Lieutenant Horn Recovers Imperial Regalia Stolen by the Nazis (7 AUG 1945)
Born and educated in Germany, Horn fled to the United States to escape Nazism in 1938. With a doctorate in art history from the University of Hamburg, he co-founded the Art History Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1943 and, the next year, after enlisting in the U.S. Army, he served as an interrogator with General George Patton’s Third Army.
The combination of Horn’s art history background and interrogation skills made him a perfect fit for the allied Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program organized in early 1945. Operating out of the Office of Military Government, U.S. Zone, the MFAA’s 300 men and women had a two-fold mission: prevent the destruction of cultural properties during the advance of allied forces and track the locations of works of art and other treasures looted by the Nazis and return them to their rightful owners.
In July 1945, Horn joined the MFAA as an art intelligence officer. His first assignment was to locate missing pieces of the Holy Roman Empire’s crown jewels stolen from the Imperial Treasury in Vienna, Austria, in 1938. After annexing Austria, Hitler had directed all art and holy artifacts be confiscated and relocated to a bunker in Nuremburg. When U.S. Army personnel arrived in Nuremberg, however, several pieces of the regalia, including the crown, orb, scepter, and two swords, were missing from the cache.
Horn interrogated more than twenty German citizens, military personnel, and Nazi officials over three days in late July. He learned that Heinrich Himmler had ordered the artifacts removed and sunk in a lake to protect them from air raids and eventual recovery by the Allies. Conflicting reports made Horn suspicious, however. Identifying a Dr. Fries, assistant to the Nuremberg mayor, and a Mr. Spacil, treasurer and head of a branch of the Reich Main Security Office, as key to the mystery, Horn arranged for their arrest and transfer to the Theater Interrogation Center. He planned to confront the two men simultaneously. This turned out to be unnecessary, as Horn reported, “Under the effect of a night of solitary confinement and the pressure of a short interrogation which preceded the scheduled confrontation, Fries broke down.”
Fries confessed to making previous false statements about the removal and location of the regalia. He and two others had taken the items and encased them in the masonry of the corridors in the underground Panier Platz Bunker in Nuremburg. A couple days later, they staged a fictitious removal with the assistance of Spacil impersonating a Security Service (SS) officer to make it appear that Himmler’s orders had been carried out as directed. Horn concluded, “the imperial insignia were slated by the chiefs of the German security service to become the symbols of a future German resistance movement.” On Aug. 7, 1945, Horn escorted Fries to the indicated location where the artifacts were found in good condition inside four copper containers in a small room 80 feet below the surface. The items were returned to Austria on Jan. 4, 1946.
Later, in May 1946, Horn also located a cache of gold coins worth $2 million (approximately $34 million today), known as the “Linz Gold.” These coins had been stolen by the Nazis from monasteries in Austria and Czechoslovakia and were eventually hidden in Salzburg, Austria. Five months later, Horn was discharged at the rank of captain but was later recalled to duty temporarily during the Korean War. He continued to teach at the University of California until his retirement in 1974. He passed away in December 1995.
Walter Horn’s report on the missing Imperial Regalia can be found at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/mary-j-regan-memo-and-enclosed-report-regarding-recovery-imperial-crown-jewels-holy-roman-empire-sent-to-walter-horn-16609.
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Article by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian. New issues of This Week in MI History are published each week. To report story errors, ask questions, request previous articles, or be added to our distribution list, please contact: TR-ICoE-Command-Historian@army.mil.
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