the succession of villages along the way. They were a relief after the monotony of the Autobahn and also served to control the speed of the convoy. We wound through streets so narrow that one could have reached out and touched the potted geraniums which lined the balconies of the cottages on either side. Laughing, towheaded children waved from the doorways as we passed by. Roger, intent on his driving, didn’t respond to the exuberance of the youngsters, and I wondered if he might be thinking of the villages of his own country, where the invaders had left a bitter legacy of wan faces.

It was after seven when we reached the battered outskirts of Linz, the city of Hitler’s special adoration. He had lavished his attention on the provincial old town, his mother’s birthplace, hoping to make it a serious rival of Vienna as an art center. To this end, plans for a magnificent museum had been drawn up, and already an impressive collection of pictures had been assembled against the day when a suitable building would be ready to receive them.

We approached the city from the west—its most damaged sector. It was rough going, as the streets were full of chuckholes and narrowed by piles of rubble heaped high on both sides. There was no sign of an escort, so we drew up beside an information post at a main intersection. Our cavalcade was too large to miss, as long as we stayed in one place. We waited nearly an hour before a jeep came along. A jaunty young lieutenant came over, introduced himself as the colonel’s “emissary” and said that he had been combing the town for us. The confusion of the debris-filled streets had caused us to take a wrong turn and, consequently, we had missed the main thoroughfare into town. The lieutenant, whose name was George Anderson, led us by a devious route to a large, barrackslike building with a forecourt which afforded ample parking space for the trucks. Billets had already been arranged, as promised, but to get food at such a late hour was another matter. However, by dint of coaxing in the right quarter, Anderson even contrived to do that.

As we drove off in his jeep to the hotel where the officers were billeted, he remarked with a laugh that he wouldn’t be able to do as well by me but thought he could dig up something. The hotel was called the “Weinzinger,” and Anderson said that Hitler had often stayed there. Leaving me to get settled, he went off on a foraging expedition. He returned shortly with an armful of rations, a bottle of cognac and a small contraption that looked like a tin case for playing cards. This ingenious little device, with a turn of the wrist, opened out into a miniature stove. Fuel for it came in the form of white lozenges that resembled moth balls. Two of these, lighted simultaneously, produced a flame of such intensity that one could boil water in less than a quarter of an hour. I got out my mess kit while Anderson opened the rations, and in ten minutes we whipped up a hot supper of lamb stew. With a generous slug of cognac for appetizer, the lack of variety in the menu was completely forgotten.

While we topped off with chocolate bars, I asked him about conditions up the line in the direction of Hohenfurth.

“You won’t have any trouble once you reach Hohenfurth, because it’s occupied by our troops,” he said, “but before swinging north into Czechoslovakia you’ll have to pass through Russian-held Austrian territory.”

This was bad news, for I had no clearance from the Russians. I hadn’t foreseen the need of it. Captain Posey couldn’t have known about it either because he was punctilious and would never have let me start off without the necessary papers.

I had heard stories of the attitude of the Russians toward anyone entering their territory without proper authorization. An officer in Munich told me that his convoy had been stopped. He had been subjected to a series of interrogations and not allowed to proceed for a week.

“Could your colonel obtain clearance for me from the Russians?” I asked.

“He could try, but it would probably take weeks,” Anderson said. “If you’re in a hurry, your best bet is to take a chance and go on through without clearance. You never can tell about the Russians. They might stop you and again they might not.”