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

by Thomas Carr Howe

Steve suggested that we drive up to Marburg to see Captain Hancock, the Monuments officer in charge of the two great art repositories which had been established there. They were the prototype of the Central Collecting Point at Munich. However, they differed in an important respect from the one at Munich: they contained practically no loot. Virtually everything in them belonged to German museums and had been recovered by our Monuments officers from the mines in which the Germans had placed them for safekeeping during the war.

Marburg, some fifty miles north of Frankfurt, lay in the Regierungsbezirk, or government district, of Kassel, which was in turn a subdivision of the Province of Hesse. It was a two-hour drive, but we stopped en route for supper with a Quartermaster outfit at Giessen, so it was nearly eight o’clock when we arrived.

We found Walker Hancock in his office in the Staatsarchiv building. He was a man in the middle forties, and of medium height. His face broke into a smile and his fine dark eyes lighted up with an expression of genuine pleasure at the sight of Lamont and Steve. This was the first time they had seen one another since the close of the war when they had been working together in Weimar. I had never met Walker Hancock, but I had heard more about him than about any other American Monuments officer. I knew that he had had a distinguished career as a sculptor before the war and that he had been the first of our Monuments officers to reach France. He had been attached to the First Army until the end of hostilities. Lamont was devoted to Walker, and Steve’s regard for him bordered on worship. While the three of them reminisced, I found myself responding to his warmth and sincerity.

He wouldn’t hear of our returning to Frankfurt that night. He wanted to show us the things in his two depots and we wouldn’t be able to see more than a fraction of them before morning. The few that we did see whetted our appetite for more. In the galleries on the second floor we saw some of the finest pictures from the museums of the Rhineland: there were three wonderful Van Goghs. One was the portrait of Armand Rollin, the young man with a mustache and slouch hat. It belonged to the Volkwang Museum at Essen. Color reproductions of this portrait had, in recent years, rivaled those of Whistler’s Mother in popularity. Walker said that it had been covered with mold when he found it in the Siegen mine with the rest of the Essen pictures. His assistant, Sheldon Keck, formerly the restorer of the Brooklyn Museum, had successfully removed the mold before it had done any serious damage.

The second Van Gogh was the famous large still life entitled White Roses. The third was a brilliant late landscape. There were other magnificent nineteenth century canvases: the bewitching portrait of M. and Mme. Sisley by Renoir, a full-length Manet, and a great Daumier. Walker climaxed the display with the celebrated Rembrandt Self-Portrait from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum of Cologne. This was the last and most famous of the portraits the artist painted of himself.

We spent the night at the Gasthaus Sonne, a seventeenth century inn facing the old market place. The proprietor reluctantly assigned us two rooms on the second floor. They were normally reserved for the top brass. Judging from the austerity of the furnishings and the simplicity of the plumbing, I thought it unlikely that we would be routed from our beds by any late-arriving generals.

Walker met us for breakfast the next morning with word that the war with Japan had ended. Announcements in German had already been posted in several of the shop windows. Though thrilling to us, the news seemed to make very little impression on the citizens of the sleepy university town. The people in the streets were as unsmiling as ever. If anything, some of them looked a little grimmer than usual.

We drove to the Staatsarchiv building with Walker. He took us to a room containing a fabulous collection of medieval art objects. There were crosses and croziers, coffers and chalices, wrought in precious metals and studded with jewels—masterpieces of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. The most arresting individual piece was the golden Madonna, an archaic seated figure two feet high, dating from the tenth century. These marvelous relics of the Middle Ages belonged to the Cathedral of Metz. It was one of the greatest collections of its kind in the entire world. Its intrinsic value was enormous; its historic value incalculable. Walker said that arrangements were being made for its early return to the cathedral. The French were planning an elaborate ceremony in honor of the event.

It was a five-minute drive to the other depot under Captain Hancock’s direction. This was the Jubiläumsbau, or Jubilee Building, a handsome structure of pre-Nazi, modern design. It was the headquarters of the archaeological institute headed by Professor Richard Hamann, the internationally famous medieval scholar. It also housed the archives of “Photo Marburg,” the stupendous library of art photographs founded and directed by the professor. Walker was putting the resources of Photo Marburg to good use, compiling a complete photographic record of the objects in his care.