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

by Thomas Carr Howe

The steep road to the lower courtyard of the castle wound for more than a mile up the side of the mountain. At the castle entrance, the major identified us to the guard and our six trucks filed into the courtyard. In the upper courtyard, reached by a broad flight of stone steps, we found the caretaker who had the keys to the main section of the castle. He did not, however, have access to the wing in which the records of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg were stored. The only door to that part of the building had been locked and sealed by Lieutenant James Rorimer, the Monuments officer of the Seventh Army, when the castle had first fallen into American hands. We had brought the key with us from Third Army Headquarters.

Before examining those rooms, we made a tour of the four main floors of the castle. The hallways and vaulted kitchens on the first floor were filled to overflowing with enormous packing cases and uncrated furniture, all taken from French collections. Three smaller storage rooms resembling the stock rooms of Tiffany’s and a porcelain factory combined, were jammed with gold and silver and rare china. Most of the loot had been concentrated on the first floor, but the unfinished rooms of the second had been fitted with racks for the storage of paintings. In addition to the looted pictures, there were several galleries of stacked paintings from the museums of Munich. The living apartments on the third floor, divested of their furnishings, were filled with stolen furniture, Louis Quinze chairs, table and sofas and ornate Italian cabinets lined the walls of rooms and corridors. They contrasted strangely with scenes from the Wagner operas which King Ludwig had chosen as the theme for the mural decorations. Only the gold-walled Throne Room and, on the floor above, the lofty Fest-Saal, were devoid of loot.

We proceeded to the wing of the castle which contained the records. Having broken the seals and unlocked the door, we entered a hallway about thirty feet long. The doors opening onto this hallway were also locked and sealed. Behind them lay the offices of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg. They were crowded with bookshelves and filing cabinets. In one room stood a huge show-case filled with fragile Roman glass. The rooms of the second floor were full of French furniture and dozens of small packing cases. These cases were made of carefully finished quarter-sawed oak. We had seen similar ones in the Göring collection. They had been the traveling cases for precious objects belonging to the Rothschilds. These too contained Rothschild treasures—exquisite bibelots of jade, agate, onyx and jasper, and innumerable pieces of Oriental and European porcelain.

At one end of the hallway were two rooms which had been used as a photographic laboratory. We had brought Kress with us. Steve went off to make arrangements to install his equipment, while Lamont and I calculated the number of men we would need for the evacuation work the next morning. We asked the major for twenty—two shifts of ten.

The Neuschwanstein operation lasted eight days. We worked nights as well, because there were thousands of small objects—many of them fragile and extremely valuable—which we could not trust to the inexpert hands of our work party. There was no electricity in the small storage rooms, so we had to work by candlelight. It took us one evening to pack the Roman glass and the four succeeding evenings, working till midnight, to pack the two thousand pieces of gold and silver in the David-Weill collection. The Nazi looters had thoughtfully saved the well-made cases in which they had carted off this magnificent collection from M. David-Weill’s house in Paris. There were candelabra, dishes, knives, forks, spoons, snuffboxes—the rarest examples of the art of the French goldsmiths of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This unique collection had created a sensation when it was exhibited in Paris a few years before the war. The fact that the incomparable assemblage would probably one day be left to the Louvre by the eminent connoisseur, who had spent a lifetime collecting it, had not deterred the Nazi robbers. He was a Jew. That justified its confiscation. Aside from the pleasure it gave me to handle the beautiful objects, I relished the idea of helping to recover the property of a fellow Californian: M. David-Weill had been born in San Francisco. The Nazis had been methodical as usual. Every piece was to have been systematically recatalogued while the collection was at Neuschwanstein. On some of the shelves we found slips of paper stating that this or that object had not yet been photographed—“noch nicht fotografiert.”

The tedious manual labor involved in packing small objects and the great distance which the packed cases had to be carried when ready for loading were the chief difficulties at Neuschwanstein. Not only did the cases have to be carried several hundred feet from the storage rooms to the door of the castle; but from the door to the trucks was a long trek, down two flights of steps and across a wide courtyard. In this respect the operation resembled the evacuation of the monastery at Hohenfurth.

Three months after our partial evacuation of the castle, a team composed of Captain Edward Adams, Lieutenant (jg) Charles Parkhurst, USNR, and Captain Hubert de Brye, a French officer, completed the removal of the loot. This gigantic undertaking required eight weeks. If I remember the figures correctly, more than twelve thousand objects were boxed and carted away. The cases were built in a carpenter shop set up in the castle kitchens. One hundred and fifty truckloads were delivered to the railroad siding at Füssen and thence transported to Paris. It was an extraordinary achievement, carried out despite heavy snowfall. The only operation which rivaled it was the evacuation of the salt mine at Alt Aussee.

The last morning of our stay at Füssen, Lamont and I had a special mission to perform. A German art dealer named Gustav Rochlitz was living at Gipsmühle, a five-minute drive from Hohenschwangau, the small village below the castle. For a number of years Rochlitz had had a gallery in Paris. His dealings with the Nazis, in particular his trafficking in confiscated pictures, had been the subject of special investigation by Lieutenants Plaut and Rousseau, our OSS friends. They were the two American naval officers who were preparing an exhaustive report on the activities of the infamous Einsatzstab Rosenberg. They had interrogated Rochlitz and placed him under house arrest. In his possession were twenty-two modern French paintings, including works by Dérain, Matisse and Picasso, formerly belonging to well known Jewish collections. He had obtained them from Göring and other leading Nazis in exchange for old master paintings. We were to relieve Herr Rochlitz of these canvases.

At the farmhouse in which Rochlitz and his wife were living, the maid of all work who answered our knock said that no one was at home. Herr Rochlitz would not be back before noon. Lamont and I returned to our jeep and started back across the fields to the highway. We had driven about a hundred yards when we saw a heavy-set sullen-faced man of about fifty walking toward us.

“I’ll bet that’s Rochlitz,” I said to Lamont. Stopping the car, I called out to him, “Herr Rochlitz?”