Trophies of War Page 9

  Inside was a vast, empty hall with the biggest fireplace Clark had ever seen, clearly meant to burn whole logs. Mahogany paneling covered the walls up to an ornately decorated ceiling. DeLuca knelt down in front of the marble hearth and poked among the ashes.

  “Jim,” he said. “Come have a look at this.”

  DeLuca moved chunks of charcoal aside and showed that there were scraps of burned uniforms and quite a bit of paper. He held up one unburned corner of a document with a signature clearly visible: a jagged, lightning bolt shape followed by a florid H and a scribble. It was Hitler’s signature.

  Oh, no, Clark thought. The ERR records. They’ve burned them all.

  “Looks like just fabric and papers, though,” DeLuca added. “Nothing else.”

  “If it’s the detailed records Valland told me about, that’s bad enough,” Clark said, dejected. “Let’s look around and see how much worse it can get.”

  With a vision of burned canvases, smashed marble and scorched tapestries in his mind, Clark led the three men up a dark stone staircase to the apartments on the second floor. The first landing opened up to a hallway with doors on either side. The Kemenate was more like a large house than a palace, and the second floor looked like any other bedroom wing. Clark pushed open the first door on his right.

  It was packed, floor to ceiling, with wooden crates. They were all unopened and intact. Several had labels with family crests or the names of Paris art dealers, all with ERR initials stenciled over them.

  Just as Rose Valland had said there would be.

  “God damn,” Piper exclaimed. “Look at all that loot. Just like that salt mine up north.”

  “No,” Clark said in a quiet voice. “This is different. Merkers was full of museum pieces evacuated underground. This is stolen property. Inside these boxes are works that once hung on someone’s wall in their house or sat on a mantlepiece. People who probably ended up in a concentration camp or worse.”

  In the next room, the walls were lined with wooden filing cabinets. In them Clark found over 20,000 catalog cards containing records of every confiscation the ERR had made in the occupied countries. There were also shipping books with entries for each shipment sent from France, Belgium and the Netherlands and every shipment from one ERR repository to another. In typical German fashion, the Nazis had kept meticulous records of every transaction. Finding the cache of stolen artworks was good, but finding the ERR archive was better. If an object wasn’t here, Clark would be able to find out where it was.

  In other rooms, he found over 8,000 negatives of looted works, endless boxes of silver and jewels, thousands of paintings, 39 photo albums of stolen art; the Nazis had even left behind the rubber stamps they had used to mark crates and individual artworks. In tunnels below the castle they found even more.

  The fairy tale castle of Neuschwanstein may not have had a princess or a dragon, but it was full of treasure.

  10

  College Park, Maryland

  “Here … on their website you can search the online catalog of the Archives,” Beth said, her tablet computer on the restaurant table. “I’ll search on ‘ERR’ … there we go. See that?”

  She turned her tablet around so Lyon could read the screen. There were three search results halfway down the page that referenced “Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.”

  “Look at the last one,” she said.

  “ ‘ERR Card Files,’ ” Lyon read aloud.

  “That’s what you want. The MFAA found them, along with tons of art and other looted objects, at Neuschwanstein Castle near the Austrian border….”

  “That’s the one that looks like Sleeping Beauty’s castle in Disney, right?” Lyon interrupted.

  “You got it,” Beth replied. “The one in California … Disney World, Disneyland? Anyway, the card files have a record of every single piece of looted art. Many have the complete provenance as well.”

  “Provenance,” Lyon replied. “That’s like the ownership history for an artwork.”

  Beth nodded. “Yes, it’s a chain of custody, if you will. If there’s a record of your mother’s painting anywhere, it will be on one of those cards. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a card for the painting. If we’re really lucky, it will have the provenance with it so we can prove that it went from Manet to your mother’s family.”

  “ ‘We’? ” Lyon asked with an arched eyebrow.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Beth replied, snapping the case shut on her tablet. “You got me hooked, mister. Pay the bill and let’s head over to the Archives. First record pull time is at ten.”

  Lyon was back to watching microfilm scroll by, but this time he felt like it was more than guesswork. Thanks to Beth, he had a way to narrow his search. They had checked out the forty or so rolls of microfilm containing ERR records and now sat side by side in two microfilm carrels.

  Beth had suggested they scan for ‘Manet’ but also for ‘Zitrone,’ ‘Blumen’ and ‘Silberplatte,’ German for ‘lemon,’ ‘flowers’ and ‘silver plate.’ After two hours of this with nothing to show but eyestrain, Lyon’s enthusiasm was wearing off again.

  “Look … I’m sure you have other things to do. You don’t have to stay,” he said to Beth as they broke for lunch. “I’m not sure I want to stay.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby,” she replied, punching him in the shoulder. “Come on, the cafeteria here isn’t terrible.”

  Three hours after lunch they were still at it, card after card sliding by on the screens, when Beth poked her head around the divider that separated the two carrels.

  “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” she asked.

  “Lunel, why?”

  “Come here,” Beth said, grabbing his sleeve and pulling him over. She pointed at the screen. “Look.”

  Lyon leaned in to read the small text on what felt like the ten thousandth card he’d seen that day. He read the now-familiar German terms: Künstler for Artist, Inventar-Nr. for Inventory Number. This one had an Inventory Number of L-14. The Artist was listed as Manet.

  Beth was pointing at Beschreibung—Description. It read Vase mit lila Orchideen und Silberplatte mit geschälten Zitrone.

  Vase with purple orchids and silver plate with peeled lemon.

  “Holy shit,” Lyon exclaimed. “My mother never said orchids—just purple flowers—but this has to be it!”

  “Right,” Beth replied. “Not likely that a little girl knows what an orchid is, just that it’s a flower. Keep reading.”

  Further down the card was ‘Aus der Sammlung’—from the collection of—‘David Lunel.’

  “That’s my grandfather!” Lyon shouted. “That’s him!”

  A researcher across the room shushed him. Lyon met the woman’s dirty look with one of his own.

  “That has to be it,” Lyon said to Beth in a quieter voice. “This means it’s real.”

  Beth thought for a moment. “Well … yes, it means that there was a painting of orchids and a lemon that the Nazis attributed to Manet. And it means that it did come from your grandfather’s collection in France … ”

  “But?”

  “But … we still don’t know if it was really a Manet. The Nazis, for all their pretensions of cultural superiority, often didn’t know what they were looking at. They were fooled by fakes and forgeries again and again.”

  And a fake will be worth nothing, Lyon thought. But … only one way to find out.

  “But, whatever,” she continued. “The point is to get your mother’s painting back for her, whether it’s a genuine Manet or not.”

  “Right … yeah,” he replied. “So, now what?

  Beth pulled out her tablet and opened the web browser. She typed ‘Manet lemon orchid vase silver’ into a search engine. The only results were another painting Manet had done of a lemon on a silver plate, and his Olympia painting which was of a nude woman with an orchid in her hair. She then opened up the archives.gov site again and searched for the same words. Only ‘Manet’ got any hits.

  “N
o online record of a Manet with orchids and a lemon,” Beth said. “We can keep searching through the ERR records and see if we find the paper trail of what happened to the painting after the Nazis got their hands on it.”

  “Oh, joy … more microfilm,” he replied with an eye roll.

  “Toughen up,” she said. “There’s no other way than what we’re doing, and we’ve only scratched the surface.”

  Beth pressed the button to rewind the microfilm and took the spool off the machine.

  “The Nazis’ obsessive attention to detail is going to help us,” she said. “The ERR kept records for each work of art and what they did with it. Manet would have been considered degenerate, so they wouldn’t have kept it for themselves. They would probably have sold it so they could use the proceeds to buy something they did want. We just need to look at the shipping records and see what dealer they sent it to. Then we’ll have something to go on. We can look for auction records, bills of sale, et cetera.”

  She checked the printed index and found the spool with the shipping records on it. After an hour of reading pages of shipping records from the Jeu de Paume, Lyon stopped Beth’s hand from advancing the microfilm.

  “There,” he said. “ ‘Zitrone und Orchideen.’ ”

  “Yep. Crate G46,” Beth read. “Hmm. ‘G46 Rot.’ What does that mean? The crate is red? ‘Reichsmarschall Goering Zug.’ Hermann Goering’s private train. Weird that he would have crated up ‘degenerate art’ … look at these other paintings in here: Pissarro, Cézanne. But … look at the date. August 15th, 1944. That was right before the Liberation of Paris. They were probably in a hurry and just loaded everything up on Goering’s train so they could get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “So my mother’s painting ended up in Goering’s hands?” Lyon asked.

  “Maybe,” Beth replied. “The good news is, we can check that too. Goering was captured by the Army at the end of the war and they found his collection in several places. It should be in the MFAA records or in the Art Looting Investigative Unit records—those are here, too. First, let’s check the Monuments Men reports to see if they found your mother’s painting at Neuschwanstein.”

  The MFAA had prepared a complete inventory of every object found in Neuschwanstein Castle. Lyon didn’t think he could stand to look at one more piece of microfilm, but he and Beth split the work so that they could get through the entire list before the Archives closed at five. They found nothing.

  “OK,” Beth said, rubbing her eyes. “We know that this lemon and orchids painting was shipped out of Paris. It was on Goering’s train and didn’t make it to Neuschwanstein with the other ERR loot that Clark found there.”

  “So where does that leave us?” Lyon asked.

  “Well, we need to check the records of what the Monuments Men and the ALIU found when they captured Goering and his collection,” she replied. “Then … I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” Lyon repeated.

  “Look,” Beth said. “I should remind you that this all may be for naught. We might strike out with the rest of the archive here and find no other mention of your mother’s painting. It could have been destroyed or it could have been picked up by a soldier as a souvenir … who knows. Plus, there were lots of mines and castles in Germany where art was found stashed away … ”

  Lyon caught the look on her face—she was staring without seeing.

  “What?” he asked.

  “There is one other possibility,” she said.

  “Yes … what is it?”

  “The Russians.”

  11

  Dresden, Germany

  May, 1945

  The hole in the ground must have been an air raid shelter since there was a line of burned corpses at the entrance, all piled up as if they were fighting to get in. One of the charred bodies was probably a woman—its arms encircled two small blackened lumps that had likely once been children. Even though the Anglo-American fire bombing had happened three months ago, Natalia Zharova thought the city still smelled like charcoal and roasted meat. Strange that no one had cleared those bodies after all this time. Dresden, once considered the Florence on the Elbe, was now the devastated symbol of total war.

  Zharova noticed movement out of the corner of her eye and spotted an old woman and a young girl poking their heads up from the rubble across the street. The lines on the woman’s face were accentuated by the dirt and grime; the girl’s face was strangely yellow. She had probably smeared her face with egg yolk, as many of the young German girls had done in recent weeks to affect a sickly look. Zharova met the old woman’s eyes and put a finger to her lips to signal for her to stay quiet.

  They did stay quiet, but it did them no good. The drunken band of soldiers behind Zharova let out a whoop when they saw the pair. One of them gave the familiar shout of “Uri! Uri! Hitler kaputt!” as they staggered onto the rubble, then down into what was once the cellar of a flattened building. At the sound of women and girls screaming, Zharova turned and went back the way she had come.

  Red Army soldiers, the men of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, wandered the destroyed streets of Dresden, desecrating corpses, digging through the rubble for souvenirs or survivors and drinking—always drinking. A corporal was weaving his way down the street, his platoon-mates following. He sang a song about apologizing to the political officer for getting wounded and promising that in the next battle, he would be sure to die twice for the motherland. When he spotted the burned bodies Zharova had seen, he burst out laughing.

  “Mother!” he shouted. “You forgot to take the roast out of the oven!”

  The rest of the platoon fell all over themselves, cackling.

  Zharova was careful to show no expression, hiding her disgust for these barbaric men. She simply walked past as if they weren’t there, as hard as they were to ignore. It wasn’t just their unruly behavior—they were a sorry-looking mess. After four years of brutal fighting, their uniforms were little more than rags held together by thread. Lice-ridden and filthy, the soldiers gave off an odor that managed to rise above the stench of the burned city.

  The platoon’s dead-eyed sergeant noticed her and managed a half-hearted nod.

  “Major,” he mumbled.

  Zharova quickened her pace, lest the platoon take note of her brand-new uniform and question her. Unlike the hardened veterans around her, she had only been in the Army for three months, receiving her rank and uniform in Leningrad as she had rushed to board a train for the front. At barely 150 centimeters tall, Zharova was not the imposing Red Army officer her rank suggested. She hid her long black hair under her peaked cap to avoid looking completely ridiculous—like a little girl playing soldier, even though she was approaching fifty. She didn’t expect or want respect from the front line soldiers, she just wanted to be left alone.

  Zharova walked west toward her destination, following the Elbe which she could see beyond the piles of scorched brick and stone. She found herself in a crater-ridden plaza, cobblestones thrown everywhere, and stopped. She had studied her map of Dresden and, even with the complete destruction, she knew where she was. The two stone shards towering above her were all that was left of the Frauenkirche, the 18th century Church of Our Lady. The shattered piece on her left had a slight curve at the top, giving a hint of the massive sandstone dome that once stood 96 meters high. Zharova spent a moment reflecting on what had been lost to European civilization in just two days of bombing, waiting for feelings of sadness or regret to come. They did not, and so she moved on.

  Further west, she found what she had been looking for. She also found something that she had hoped to avoid, or rather someone—her commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Veselovsky. He was standing in the street with the three other members of her brigade.

  Veselovsky had only been a Lieutenant Colonel for as long as Zharova had been a major—their entire brigade had received their commissions and uniforms on the same Leningrad train platform. Yet here he was, summoning his most condesce
nding, imperious attitude for a confused-looking captain the four of them had come upon in the street. Unlike the rest of the Commission officers, he looked like a colonel—powerfully built, and taller than almost every other man in the Red Army. What was worse—he knew that he looked the part and never missed an opportunity to play it. As Zharova got closer, she could hear Veselovsky berate the man.

  “ … not your responsibility, Comrade Captain, it is mine. It is I who have been sent here by the Extraordinary State Commission on the Registration and Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascists Occupiers and their Accomplices and the Damage done by Them to the Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises and Institutions of the USSR.”

  Zharova suppressed a groan at Veselovsky’s use of the Commission’s full name. Who can even remember all that?

  The captain removed his cap and scratched his shaved head.

  “My apologies, Comrade Colonel,” he replied. “I was simply checking to be sure there were no Germans inside.”

  “What you call ‘checking,’ I call ‘about to blindly lob a grenade into a building the importance of which you know nothing!’ ” Veselovsky fired back.

  The captain shrugged, saluted and left with a bewildered look.

  “Ah, Major Zharova!” Veselovsky said as he noticed her watching him. He waved her over. “Come, come! I have found it!”

  Yes, idiot, she thought while keeping a neutral expression. You found it. And that captain found it, and now I have found it, right where every map says it should be.

  Zharova had been putting up with Veselovsky for four years now, since the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad. When she had gotten word that the artworks in the Hermitage museum were being evacuated from the city, she had volunteered to help. Veselovsky was an assistant director of the Hermitage and, while determined and heroic in defense of his museum, he was an insufferable tyrant from the beginning, ordering everybody about even when there was nothing to be done. After Zharova’s apartment was destroyed by the Luftwaffe, she moved into the basement of the museum with hundreds of others, all of them barely tolerating Veselovsky until the siege lifted in January of 1944. Now, through fate or bad luck, she was with him again.