The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [118]
52
GOERING ON THE RUN
Goering had begun shipping his treasures from Carin Hall in January 1945, after careful consultation with his chief art consultant. What he could not send away, he buried in trenches scattered around the sprawling grounds of his estate. His silver vanished under the earth, as did much of his wine collection and a marble statue of Venus. To ensure that the hiding places stayed secret, Goering sent the soldiers who had done the digging to the deadly fighting on the Russian front.
The loot that Goering squirreled away underground was, compared with the rest, only bits and pieces. Convoys of trucks loaded with art shuttled from Carin Hall to a nearby railroad station. In the meantime, engineers planted explosives throughout the enormous house, to make sure that when the conquerors arrived they would be deprived of this splendid trophy.
When he was not pondering places to hide his art, Goering turned his attention to military affairs. With the war going badly, he issued a handful of death sentences to German officers for desertion and cowardice under fire. He ordered one Luftwaffe general shot for using military trucks to carry huge quantities of champagne, cigarettes, and coffee to his home in Germany. The condemned man, Goering charged, had even stolen art! “From one private house in Serbia he stole valuable works of art: a watercolor, a carpet, and two vases.”
The prizes of Goering’s collection filled two private trains outfitted with eleven extra boxcars. Once his trains were safely loaded, Goering shot four bison from his private menagerie (presumably to keep the animals, too, from enemy hands), signaled for his chauffeur, and drove off. A few hours later, the engineers set off their dynamite charges and Carin Hall exploded into rubble.
By the spring of 1945, Germany lay in ruins. Hitler cowered in his bunker, crazy or close to it, while the Allies marching from the west and the Red Army marching from the east came ever closer to Berlin. On April 23, as rumors and panic spread, Goering sent Hitler a telegram. Unless he received orders to the contrary, “I as your deputy…assume immediately total leadership of the Reich.” Martin Bormann, Hitler’s closest aide and Goering’s sworn enemy, screamed to Hitler that Goering was attempting a coup. Bormann sent out two telegrams of his own. The first, in Hitler’s name, informed Goering that Hitler, and Hitler alone, remained fully in charge of Nazi Germany. The second, from Bormann to two SS commanders, ordered Goering arrested for treason. The orders were impossible to misinterpret. “YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS WITH YOUR LIVES,” the telegram read.
Against this backdrop, no one quite knew what had become of Goering’s stolen art. Even in quiet times, the logistics would have been complicated—three trains had left Carin Hall headed toward Nuremberg, and another art-filled train had pulled out of Berlin. But as Germany fell apart, so did Goering’s plans. The wonder was that Goering’s scheme worked as well as it did. “The German army was retreating on all fronts in utter chaos,” wrote one historian. “Wounded German soldiers were everywhere. Some were trying to save themselves on horse-pulled wagons. Others, the unlucky ones, remained lying in the mud and snow, dying a slow death where they had fallen because there was not any means of transporting them to safety. In the midst of all this suffering, Goering had commandeered two primary and two secondary trains in full operation for the plea sure of his personal entourage.”
In the end, the trains came to rest in the mountain town of Berchtesgaden, Germany, near Salzburg and the Austrian border. Berchtesgaden had long served as