For months I’ve been researching ideas to explain the path that the mysterious missing painting at the heart of my story might have taken when it disappeared. And, thanks to my mother, I’ve now got a solution that works.
The basics are public knowledge. During World War II, the Nazis under Hitler’s direction looted Europe of masterpieces from museums and private collections. The former house painter, rejected by Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, was intent on amassing the world’s biggest collection of fine art, and displaying it in the grandiose Führermuseum he planned to erect in his birthplace.
Works by Degas, Canaletto, Rembrandt, Bellini, Raphael, Klimt, and Van Gogh are among the masterpieces still missing. The particular painting I am focused on was stolen early in the war and taken to Berlin. From there it went east to adorn the castle of a high-ranking Nazi official. In the later years of the war, it was sent away for safekeeping and moved several times. As the invading Russian army approached, other works were sent west toward the American army – but this painting never arrived.
I’ve intensively researched the key figures in the painting’s disappearance and have several theories about who might have taken it originally. It seems to me that it could not have remained in the possession of any of these people for long. Many died in the last days of the war. Some were rounded up, imprisoned, and executed after the Nuremberg Trials. Those who survived were interrogated and certainly did not have a masterpiece hidden in their attic. At some point, I believe, the person who took the painting passed it on, and then others found or stole it again.
Germany was in chaos in the last months of World War II. My own mother has a harrowing story of her flight on foot from the Kinderlandverschickung (KLV) camp in Czechoslovakia where she had lived with other girls evacuated from Berlin for the past two years. She had just turned 13 when they left the camp on April 20, 1945, Hitler’s birthday. They walked for days to reach another school, and then after a short stopover, had to cross the Arber mountains to reach Bavaria. German soldiers were hiding in the forests of the Arber, and there was plenty of shooting still going on. After days and nights of struggling to get through the woods, their group of children ended up in a poor farming community. She remembers helping the farmers collect stones off their fields to earn a meal. Hunger was great, they cooked all kinds of weeds to make soup, and many of the girls became ill from malnutrition.
When the war ended, her group was fortunate to be picked up by American soldiers, who loaded them into trucks and transported them to a school gym. The troop that found them was made up of Black soldiers, the first Black men they had ever seen. Slowly, day by day, they found foster families for the children. My mother and another girl wound up with a farming family who cared for them all through the summer and early fall. By October, the two girls were desperate to see their families. The farmer gave them food and some cash, and they made their way toward Berlin. After days of walking, hitchhiking, and hopping freight trains, they reached a border to the Eastern zone, where a guide took them across one rainy night through fields and forests, keeping very quiet and trying to avoid any Russian soldiers. The next morning they reached a small town with trains that ran to Berlin.
In this period after the war, everything was still very disorganized, people had little to eat, and trains were used by the city people to reach the country where they hoped to find farmers who would exchange valuable items for food like potatoes, flour, and cabbage. So when a train would arrive, it was already packed full, with people hanging out the windows. Somehow the two 13-year-old girls managed to get on, and eventually reached Berlin, which lay in ruins.
My mother’s stories of this tumultuous period helped to inform my thinking about what someone with access to a valuable painting might have done with it immediately after the war. But then she did me an even bigger favor. She translated an out-of-print book for me, Asche und Rubin, the biography of an American model who married a German nobleman and lived through the war years in Germany. She too experienced the chaos at the war’s end. And deep within her story, I found an anecdote that has given me a new idea to solve the puzzle of the painting’s fate.
So thanks Mom!
Michael
