Goring's Beauties

Near Berchtesgaden is a little Bavarian village named Unterstein whose normal preoccupations are tourists and farming. Today Unterstein is an art center. In a whitewashed building, once a rest center for German railway workers, the American joist Airborne Division has put on display Hermann Goring's fabulous $200,000,000 collection of art works, the creme de la creme of the loot of Europe.

After visiting Unterstein last week, TIME Correspondent Percy Knauth cabled:

This fantastic treasure was discovered by a Seventh Army counterintelligence task force which was scouring the countryside for hidden stores of bullion. They first found an empty cave built into a hillside, then Captain Harry V. Anderson found the engineer who had designed the cave. One room, the engineer said, had been walled up. The wall was broken down, and there, in dripping darkness, was the Goering treasure.

Next Captain Anderson found a stoutish, red-faced, blond-haired man named Walter Andreas Hofer. He is a former art dealer who for the last eight years has done all of Goering's buying. He identified the pictures, and told how most of the collection was acquired.

Hofer maintained stoutly that everything was destined for museums and for the benefit of the German people, and that everything was legally acquired. The story does not stand up. For. one thing, in some photograph albums of Goering's various homes, notably Karinhall near Berlin, you will see most of the paintings hung on Goring's very private walls. For another thing, Hofer's own story makes it clear that, despite all sorts of legalistic shenanigans, it was generally the pressure of Goering's name and station that finally closed the deal.

Favorite & Rival. Lucas Cranach, an early 16th-Century German master, was a Goering favorite, and he had some beauties--about 50 in all. He had a lovely Venus by Cranach, a Madonna with Child and John the Baptist, and a haunting portrait of Prince Moritz of Saxony as a boy. "It is a curious thing," Hofer added, "but that portrait has great similarity to little Edda, Goering's daughter."

There are five Rembrandts, the most valuable being a famed portrait of an old man painted in 1660, when Rembrandt took to using a knife blade and brush end instead of the straight brush technique. "I had to buy it in a hurry," Hofer said with a smile, "because Hitler's buyer was also there [in Paris], and he could have outbid me."

This seemed to smack of artistic rivalry between Hitler and Goering, and Hofer confirmed the suspicion. But it seems that Goering and Hitler eventually agreed that, since Hitler preferred 19th-Century art, he should have priority on that and Goering could have the rest.* Hitler's collections, according to Hofer, are now hidden in caves somewhere in Germany, and have not been found.

Confiscation & Formality. There were also nice differences between the manner in which Goering and Hitler acquired some of their pieces. Whereas Hitler was in a position to confiscate something "in the name of the German state"--as, for example, the Rothschild collection in Paris --Goring preferred more formal methods, with at least a fiction of legality. Goering did get some fine things from the Rothschild collection, such as a portrait of the Infanta Margarita Teresa by Velasquez, but Hofer insisted that everything taken from the Rothschild collection (which he said was "collected") was later appraised by French experts and a price paid to the French state--which, of course, was considerably in debt to Germany.

Goering nevertheless was not above outright confiscation. In the voluminous records kept of his collection, there is documentation on the treasures belonging to the Prince of Hesse, Count Volpi "and other Italians inimical to Germany." These objects, according to the records, were confiscated by the Sicherheitsdienst (security police).

Even when Goering bought things, it was not always to the satisfaction of the seller. One of his best pictures is an early Van Dyck. It was bought through Daniel Katz, an Amsterdam art dealer, and the receipt shows that Goering paid 200,000 marks ($80,000) for it. Hofer estimated the value of the picture at $150,000. There is also a rather acrid exchange of letters in the Goering files between Hofer and a Swiss lawyer, the gist of which is that the Reich Marshal was expected to pay more than he did for a certain item.

Goering had other people besides Hofer working to get pictures for him, although Hofer was always the man who closed the deal. There is considerable mention of "Task Force Rosenberg," which as near as I could figure out went around France, Holland and Belgium, confiscating art collections. There is also frequent correspondence with a ist Lieut. Dillenberg. who seems also to have kept an eye out for choice objects, perhaps as a member of the "Art Historical Detachment" of the Luftwaffe, which is mentioned several times.

Gold & Jewelry. Even more dazzling than the paintings are the gold and jewelry of Goring's collection. There are stacks of tableware made out of solid gold. There are two boxes in one of the rooms, both solid gold and crusted with fine gold handiwork set with precious stones. The center piece of one is an enormous aquamarine set in gold filigree on an ivory panel. There are gold candlesticks by the dozen.

The thing that sticks out most in my mind is not a Rubens or a Rembrandt or even a diamond-crusted cigaret box. It is a silver cup presented by Hermann Goering, Reich Master of the Hunt, to Hermann Goering, Reich Master of the Hunt. Yes, that is what it says.

* Although Goering specialized in old masters, he had a taste for moderns. His loot included two Van Goghs (a Sunflowers and Bridge at Aries), and at least two Renoirs.

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