Captain Posey and Private Lincoln Kirstein picked up additional rumors from museum directors in Luxembourg. They had heard that the altarpiece was in a salt mine, but they had also been told that it was in the vaults of the Berlin Reichsbank. It was impossible to reconcile these conflicting pieces of information. Finally, near Trier, Posey and Kirstein tracked down a young German scholar who had been in France during the occupation. Lincoln told me later that it was hard to believe that this unassuming fellow had been high in the confidence of Göring and other members of the Nazi inner circle. From him they learned that the altarpiece had been taken to Alt Aussee.
Then followed the rapid advance across Germany. To Posey and Kirstein it was a period of agonizing suspense. They couldn’t be sure that Third Army would move into the area in which the mine lay. Just as their hopes began to fade, occupancy of the cherished area did fall to Third Army. Tactical troops were alerted to the importance of the isolated mountain region. It was of no significance as a military objective and would doubtless otherwise have been left unoccupied for the moment. They pressed forward through Bad Ischl and the wild confusion of capitulating German troops to the wilder confusion of surrendering SS units in the little village of Alt Aussee itself. From there it was but a mile to the mine.
When they reached the mine, they found it heavily guarded by men of the 80th Infantry Division, but the mine had been dynamited. It wasn’t possible to go into the mine chambers. Armed with acetylene lamps, Posey and Lincoln entered the main tunnel. They groped their way along the damp passageway for a distance of a quarter of a mile or more before they reached the debris of the first block. After assessing the damage they returned to consult the Austrian mineworkers. The miners said it would take from ten days to two weeks to clear the passageway. Captain Posey thought that the Army Engineers could do it in less than a week, perhaps in two or three days. Both were wrong. They entered the first mine chamber the next day.
And now, here before us, stood the fabulous panels which they had found on that May morning a few weeks before. While we examined them, Sieber pieced out the one gap in the story of the altarpiece: the Nazis had taken it from Paris to the Castle of Neuschwanstein where a restorer from Munich worked on the blisters which had developed on some of the panels. The altarpiece remained at the castle for two years. It was brought to the mine in the summer of 1944. Pieces of waxed paper were still affixed to the surface of the panels, on the places where the blisters had been laid. The big panel representing St. John had split lengthwise with the grain of wood. This had happened at the mine. Sieber had repaired it, and George said he had done a good job. As we were leaving the Mineral Kabinett, Sieber asked me if Andrew Mellon really had offered ten million dollars for the altarpiece. People had said so in Berlin. I hated to tell him that the story was without foundation, so far as I knew.
When we came out of the mine at noon we found that Steve and Shrady had finished loading two trucks. They said they had enough pictures left to fill two more. The afternoon crew would be coming on at four. In the meantime it was up to Lamont and me to select at least two hundred paintings, so that the loading could go on without interruption.
After lunch we returned to the mine with Sieber. This time the trip on the train was much longer. Our objective was a part of the mine called the Springerwerke. Owing to the peculiar honeycomb structure of the mine network, it had been necessary to establish guard posts at intervals along the tunnels. One of these was at the entrance to the Springerwerke. Two GIs were on duty. It was a dismal assignment as well as a cold one. They were bundled up in fleece-lined coats which had been made for German troops on the Russian front. George and Steve had obtained about two hundred of these coats and were using them for packing unframed pictures. Each time a convoy of empty trucks returned from Munich, they counted the coats carefully to make sure that none had disappeared.
The Springerwerke contained more than two thousand paintings. They were arranged in two tiers around three sides and down the center of a room fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. In one section we found thirty or forty Italian paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the well known Lanz Collection of Amsterdam. Next to them we came upon the group of canvases, which the Germans in their greedy haste had filched from Bruges when they had made off with the Michelangelo Madonna. Aside from these two lots, the pictures had been stored according to size rather than by provenance. It was a bewildering assortment. Quality was to be our guide in making this initial selection. And as a kind of corollary, we were to set aside for shipment all pictures bearing the infamous “E.R.R.” stencil—the initials of the Rosenberg looting organization. We had Sieber and four of the gnomes to help. Sieber stood by with list and flashlight. Two of the gnomes hauled out the pictures for us to examine. The other two put protective pads of paper filled with excelsior across the corners of the ones chosen.
By the end of the afternoon we had picked out between a hundred and fifty and two hundred paintings. The crew which had come on at four had already gone up with one trainload. We took stock of the lot waiting to go. We hadn’t done so badly: our selection included works of Hals, Breughel, Titian, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Rubens, Van Dyck, Lancret, Nattier, Reynolds, and a raft of smaller examples of the seventeenth century Dutch school. Not a dud among them, we agreed smugly.
Before we knocked off for supper, Sieber showed us an adjoining room divided into small compartments. Each one contained a miscellaneous assortment of art objects—pictures, porcelain, bric-a-brac of various kinds. Each compartment bore a label with the name of a different family, fifteen or twenty in all. They were the pilfered possessions of Viennese Jewish families. Our feelings were of both pathos and disgust. After working with the fruits of looting on a grand scale, we found these trifles sordid evidences of greedy persecution.
Lamont and I spent the next two days in the Springerwerke. We worked nights as well. It was a molelike existence. On the third morning we transferred our base of operations to the Kammergrafen, the largest of the mine caverns and the most remote. It was three-quarters of a mile from the mine entrance. Whereas the other mine chambers were on one level, the great galleries of the Kammergrafen were on several. Beyond those in which floors had been laid, there were vast unlighted caves of echoing blackness.