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

by Thomas Carr Howe

By noon the next day our first convoy of four trucks was ready for the road. Two of the trucks were filled with books, twenty-seven cases of them. The other two contained twenty-five cases, but not cases of books: four were filled with glassware (308 pieces); seven contained porcelain (1135 pieces); eight contained gold and silver plate (415 pieces); and the remaining six were packed with rugs. These were from Karinhall, near Berlin, the largest of Göring’s seven households.

As soon as we had dispatched the convoy, Lamont and four members of the work party resumed the sorting and stacking of the numbered paintings. Sergeant Peck and I, with two helpers to shift the larger canvases, proceeded with the numbering. Steve took off for Alt Aussee to pick up Kress, the photographer, and his paraphernalia.

That night Lamont decided we should improve our quarters. This involved moving from the room we occupied at the front of the building to a much larger one at the back. The new room had several advantages which the old one lacked. It had been the reading room of the rest house in the days of the Luftwaffe occupancy and was attractively paneled in natural oak with built-in bookshelves. It was thirty feet long and fifteen wide, nearly twice the size of our former room, and opened onto a broad porch. There were French doors and two large windows which afforded a spectacular view of the mountain range to the east. The Eagle’s Nest crowned the highest of the peaks. At one end of the room was an alcove, with a built-in desk and couch. With a little fixing up, it could be turned into a comfortable sitting room.

Before we could transfer our belongings to this spacious apartment, we had to clear out a few of the Reichsmarschall’s—half a dozen pieces of sculpture and three large altarpieces. The outstanding piece of sculpture was a life-size statue of the Magdalene which Göring had acquired from the Louvre. Similarly, the most important of the three altarpieces was a big triptych which also had come from the Louvre. Göring did not remove these objects by force. He obtained them by exchange after prolonged negotiations with the officials of the museum. According to the information given me, both parties were well pleased with the trade. As I recall, the Louvre received six objects from the Reichsmarschall’s collection in return for the triptych and the statue. I was told that one of the six pieces was a painting by Coypel, the eighteenth century French artist, which had belonged to one of the Paris Rothschilds. It was because they were of German workmanship that Göring particularly coveted the pieces which he obtained from the Louvre. It is presumed that this did not prejudice the Louvre in their favor.

The statue, portraying the Magdalene clothed only in her long blonde tresses, was known as “la belle allemande,” the beautiful German. It was an exceptionally fine example, in polychromed wood, of the work of Gregor Erhardt, a Swabian sculptor of the first quarter of the sixteenth century. I fancied that Göring detected a resemblance between the statue and his wife. Lamont and I carried the statue down to the first floor of the rest house and placed it at the foot of the stairs.

It was one of the last objects we packed for shipment and, during our stay at Berchtesgaden, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I had caught Frau Göring on her way to the bath. I was not the only one with that idea. One evening I found the GI guard draping a raincoat about the Magdalene’s shoulders. I had given strict orders that the guards were to touch nothing in the collection, so I stopped to have a word with him on the subject. He said with a sheepish look, “I didn’t mean to break the rules, sir, but I thought Emmy looked cold.”

The altarpiece which Göring acquired from the Louvre was a sumptuous affair consisting of three panels painted with nearly life-size figures against a gold background. It was by the Master of the Holy Kinship, an artist of the Cologne School of the fifteenth century. The large center panel represented the Presentation in the Temple; the right-hand panel, the Adoration of the Magi; the left-hand panel, Christ Appearing to Mary. During its recent peregrinations the central panel had cracked from top to bottom. But fortunately the cleavage, which ran through the center of the middle panel, fell in an area devoid of figures. An adroit restorer could easily repair the damage. We shifted the altarpiece to an adjoining room.

The two remaining altarpieces were works of the fifteenth century French school. One represented the Crucifixion; the other, the Passion of Christ. The Crucifixion had belonged to the Paris dealer Seligmann, whose collection had been confiscated by the Nazis. The inventory did not show the name of the former owner of the other panel. A highly imaginative composition with nocturnal illumination, it was attributed to the rare French master, Jean Bellegambe. As we carried the altarpieces into the room in which we had placed the one from the Louvre, I remarked to Lamont that for a godless fellow Göring seemed to have had a nice taste for religious subjects. The pieces of sculpture, which we added to the collection in the lower hallway, were also of devotional character: two Gothic statues of St. George and the Dragon, one of St. Barbara, and two of the Madonna and Child.

We brought three large wardrobes from our old room, placed two of them at right angles to the walls to form a partition, and set the third in a corner of the new room. The beds came next. In another hour we had the furniture arranged to our satisfaction. By the time we had added a silver lamp, borrowed temporarily from the Göring collection, and tacked up a few of our photographs, the place looked as though we had been living there for weeks.

Without Steve the loading went more slowly, but we managed to finish three trucks by two o’clock the next day. The driver of one of the escort jeeps had brought us a message from Munich that it would simplify the work at the Central Collecting Point if we dispatched the trucks in groups of three or four instead of waiting until we had six loaded. At the Alt Aussee mine we hadn’t been able to work on such a schedule because we lacked sufficient escort vehicles. We didn’t have that problem at Berchtesgaden because the shorter distance made possible a one day turnaround. The jeeps could easily make the round trip in half a day. Accordingly, we sent off our second convoy that afternoon. The trucks contained the rest of the books—forty-three cases in all—sixty-five paintings and fifteen of the larger pieces of sculpture.