The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [116]
An officer pointed at the bags. “Open one of them,” he commanded. Someone reached into a bag and dragged out a gold brick. Fifty pounds, maybe? The gold, it turned out, had been brought from Berlin a few weeks before. Huge teams of slave laborers had staggered into the mines carrying bags of gold, trip after trip, for seventy hours. White began counting: 4,522 bags in all. He calculated for a minute. Something on the order of 100 tons of gold.
Down another passageway, White looked into a room filled with countless neatly labeled sacks of paper money. “At the end of the stack was a small, gentle-faced man in a rumpled gray suit, sitting disconsolately on a couple of million dollars.” This was Paul Rave, curator of the German state museum. “With weary courtesy,” White wrote, “he showed us crate after crate of Greek, Chinese, and Egyptian ceramics, packing cases full of canvases by Menzel, Dürer, Manet, Constable, Raphael, Titian, Van Dyck, Leonardo da Vinci.” The crates stood in stacks on the floor. Occasionally a bit of salt sprinkled down from a cave wall.
51
THE DENTIST’S TALE
The soldiers of Patton’s Third Army made the next colossal find, too, and if anything it was even more of a fluke. It began with a toothache. Lincoln Kirstein would go on to a renowned career that included such milestones as co-founding the New York City Ballet (with George Balanchine), but in May 1945 he was a private in the U.S. Army, and a Monuments Man. The army had reached Trier, Germany. Kirstein’s captain had a throbbing wisdom tooth. The private’s job was to find a dentist.
Kirstein wandered into the streets and beckoned a young boy over to him. They had no common language, but Kirstein puffed out his cheeks and moaned, to mime a toothache. For a payment of three sticks of gum, the boy grabbed Kirstein’s hand and led him down the street to a doorway beneath a large painted picture of a tooth. The dentist spoke English, and he liked to talk. He took care of Capt. Robert Posey’s tooth and then settled in for a gabfest. What were the Americans up to? Protecting art? Really? What an astonishing coincidence—would you believe that my daughter’s husband is in the art preservation line, too?
The dentist led Kirstein and Posey to meet his son-in-law, who proved as talkative as the old man. For twenty minutes, though, the talk never got beyond chitchat. In a study lined with art books, Hermann Bunjes talked about his academic career—he had studied in Bonn and at Harvard. Bunjes and Kirstein swapped anecdotes about Harvard and the art world. Had Kirstein known Kingsley Porter? And his lovely wife? “I tried to decipher his face,” Kirstein wrote later. “Kind? Dangerous? Servile? Clever?”
Finally, over Courvoisier, the truth emerged. Bunjes sent his wife out of the room and then admitted that he had spent the war in Paris with the SS, helping Hitler and Goering identify art suitable for stealing. Bunjes, one historian would later write, “was almost the nastiest piece of goods in the game.” Now that he had decided to talk, he laid out all the ugly secrets of his trade. He handed Posey and Kirstein detailed catalogs of looted artwork, listing titles, sizes, and “purchase” prices. And had his visitors heard of the salt mine at Alt Aussee, in the mountains near Salzburg, and did they know what was stored there?
“Information tumbled out, incredible information,” Kirstein recalled, “lavish answers to questions we had been sweating over for nine months, all told in ten minutes. It must have been as great an exercise of discipline on Captain Posey’s part as on mine to betray no flicker of surprise or recognition. He almost seemed to assume we knew it anyway.”
Bunjes interrupted his torrent of talk to confide in his fellow scholars. He feared for his life. The SS was not popular. In return for the information he had provided, would the Americans guarantee him and his family safe passage out of the country?*
POSEY AND KIRSTEIN were desperate with excitement and frustration. According to Bunjes, Alt Aussee contained the best of all the Nazis