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

by Thomas Carr Howe

Some of his methods had been ingenious. He was credited with having devised the system of “birthday gifts”—a scheme whereby important objects were added to the collection at no cost to the Reichsmarschall. Each year, before Göring’s birthday on January twelfth, Hofer wrote letters to wealthy industrialists and businessmen suggesting that the Reichsmarschall would be gratified to receive a token of their continued regard for him. Then he would designate a specific work of art—and the price. More often than not, the piece in question had already been acquired. The prospective donor had only to foot the bill. Now and then the victim of this shakedown protested the price, but he usually came through.

In Hofer, the Reichsmarschall had had a henchman as rapacious and greedy as himself. And Hofer had possessed what his master lacked—a wide knowledge of European collections and the international art market. Göring had been a gold mine and Hofer had made the most of it.

Hofer had been arrested shortly after the close of hostilities. He had been a “guest” at House 71 for some weeks now, and was being grilled daily by our “cloak and dagger boys.” They were probing into his activities of the past few years and had already extracted an amazing lot of information for incorporation into an exhaustive report on the Göring collection and “how it grew.” Hofer was just one of a long procession of witnesses who were being questioned by Plaut and Rousseau in the course of their tireless investigation of the artistic depredations of the top Nazis. These OSS officers knew their business. With infinite patience, they were cross-examining their witnesses and gradually extracting information which was to lend an authentic fascination to their reports.

Hofer’s wife, they told us, had ably assisted her husband. Her talents as an expert restorer had been useful. She had been charged with the technical care of the Göring collection—no small job when one stopped to consider that it numbered over a thousand pictures. Indeed, there had been more than enough work to keep one person busy all the time. We learned that Frau Hofer was living temporarily at Berchtesgaden where, until recently, she had been allowed to attend to emergency repairs on some of the Göring pictures there.

We turned back to the subject of Hofer, who had not yet finished his daily constitutional and could be seen still pacing back and forth below us. He was, they said, a voluble witness and had an extraordinary memory. He could recall minute details of complicated transactions which had taken place several years before. On one occasion Hofer had recommended an exchange of half a dozen paintings of secondary importance for two of the very first quality. As I recall, the deal involved a group of seventeenth century Dutch pictures on the one hand, and two Bouchers on the others. Hofer had been able to reel off the names of all of them and even give the price of each. It was just such feats of memory, they said with a laugh, that made his vague and indefinite answers to certain other questions seem more than merely inconsistent.

Listening to our hosts, we had forgotten the time. It was getting late and George would be wondering what had happened to us. There had been a heavy downpour while we were at dinner. The weather had cleared now, but the evergreens were dripping as we pulled out of the drive.

The road to Alt Aussee ran along beside the swift and milky waters of an Alpine river. It was a beautiful drive in the soft evening light. The little village with its winding streets and brightly painted chalets was an odd setting for GIs and jeeps, to say nothing of our lumbering command car.

We found our way to the Command Post, which occupied a small hotel in the center of the village. There we turned sharply to the right, into a road so steep that it made the precipitous grades over which we had come earlier that afternoon seem level by comparison. We drove about a mile on this road and I was beginning to wonder if we wouldn’t soon be above the timber line—perhaps even in the region of “eternal snow” to which Roger had once so poetically referred—when we came to a bleak stone building perched precariously on a narrow strip of level ground. Behind it, a thousand feet below, stretched an unbroken sea of deep pine forests. This was the control post, and the guard, a burly GI armed with a rifle, signaled us to stop. We asked for Lieutenant Stout. He motioned up the road, where, in the gathering dusk, we could distinguish the outlines of a low building facing an irregular terrace. It was a distance of about two hundred yards. We drove on up to the entrance where we found George waiting for us.

He took us into the building which he said contained the administrative offices of the salt mine—the Steinbergwerke, now a government monopoly—and his own living quarters. We entered a kind of vestibule with white plaster walls and a cement floor. A narrow track, the rails of which were not more than eighteen inches apart, led from the entrance to a pair of heavy doors in the far wall. “That,” said George, “is the entrance to the mine.”

He led the way to a room on the second floor. Its most conspicuous feature was a large porcelain stove. The woodwork was knotty pine. Aside from the two single beds, the only furniture was a built-in settle with a writing table which filled one corner. The table had a red and white checked cover and over it, suspended from the ceiling, was an adjustable lamp with a red and white checked shade. Opening off this room was another bedroom, also pine-paneled, which was occupied by the captain of the guard and one other officer. George apologized for the fact that the only entrance to the other room was through ours. Apparently, in the old days, the two rooms had formed a suite—ours having been the sitting room—reserved for important visitors to the mine. For the first few days there was so much coming and going that we had all the privacy of Grand Central Station, but we soon got used to the traffic. George and Steve Kovalyak shared a room just down the hall. Lamont had spoken of Steve when we had been at Hohenfurth, and I was curious to meet this newcomer to the MFA&A ranks. George said that Steve would be back before long. He had gone out with Shrady. That was Lieutenant Frederick Shrady, the third member of the trio of Monuments Officers at the mine.