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 crème de la crème 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 Göring 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 Göring'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 Göring'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 Göring's name and station that finally closed the deal.
Favorite & Rival. Lucas Cranach, an early 16th-Century German master, was a Göring 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, Göring'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 Göring, and Hofer confirmed the suspicion. But it seems that Göring and Hitler eventually agreed that, since Hitler preferred 19th-Century art, he should have priority on that and Göring could have the rest.* Hitler's collections, according to Hofer, are now hidden in caves somewhere in Germany, and have not been found.