Determining the contents of all the storage cases without first actually opening every one presented a variety of challenges. At Kochendorf the German penchant for meticulous record keeping facilitated that process. The director of the mine had two record books with complete inventories of the estimated 30,000 cases stored there. These riches included a 16th-century oil, the Stuppacher Madonna by German artist Matthias Grünewald. According to Ettlinger, Captain Rorimer tried unsuccessfully to buy the painting on behalf of his own Metropolitan Museum, offering the then-unheard-of sum of $2 million.

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At Heilbronn, clues came from many sources. Rorimer had tracked down German museum directors who provided key leads. One interrogation pointed to the discovery of boxes in the mine containing bills of sale and records of art transactions. The Americans also hired three Germans for the mine office who often provided helpful tidbits. One was an art historian; another, Ettlinger suspected, had worked for a Nazi art theft operation in Paris. “In the underground operations we were at the end of a long chain,” Ettlinger said. “There was a whole series of steps before I was informed that in ‘Box So and So’ there’s a Rubens.”

The most valuable painting Ettlinger unearthed at Heilbronn was a Rembrandt self-portrait. It had been stolen from the museum in Ettlinger’s hometown of Karlsrühe — a detail that pleased him.

Shipments from the Heilbronn and Kochendorf mines typically went to the cities of Munich or Wiesbaden, where Rorimer had helped establish central storage depots called Collecting Points to consolidate the hundreds of artworks arriving from German repositories in mines, castles and bunkers. At Wiesbaden, the Collecting Point was housed in a vast, 300-room war-ravaged museum where displaced persons had to be removed from the basement.

The Monument Men’s key enlisted man there, Sergeant Kenneth C. Lindsay, later noted the staff’s resourceful improvisation in transforming the old museum temporarily into one of the world’s greatest collections of art. His commander was Captain Walter I. Farmer, an interior decorator in peacetime and a can-do kind of officer recently with the Army engineers. To repair the museum’s damaged skylights and replace more than 2,000 broken windows, Farmer “borrowed” 26 tons of glass from a U.S. Army Air Forces installation being built nearby. For humidity control, the men placed buckets of water in the galleries. And to cushion the sculpture and paintings for shipment, they improvised packing material from sheepskin greatcoats tailored for the German invasion of Russia but never delivered to the freezing troops driving toward Moscow in cotton summer uniforms. The coats had been discovered at a salt mine in Merkers along with 100 tons of gold, 27 Rembrandts and other treasures from the 15 state museums of Berlin.

Soon after Lindsay’s arrival at Wiesbaden, where he took up residence in the museum director’s office, enormous convoys of trucks escorted by tanks and laden with the Merkers booty lined up outside. Rorimer, as always, was in the thick of things, riding in the lead jeep. Lindsay, a trained art historian, had served in signal intelligence until one day in Paris he read an article in The Stars and Stripes about Rorimer and the Monuments Men. At Wiesbaden he became so enthusiastic about his work sorting, identifying, cataloguing and returning thousands of artworks that he chose to stay on an extra five months beyond his scheduled departure for the States.

One of Lindsay’s most memorable experiences was the uncrating of the ancient Egyptian bust of Queen Nefertiti. In 1912 German archaeologists had excavated the richly painted limestone statue, removed it from Egypt and donated it to a Berlin museum. When the Egyptian government learned that the bust might be at Wies­baden, a representative was sent to find out if it was really there. Lindsay was designated to open the suspect box labeled Die Bunte Königin — “The Multicolored Queen” — while a gallery of officials stood by.

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