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

by Thomas Carr Howe

Neuschwanstein. Typical storage room in the castle. In adjoining room Lieutenants Howe, Moore and Kovalyak packed 2,000 pieces of gold and silver looted from M. David-Weill.

When I got back to the hotel at noon I found messages from Steve and Lamont. Steve had gone over to Unterstein to see about the repairs on his Steyr truck, the one he and Kress had spent so much time on—fitting it up as a mobile photographic unit. There was also some work to be done on the Mercedes-Benz, which had been standing idle, concealed behind a clump of bushes by the rest house, during our evacuation of the Göring collection. Steve had been right about the car; Colonel Davitt at Alt Aussee had not pressed his claim to it.

Lamont had taken off for St. Agatha in a truck borrowed from Brigade Headquarters to pick up the Hitler-Mussolini pictures.

There was also a message brought down by courier from Captain Posey’s office. It contained a list of three places in the vicinity of Berchtesgaden which should be inspected on the chance that they contained items from the Göring collection. One of them was the forester’s hut at Hintersee which I had just seen. The other two were castles in the neighborhood: Schloss Stauffeneck-Tiereck and Schloss Marzoll. I asked Major Anderson at lunch what he knew about them. He had nothing to contribute on the subject and said I’d probably draw a blank on all three. After removing the Göring things from the train, he had taken the precaution of publishing a notice to all residents of the area instructing them to declare all art works in their possession. He had done this as a means of recovering objects which might have been sequestered by Göring’s agents and objects which might have been surreptitiously removed from the train while it stood on the siding. The results had been disappointing. Only about thirty pictures had been turned in and none of them was in any way connected with Göring.

The major’s prediction was correct. Lamont, Steve and I visited the two castles the next day. In addition to their own furnishings, Schloss Stauffeneck-Tiereck and Schloss Marzoll contained only books from the University of Munich. These fruitless researches took all day. It was after five when we left Berchtesgaden.

It was raining when we reached Munich three hours later. Kress had no place to stay and it took us an hour to locate a civilian agency which provided billets for transients. The only thing they had to offer was a room for one night in a ruined nunnery on the Mathilde-Strasse. It was a gloomy place. There was no light and the windows were without glass. One of the Sisters, candle in hand, led us along a dark corridor to a small single room at the back. We followed with our flashlights. We gave Kress a box of K rations and told him we’d come back for him in the morning. Steve was of two minds about the place: on the one hand it wasn’t good enough for Kress; on the other he was impressed by the compassion of the Sisters in offering refuge to strangers. He wanted me to point out to Kress the anomaly of his being given sanctuary by the Church. I convinced him that my German wasn’t fluent enough. We thanked the Sister and went off to find ourselves a billet. We decided on the Excelsior, the hotel for transient officers. We were several miles from Third Army Headquarters, whereas the hotel was only a few blocks away.

I didn’t like driving the Mercedes-Benz around Munich, even though I had got away with it so far. The Third Army regulation forbidding officers to drive was strictly enforced. Perhaps my uniform baffled the MPs. It consisted of a Navy cap with blue cover, a British battle jacket with Navy shoulder boards, khaki trousers and black riding boots. It was my personal opinion that the MPs mistook the shoulder bars for the insignia of a Polish officer. The Poles, and the other liaison officers as well, were allowed to drive their own cars. Steve used to pooh-pooh my apprehensions about the MPs. “They’re a bunch of dumbheads,” he would say. “I ought to know. I used to be one.” All the same, he didn’t do much daytime driving around town.

Captain Posey had our next job lined up for us. We were to evacuate the records of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg—the German art-looting organization—from Neuschwanstein Castle. The job would include the removal of part of the stolen art treasures also. The captain told us that the castle contained a great quantity of uncrated objects, mostly gold and silver. They presented a serious security problem and it wasn’t safe to leave them there indefinitely. Even though the French were anxious to get everything back from Neuschwanstein, for the present they would have to be content with the gold and the silver objects and as many of the smaller cases as we could handle. It would be more practicable to ship the larger things—furniture, sculpture and pictures—direct to France by rail. This possibility was being investigated. It would save moving the things twice—first from Neuschwanstein to Munich, and then from Munich to Paris. But the records were badly needed at the Collecting Point in connection with the identification of the plunder stored there. So we were to concentrate on them and on the objects of great intrinsic value.