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

by Thomas Carr Howe

It was a little after three when we reached Goisern. The truck had been parked by the headquarters of a small detachment of troops on the edge of town. There were several houses near by but plenty of room for us to maneuver the empty truck alongside. The Negro driver of the stranded truck said that it had “thrown a rod” and would have to be taken to Ordnance for repairs. That meant that the vehicle would be laid up for two or three weeks. We’d have to see about a replacement. The main thing was to get on with the unloading before it began to rain. And it was the truck with the big pictures.

With the two trucks lined up alongside, and only a few inches apart, we could hoist the pictures over the sideboards. In this way each row of paintings was kept in the same order. Lamont and Steve boarded the empty truck, while one of the gnomes from the mine and I started unlashing the first stack of loaded pictures. Before long a crowd of women and children had collected to watch this unusual operation. There were excited “oh’s” and “ah’s” as we began to transfer one masterpiece after another—two large Van Dycks, a Veronese, a pair of colossal decorative canvases by Hubert Robert, a Rubens, and so on. The spectators were quiet and well behaved, whispering among themselves. They didn’t pester us with questions. We rather enjoyed having an audience. We finished the job in an hour and a half.

It wasn’t too soon, for as we were securing the tarpaulin at the rear of the newly loaded truck, it began to pour. We parked the truck, arranged for an overnight guard, then climbed into our jeep and started back to the mine. In a few minutes the rain turned to hail. The stones were so large that we were afraid they’d break the windshield of the jeep. We pulled over to the side of the road and waited for the storm to let up. While we waited, the gnome told us that sometimes the hailstones were large enough to kill sheep grazing in the high meadows. Only the summer before he had lost two of his own lambs during one of the heavy summer storms. He swore that the stones were the size of tennis balls.

We were thoroughly soaked and half frozen when we got back to the mine. But we had won our race with the weather, and the truck would proceed to Munich with the next convoy.

During the next three days we were beset by a series of minor difficulties. Two of the trucks broke down on the way up to the mine to be loaded. It took half a day to get replacements, so the convoy was delayed. One night the guard on duty at the mine entrance developed an unwarranted interest in art and poked around among the pictures which Lamont and I had carefully stacked according to size for loading the next morning. No harm was done, but it caused a delay. He was under strict orders to let no one into the temporary storage room and was not to go in there himself. It was partly our fault; we shouldn’t have trusted him with the key. The captain of the guard was notified and appropriate disciplinary action taken. The gnomes developed a tendency to prolong their regular rest periods beyond a point Steve considered reasonable, and we had to come to an understanding about that. On the whole, however, the work went fairly well.

Even the great chambers of the Kammergrafen were beginning to thin out. They were far from empty, but we had cleared them of a substantial part of the external loot, that is, the loot which had come from countries outside Germany. There were still quantities of things taken from Austrian collections, but they had not been our primary concern. The time had come to make a final check, to make sure that we had not overlooked anything important in the category of external loot.

Together with Sieber, we started this last inspection. We checked off the pictures first. Our work there had been pretty thorough. After that the sculpture. This also seemed to be well weeded out. And the furniture too.

Sieber was ahead of us with his flashlight. The light fell on two cartons standing in a dark corner behind a group of Renaissance bronzes. I asked what was in them. Sieber shrugged his shoulders. They had never been opened. He had forgotten that they were there. We dragged them out and looked for an identifying label. Sieber recalled that one of the former custodians at the mine had said the things inside were “sehr wertvoll”—very valuable, but he knew nothing more.

We carried the boxes to a table where there was better light. They were the same size, square, and about two feet high. They were not heavy. We pried open the lid of one of them with great care. It might be Roman glass, and that stuff breaks almost when you look at it. But it wasn’t Roman glass. Inside was a row of small cardboard boxes. I lifted the lid and removed a layer of cotton. On the cotton beneath lay a magnificent golden pendant studded with rubies, emeralds and pearls. The central motif, a mermaid exquisitely modeled and wrought in iridescent enamel, proclaimed the piece the work of an Italian goldsmith of the Renaissance. The surrounding framework of intricate scrolls, shells and columns blazed with jewels.

There were forty boxes filled with jewels—necklaces, pendants and brooches—all of equal splendor. The collection was worth a fortune. Each piece bore a minute tag on which appeared an identifying letter and a number. These were Rothschild jewels. And we had stumbled on them quite by accident.