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

by Thomas Carr Howe

The papers had been full of stories about German salt mines—the big one at Merkers where our troops had found the Nazi gold and the treasures from the Berlin museums. I was going to Germany. Would I find anything like that?

I had flown to Washington to receive last-minute instructions. I was to make the trip across by air and was given an extra allowance of twenty-five pounds to enable me to take along a dozen Baedekers and a quantity of photographic paper for distribution among our officers in the field. I had been introduced to Craig Smyth while in the midst of these final preparations. Like me, he was a naval lieutenant and his orders were identical with mine. He was a grave young Princetonian, formerly on the staff of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

It was raining when we reached Stevensville, Newfoundland, early the next morning. After an hour’s stop we were on our way again. Shortly before noon we struck good weather and all day long sea and sky remained unvaryingly blue. Late in the afternoon we landed on the island of Terceira in the Azores. We had set our watches ahead two hours at Stevensville. Now we set them ahead again. We took off promptly at seven. This was the last lap of the journey—we’d be in Paris in the morning. Presently our fellow passengers settled down for the night. Two of the cushioned chairs were empty, so Craig and I took possession. They were more comfortable than the cots, and as soon as the steward turned out the lights I dropped off to sleep.

It was still dark when I awoke hours later, but there was enough light for me to distinguish two black masses of land rising from the sea. On one, the beacon of a lighthouse revolved with monotonous regularity. We had just passed over two of the Channel Islands. The dawn came rapidly and a pink light edged the eastern horizon. It was not long before we sighted the coast of France. We flew into rosy clouds and, as they billowed about the plane, we caught tantalizing glimpses of the shore line below. The steward pointed out one promontory and told us it was Brest. Soon we had a spectacular view of Mont St. Michel and the long causeway over which I had driven years before on a sketching tour in Normandy. I wondered what had become of Mère Poulard and her wonderful omelettes and lobster. Some people said they had brought more visitors to Mont St. Michel than the architecture. Very likely she was dead and the Germans had probably disposed of her fabulous cuisine.

We had lost two more hours in the course of the night, so it was only seven-thirty when we swooped down at Orly field, half an hour from Paris. It was a beautiful morning and the sun was so bright that it took us a few minutes to get accustomed to the glare. As we walked over to the airport office, we had our first glimpse of war damage at close range—bombed-out hangars and, scattered about the field, the wreckage of German planes. But the airport was being repaired rapidly. Trim new offices had been built and additional barracks were nearing completion. Craig and I booked places on the afternoon plane for London and then climbed onto the bus waiting to take us into Paris.

Thanks to various delays in getting out of Washington, we had missed the Paris celebration of VE-Day by a margin of three days. So we were about to see the wonderful old city at the beginning of a period of readjustment. But a peaceful Sunday morning is no time to judge any city—least of all Paris. Everything looked the same. The arcades along the right side of the Rue de Rivoli and the gardens at the left were empty, as one would expect them to be. We turned into the Rue Castiglione and came to a halt by the column in the Place Vendôme.

After we had checked our bags at the ATC office, we walked over to the Red Cross Club on the Place de la Concorde. We shaved, washed and then had doughnuts and coffee in the canteen.

Our next move was to call Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Webb, the British officer who was head of the MFA&A Section at SHAEF headquarters in Versailles. Before the war, Colonel Webb had been Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge. I explained to him that Smyth and I had arrived but that our orders directed us to report first to Naval Headquarters in London—ComNavEu—and that as soon as we had complied with them we would be back. That was all right with the colonel. He said that Lieutenant Kuhn, USNR, his deputy, was away on a three-day field trip and wouldn’t be returning before the middle of the week. And we were primarily Charlie Kuhn’s problem.

With that formality out of the way, we retrieved our luggage and wheedled the ATC into giving us transportation to the Royal Monceau, the Navy hotel out near the Étoile. It was time to relax and luxuriate in the thought that it was May and that we were in Paris—that climatic and geographic combination so long a favorite theme of song-writers. I thought about this as we drove along the Champs Élysées. The song writers had something, all right—Paris in May was a wonderful sight. But they had been mooning about a gala capital filled with carefree people, and the Paris of May 1945 wasn’t like that. Architecturally, the city was as elegant as ever, but the few people one saw along the streets looked anything but carefree. And there were no taxis. Taxis have always seemed to me as much a part of Paris as the buildings themselves. In spite of a superficial sameness, Paris had an air of empty magnificence that made one think of a beautiful woman struck dumb by shock. I wondered if my thoughts were running away with me, but found that Craig’s impressions were much the same.