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By Root 1690 0

’ stolen paintings and sculptures, the ones expressly intended for Hitler’s museum. The treasures had been well cared for in their underground home. Platoons of workmen had built thousands upon thousands of storage shelves, four tiers high in some places. The mine itself was a good repository for art because its temperature and humidity scarcely varied throughout the year. But the Nazis had supposedly given orders that the mountain and all its contents be blown to bits if that was necessary to keep Hitler’s possessions out of enemy hands. Alt Aussee had no particular military value, but Posey bombarded the commanders of the Third Army with urgent pleas to race into the Alps and up to the mine.

By the time Kirstein and Posey reached Alt Aussee, American military engineers were already at work defusing explosives. The mine was cold and gloomy, a mysterious kingdom unto itself honeycombed with caverns and guaranteed to disorient outsiders. Historical documents showed that it had been worked since 1310, and presumably for centuries before that. Countless generations of miners had followed one another into the dark, and the American soldiers told one another tales of bent and inbred gnomes laboring with pickaxes and wheel-barrows.

Following a German guide, the two Monuments Men made their way half a mile down a long tunnel. Light from their lamps revealed sticks of dynamite in the walls. The guide stopped at an iron door and opened two padlocks. Kirstein and Posey stepped through the doorway and found themselves inside a cavern.

There they beheld one of the glories of Western art, eight panels of Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb, painted some five hundred years before.* The Ghent altarpiece, as it was known, had been near the top of Kirstein and Posey’s wish list. Like detectives with “missing person” photographs, the Monuments Men had shoved pictures of the missing altarpiece in front of every stranger in Europe. Months had passed while they chased down rumors that the altarpiece was hidden in a mine, or at Goering’s Carin Hall, or in a Berlin bank vault, or in Switzerland or Sweden or Spain. Now here the panels were, unwrapped but unharmed, resting atop four empty cardboard boxes in a cavern beneath a mountain. Kirstein and Posey studied the ancient paintings in the flickering light of their acetylene torches.

In another chamber in the mine the two men found Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, an almost life-size statue carved a few years after the Pietà. It lay on its side on a brown-and-white-striped mattress, wrapped in a piece of tarpaper. Both the Van Eyck altarpiece and the Michelangelo statue had been stolen from Belgium. The Madonna’s trip to Alt Aussee had been especially precarious, with the statue jouncing its way over the mountains in the back of a truck, on a mattress, while Allied bombs meant for German troops fell all around.

The largest and most remote “gallery” in the salt mine contained portions of entire looted collections as well as lone masterpieces. Here were painting upon painting stolen from the Rothschilds in France and from Goudstikker in Holland, among others, and a dizzying miscellany of Titians and Tintorettos and Van Dycks and Rubenses and Rembrandts. Statues and sculptures represented every nation and every historical epoch, from Egyptian tombs to Roman villas and French chateaux. One solitary treasure, acquired in Vienna by Hitler, stood out as perhaps the best of all. This was Vermeer’s Art of Painting.

Goering was well represented at Alt Aussee, too. In March, fifteen cases packed with art stolen from the Naples museum had arrived at the salt mine. The cases, which contained the gems of a far larger collection, had been carried off by the soldiers of the Hermann Goering Division, an elite Luftwaffe unit. The plan had been to present the works of art—including Titian’s Danaë, Raphael’s Madonna of Divine Love, and Brueghel’s Blind Leading the Blind—to the Reich Marshal as a birthday present.

George Stout, one of the most renowned of the Monuments Men, compiled a list of just