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[[IMAGE: standing woman surrounded by symbols of the arts]] BACK from the Salt MINES

The Restitution of Fine Art is a Weird Odyssey

   When, early in May, Third Army officers reached the small town of Alt Aussee, high in the spectacularly mountainous country about 75 miles northeast of Salzburg, they found a salt mine above the town where, deep in a mountainside, was located one of the greatest collections of fine art in the world. The art, "collected" in the main from every country occupied by Germany during the war years, had been scheduled for destruction by the nazis in order to prevent its "desecration" by the American forces. On orders from the Gauleiter of Oberdonau, SS troops had transported to the mine eight big cases, marked: "Marble -- Don't Drop." Had their contents been properly placed and detonated, it would have wrecked the seven huge works (in which reposed, among other things, some 10,000 paintings) by rendering them completely inaccessible and flooding them with water. 
   Fortunately for the countries to which the massive treasure belongs, an art expert working at the mine, in connivance with a few others who knew the salt works well, was able to place the charges in such a way that the tunnels which were destroyed did not actually render the repositories inaccessible, since the interior approaches are a honeycomb of passageways. The Gauleiter had to flee before his order to have the art technician shot could be carried out.

THE ALT AUSSEE MINE
   Aside from the art which the repository contained, the mine itself was found to be an extraordinary place. Its one entrance gives access to a horizontal tunnel burrowed for at least a mile inside the mountain. (The other salt mines used as repositories in Germany and Austria are accessible by vertical schafts, one of which is 3,000 feet deep.)
   The art repositories could be reached by a small eighteen-inch-wide track, mounting a tiny engine capable of dragging six or eight dollies. It consists of seven "Werke", each of which is a series of vast vaulted chambers. The origin of these salt works is lost in antiquity. It is know that they were active a thousand years ago, though legend claims that they are three thousand years old. For the last five hundred years they may have been worked by the same families in which inbreeding has produced a curious kind of salt-mine clan, apparently generally smaller than average and speaking a pronounced dialect unique to the tribe.
   The chambers of the mine, which are all electrically illuminated, were practically perfect repositories for paintings. The summer temperature is a steady 40 degrees fahrenheit (rising, oddly enough, to 47 in winter). Constant temperature and practically ideal humidity meant that the pictures suffered little, whereas the fine collection of renaissance armor, including gold and silver-inlay dress armor (which had belonged to Franz Ferdinand of Sara- 

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