The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [115]
No one on the Allied side knew—perhaps, in their panic, the Nazis themselves did not know—just what the point of the hiding was. Did the Nazis dream that somehow they could cling to what they had taken, or was their goal to protect their stolen art from bombs, or did they simply mean to deprive their enemies of what they could not keep for themselves? Quite likely the attempt to cling to their treasure was more a reflex than a plan, like a shipwreck victim’s clutching a bag of gold coins as the waves close around him.
“At the height of its war effort,” the journalist Janet Flanner wrote a few years afterward, “the United States had almost three million men under arms in the European Theater of Operations. Exactly one dozen men out of these millions were functioning…as a rarissimo group known as Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives.” Unlikely soldiers, most of the so-called Monuments Men were art historians, curators, and artists. In the chaos of war, their almost impossible task was to do their best for the preservation of art—to try to keep to a minimum the number of cathedrals flattened and paintings grabbed as souvenirs or chopped into pieces for kindling.
Shortly after the Nazis surrendered, the number of Monuments Men reached a peak of perhaps eighty. They came from the Fogg Art Museum and the Met, the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery, and universities large and small. With the fighting ended, their mission changed—now they were engaged in an Easter egg hunt to find works of art hidden across an entire continent—but their task still dwarfed their numbers. The whereabouts of tens of thousands of paintings and sculptures, including Goering’s prized “Vermeer,” were unknown. Ill-equipped, the art men thumbed rides and commandeered bicycles and chased down countless rumors, terrified that they would arrive too late at a bonfire set by the Nazis and fueled with Raphaels and Rembrandts and Titians.
In April and early May 1945, American soldiers found hidden troves of art at fifty-three different locations in Germany. Each was an Aladdin’s cave crammed with treasure. Many of the biggest finds came about through happenstance, the product of a wrong turn or an overheard conversation. On the night of May 5, for instance, a chance meeting between an American military policeman and two Frenchwomen ended up in the discovery of a salt mine crammed with art and Nazi gold.
The MP, a private named Mootz in Patton’s Third Army, had stopped two women out after curfew. The women had wandered out of a displaced persons camp near Merkers, Germany, and they had no papers. It was an emergency, they told Mootz. A woman in the camp was about to give birth; they had to find a midwife. Mootz, dubious, hustled the women back to where they belonged. The Frenchwomen chattered the whole way, something about the baby, and they asked Mootz a strange question—what did the Americans plan to do about the mountain of gold in the salt mine?
Mootz relayed the story to his superiors. They asked around. “Everybody in town was amazed at such ignorance,” recalled the Australian journalist Osmar White. “Of course there was treasure in the salt mine—the gentlemen in charge of it were staying at the local hotel! And so they were—three prim men in black clerkly coats, wearing eyeglasses and short haircuts. They were frank. They disclosed all with an air of undisguised relief.”
White tagged along with the first American party to investigate the Merkers salt mine. The journalist and several officers squeezed into a tiny elevator that rattled its way into the blackness. Twenty-one hundred feet below the ground, they stepped into a passageway where a sign on the wall read, “Heil Hitler!” They set out down a long hall and eventually arrived at an enormous cavern that stretched fifty yards and had train tracks running down its center. On both sides of the tracks, all the way to the deepest part of the cave, canvas bags stood in knee-high piles, row upon endless