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

by Thomas Carr Howe

And I remember the next time I saw that picture: it was at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was included in the small group of outstanding Dutch masterpieces returned to Holland by special plane as a gesture of token restitution in the name of General Eisenhower!

Lamont and I liked Sieber, the German restorer. Lamont referred to him as the “tragic Gilles in white.” Not that there was anything particularly tragic about him, any more than there was about the plight in which most Nazis found themselves. He made no bones about having joined the Party in the early thirties—ironically enough at the suggestion of one of his clients, a Jewish art dealer, who had thought it would be a good thing for Sieber’s business. Sieber had been a restorer of pictures in Berlin and had done a little dealing on the side. It was the half-mournful expression he perpetually wore, together with his white costume, that accounted for Lamont’s appellation. George had described him as a good, run-of-the-mill restorer, perhaps a little better than average. He had sized him up as a man ninety-eight per cent preoccupied with his profession and possibly two per cent concerned with politics. And George, as I think I have observed before, was a good judge of men. Sieber was a quiet, willing worker. He was neither fawning on the one hand, nor arrogant on the other. When you asked him a question, you always got a considered answer.

One evening we drew Sieber out on the subject of the attempted destruction of the mine. We had heard several versions of this fantastic plot and, according to one, Sieber had been instrumental in foiling the conspirators. The story was as follows: On the tenth, thirteenth and thirtieth of April 1945, Glinz, the Gauinspektor of Ober-Donau, had come to the mine with eight great cases marked in black letters “Marmor—Nicht stürzen,” that is, “Marble—Don’t drop.” He was acting on explicit instructions from Eigruber, Gauleiter of the region, to place them at strategic positions in the mine tunnels. Each case contained a hundred-pound bomb. Had these bombs been detonated, the entire contents of the mine would have been destroyed. The resulting cave-ins would have blocked every means of access. It would have taken months to repair the apparatus which carried off the water seeping constantly into the mine chambers. By that time the treasures they contained would have been completely ruined. It is generally agreed that Eigruber had obtained Hitler’s tacit consent to this artistic Götterdämmerung, if not his actual approval of it.

I learned later that Captain Posey found a letter from Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, stating in the first paragraph that the contents of the mine must, at all costs, be kept from falling into the hands of the enemy. And then the second paragraph stated that the contents of the mine must not be harmed.

Members of the Austrian resistance movement got wind of this diabolical plan and took Sieber into their confidence. His intimate knowledge of the mine passageways enabled him to set off small charges of dynamite here and there along the tunnels without endangering the contents of the chambers beyond. The resulting damage was slight and served a twofold purpose: it gave the impression that the mine had been permanently walled up; and, if that ruse were discovered, immediate access to the art works themselves was denied the plotters. Eigruber did discover that his attempt had been thwarted and in his rage gave orders for the counterconspirators to be rounded up and shot. But by that time it was the seventh of May, so the tragedy was mercifully averted.

Sieber told the story in a straightforward, factual way. I don’t think it mattered to him who got control of the mine, but it was simply unthinkable that any harm should come to the precious things it housed. It was very much to his credit that he never capitalized on the part he played in this affair. The only other reference he made to it was when he later showed us the places where he had set off the charges of dynamite.

During all the time we were at the mine, Sieber made only one request of us. It came at the very end of our stay and was reasonable enough: he asked if we could expedite his return to Germany. There seemed to be little prospect of regular employment for him in Austria, but that was of less concern to him than the welfare of his wife and young daughter who lived with him in a house near the mine. Some months later, one of our officers tried to get him a job in Wiesbaden, but he was not acceptable to the Military Government authorities there because of his political affiliations. The last I heard of him, he and his family were still at Alt Aussee, waiting for permission to go back to Germany. I hope they finally got it.

Our concentrated efforts underground produced the desired results. Pictures were coming out of the mine at such a prodigious rate that George called a halt. Enough of a backlog had been accumulated to make further selection down in the mine unnecessary for a couple of days. Lamont and I had better help with the actual loading.

Loading a truck was a specialized operation, and George had perfected the technique. Lamont, Steve and Shrady were his pupils. That left me the only neophyte. So far I had had experience only with the loading of cases and heavier objects such as furniture and sculpture.

Packing pictures, especially unframed ones—and there were a great many of the latter at Alt Aussee—was an altogether different problem. The first step was to place a length of waterproof paper over the side bars of the truck and spread it smoothly on the floor to the center of the truck bed. For this we had a large supply of stout, green, clothlike paper which had been used by the Wehrmacht as protection against gas attacks. Then a strip of felt was laid over the paper. The third step was to place “sausages” in two rows, end to end, on the floor of the truck. The space between the rows would depend on the size of the pictures to be loaded, for they were intended to cushion the shock as the trucks rumbled along over bumpy roads. The “sausages” had been George’s invention. Packing materials of all kinds were at a premium, and certain types just didn’t exist. To make up for the lack of the usual packer’s pads, George had improvised this substitute. In one of the mine chambers he had found a large supply of ordinary curtain material of machine-made ecru lace. This had been cut up into yard lengths, eighteen inches wide. When rolled around a central core of coarser cloth, or sometimes excelsior, and tied with string, they were a very satisfactory “ersatz” product. We used to refer to them augustly as the pads made from Hitler’s window curtains. Their manufacture was periodically one of the major industries at the mine. George had trained a crew of the gnomes and they loved to turn them out. It was easy work. Seated at long benches they resembled a kind of Alpine “husking bee.”