IN THE LAST WEEK of October 1939, Himmler and his large entourage of senior SS and Gestapo officers rode in sleek comfort through the Polish countryside, with windows shut and shades drawn. As their private train clattered eastward—past shelled villages and bombed airfields, abandoned cars and houses pocked with bullet holes—the SS chief and his staff pored over a thick stack of dispatches and reports. Himmler had equipped Sonderzug Heinrich with everything a mobile SS and Gestapo headquarters needed: three cars fitted with antiaircraft guns, a baggage car, plush parlor, secretarial and office car, Mitropa diner, refrigerator car, six sleepers, and a radio car equipped with telegraph facilities.1 The din from the office was nearly deafening as secretaries clattered at typewriters and tall, blond-haired men in uniforms dictated orders in loud, rough voices. Himmler, who was tireless when he relished his work, did not want to waste a minute in completing the business at hand—the destruction of Poland.
Hitler had launched his assault on Poland at 4:30 on the morning of September 1. Without any declaration of war, he had unleashed squadrons of lethal Stuka bombers upon the sleeping Polish Air Force and hurled five armies into the heart of Poland. The speed of the assault, the blitzkrieg, was terrifying, and on the morning of September 3, Britain declared war, followed later in the day by France. Hitler took the news poorly. He had gambled that Britain would merely stand by as he methodically dismembered Poland. The German military, in the opinion of many German experts, was simply not ready for a widespread European war.2 But Hitler was not about to back down from World War Two.
In the weeks that followed, the Western Allies did little to save Poland, and Hitler, who had privately vowed to “annihilate the Polish people,” showed no mercy on his new subjects.3 He directed Himmler to crush any sign of resistance.4 For this, Himmler dispatched six specially trained Einsatzgruppen, or roving killing units, to Poland. Each was some five thousand strong, and made up of men from a wide range of forces under Himmler’s command—the SS, the Criminal Police, the regular German Order Police, and the Secret State Police or Gestapo. Following generally on the heels of the armies, the Einsatzgruppen searched for any sign of opposition.5 Equipped with lists of potential enemies, they dragged priests, rabbis, landowners, peasants, doctors, teachers, and lawyers from their homes and executed them in public squares and streets. Often, they freely improvised on the terror. According to one British eyewitness in the small Polish town of Bydgoszcz:
The first victims of the campaign were a number of Boy Scouts, from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the market-place against the wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too. He received five wounds. A Pole said afterwards that the sight of those children lying dead was the most piteous of the horrors he saw. That week the murders continued. Thirty-four of the leading tradespeople and merchants of the town were shot, and many other leading citizens. The square was surrounded by troops with machine guns.6
In this way, Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen slaughtered an estimated sixty thousand Poles in the early weeks of the war.7
On September 27, Warsaw surrendered after fierce bombardment. Almost immediately, Hitler began carving Poland up into three separate entities. He brought the western flank, a region where one in every six inhabitants descended from German families, into the Reich.8 The ethnic Germans would be permitted to stay; everyone else would eventually be deported eastward. Hitler transformed the central region, which included Warsaw, Kraków, and Lublin, as well as the poorest, rockiest, and least fertile lands in the country, into a kind of colony known as the General Government. It would become a vast no-man’s-land for future slave laborers—Polish Christians, German Jews, Polish Jews, and Gypsies.9 That left only Poland’s eastern flank outside German control. The Soviet Union had invaded and occupied it in mid-September, but Hitler viewed this as a purely temporary arrangement until he could unleash the Wehrmacht on the Red Army.
No sooner had the first corpses been trucked off Polish streets than many senior Nazis began eyeing the possibilities of plunder. For centuries Polish princes and merchant families had collected fine art, rare books and coins, and ancient manuscripts. The country’s cathedrals harbored hundreds of artistic masterpieces, and its numerous museums exhibited important archaeological and historical treasures. All these prizes were now up for grabs among senior Nazis.
JUST FOUR DAYS after the armored columns of the Wehrmacht pounded across the Polish frontier, Sievers wrote to Himmler with an important suggestion. The outbreak of World War Two had brought all expedition planning to an abrupt halt and the offices of the Ahnenerbe had grown strangely quiet. Kiss’s expedition to South America, Wüst’s journey to Iran, Schweizer’s field trip to Iceland, and Huth’s trip to the Canary Islands—all had been postponed indefinitely, and it was clear to Sievers that many of the Ahnenerbe scholars would need new projects to occupy their time and justify their salaries. Sievers had come up with a plan. “In the formerly German part of Poland,” he noted in a letter September 4, 1939, “there are numerous museums which have irreplaceable finds, documents, and monuments for the study and proof of prehistoric and historic German culture in the eastern area.”10
Sievers proposed sending an Ahnenerbe scholar to Poland to seize all potentially useful materials—“catalogues, reports of grave excavations, drawings and photographs”—and ship them back to Germany.11 Such records would greatly assist scholars in fabricating evidence for claims that Germany was merely righting an ancient wrong and seizing land that legitimately belonged to it. While it was certainly true that Poles and Germans had fought over their borderlands for hundreds of years, the Reich now wanted all of Poland, and it intended to present its criminal acts of mass murder and deportation as legitimate policies.
Sievers had already discussed the idea of seizing Polish materials with a young Ahnenerbe scholar and SS-Untersturmführer, Dr. Peter Paulsen. Paulsen was a professor of archaeology at the University of Berlin.12 He was a Viking expert with an international reputation and a dedicated Nazi who had worked as an archaeologist for RuSHA. At thirty-six, he had published half a dozen monographs, on subjects ranging from medieval gold treasures to the symbolic meaning of weapons, and had taken part in excavations in Poland, Hungary, and the Middle East.13 Senior German archaeologists praised his abilities highly. According to one prominent scholar, Paulsen was “the best expert on the Vikings among the young German prehistorians. Also abroad he has a good reputation among Swedish scholars.”14
Paulsen, who had grown up in a little town just south of the Danish border, had worked hard to get where he was. His salesman father had died in a train accident in California when Paulsen was just three years old.15 After that, the family was forced to scramble to make ends meet. Paulsen was a good student, and he managed to put himself through university thanks to a string of part-time jobs. His professors encouraged him in the study of prehistory and art history. In 1927, at the age of twenty-five, he took out a Nazi party membership.16 Like many other Nazis of the day, he was drawn to the mystical view of archaeology and was exceedingly fond of the old Icelandic sagas. He named his children Sigurd, Hetha, and Astrid, after Norse heroes and heroines.
In 1938, he and his young family moved to Berlin, where he had landed work at the university and at the Ahnenerbe. His ailing wife suffered from a serious thyroid condition that required surgery, forcing him to borrow money from the SS, and he seemed notably lacking in the kind of high-octane confidence that characterized many of the young scholars there.17 Indeed his official portraits showed a rather harried-looking man, with deep-set, wary eyes, a thick thatch of dark curly hair, and an air of being rather uncomfortable in his skin.18
Even so, Paulsen was eager to begin the plunder of Polish museums, and Sievers was convinced that time was of the essence. As he noted in his letter to Himmler, they would need to move swiftly once the hostilities were over, particularly if they hoped to confiscate not only important records and documents but also Poland’s most important prehistoric treasures. Polish authorities would be expecting looters, and “as all wars have shown up to now, the enemy side will make efforts to hide or evacuate the most valuable finds.”19
While Sievers waited impatiently for Himmler’s reply, he asked Paulsen and a colleague, Dr. Ernst Petersen, to draw up lists of the most important Polish museums. Paulsen quickly obliged. In his office at the University of Berlin, he jotted down the names of more than a dozen Polish institutions worthy of looting—from the famous Wavel Castle in Kraków to the Museum of Archaeology in Warsaw.20 Moreover, since he took a personal interest in the fine arts, he also included a museum of art in Lemberg, as well as the bronze doors of the Gnesen Cathedral and a major sculpture by Veit Stoss in Kraków. Petersen, who was one of Germany’s leading experts on the prehistory of Eastern Europe, submitted a second list three days later. This itemized thirty-six major Polish museums and academic institutes and included the names of their directors and curatorial staffs.21 In addition, it tabulated dozens of smaller archaeological collections in schools and local museums, as well as the names of Polish scientific societies and the locations of the most important archaeological excavations in Poland.
But it was Paulsen’s brief mention of German artworks that seems to have galvanized Himmler. On September 21, Himmler approved a plan to send a detachment of scholars to Poland to secure both art and archaeological treasures.22 He put Paulsen in charge and placed him under the command of the Reich Main Security Administration, a newly created SS umbrella organization that directed all police and security affairs in the Reich, including the operation of the concentration camps. Paulsen reported to Dr. Franz Six, a thirty-year-old SS-Standartenführer with a doctoral degree in political science and a long history as a stormtroop leader.23 Six outlined the mission to Paulsen. The archaeology professor was to travel to the old royal capital of Kraków with a small team and three furniture trucks to locate, seize, and transport back to Berlin one of Poland’s greatest and most beloved art treasures—the Veit Stoss altar.24
THE ALTAR OF St. Mary’s Church in Kraków is one of the masterpieces of fifteenth-century Gothic art. Its creator, Veit Stoss, or as he is known to Poles, Wit Stwosz, was a man of immense energy and great misfortune. Stoss was born in either 1447 or 1448 in the little town of Horb am Neckar, southwest of Stuttgart.25 He gravitated as a young man to Nuremberg, where he developed a career as a master carver. In 1477 he accepted a commission in Kraków to carve a massive altar for the Church of St. Mary. He spent the next seventeen years in Poland, laboring over a variety of commissions in stone as well as wood, always breathing life into his carefully observed human figures. When at last Stoss returned to Nuremberg, tragedy awaited. He lost money in a confidence scheme, and to compensate for his losses, he forged a promissory note with the name of the man who’d introduced him to the huckster. The local magistrates condemned him to public branding on both cheeks, turning the carver into a marked man. Emperor Maximilian eventually pardoned Stoss, but his life was ruined and he never recovered from the humiliation.
The altar in Kraków, however, is from the most splendid period of Stoss’s career. The artist spent twelve years toiling on it, carving two hundred figures—saints, apostles, magi, and angels—from a single piece of limewood, then delicately painting and gilding each one. The finished altar spans nearly thirty-six feet in width. Its central panel portrays the death of the Virgin Mary and her glorious ascent to heaven; the two adjacent panels depict more than a dozen scenes from the life of the Holy Family. Stoss modeled many of the figures upon his neighbors in Kraków, and it is clear that he had observed their foibles with a loving eye. He depicted one of the three magi, for example, as an exuberant young nobleman, who, as one art critic noted, “strides briskly forward, his drapery swirling because of the swiftness of his approach, exposing to view his trim cuirass of burnished gold, as he ostentatiously doffs his hat, much to the consternation of the old attendant behind.”26
After his death, Stoss fell into obscurity in Germany, largely because his finest works lay in Poland. In 1933, however, the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg hosted a major Stoss exhibition to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the sculptor’s death. The display of his exquisitely lifelike figures in wood and stone stirred a newfound pride in his artistry and a deep-seated envy in the breasts of some art collectors, particularly those prominent in the Nazi party. It irked the ultranationalists terribly to think that Stoss’s finest work adorned a Polish church, instead of the walls of a German art gallery.
Paulsen departed from Berlin on October 1, 1939, with three furniture wagons and attached containers. Polish officials in Kraków had already taken measures to hide the altar, suspecting that someone like Paulsen would soon be turning up on their doorsteps. They had spent lavish amounts of money to restore the altar six years earlier for their own commemoration of Stoss’s death and were now desperate to protect it. As an aid to concealment, they cut up the altar into thirty-two massive pieces, packing them carefully in crates and sending them into hiding places in the Polish countryside.
Paulsen, however, seems to have known exactly where to look. Almost certainly, he had received intelligence from the Reich Main Security Administration, for within days of his arrival, the archaeologist had sniffed out the whereabouts of the boxes. He had located part of the altar, for example, in the fourteenth-century cathedral of Sandomierz, a small town some one hundred fifty miles northeast of Kraków. The four boxes he discovered there weighed seventeen hundred pounds each, and Paulsen and his assistants had to ferry them back to Kraków, across a remote hilly countryside that had yet to be fully subdued by the German army. “Transportation of the Veit Stoss figures,” Paulsen complained in a private letter dated October 5, “turns out to be rather difficult. Military movements are a serious hindrance to the ride. On the way from Sandiomierz to Kielce, a car—fortunately without a load—broke down … On account of the bad road conditions, we had to drive without a trailer, and for reasons of security, the drive could only be made during daytime. Today I finally arrived at Kraków with the first load. And tomorrow I am going to pick up the second and last load at Sandomierz.”27
While in Sandomierz, Paulsen searched for other objects worthy of plunder. He stopped in at the “nice district museum” and ascertained that the building and all of its contents were secure and under the control of German police forces.28 Then, according to a later report, “I took the valuable card index [the central record system that listed all the artifacts] from the museum in Sandomierz, which I found being hidden by a Jew.”29 Such indexes recorded all pertinent details about the artifacts and would allow the Ahnenerbe staff to pick out at their leisure objects worthy of looting. Paulsen made no further mention of the fate of the brave Jewish curator who attempted to hide the index. With these records in hand, Paulsen departed for Kraków with the second shipment of the Stoss figurines.
In Poland’s old royal capital, Paulsen proceeded to organize the transport of the various crates he had located. He realized to his consternation, however, that he would not be able to convey the massive shrine section of the altar back to Berlin without the help of technical workers, so he agreed to store it until they arrived. In his free time, he toured Kraków’s museums, seizing their card indexes and registers.30 When he was at last ready to escort the altar back to Berlin, the city’s prince-bishop made a final passionate protest against the theft to Kraków’s new German mayor, explaining the deep religious significance of the artwork.31 “The Veit Stoss altar is as important to Kraków,” noted Paulsen in his later report, “as the painting of the Black Madonna is to Czestochowa.”32 But Paulsen was unmoved by the pleas of the prelate. He set off with the figurines, arriving in Berlin on October 14, 1939. He personally delivered the boxes of the altar to a treasury in the new Reichsbank. Only the bank’s director, he noted confidently, possessed the key.
News of Paulsen’s success traveled swiftly through the Nazi grapevine. A month after his return, the lord mayor of Nuremberg, Willy Liebel, penned a letter urging Hitler to bestow the altar on his city, the place where Stoss had endured his greatest humiliation.33 Goebbels, in turn, pressed Hitler to give him the artwork for a touring exhibition to mark its triumphant return to Germany, and Himmler seems to have had his own designs on the massive sculpture. Already, he had helped himself to one of its beautifully worked panels, Christian motifs and all.34 All this politicking astonished Hitler. No one had bothered to seek his permission for the theft.35 After mulling over the problem, however, Hitler agreed to send the altar—all of it—to Nuremberg, where it was stowed, secure from aerial attacks, in a huge underground vault beneath the city’s medieval castle, until it could be safely displayed. It remained there until the summer of 1945.36
IMMEDIATELY AFTER DROPPING off the altar at the Reichsbank treasury in Berlin, Paulsen met with Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Main Security Administration.37 Heydrich ordered Paulsen to return to Kraków, where he was to begin seizing important museum collections. Sievers saw this as a golden opportunity for the Ahnenerbe. “Paulsen,” he wrote after learning the news, “has control over all of the material from various museums and collections in Kraków because he has secured the registers and catalogs. As it is to be assumed … that the cultural goods are to be transferred to Germany as completely as possible, it is necessary to view, seize, and transfer to Berlin those parts of the collections important to the work of the Ahnenerbe, especially those which focus on prehistory and early history, valuable collections of house markings, gables, and weapons studies, as well as scientific collections on nature and ethnology, etc.”38
Sievers wanted the plundering to be carried out with scientific exactitude. This, he realized, would require a team of highly trained specialists. He began hurriedly assembling an SS scholarly command—Dr. Eduard Tratz, the head of one of Austria’s most important natural history museums, the Haus der Natur in Salzburg; Dr. Ernst Petersen, the archaeologist who had compiled one of the lists of Polish institutions to be plundered; Dr. Theodor Deisel, an art historian; Dr. Paul Dittel, a historian and geographer who specialized in archival, library, and museum collections; Dr. Wilhelm Mai, a specialist in folktales and legends; and SS-Hauptscharführer Luismann, who would serve as the driver.39
Sievers also realized that Paulsen and his colleagues would require considerable administrative support. He sent a proposal to Himmler on October 16 suggesting that he be sent with Paulsen to Poland “to oversee and complete the assignment, which needs to be done as quickly as possible so that Paulsen can continue on from Kraków to Warsaw.”40 Himmler immediately recognized the wisdom of this. A day later, his personal administrative officer, Dr. Rudolf Brandt, informed Sievers that he was to proceed to Poland with Paulsen and his scholars.
If Himmler thought that his unit of experts could simply take what they wanted in Poland, however, he must have been extremely disappointed. In Kraków, Paulsen learned that Göring had dispatched a similar team of experts on an identical mission. Göring’s avarice was legendary. The Reich minister of aviation owned eight sumptuous residences—castles, villas, hunting lodges, and mountain chalets—each lavishly decorated with German, Flemish, Dutch, and Italian Old Masters as well as fine Gobelin tapestries and costly Persian rugs. Göring never missed out on an opportunity to add to his collection. To lay hands on the finest Polish pieces, he had chosen SS-Sturmbannführer Kajetan Mühlmann, an art historian with a very shady reputation, to head up a team of nine experts.
Mühlmann was a domineering man with a short temper, a criminal record for petty offenses, and a talent for “ferreting out art treasures.”41 From the beginning, he seems to have taken complete control of the situation in Poland. He swiftly forged an alliance with Hans Frank, the new leader of the General Government in occupied Poland, and proceeded to outmaneuver Paulsen at nearly every turn. By the end of October, Mühlmann had obtained precisely what Göring most wanted—first crack at all of Poland’s rich art treasures. In exchange, Mühlmann agreed to give to Paulsen and his scholars carte blanche on Poland’s archaeological, ethnological, and natural history collections.
Paulsen reluctantly accepted these terms, and he and Petersen set to work, assessing the collections of Kraków’s scientific institutes and museums. But before they could begin transporting the valuables back to Germany, they received new orders from Franz Six at the Reich Main Security Administration. Six had just returned from a tour of Warsaw, which had suffered heavy shelling and bombing during the siege, and he ordered the unit to begin its pillaging there before others beat them to the punch. So Paulsen and his team swiftly moved their base of operation northward. To assist with the work, Sievers sent three other researchers—Dr. Heinrich Harmjanz, an expert on folklore and ethnology; Dr. Hans Schlief, an architect who had become a prominent classical archaeologist; and Dr. Günther Thaerigen, an archaeologist.42
To those familiar with the beautiful parks and gardens of Warsaw before the war, the Polish capital must have seemed a shocking sight. The Royal Castle was in smoldering ruins. The palace of the papal nuncio, the National Theater and Opera House, the City Hall, and most of the city’s hospitals and principal railway stations were either destroyed or severely damaged. Entire residential streets in both the suburbs and old town had been flattened, and the sickly smell of decaying human flesh seeped from the ruins. Those who survived walked about in a state of shock. Warsaw’s citizens had put up a strong, spirited defense, but the German army, with its superior armaments, had finally overrun their streets. In the days that followed, citizens were forced to turn in their radios to authorities and spend hours each day lining up in the bitter cold to get bread and other rationed food. As they stomped their feet to stay warm, new loudspeakers in the streets blared the latest Nazi propaganda.
If Paulsen took much notice of the misery, however, he made no mention of it, even in passing, in his letters. He had other, more pressing matters on his mind. To inspect the museums and carry off their treasures, the team needed transportation. Cars were scarce in the Polish capital in early November 1939; trucks were almost impossible to requisition. But Paulsen managed to patch together transport for his command, and the Ahnenerbe scholars buckled down to work with a cold orderliness, interpreting their orders liberally.
One of their first targets was the State Archaeological Museum in Lazienki Park, a former royal hunting preserve. The museum was the hub of archaeological investigation in Poland. Fourteen of Poland’s leading archaeologists worked there, and it served as a central repository for their collections of artifacts—flint axes, bone points, amphorae, swords, sickles, halberds, scabbards, necklaces, fibulae, bronze collars, bronze cauldrons, face urns, figurines. The museum also housed extensive files and card indexes on all the country’s archaeological sites, as well as an important twelve-thousand-volume archaeological library.43 The Paulsen unit intended to seize all of the most important material and cart it back to Germany, where they would put it to use for the Nazi cause.
They also planned on stamping out, once and for all, the particular brand of research that the museum specialized in. The Polish archaeologists were a patriotic lot who had spent nearly two decades searching for the origins of the Slavic peoples. The quest had led them at times to parts of Europe that Germans had earmarked as their own. This infuriated Paulsen’s men, who continually referred to the museum as a “poison kitchen.”44 So they decided to steal the entire research base of their Polish colleagues. As one of Paulsen’s subordinates later noted, this would allow German scholars to comb through the Polish data, “to establish where the Poles: 1.) forged the results of discoveries, 2.) suppressed them if they appeared altogether too unfavorable against Poland, 3.) exaggerated Slavonic influences, or 4.) discontinued investigations at the very moment when they met with Germanic remains beneath the Slavonic ones.”45 The terrible irony in all of this seems never to have occurred to the German scholars.
Paulsen delegated Petersen, Schleif, and Thaerigen to take care of the museum, which was under German guard. The trio arrived on their first day in Warsaw and were none too pleased to see a young rising star in Polish archaeology, Dr. Konrad Jazdzewski, and two colleagues in the offices.46 Jazdzewski was a thirty-year-old native of Upper Silesia, the much-contested borderland that curved along the southwestern edge of Poland.47 He had studied in both Germany and Poland and spoke German well. Almost certainly, Jazdzewski recognized Petersen from scholarly conferences and meetings he had attended in Eastern Europe, and perhaps he felt a moment of relief seeing a fellow archaeologist turn up at the museum. If so, the sensation must have been fleeting. Petersen despised the young Polish researcher and made no effort to hide it.48 He thought Jazdzewski belonged to “the worst anti-German agitators.”49
Together with his SS companions, Petersen asked Jazdzewski to show them the museum collections. He spoke more like a conqueror than a colleague. Jazdzewski knew that the German archaeologists had arrived to case the collection. He gave them the required tour, but as soon as they left he and his colleagues went through the glass display cases, removing the most valuable pieces and hiding them as best they could in the storage area. The following day, Schleif and Thaerigen returned. They were enraged to discover the empty display cases and immediately searched the storage area, locating some of the missing items. Then they threw Jazdzewski and his colleagues out of the museum.50
With the Polish researchers gone, Schleif and Thaerigen began crating up the museum’s extensive collection of artifacts, its official records and documents, and its library, for shipment back to the Reich. The packing must have taken days, for the museum had extensive holdings, including many delicate ceramics that needed careful wrapping. The German team were reluctant to leave anything significant behind; the material, as Paulsen later observed, would be used to “build the SS research.”51
As Schleif and Thaerigen wrapped up the key holdings of the archaeological museum, Paulsen combed through Warsaw’s other major institutions. He crated up prehistoric treasures from the National Museum and sifted through the display cases and storage areas of Warsaw’s Military Museum, seizing the sword of Sandomir and several other splendid ceremonial weapons. At the Crazinski library, he was delighted to find two handsome Viking swords and two ceremonial battle-axes. These he also took and dutifully shipped off to Berlin.
Meanwhile another detachment member, Eduard Tratz, rifled through collections at the State Zoological Museum, examining its collection with a connoisseur’s eye.52 At fifty-one, Tratz was one of the most respected citizens of Salzburg. He had personally founded the city’s natural history museum, the Haus der Natur, in 1924, and with assistance from Austria’s new Nazi masters, he had rapidly expanded its facilities. Tratz believed museums played an essential role in society, as “the link between science and the people, between humans and nature.”53 To better communicate Nazi party doctrine to the public, he had recently added eight new departments to the Haus der Natur. These specialized in such subjects as racial development, racial hygiene and eugenics, and animal domestication and breeding.
Tratz spent two days at the State Zoological Museum in Warsaw, selecting specimens to send back to the Haus der Natur. He and a colleague chose 147 of the museum’s most exotic bird specimens—from the resplendent quetzal of the Central American cloud forest to the crested serpent eagle of Japan—as well as three huge European bison, a massive Nile crocodile, and two wildcats.54 Tratz also carefully sorted through the museum’s collection of skulls and skeletons. The Haus der Natur was planning important new exhibition rooms on human heredity to popularize Nazi ideas of race and prehistory.55 As part of this exhibit, entitled “The Ancestors,” Tratz and his staff intended on displaying head casts of the Nordic and Jewish “races,” as well as the remains of ancient humans, such as the Neandertal and the Cro-Magnon. So from the Warsaw collections Tratz selected a variety of human, chimpanzee, and gorilla skeletons; a plaster model of a Neandertal; and casts of the braincases of Pleistocene humans.56 In addition he crated up a mammoth jaw, the skull of an Ice Age rhinoceros, and dozens of expensive reference books on butterflies, mollusks, protozoa, snails, crabs, paleozoology, bird migrations, the history of philosophy, and anatomy.57 All this he dispatched to the Haus der Natur.
Paulsen delegated other scholars to tackle Warsaw’s libraries. The Reich Main Security Administration, which directed all mass murder in the Third Reich and in the newly annexed territories, was assembling a library to educate its staff on Jews and other enemy groups. Paulsen’s commanding officer, Franz Six, believed that it was “necessary for research purposes to carefully study the written works produced by the enemy in order to understand the mental weapons of ideological enemies.”58 Indeed, officers in the Reich Main Security Administration would later use reference volumes on the Jewish diaspora to help trace the origins of ethnically mixed communities in the Soviet Union. Those communities identified as Jewish were then slated for liquidation.59
To line the shelves of this new SS library, Paulsen and his colleagues carted off the Sejm Library in Warsaw and approximately forty thousand books from the Judaic library in the Great Synagogue on Tlomacka Street.60 In addition, Paulsen crated up the library in the Ukrainian Science Institute and packed away some fifteen hundred books from what was likely the Seminar for Indo-European Linguistics at the University of Warsaw. The latter volumes were almost certainly intended for Walter Wüst, the superindendent of the Ahnenerbe.
Göring’s experts had given Paulsen a free rein in all these areas, but the two groups of scholars fought like vultures over the large private libraries of the Polish nobility. These, after all, contained many rare works of art. After much wrangling, for example, Paulsen and Sievers succeeded in laying hands on one of the most important treasures from the Zamoyski library—the Suprasl Codex, an eleventh-century manuscript containing the oldest-known written example of the proto-Slavic language. The two SS officers wrapped it up carefully and sent it to a Reich Main Security Administration storage facility in Berlin. It was a very valuable document. Indeed, Sievers later gleefully estimated its value at between 4 and 5 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of some $20 to $26 million today.61
Paulsen also persuaded Mühlmann to release several important Jewish and Freemasonry artifacts from Poland’s National Museum. The archaeologist was under orders to send these goods to Wewelsburg, the German castle that Himmler was refurbishing as a senior SS academy.62 Almost certainly the items were intended for a private exhibition at Wewelsburg, one resembling a Freemasonry “museum” once installed in the SS Security Service headquarters in Berlin. Before the war, SS officers had led groups of SS men and Hitler Youth clubs through the display, which warned in the most dire and lurid terms of the perils of Freemasonry. As one visitor later recalled, “I was shown papers illustrating the work and methods of the Masons, seeking to prove that they used poison to remove the traitors from their own ranks. There were skulls all over the place, a coffin marked with Masonic signs, aprons and insignia—really quite a gruesome display.”63
As Paulsen and his team of experts stripped Warsaw’s museums and libraries bare, Hans Frank, the new leader of the occupied Polish colony known as the General Government, could not shake the feeling that the specialists were robbing him blind. Frank intended to live like a king in Poland, and to do this he needed to put an end to the thievery.64 He issued a decree prohibiting any further shipments of property to Germany without his government’s express approval or without payment from Berlin, a regulation that was to take effect on November 22, 1939. Paulsen, who had yet to plunder all the museums on the Ahnenerbe’s list, deeply resented the interference. But he felt powerless against Frank—an old friend of Hitler—and saw little alternative but to bow to his orders. Paulsen’s colleagues were infuriated by this timidity, but none more so than Hans Schleif, who had spent days packing up the voluminous collections at the State Archaeological Museum in Lazienki Park.
Schleif was a loose cannon in Ahnenerbe circles. He was arrogant and brutally direct, and he considered many of his co-workers fools.65 He saw little chance at all of shipping the State Archaeological Museum collection to the Reich before the November 22 deadline that Frank had set. Nonetheless, Schleif traveled twice to Poznan in hopes of wrangling some kind of rail transport for the collection. It was a huge shipment—five freight cars’ worth of plunder—and no one was able, or perhaps willing, to help him.
The November 22 deadline came and went, but Schleif refused to give up. After days of haranguing and storming and browbeating others, he and a colleague finally managed to finagle transport of the collection to Poznan on November 30. It meant disobeying an explicit order from Hans Frank, but Schleif was beyond caring. He desperately wanted to strip the archaeological “poison kitchen” bare and cart its collection back to the Reich. He waited for the crates to be loaded on the freight cars, then hurried back to the Reich, where he wrote a letter to Sievers explaining his own criminal actions and complaining about Paulsen’s ineptitude. A few weeks later, after opening the crates in Poznan, he gloated over his success. “The Warsaw material is now entirely unpacked and registered. Now for the first time, it is possible to obtain a survey of the truly excellent stock.”66
Back in Berlin, Paulsen penned a final report to the Reich Main Security Administration, listing his detachment’s achievements and taking credit for the transport of the State Archaeological Museum collection to the Reich. He was proud of the successes—so much plunder, it seemed, in so short a time. But he deeply regretted leaving so many valuables behind. Many fine collections still lay untouched in Warsaw, “and in Kraków, everything still needs to be done.”67 But by then it was clear to the senior SS staff that Paulsen lacked the brazen arrogance needed to be a thief among thieves.68 So Sievers quietly arranged for a reassignment, finding him a teaching job at an SS officer-training school far away from the front.69
Working quietly in the background, Himmler searched for some legal way of plundering Poland’s riches. Through clever political maneuvering, he took control of a public corporation that Göring founded to confiscate the assets of Jewish and Polish citizens. The corporation had a very forget-table name, the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost, or Main Trust Center East, and served largely as a cover for further piracy in Poland. Most of the profits went straight to Göring, but Himmler arranged to siphon off part of the proceeds for his own SS projects. He placed the Ahnenerbe in charge, named Sievers as the corporation’s managing representative, and rewarded Schleif for his earlier audacity with the “poison kitchen” by appointing him trustee for Wartheland, one of the Polish regions incorporated into the Reich.
The new Nazi regime in Wartheland had already begun expelling Jews, and officials there intended to treat Polish Christians much the same. “Everything that is Polish is going to be cleared out of this region,” boasted the new Nazi Gauleiter.70 Each deportee would be allowed to take only a small valise, with room enough for a change of shirt perhaps and some underwear and socks; everything else would have to be abandoned. It was a prime opportunity for looting, and the Ahnenerbe staff was delighted at first by the possibilities. “Quite a few works of art and libraries have lost their owner,” Schleif pointed out smugly in a letter to Sievers.71
Under Sievers’s orders, Schleif and the other Ahnenerbe scholars fanned out into the Polish countryside. They inventoried archives, museums, public collections, castles, manors, and other wealthy Polish and Jewish homes, then registered and seized all portable valuables—historic and prehistoric artifacts, old property deeds, books, documents, paintings, sculptures, wood carvings, furniture, silverware, fine carpets, and expensive jewelry.72 Schleif, a sarcastic and overbearing man, was not much of a team player, and the Ahnenerbe scholars soon wearied of him. They grew to hate the Polish countryside.73 The local farmers were continually scattering horseshoe nails over the roads, puncturing the tires of their vehicles. The roads were poor and the scholars got stuck in the mud. If they were wearing civilian clothing, the farmers ignored their requests for help, and often when they arrived somewhere promising, they were too late. The Gestapo had already beaten them there, cleaning out all the best booty.74
When Schleif lost his enthusiasm for the work, another Ahnenerbe scholar, Ernst Petersen, replaced him. Petersen expanded the efforts. In fifteen months, the scholars of the Main Trust Center East ransacked 500 castles, estates, and private apartments; 102 libraries; 15 museums, 3 art galleries; and 10 coin collections.75 They plundered the silverware of Prince Radzi-will; the pearls and gold and silver jewelry of Karl Albrecht von Habsburg-Lothringen; the Dürer drawings at the Lemberg Museum; and important collections from the Museum of Ethnology and Natural Sciences at Plock. At Golochow Castle, they made off with priceless treasures—a rare collection of vases, the oldest of which dated back to the seventh century B.C.; an eleventh-century Italian fountain; a portrait of Copernicus; and dozens of costly paintings, including works by the modern French master Jean François Millet. By March 28, 1941, they had amassed a large storehouse of treasures—some 1,100 paintings, 500 pieces of furniture, 35 boxes of church treasures, and 25 sets of rare metal objects.76
The staff of the Main Trust Center East sold some of these valuables immediately to avid buyers. The profits went to Göring. But the trust center officials packed up most of the treasure in crates and sent them with an armed guard to a central collection point in Berlin. Sievers estimated that by the end of 1941 the Main Trust Center East had confiscated goods worth 3 million reichmarks, or some $15.6 million today—a figure that is likely far too low.77 Göring received the lion’s share of the proceeds, but the Ahnenerbe submitted a bill for its services, charging 10 percent of the total. Göring, however, seems never to have paid.
But the pillaging of Poland had given Sievers and many other Ahnenerbe scholars an appetite for piracy. They had looted entire museums and libraries in Poland without a qualm, stealing their greatest treasures. In the elegant Ahnenerbe villa in Berlin-Dahlem, staff members followed the latest reports from the front avidly and watched the advances of the Wehrmacht with new, avaricious eyes.