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

by Thomas Carr Howe

By contrast, everything started off beautifully the following morning. Major Anderson appeared as we were finishing breakfast.

His apologies were profuse and he did everything he could to make amends. We declined his offer to obtain rooms for us at the elegant Berchtesgadener Hof in town. We wanted to be on the spot. There was plenty of room in the rest house where we would be working; and we could mess with the half-dozen officers billeted in the adjacent barracks. The major introduced us to Edward Peck, the sergeant, who had been working on an inventory of the collection.

Together we made a tour of the premises. The paintings alone filled forty rooms. Four rooms and a wide corridor at the end of the ground-floor hall were jammed with sculpture. Still another room was piled high with tapestries. Rugs filled two rooms adjoining the one with the tapestries. Two more rooms were given over to empty frames, hundreds of them. There was the “Gold Room” where the objects of great intrinsic value were kept under lock and key. And there were three more rooms crammed with barrels, boxes and trunks full of porcelain. One very large room was a sea of books and magazines, eleven thousand altogether. A small chapel on the premises was overflowing with fine Italian Renaissance furniture.

The preliminary survey was discouraging. Although the objects were infinitely more accessible than those at the mine had been, this advantage was largely offset by the fact that they were all loose and would have to be packed individually. Even the porcelain in barrels would have to be repacked.

Our first request was for a work party of twelve men—GIs, not PWs. We suggested to the young C.O., Major Paul Miller, that he call for volunteers. If possible, we wanted men who might prefer this kind of job to guard duty or other routine work. They could start in on the books while we mapped out our plan of attack on the rest of the things. Steve went off with Major Miller to select the crew, and Lamont and I settled down to discuss other problems with Major Anderson and Sergeant Peck.

It was the sergeant’s idea that the collection could be packed up one room at a time. He had compiled his inventory with that thought in mind. Unfortunately we couldn’t carry out the evacuation in that order. We explained why his system wouldn’t work: paintings, for example, had to be arranged according to size. Otherwise we couldn’t build loads that would travel safely. Even if we could have packed the pictures as he suggested—one room at a time—it would have meant the loss of valuable truck space. We assured him that, in the long run, our plan was the practical one. It did, however, involve considerable preliminary work. The first job would be to assemble all of the pictures—and there were a thousand of them—in a series of rooms on one floor of the building. As the sergeant had not quite finished his lists, we agreed to devote our energies to the books for the rest of the day. By morning he would have his inventory completed. Then the pictures could be shifted.

Lamont and I wanted to know more about the collection. How did it get to Berchtesgaden in the first place? Major Anderson was the man who could answer our questions.

As the war ended, the French reached the town ahead of the Americans. They had it to themselves for about three days and had raised hell generally. Göring’s special train bearing the collection had reached Berchtesgaden just ahead of the French. The collection, having been removed from the Reichsmarschall’s place, Karinhall, outside Berlin, was to have been stored in an enormous bunker by his hunting lodge up the road. But there hadn’t been time. The men in charge of the train got only a part of the things unloaded. Some of them were put in the bunker, others in a villa near by. Most of the collection was left in the nine cars of the train. The men had been more interested in unloading a stock of champagne and whisky which had been brought along in two of the compartments.

When the French entered the town, the train was standing on a siding not far from the bunker. They may have made off with a few of the things, but there were no apparent depredations. They peppered it along one side with machine-gun fire. However, the damage had been relatively slight.

Then the French had cleared out and the train was, so to speak, dumped in Major Anderson’s lap, since he was the Military Government Officer with the 101st Airborne Division. Under his supervision, the collection had been transferred from the train, from the bunker and from the villa, to the rest house. Later he had been instrumental in having it set up as an exhibition. The exhibition had been a great success—perhaps too great a success. He meant that it had attracted so much attention that some of the higher-ups began to worry about the security of the things. Finally he had received orders that the show was to close and of course he had complied at once.