“Recovering what they had grabbed called for a somewhat different kind of detective work,” Taper said, “cultivating informants, keeping an eye on the local black markets, and the like.” In a first for the Monuments Men, he worked closely with the postwar German civilian police. Using claims filed by the Dutch, he compiled lists of artwork expropriated from the collection of a prominent Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, Jacques Goudstikker, and provided them to dealers in the Frankfurt area. Many of these were suspected of engaging in shady transactions during the war, and Taper required them to identify any works they had sold and the purchasers. German police officers were then employed to track down a number of these works.

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On a series of fruitful investigations in Berchtesgaden, Taper teamed up with an older Monuments intelligence officer, Lieutenant Edgar Breitenbach. A Hamburg-born Jew trained in library science and with a doctorate in art history, Breitenbach had left Germany before the war. He was “a squat, middle-aged man, with a stubby pipe invariably smoldering in his mouth,” Taper wrote of Breitenbach, who died in 1977. “He always seemed to be having the time of his life, even when trying to act solemn. During our Berch­tes­gaden investigations, he habitually dressed in Bavarian peasant garb, and not long after we had arrived there on our first visit, I heard that the German chief of police of Berchtesgaden had sent out a puzzled inquiry, wanting to know who this man was who was running around the country in lederhosen, speaking with a Hamburg accent through a pipe and claiming to be an American officer and a doctor of arts.”

Taper and Breitenbach were on the trail of a trainload of Göring’s possessions sent south in the last month of the war. Nazi guards had abandoned the train near Berchtesgaden, and local peasants swarmed over it, taking not only the plentiful schnapps but also manifold possessions Göring had amassed at his country estate, Carinhall. Even though the pair of Monuments officers arrived on the scene more than two years after the event, they succeeded in retrieving a number of missing items — along with colorful details of the train looting.

“It was a real mob scene,” wrote Taper. “Three women laid hands on the same Aubusson carpet, and a heated struggle ensued until along came a local dignitary, who said to them, ‘women, be civilized, divide it among you.’ So they did. Two of the women used their portions as bedspreads, but the third cut hers to make window curtains.”

For all his successes, Taper can’t shake the memory of a failure: his inability to find Raphael’s famous Portrait of a Young Man. The 16th-century masterpiece disappeared from a family collection in Kraków, Poland. Taper spent months interrogating a number of jailed Nazis, including two art advisers to the German governor general of Poland, Hans Frank. One interrogation lasted 12 hours. He suspected that Frank’s entourage took the painting when they fled west to escape the Red Army, but all traces of it were lost. Though Taper had seen only a black-and-white photograph of the painting, “in my dreams it was always in sumptuous color.” Six decades later, after a successful career as a staff writer for The New Yorker, a biographer and professor of journalism, Taper is still haunted by it — “possibly the most important painting lost in the war whose fate remains unknown.”

Back at Heilbronn, Tech 4 Ett­linger did a little unauthorized sleuthing of his own before returning home to New Jersey in the summer of 1946. He remembered that his maternal grandfather, Otto Oppenheimer, had been a minor patron of German artists and collector of their work. Before emigrating to the United States, Oppenheimer had stored his collection of nearly 2,000 etchings and bookplates — many of them first prints signed by the artists — in a Baden-Baden warehouse. Baden-Baden was 60 miles southwest of Heilbronn, in the French Zone of Occupation. When the personal valet for the French zone’s governor general visited Heilbronn, Ett­linger prevailed on him for directions to the warehouse.

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