The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [119]
Goering had traveled to Berchtesgaden on April 21 to take charge of his art, but the Nazis had arrested him as soon as Bormann sent his telegram. They placed him under house arrest, first in Berchtesgaden, and later in his childhood home, Mauterndorf Castle, where he had grown up fantasizing that he was a medieval warrior.
Then, on April 30, Hitler killed himself. With no one left to forbid it, Goering ordered his chauffeur to pack the suitcases and prepare for an immediate departure. Goering, his wife, Emmy, and their young daughter climbed into the back of his black Mercedes and off they went. On roads crowded with weary, wounded soldiers, they traveled like royalty. Altogether their entourage numbered seventy-eight; two trucks were jammed full of luggage, each piece bearing Goering’s initials, and other trucks carried food and liquor and champagne.
Even with their country devastated, German soldiers cheered Goering when they caught sight of him, whooping approval and rushing over to shake his hand. In one such scrum, the head of a Seventh Army search party, an American soldier named Jerome Shapiro, spotted his man. Lieutenant Shapiro’s orders were to bring Goering in alive and unharmed. Pvt. Alfred Frye covered Shapiro with his machine gun. Shapiro stepped out of his Jeep and approached Goering’s Mercedes. Goering handed Shapiro his revolver. A week before, Shapiro had been one of the American soldiers who liberated Dachau. Now the Jew from Brooklyn took the Nazi Reich Marshal into custody.
Goering, relieved that it was the Americans rather than the Russians who had found him, offered no resistance. Operating under the delusion that he would soon be meeting with General Eisenhower to negotiate surrender terms, he settled in as if he were not a prisoner but a diplomat.
Goering was a very big fish, but Eisenhower had no intention of bargaining with him. Interrogation began on May 8, the day after the arrest. First, though, the Americans ordered Goering to remove his medals, his diamond ring, his solid gold baton, and his solid gold epaulets.
THE RED ARMY had reached Carin Hall too late, and the Allies had not immediately found Goering’s trains and their priceless cargo in the Bavarian Alps. Goering’s plan had been to unload his artwork secretly and hide it away, but the local villagers had found the trains first, hidden (unsuccessfully) in a tunnel. Improvising desperately, Goering’s curators had managed to unload a considerable stash of art inside a room deep within an air raid bunker; they sealed off the makeshift vault with cement in the hope that it would be overlooked. In the meantime, the trains were under siege. “The whole population seemed to be on their legs fighting to get into the cars,” one policeman recalled, “carrying heavy loads, sawing up big carpets, beating and scratching each other in their greed to capture a part of Goering’s heritage.”
Then the looters found Goering’s stores of champagne and wine, a prize far better than carpets and paintings. Grabbing anything they could carry, swigging from upturned bottles, the rioters staggered off with their finds. The Monuments Men had yet to learn of the trains’ whereabouts. Goering knew, but he had not told his captors. The Americans had decided to wean him off the morphine he was addicted to, and he was sullen and only fitfully cooperative. Even so, a Monuments Man named James Rorimer—destined one day to become director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—had primed Goering’s interrogators with questions to ask. On the night of May 13, Goering and an officer named Zoller stayed up drinking until one in the morning. Goering’s mood improved as the night wore on. The last time he had seen his art, he eventually told Zoller, his train was in a railway tunnel near Berchtesgaden. Zoller relayed the information to Rorimer.
The Americans and the French were already in the vicinity, and the French happened on the looted trains. Not much interested, they sprayed one car with machine