The Altaussee salt mine, deep in the Salzkammergut alps of Austria, was the central evacuation depot for the Führermuseum Linz collection and for substantial parts of Göring’s personal art collection from spring 1944 onwards. The mine had been chosen because the temperature inside the salt workings was a constant eight degrees Celsius and the humidity a stable seventy five per cent. Painting and sculpture would be safer there than in any heated and air-conditioned modern museum. The mine could not be bombed. The galleries went four hundred metres into the mountain. By May 1945 the mine held around six thousand five hundred paintings, two hundred and thirty drawings, one hundred and thirty seven sculptures, and around eighty thousand books, plus tapestries, furniture and decorative objects. The most important works in the holding included Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges, the Ghent Altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, Vermeer’s Astronomer, the Várad chalice and the Czartoryski Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo.
The mine had been requisitioned by the Sonderauftrag Linz in summer 1943 and the works moved in over the next eighteen months. The miners and the local engineers fitted out the salt galleries with wooden flooring, electric lighting, and rudimentary climate monitoring. The works were stored in wooden crates and on wooden racks in the galleries. The Sonderauftrag staff under Hermann Voss inventoried the collection room by room. The German art historian Karl Sieber, the head of restoration for the Sonderauftrag, oversaw the conservation of the works in storage and is the source of much of the surviving documentation.
In late April 1945, with American forces approaching, the local Gauleiter, August Eigruber, an Austrian Nazi from Linz, received what purported to be a Führer order to dynamite the mine and destroy the contents. The order, codenamed Nero, instructed Eigruber to ensure that nothing of value fell into the hands of the enemy. Eigruber took the order at face value. He had eight crates, each containing one tonne of high explosives, taken into the mine and placed in the central galleries. The crates were labelled Vorsicht, Marmor, nicht stürzen, Caution, marble, do not drop, in an attempt at concealment.
The miners and the regional officials saved the collection. The mine director Emmerich Pöchmüller, the chief mine engineer Eberhard Mayerhofer, the regional Austrian SS officer and resistance member Albrecht Gaiswinkler, and the local Wehrmacht commander Otto Högler, working in different and overlapping ways, conspired to undo Eigruber’s plan. Pöchmüller and Mayerhofer falsified the explosives inventory and persuaded Eigruber’s men to remove the crates from the central galleries on the pretence that they were being repositioned. The miners then carried the crates out of the mine and hid them in the surrounding forest. Gaiswinkler, who had been parachuted into the area by Allied special forces in early April 1945 with orders to organise a local resistance, met with the miners and the regional officials and helped to coordinate the operation. The mine entrances were sealed with smaller charges that collapsed the access tunnels but did not damage the galleries containing the art. The damage was repaired in a few weeks. The collection was saved.
American forces of the Third Army’s 80th Infantry Division reached Altaussee on 8 May 1945, the day of the German surrender. Monuments Men officers, including Lieutenant Robert Posey and Private First Class Lincoln Kirstein, opened the mine on 12 May 1945 and began the inventory. The inventory took several months. The works were transferred over the next year to the Munich Central Collecting Point, which the Americans had set up in the Führerbau and the Verwaltungsbau on the Königsplatz, the same buildings in which Hitler had personally inspected the Führermuseum acquisitions during the war. From Munich, the Monuments Men returned the works to the countries of origin under the Allied policy of external restitution.
August Eigruber was arrested by American forces in May 1945, tried at Dachau in May 1946, convicted of war crimes related to atrocities at Mauthausen and the Mauthausen sub-camps, and hanged on 28 May 1947. His attempted destruction of the Altaussee collection was raised at his trial as a separate count and contributed to the death sentence. The miners and engineers who had saved the collection were honoured by the Austrian state and by the various countries to which the works were eventually returned. Pöchmüller and Mayerhofer received the Cross of Merit of the Republic of Austria. Gaiswinkler was elected to the Austrian parliament after the war and served as a Social Democratic member from 1945 to 1949.
Altaussee is now a working salt mine and a tourist attraction. The galleries that held the Führermuseum collection are open to visitors. A small commemorative installation marks the spot where the explosives had been placed.
See also
- Fuhrermuseum Project
- The Monuments Men
- Adolf Hitler
- Hermann Göring
- The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg
- The Washington Principles 1998
- The Gurlitt Collection
Sources
- Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men, Center Street, 2009
- Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa, Knopf, 1994
- Konrad Kramar, Mission Michelangelo: Wie die Bergleute von Altaussee Hitlers Raubkunst Retteten, Residenz, 2013
- Lincoln Kirstein, Memoirs, manuscript at the New York Public Library Performing Arts collection
- Robert Posey, papers, Monuments Men Foundation archive
- Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Sonderauftrag Linz files, B 323