After the Reich (75 page)

Not everything was rubbished. In Silesia delighted Russian officials seized immense numbers of wireless sets. In the villas of prosperous Silesians well-stocked libraries were found, and 40,000 art books were collected and despatched back to the Pushkin Museum. In Gleiwitz there was excitement when a horde of Stradivari and Amati violins was seized, until it turned out that they were fakes. Silesia, however, was not as rich in artefacts as its soil was fertile. A Kolbe figure was located and appropriated. As they searched for booty on one estate Soviet art experts found a group of soldiers about to hang a monkey. The creature was accused of having lifted its paw in salute when they had shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ as a joke. The irony of the monkey’s response had been lost on them. The art historians rescued the beast and made it their companion.
¹²

Soviet officers - particularly Lieutenant Yevgeny Ludshuveit - were credited with saving the Schlosser of Sanssouci (the town palace was destroyed by British bombs in April). Frederick the Great’s art collection, however, went east, and a Russian officer is thought to have slashed Philip de László’s portrait of William II with a sabre.
¹³
Most of the Russian energy went into removing the best parts of the collections they found. In the old Cistercian monastery at Lehnin they found some stored works of art and organised their shipment. Frederick the Great’s first palace, Schloss Rheinsberg, was stripped of its last contents, right down to the painted over-doors. Viktor Lazarev, however, a professor of art history at Moscow University, was one who respected the architectural ensemble where possible. In Potsdam he advocated leaving paintings, sculpture, chandeliers and tapestries
in situ
, when they were conceived as part of the
Gesamtkunstwerk
. As many as 60,000 POWs were used in the evacuation of these works of art, loading them on to 90,000 railway trucks.
¹⁴

Berlin was not the only place rich in art treasure. The Russians had the run of Saxony and much of Thuringia, not to mention Pomerania and the prosperous port of Danzig. The electors and kings of Saxony had been great collectors, and the Dresden Gallery was one of the world’s foremost art museums. Part of the collection had been stored in a quarry at Grosscotta near Pirna. Among the paintings there was the
Sistine Madonna
by Raphael. The art historian Natalia Sokolova was the first to see the pictures when a German unlocked the door to the store room.

A simple goods wagon stood in the tunnel. The German handed me the candle. [Leonid] Rabinovitch turned on an electric lamp. In this twilight were glimpsed the gold frames of the pictures, that were tightly packed together. We turned our lights towards them and I felt I had gone deathly pale. Before me I could see the broad span of the eagle that bore off Rembrandt’s
Ganymede
in its claws. Rabinovitch carefully moved the painting to the right, and another appeared.

‘Do you see?’ he whispered. ‘Wonderful,’ said the German . . . what lay before me was the
Sleeping Venus
of Giorgione . . . After that came the
Self
-
Portrait with Saskia
by Rembrandt and a small, silvery landscape by Watteau, a view of
Dresden
by Canaletto, Titian’s
Portrait of a Woman in White
. . .

The conditions in the quarry were terrible: it was cold and damp: ‘The Germans had lost any moral claim to [the pictures]. Now they belonged to the Red Army.’ There was a fear that they might have to fight the Americans for them if they did not get them to their collection point at Schloss Pillnitz as quickly as possible. Marshal Koniev came to inspect the haul. He was also impressed and telegraphed Stalin to tell him that the treasure had been found.
¹⁵

There was more booty in Schloss Weesenstein. Here the Russians found the Koenig Collection that had been bought by Prince John George of Saxony, and forty-five Rembrandt etchings that had belonged to the industrialist and banker Rudolf Gutmann of Vienna and had since been earmarked for the Führer’s Museum in Linz. Only one of the etchings had been detached from the collection:
The Jewish Bride
was thought to portray too sensitive a subject.
¹⁶

More paintings from the Dresden Gallery were found at Pockau-Lengefeld by the Czech border in the fortress at Königstein and some modern masters in a house in Barnitz. In Meissen orders were given to restart production of the famous porcelain. This was not possible, however, as the
demontagniki
had made off with the equipment. The contents of the Porcelain Museum as well as some valuable paintings were stored in the old castle at the top of the hill. Also in Saxony, Leipzig’s most valuable collections had been placed in the strongrooms of banks. Nearly a hundred were found in a vault on the Friedrich-Tröndlin-Ring in October. Thirty more were found in a bank in the Otto-Schill-Strasse. The Russians took only 10 per cent of their find home, but that still amounted to over a hundred paintings. Another fifty-two came from the Coburgs’ Jagdschloss Reinhardsbrunn and the palace in Dessau. Added to the pictures were whole libraries from Friedenstein, Gotha and Leipzig. These were taken to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, together with the university libraries from Leipzig and Halle.
¹⁷

At the beginning of May a search had been made for the vanished treasures of Danzig after the Russian shelling of the old city. The hunt began in the Arsenal, where the Trophy Brigade had to brave the stench of decomposing corpses to locate their quarry. After two days they found the hiding place and unearthed treasures from the town hall and the museum. The best bits went to Russia. A few odds and ends were given to the new Polish director of the museum. In the ruins of the famous Artushof, they looked in vain for the fifteenth-century wooden relief of St George. It had been destroyed in the fire following the shelling. In the wreckage of a bank, however, they unearthed the coin collection from Marienburg, the fortress of the Teutonic Knights.
¹⁸

The Soviet forces perpetrated all sorts of theft. The most common was the pillaging which accompanied their arrival and which has never been accurately assessed. When it is considered that virtually every sewing machine, every gramophone and every wireless set went east, it can only be described as looting on a staggering scale. The trophy battalions followed on the heels of the soldiers who pinched anything that took their fancy. By 2 August 1945 these had seized 1,280,000 tons of material and 3,600,000 tons of equipment. This way they hoped to make good the losses they had incurred in the war. Officially they claimed the Germans had destroyed $168 milliard’s worth of equipment, but that figure must also have included items they destroyed themselves in their retreat.
¹⁹

It was not always the Russians who arrived first. The art historian Paul Ortwin Rave guided the MFAA to Ransbach where the Berlin State Theatre and the Opera House had stored their costumes. They found the remains of an orgy that had been enjoyed by Russian and Polish workers and prisoners together. Once their German guards had run off they had broken into the cases and dressed themselves up in costumes from
Aïda
and
Lohengrin
. They had also found a hidden fund of champagne and cognac. In their drunken state they had broken into cases containing Dürers and Holbeins, but at the sight of the saints they had fled in holy terror. The Americans took the prize to Frankfurt in their zone. It was they who located the treasure in Altaussee, as well as parts of Göring’s collection, including the sixteen cases which the Reichsmarshall had grabbed from among the pictures stored in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino and which the Germans had taken into safe keeping before the British destroyed the building.
²⁰

Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein recalled examples of the Americans’ cupidity in their zone. He was staying in his wife’s family mansion, Budingen, when the US governor of Hessen, Newman, sent word to requisition silver and furniture for his palace. They fobbed him off with tableware, which was later returned. In June 1946 Clay rebutted a charge of looting made against some of his soldiers who were accused of stealing six paintings.
²¹
Easier to verify was the theft of the Quedlinburg Bibles by American soldiers in Thuringia.
²²
The American commander in Budingen was a Captain Robinson, who swiped five pictures from the Städel Gallery in Frankfurt. ‘Robinson revealed himself as nothing more than a common thief.’ They were traced as far as Holland, whence they were in all probability shipped to the United States. They were put up for sale many years later, and the Städel was able to buy them back.
²³
Most American cases were restricted to petty larceny out of a desire for souvenirs, though occasionally a shop was looted for objects like cameras. GIs had a passion for Nazi artefacts only equalled by the Soviet
soldateska
- as they advanced through Germany they trashed each SS barracks in the pursuit of flags and swastikas. There was also a celebrated case when two officers of the Women’s Army Corps were tried for stealing $1,500,000 worth of jewellery from Princess Mary of Hesse, a fantastic sum then.
²⁴

Captain Frank M. Dunbaugh took the 50,000 tin and lead soldiers that were the pride of the Hirtenmuseum in Hersbruck in Franconia. They represented the armies that went to war in 1914. In an effort to relocate the soldiers the town contacted President Eisenhower, who promised his support. Some 500 of the figures were tracked down in Texas. When Dunbaugh was asked his excuse for ‘liberating’ them he replied that it was to ‘deglamorize the Hitler war machine in every way possible’. Theft was therefore justified by JCS 1067. In 1958 another 20,000 of the soldiers were located and eventually shipped back to Hersbruck. An attempt to force the Americans to compensate the museum for the rest fell on deaf ears.
²⁵

The Americans were not all thieves. In Wiesbaden they organised a Central Collecting Point for Jewish paintings and books stolen by the Nazis. It was run by Theodor ‘Ted’ Heinrich, later professor of art history at the University of Toronto. Surviving Jews could apply to retrieve their belongings there. The Americans also located a favourite grey that had belonged to Queen Wilhelmina of Holland and which had been seized by the Germans during the occupation of her country. In the confusion at the end of the war, the horse had been given to a circus. The Americans returned the animal to its mistress who had it saddled in order to form part of a parade. When the music struck up, the horse got up on its hind legs and began to dance, a trick it had learned in the circus. Her majesty was not amused and the horse was put out to grass.
²⁶
Queen Wilhelmina might have been more grateful that the horse had not been eaten by hungry Germans or DPs. In Munich Carl Zuckmayer reported that Poles had stolen the world’s sole porcine tightrope walker, once the pride of Althof’s travelling circus - they had then slaughtered it and had it for dinner. When the owner tried to prevent the Poles from killing his beloved pig he nearly lost his own life as well. Althof had had the hog insured abroad and apparently received no compensation for his loss.
²⁷

There were acts of common theft perpetrated by the British too. At the Krupp residence, Villa Hügel in Essen, an inquiry carried out in 1952 revealed that property valued at two million marks had been purloined during the occupation. Much of it was later found in Holland, where it was waiting to cross the Channel. The greatest scandal surrounding the British Zone was the use of Schloss Bückeburg, home of the Schaumburg-Lippe family, by the RAF. The process was begun by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, whom the art historian Ellis Waterhouse compared to Göring in his acquisitiveness. Coningham removed and distributed enormous quantities of valuable silver, furnishings and
objets d’art
from the Schloss, and much of it later remained unaccounted for. The affair led to the resignation of the military governor, Marshal of the RAF Sir Sholto Douglas.
²⁸

The British lagged behind the Russians and the Americans in purloining art works, but they had their own brand of organised theft in T-Force, which sought to glean any industrial wizardry hatched under the Nazis and bring it home to Britain. The Russians and the Americans were equally guilty on this score, but, as George Clare puts it, they ‘preferred the inventors to the inventions’, while the British were too hard up to feed their boffins. In Cuxhaven, however, they learned what they could about the workings of the V2, and they made off with all the German naval equipment they could find. One of the things that Clare saw at the Askanier Works when he was interpreting there was a prototype tape recorder.
²⁹
In January 1947 the British launched Operation Matchbox designed to lure German scientists to their zone, but they were even less efficient than the French; and the Americans had the pick of them.
³⁰
As one American put it, ‘The British and the Russians have got hold of a few German scientists . . . but there can be no doubt that we have captured the best.’
³¹

The Allies stole men and women who for one reason or another were useful for their projects. Under the pretext of accusing them of seeking to develop an atomic bomb, bacterial warfare, space travel and guided missiles, the British and Americans arrested a number of nuclear physicists and had them brought to England in what was meant to be a species of joint enterprise.
³²
These included Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg and Max von Laue. With the exception of Heisenberg, the men were found in Hechingen in Württemberg, where they had been working on their uranium piles, drawn from the mines of Joachimsthal in the Sudetenland. Heisenberg was discovered in his family skiing chalet in Upper Bavaria. Others, such as Richard Kuhn and Wolfgang Gertner, were apprehended in Heidelberg. Some of the smaller fry were taken by the British in Hamburg.