Trophies of War Page 16

  Lyon nodded. That face was not one he would soon forget.

  “What about the other two?” he asked. “Not the types I would expect to be mafia, in suit and tie. They looked more like KGB agents from a movie.”

  Beth was quiet for a moment, then she shot Lyon a guilty look.

  “They probably were KGB,” she said.

  “What the hell are you talking about? The Soviet Union is long gone, along with the KGB.”

  “They’re not called KGB anymore—it’s FSB now.”

  Lyon had a sinking feeling again.

  “More that you’re not telling me?” he asked.

  “More rumors,” Beth replied. “It was something else that I was trying to investigate—a connection between the mafia stealing trophy art and the government participating. During the Cold War there were stories about KGB agents showing up in Paris and London with art that was thought lost during the war. Also … ”

  Lyon rolled his eyes. “What?”

  “In the mid-Nineties, an official from the Ministry of the Interior was found dead near the railroad tracks in a town outside Moscow. He was investigating a series of art thefts from the Art Gulag—St. Sergius Monastery.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Lyon exclaimed. “Now is that everything? There’s nothing else that you’re not telling me? No more surprises?”

  “That’s everything,” Beth replied. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah. You’re sorry.”

  After the adrenaline let-down and a night with no sleep, Lyon put his head against the window and closed his eyes.

  “Hey! Let me see that map again,” Beth said, startling Lyon awake.

  His briefcase was on the seat between them. Lyon pulled the green book from a zippered pocket, took out the map and handed it to Beth.

  She held the map in one hand with her phone in the other, tapping at the screen.

  “What are you doing?” Lyon asked.

  “I think I’ve seen this before,” she replied. She tilted the paper so Lyon could read. “My German is terrible so I’m using a translation website. Damn German words are so long … there … ‘übersichtsplan’ is lay-out plan … art … storage … See ‘Salzberg’ there?”

  “That’s a city in Austria, isn’t it?” Lyon asked.

  “Salzburg with a u, yes, but in this case I think it means literally a Salz Berg—salt mountain.”

  She handed Lyon the map and did some more tapping on the phone’s screen. Lyon looked at the squiggly lines on the paper and realized that if Beth was right, this was the map of a salt mine.

  “Yes,” she exclaimed, showing Lyon a tiny image of the same map on her phone. “Altaussee, Austria. It was the biggest repository that the Monuments Men found. Thousands of artworks were stored by the Nazis in an enormous salt mine. This is the map of that mine.”

  Lyon looked at the green diary and again at the map.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “You just told me that the Monuments Men found the mine. So what were the Russian Trophy Brigades doing with this map?”

  16

  Merkers, Germany

  June, 1945

  Gravel crunching beneath the tires of the ZIS-5 truck was the only sound as the Russians slowly drove into the Kaiseroda mine complex. Natalia Zharova noticed tank and tire tracks everywhere, but no sign of Americans, Germans or anyone else. For such an enormous industrial site, the mine was strangely quiet.

  Nor had they had seen a single soul on the drive from Cotta. The two SMERSH men, squeezed into the cab with Zharova, boasted that there were no Germans left alive for them to see. Zharova doubted it. It was more likely that German civilians, recognizing a Russian truck and the Red Army soldier in the back, were hiding.

  They stopped the truck near the mine entrance and got out. The tall sliding doors of the metal building were open, revealing the cavernous interior, which was also quiet with no signs of anyone left behind. The SMERSH men and the soldier swung their Pepeshas by the slings and held the guns in the ready position, fingers on triggers.

  “Is anyone here?” Zharova shouted in German. Her own voice echoing off the walls was the only reply.

  “See?” one of the SMERSH men said—Zharova thought his name was Chuzhoi. “We’ve killed all the bastards! Now all that’s left is to take what our artillery hasn’t destroyed!”

  The other two men laughed.

  Zharova spotted the mine’s elevator and the generator that powered it. She ordered the soldier to see if the generator would start. It did, on the first try. Likely another sign that the Americans had been here.

  The four Russians entered the steel cage of the elevator. Chuzhoi took hold of the control lever and pulled, starting the motor above their heads. There was a sudden drop and the metal cable began creaking, lowering them into the shaft. Zharova switched her flashlight on as they descended into the darkness. The gray walls sparkled with salt crystals.

  Several minutes later, they came to the bottom. Bare lightbulbs hung from the ceiling, casting pools of light across the floor of a large tunnel, one that was empty but for scraps of wood, loose straw and bits of rope. The SMERSH men and the soldier charged out of the elevator and into the tunnel, beginning their search and not noticing what, to Zharova, were obvious signs that the Americans had indeed been packaging art to remove from the mine.

  Zharova followed the men down the tunnel until they came to a brick wall with a steel bank vault door and a hole blasted next to it. The Russians squeezed through.

  On the other side was a room the size of an aircraft hangar, but with a low, jagged ceiling of salt. Narrow-gauge railway tracks ran down the center of the room—the empty room.

  “This was where the Americans stole the German gold,” Chuzhoi said. “Their newspapers published many pictures celebrating their thievery.”

  Zharova said nothing, but wondered how it was that SMERSH agents in the field always knew so much about what foreigners were up to. She walked to the far end of the cave-like room where she could see the light of a tunnel that led further into the mine.

  The passageway opened up to another large room that, to Zharova’s trained eye, had obviously been used for storing something quite different than gold.

  “There was art here,” she said, pointing to the rows of empty wooden racks. She counted them and guessed that there had been hundreds of paintings here. And the racks only took up a third of the room—if the rest of the space had been taken up with art objects, then Veselovsky was very wrong. The Americans had not found ‘some few pieces of art.’ They had stumbled upon a repository at least as large as the Dresden Gallery in Cotta, if not bigger.

  Zharova ordered the men to search deeper into the mine, but she knew they would find nothing. It wasn’t just gold the Americans had taken out of this mine—they had carefully and professionally emptied this place of all its treasures. Just as she would have.

  17

  Altaussee, Austria

  June, 1945

  Dearest Lilly,

  Thank you for your letters and for sending the girls’ drawings. I see many art treasures every day, but those crayon pictures are truly priceless to me!

  The war in Europe may be over, but my work goes on. Does it ever. I’m living on fifteen minute naps and an endless stream of Army coffee. My third cup of the morning is now starting to do its job, so I thought I’d take a moment to write before Paul and I have to get to work.

  I’ve been with the Third Army, following Patton ever southward. I got to see Berchtesgaden, the Nazi alpine retreat, which was so beautiful it made me wonder why they ever came down off Hitler’s mountain. How much better off we’d all be if they had just stayed up there drinking beer and keeping their monstrous schemes to themselves!

  Ironically, I have Hermann Goering to thank for that little side trip. It seems he had a train loaded up with art from his Carinhall estate and sent it into a tunnel near Berchtesgaden. Shortly after he was captured, he told one of our interrogators about the train, saying he was concerne
d about the safety of its contents. I don’t think he really gave a damn since much of it was stolen anyway; he tried to use it as a gesture of goodwill. The train was fine—well-protected in the tunnel with the art professionally packed inside. I was hoping to find a certain special item on that train, but alas ...

  From there, it was a race to southern Germany and Austria. The big fear was of the so-called Alpine Redoubt, which everyone assumed would be the last stand of the Nazis. Reports had been coming in for months about weapons, food, gold and art stockpiled in the Alps for the Nazis to stage their comeback from their mountain fortress, dragging the war on for years. Every twisting mountain road was imagined to have a team of SS commandos around each bend. Instead, most of the Germans we saw were surrendering by the thousands and pretty cheerfully at that.

  The stockpile of art did turn out to be true. This latest find in Altaussee, Austria—in another cursed mine of course!—puts all the rest to shame. The scale is just incredible. We’re more than three weeks into the evacuation with a deadline of July 1st, but I don’t think we’re going to make it. There’s simply too much here - thousands upon thousands of objects. Yesterday, we had to start using medieval tapestries as packing material while we waited for the proper stuff to come up the mountain.

  Technically, we’re in the Soviet Zone, but the word is that the Russians aren’t really cooperating on art and archives collection or restitution. There are also rumors that they are stripping entire factories and sending them back to Moscow. So, we’re taking charge of clearing out this mine even though the job really belongs to Uncle Joe. Seems like we might have only been allies of convenience.

  I’ll spare you the details on everything I’ve seen on my ‘tour’ of this wrecked country—I’m sure you can imagine or maybe you’ve seen some of the newsreels. Whatever you think you know, I can tell you the truth is worse. The adults I don’t feel much sympathy for. They supported Hitler when he was winning and they are getting their just deserts now that he’s lost.

  It’s been the children that have really affected me. Everywhere we go now we see starving packs of them wandering around, begging for food, scratching through the rubble. It makes me think of our girls. I know they are safe at home with you, of course, but I can’t help wondering what the families of these lost children must be thinking, how they must be sick with worry and grief. If their families are even alive.

  You’ll think I’m being silly, but I’ve had little Maggie on my mind most of all. She was so small when I left that she doesn’t know her Daddy except as that man in the photograph. I’d like to write just to Maggie. Would you read it to her for me?

  Hello, Margaret. I am your father. You may not remember me, but I remember you. I remember when you were fresh and pink in the hospital nursery right after you were born. I remember how you never let your mother sleep more than two hours in a row when we first brought you home! I know that you are a beautiful and smart little girl who makes her Daddy proud. I want you to know that I think about you every day and that soon I’ll be home so that we can get to know each other again. Until then, know that I love you and Mommy and your sisters very much. I wouldn’t have been away from you for so long if it wasn’t very important, but that’s coming to an end soon and we’ll all be together and I will never leave again. Love, Daddy.

  Thank you for indulging me, dear!

  I won’t give you false hopes by speculating on when my work will be done or how soon I can come home, but I will say that MFAA headquarters has been making noises about sending some of us home for a long break. We shall see!

  Love,

  Jim

  Paul DeLuca entered the tent and saw Clark pull the letter out of his typewriter. About to speak, he waited in silence as Clark folded the paper.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” DeLuca said. “Letter home?”

  Clark nodded and affected a cough to cover up the lump in his throat.

  “Is the convoy back from Munich yet?” he asked.

  “No, but one of the ALIU guys has something for you,” DeLuca replied. “He’s waiting by the guardhouse.”

  The Art Looting Investigation Unit was an arm of the Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. intelligence agency. Its aim was to gather information on Nazi art looting operations for use in the upcoming war crimes trials. Now that the war was over, the ALIU was busy with interrogations and reports and Clark was interacting with them more and more.

  “Alright,” Clark replied. “To the guardhouse then.”

  A Navy lieutenant commander was leaning against the gray stone guardhouse, his arms folded and a garrison cap stuck under his shoulder strap. A civilian was standing next to him, looking nervous in his dusty brown suit.

  “Roger Hammett,” the Navy man said with a smile, smoothing down his blond hair. “Let’s take a stroll.”

  The four men walked across the busy mine yard, weaving their way through the men and vehicles toward the mine entrance. The towering, pine-covered Alps loomed over the facility, casting shade over everything, even on such a clear, sunny day. Hammett wasn’t saying a word, so Clark followed in silence, his curiosity growing.

  At the mine entrance, they each grabbed a carbide lamp as they went in the horizontal shaft, bored into the mountain hundreds of years ago. The clicking of the strikers echoed off the gray walls as the men lit their lamps. Clark kicked aside some rubble in the middle of the passageway, something he had done hundreds of times in the last few weeks. He didn’t even notice himself doing it anymore.

  The Altaussee mine had narrowly escaped falling victim to Hitler’s Nero Decree that anything of value in the Reich was to be destroyed lest it fall into the hands of the Allies. A local Austrian Gauleiter, a fanatical Nazi, had given the order to detonate several 500 kilogram bombs inside the mine, obliterating the art repository within. A spontaneous conspiracy of mine workers, art officials and members of the Austrian Resistance defused the bombs and destroyed the entrances to the mine so the Gauleiter would think the job had been done. Clark and the other Monuments Men, even all these weeks later, were still clearing the rubble.

  Once past the bomb damage, the men came to the first mine chamber. This was not a hasty dumping ground for art objects—it was a museum-quality warehouse, crafted with care by professionals. The Germans had build wooden floors, ceilings and row upon row of massive racks for the thousands of artworks stored in the mine’s constant temperature and humidity.

  Hammett stopped at a tall, narrow crate that had yet to be opened. He pointed at the civilian.

  “This is Georg Müller. He was in charge of filling this repository.” Hammett smiled. “I guess you could say he is your counterpart, Clark. He filled it … you’re emptying it. Anyway … Herr Müller, please tell these gentlemen what you were telling me earlier.”

  Clark held up a hand to stop Müller. “Sorry, we don’t speak German. Commander, will you translate?”

  “No need, gentlemen,” Müller said in unaccented American English. “I studied at Yale. My mother was from Chicago.”

  No one looked surprised. They had seen and heard too many strange things to be fazed by a German who seemed as American as they were.

  “Do you see this marking?” Müller asked, pointing to the crate. ‘A.H., Linz’ had been stenciled in black. “The ‘A.H.’ is for Adolf Hitler, of course, and ‘Linz’ is his hometown of Linz, Austria.”

  “We know that, yes,” Clark replied, getting impatient. “There are hundreds of crates in here marked the same way.”

  Müller gave him a condescending look that Clark thought made him seem German again.

  “Yes, but why do they say ‘A.H., Linz’?”

  Clark had been working from 0400 to 2000 every day without a break since coming to Altaussee. His patience was gone.

  “Can we please get to the point?” he asked Hammett. “What is this all about, sir?”

  Hammett told Müller to continue.

  “Hitler had agents fanned out across Europe, compiling photo alb
ums of artworks for his selection. He paid for them with money from Mein Kampf royalties and other personal funds, but of course these were not free transactions on the part of the sellers.”

  “I’m familiar with the process,” Clark interjected. “Goering did things much the same way and I’ve seen many similar crates with his initials stenciled on them as well. So what?”

  Müller chuckled. “Yes, I have seen several of those ‘H.G.’ crates here. There was always a tension between the two men when it came to who would be getting what pieces. The difference is that Goering ‘bought’ art for his own personal collection, while Hitler was gathering works to fill the great museum he envisioned - the Führermuseum.”

  The German paused for effect and saw that he had Clark’s attention.

  “The Führermuseum was to be an enormous complex in Hitler’s hometown of Linz,” he continued. “Albert Speer was to build him an opera house, a massive library, a hotel and of course an art museum. Hitler fancied himself a misunderstood artist and this museum was to be his revenge on everyone from his youth who told him he was without talent or taste. You could say that both Hitler and Goering flattered their own pretensions with the art treasures of Europe.

  “That is what Altaussee is for, among other things. In a sense, it is the Führermuseum. You are standing in it right now.”

  Clark could only shake his head.

  Hammett patted the German on the shoulder. “Thank you, Herr Müller. You may go.”

  Müller raised his lantern in a kind of salute to the three Americans and turned to go back up the mineshaft.

  “Just a second,” Clark said to Müller. “You mentioned seeing crates with Goering’s initials come through here. I haven’t seen any yet. Are they still here?”

  “As far as I know, yes,” Müller replied.

  “Any that are painted red in any way or stamped with red lettering?”

  Müller thought for a moment.

  “Perhaps,” he answered. “That does sound familiar, but as you well know, there are thousands of objects and crates in here. I can’t be sure.”