The galleries were so high that those on the first level could accommodate three tiers of pictures between floor and ceiling, while those on the second had four tiers.
The records listed six thousand pictures. In addition there were quantities of sculpture, hundreds of examples of the very finest eighteenth century French cabinetwork, tapestries and rugs, and the books and manuscripts of the Biblioteca Herziana in Rome—one of the greatest historical libraries in the world. Kammergrafen was quality and quantity combined, for here had been stored the collections for Linz.
Among the pictures, for example, were canvases from the Rothschild, Gutmann and Mannheimer collections, the celebrated tempera panels of the fourteenth century Hohenfurth altarpiece, Rembrandts and other great Dutch masters from the stock of Goudstikker, who had been the Duveen of Amsterdam, a collection of French pictures known as the “Sammlung Berta,” and hundreds of nineteenth century German paintings, these last the objects of Hitler’s special veneration.
The sculpture ranged from ancient to modern, with notable emphasis on examples of the Gothic period. There were Egyptian tomb figures, Roman portrait busts, Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, exquisite French marbles of the eighteenth century and delicate Tanagra figurines. A bewildering hodgepodge of the plastic arts.
There were tapestries from Cracow, furniture from the Castle at Posen, rows of inlaid tables and cabinets from the Vienna Rothschilds, shelves and cases filled with the finest porcelains, prints and drawings of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the decorations from the Reichskanzlei in Berlin, and Hitler’s own purchases from the annual exhibitions of German art in Munich. Such was the Kammergrafen treasure. And the best of it, as I have said before, was to have adorned the galleries of the unbuilt Führer Museum at Linz, the city by the Danube which Hitler aspired to raise to the dignity of Vienna.
The rarest treasure of that collection was the celebrated Vermeer Portrait of the Artist in His Studio. This superb work of the seventeenth Dutch master, by whom there are only some forty unquestioned examples in the world, had been for years in the collection of Count Czernin at Vienna. The collection was semipublic; I had visited it before the war. Known simply as the “Czernin Vermeer,” the picture had long been coveted by the great collectors. It had remained for Hitler to succeed where others had failed: he acquired this masterpiece in 1940 for an alleged price of one million, four hundred thousand Reichsmarks—part of his earnings from the sale of Mein Kampf. He boasted at the time that Mr. Mellon had offered six million dollars for it. Whether the sale was made under duress is still a matter of controversy. Members of the Czernin family today contend that it was. The picture has now been returned to Vienna where the matter will be ultimately decided.
Rivaling the Vermeer in international significance were the fifteen cases of paintings and sculpture from Monte Cassino. The paintings included Titian’s Danaë, Raphael’s Madonna of the Divine Love, Peter Breughel’s Blind Leading the Blind, a Crucifixion by Van Dyck, an Annunciation by Filippino Lippi, a Sacra Conversazione by Palma Vecchio, a Landscape by Claude Lorraine, and Sebastiano del Piombo’s Portrait of Pope Clement VII. Among the sculpture were antique bronzes of the greatest rarity and importance from Herculaneum and Pompeii. All had belonged to the Naples Museum. In 1943 the Italians had placed them, together with one hundred and seventy-two other cases of objects from the Naples Museum, in the Abbey of Monte Cassino for safekeeping. The following January, arrangements were made for all of the cases to be returned to the Vatican. When they arrived, fifteen were missing. Members of the Hermann Göring Division had carried them off as a birthday gift for the Reichsmarschall. Göring was incensed, when he learned of the arrival of these treasures, and refused to accept them. There is reason to believe that such was his reaction, for he had striven to maintain a semblance of legality in his art transactions. Even this rapacious collector could not have interpreted the behavior of his loyal officers as “correct,” so far as the Monte Cassino affair was concerned. After the Reichsmarschall’s refusal of the cases, they were brought to Alt Aussee for storage, pending their later return to Italy.
The Springerwerke had been child’s play compared with the task confronting us in the Kammergrafen. We began arbitrarily with the big pictures. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Van Dyck, Rubens, Rembrandt—all were represented in profusion. Many of them were from private collections in Holland, Belgium and France, and were unknown to us save through reproduction. It was a great lesson in connoisseurship, particularly when we had exhausted the “stars” and come to the lesser masters. The Dutch school of the seventeenth century was abundantly represented. There were scores, hundreds, of still lifes and flower paintings. My predilection for them amused Lamont and Sieber. I had always admired these incredibly deft creations of the seventeenth century Dutch artists, and here was an unparalleled opportunity to study them.
There was one peculiar thing about our selections: if a picture looked good to us down in the mine, it invariably looked better when we examined it later in the light of day at the mine entrance. This happened time and again. I remember one instance in particular. The painting was a large Rembrandt, a study of two dead peacocks. Down in the mine we had looked at it without much enthusiasm, though we admired it, and had even hesitated to include it in that first selection, which was to number only the best of the best. The next morning, as it was being loaded onto the truck, we were struck by its distinction.