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

by Thomas Carr Howe

When we arrived Colonel Webb was deep in conference with a lady war correspondent. The tall, rangy colonel, who reminded me of a humorous and grizzled giraffe, came out to welcome Craig and me. His cordiality was overwhelming at first, but we soon learned the reason. Miss Bonney, the correspondent, was giving the colonel a bad time and he needed moral support. She was firing a rapid barrage of searching questions, and in some cases the colonel didn’t want to answer. I was fascinated by his technique. He obviously didn’t wish to offend his inquisitor, but on the other hand he wasn’t going to be pressed for an expression of opinion on certain subjects. At times he would parry her query with one of his own. At others he would snort some vague reply which got lost in a hearty laugh. Before the interview was over, it was Miss Bonney who was answering the questions—often her own—not the colonel.

Neither Craig nor I could make much of what we heard, but after Miss Bonney’s departure the colonel took us into his confidence. Somewhere this indomitable lady had got hold of stray bits of information which, properly pieced together, made one of the most absorbing stories of the war, as far as Nazi looting of art treasures was concerned. The time was not yet ripe to break the story, according to the colonel, so it had been up to him to avoid giving answers which would have filled in the missing pieces of the puzzle.

Then the colonel proceeded to tell us about the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, the infamous “task force”—to translate the word literally—organized under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg, the “ideological and spiritual leader” of the Reich, for the methodical plundering of the great Jewish collections and the accumulated artistic wealth of other recognized “enemies of the state.” Rosenberg was officially responsible for cultural treasures confiscated in the occupied countries. He had virtually unlimited resources at his command. In the fall of 1940, not long after his appointment, Rosenberg received a congratulatory letter from Göring in which the Reichsmarschall promised to support energetically the work of his staff and to place at its disposal “means of transportation and guard personnel,” and specifically assured him the “utmost assistance” of the Luftwaffe. Even before the war, German agents had accumulated exhaustive information concerning collections which were later to be confiscated. The whereabouts of every object of artistic importance was known. Paintings, sculpture, tapestries, furniture, porcelain, enamels, jewels, gold and silver—all were a matter of record. When the Nazis occupied Paris, the Rosenberg Task Force was able to go into operation with clocklike precision. And so accurate was their information that in many instances they even knew the hiding places in which their more foresighted victims had concealed their valuables.

The headquarters of the E.R.R.[1] had been set up in the Musée du Jeu de Paume, the little museum in the corner of the Tuileries Gardens overlooking the Place de la Concorde. The large staff was composed mainly of Germans, but some of the members were French. Looted treasures poured into the building, to be checked, labeled and shipped off to Germany. But it was more than a clearing house. The choicest things were placed on exhibition and to these displays the top-flight Nazis were invited—to select whatever caught their fancy. Hitler had first choice, Göring second.

It did not occur to the members of the E.R.R. staff that their every move was watched. A courageous Frenchwoman named Rose Valland had ingratiated herself with the “right people” and had become a trusted member of the staff. During the months she worked at the museum, she had two main objectives. One was to sabotage the daily work as much as possible by making intentionally stupid mistakes and by encouraging the French laborers, engaged by the Germans, to do likewise. The other, and far and away the more important, was the compilation of a file, complete with biographical data and photographs, of the German personnel at the Jeu de Paume. How she ever accomplished this is a mystery. The colonel said that Mlle. Valland, now a captain in the French Army, was working with the official French committee for Fine Arts. She had already provided our Versailles office with a copy of her E.R.R. file. Later in the summer I met Captain Valland, a robust woman with gray hair and the most penetrating brown eyes I have ever seen. I asked her how she had ever had the courage to do what she had done. She said with a laugh, “I could never do it again. The Gestapo followed me home every night.”

After regaling us with this account of the E.R.R., Colonel Webb whetted our appetites still further with an outline of what his deputy, Charlie Kuhn, was up to. As the result of a “signal,” he had taken off by plane for Germany, and at the moment was either in the eastern part of Bavaria or over the Austrian border, trying to trace two truckloads of paintings and tapestries which two high-ranking Nazis had spirited away from the Laufen salt mine at the eleventh hour. Latest information indicated that the finest things from the Vienna Museum had been stored at Laufen, which was in the mountains east of Salzburg; and it was further believed that the “top cream” of the stuff—the Breughels, Titians and Velásquezes—was in those two trucks. These pictures were world-famous and consequently not marketable, so there was the appalling possibility that the highjackers had carried them off with the idea of destroying them—Hitler’s mad Götterdämmerung idea. There was also the possibility that they intended to hold the pictures as a bribe against their own safety.

Back at the hotel that night, Craig and I reviewed the events of the day. What we had learned from Colonel Webb was only an affirmation of the exciting things we had gleaned from the reports in the London office. We were desperately anxious to get into Germany where we could be a part of all these unbelievable adventures instead of hearing about them secondhand. Strict censorship was still in force, so we weren’t able to share our exuberance with our respective families in letters home. But we could at least exult together over the fantastic future shaping up before us.

We found Charlie Kuhn at the office the next morning. He was a tall quiet fellow with a keen sense of humor, whom I had first known when we had been fellow students at Harvard back in the twenties. During the intervening years we had met only at infrequent intervals. He had remained to teach and had become an outstanding member of the Fine Arts faculty in Cambridge, while I had gone to a museum. His special field of scholarship was German painting and it was this attribute which had led the Roberts Commission to nominate him for his present assignment as Deputy Chief of the MFA&A Section. He had already been in the Navy for two years when this billet was offered him. Notwithstanding his obvious qualifications for his present job, he had so distinguished himself in the earlier work upon which he had been engaged—special interrogation of German prisoners—that it had required White House intervention to “liberate” him for his new duties. No closeted scholar, Charlie chafed under the irritations of administrative and personnel problems which occupied most of his time.

That morning at Versailles he was fresh from his adventures in the field, and we buttonholed him for a firsthand account. Yes, the trucks had been located. They had been abandoned by the roadside, but everything had been found intact. The reports had not been exaggerated: the trucks had contained some of the finest of the Vienna pictures and also some of the best tapestries. They were now in a warehouse at Salzburg and would probably remain there until they could be returned to Vienna. As to their condition, the pictures were all right; the tapestries had mildewed a bit, but the damage wasn’t serious.

It was hard to settle down to the humdrum of office routine after his recital of these adventures. Charlie said he wanted to ship us off to Germany as soon as possible because there was so much to be done and so few officers were available.