The

The In the days after Eisenhower Bradley and Patton descended into the Merker's mine

and saw both the wealth and the horror of the Third Reich, the clock was ticking.

Under the Yalta agreements, the part of Germany containing Merkers would soon be handed over to Soviet control.

Everything in the mine, every gold bar, every suitcase of stolen rings, every

Rembrandt and Mene and Durer had to be moved westward to the American zone before that

happened.

The man in charge of making that happen was Colonel Bernard Bernstein, and he had very little time.

The On April 11th, the day before the general's visit, two men reported for duty at Merkers who had played crucial roles in saving the art.

The first was Lieutenant George Stout, the United States Naval Reserve,

a monuments and fine arts and archives officer attached to G5, the 12th Army Group. Stout was no

ordinary soldier. He was the former chief of conservation at Harvard's Fogg Museum, and he was

considered America's greatest living expert on the techniques of

packing and transporting works of art. The second was a similar chief, the British lieutenant

Colonel Joffrey Webb. Their arrival at Merckers was not accidental. Earlier, Captain Robert

Posey and private Lincoln Kirsten Monuments men who had been among the first to enter the mine and survey its contents had reported what they found to the chain of command.

Posey recommended that Stout specifically be sent to provide technical guidance for what would be an enormously complex and delicate operation, moving hundreds of irreplaceable

works of art out of a salt mine, up a 2,000 foot shaft and overland to Frankfurt without damaging

any of them. When Webb and Stout arrived, they discovered that Bernstein's authority over the mine

was absolute.

Webb was actually denied access.

Bernstein showed them his letter from Third Army's chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay,

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