The True-Crime Story of Kraków’s St Mary’s Altarpiece

Oltarz-Wita-Stwosza-pap_19481001_06Y.jpg, default, Professor Słonecki working on the sculpture of Saint Matthew the Apostle (Dormition of the Virgin Mary scene in the central cabinet), part of Veit Sto

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As in any proper true-crime story, we have villains, a complex hero, hideouts, plot twists and even gunshots at the end. Looking at Veit Stoss’s dignified retable today, it is hard to believe this story is about that masterpiece.

Kraków, 1443–1795

Like any good thriller, this one also begins with an earthquake. Or, more precisely, a series of tectonic tremors in the Lesser Poland region in 1443. Among the casualties were the vault of the Gothic chancel at St Mary’s Basilica in Kraków, erected about a hundred years earlier, and the altar from that period, which was probably destroyed along with it. Thirty-five years later, the Kraków City Council began raising funds for a new retable (an altarpiece, i.e. an altar decoration), and Veit Stoß, who had moved to Kraków from Nuremberg, was chosen as the artist. History is silent about his works before 1477 (the date of his arrival in Kraków), yet he must already have enjoyed a reputation, given that he was awarded such an important commission. The sculptor – known in Poland as Wit Stwosz – brought his family to Lesser Poland, bought a house on the corner of Grodzka and Poselska Streets, set up a workshop and over the next 12 years created a large, polychromed and gilded cabinet-style polyptych.

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Ołtarz wykonany przez Wita Stwosza w latach 1477-1489, Kościół Mariacki w Krakowie, fot. Jakub Porzycki/AG

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Completed in 1489, the altarpiece remained in place for almost half a millennium. It survived, among other perils, the great fire of Kraków in 1850. The greatest threat came from the modernisation of the basilica in the Italian Baroque style, carried out by the parish priest Hiacynt Łopacki in the mid-18th century. The culmination of the work was to be the replacement of the high altar. Jakub Fontana prepared the design and a wooden model, while Antoni Michał Potocki, the Voivode of Bełsk, provided the funds. Everything was on track for Veit Stoß’s retable – a masterpiece of the Gothic style, which was little appreciated at the time – to be dismantled and sent off in pieces to some remote spot in the province. However, the process of Baroqueisation was interrupted by the parish priest’s death in 1761, and the Partitions, which took place shortly afterwards, put an end to the matter once and for all. Furthermore, in the year of the last Partition, the polychromy and gilding of Stoß’s work were restored.

Nuremberg–Berlin, 1933–1938

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Wawel Royal Castle with a flag bearing a swastika, 1939–1945, photo: Kraków-Warsaw Press Publishing Group / National Digital Archives

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The Nazi plunder of works of art and valuables did not begin on 1 September 1939. The chaotic looting carried out a year earlier, following the German annexation of Austrian and Czechoslovak territories, served as a dress rehearsal for the systematic wartime plunder that followed. The Nazis drew lessons from it and, as with their genocidal methods, refined the mechanics of art looting through technical improvements. During the September campaign, they knew not only what to bomb but also what to remove and where to take it.

Stoß’s works in Kraków were gaining popularity in the Reich even before the war, following the Nazis’ rise to power. In 1933, an anniversary exhibition was held at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, with Goebbels himself serving on the honorary committee. The St Mary’s Altarpiece was presented at the exhibition through photographs. In 1938, when the Reich expanded to include the territories of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia, Gerhard Sappok, an employee of the Nazi propaganda publishing office in Berlin, wrote an article on the nationality and spelling of the surname of the creator of the Kraków retable, noting with satisfaction that Polish researchers acknowledged his arrival from Nuremberg. In the hands of the propaganda machine, Veit Stoß became one of the first harbingers of the Germanic civilising mission in the barbaric East.

Disputes between the Polish and German burghers in sixteenth-century Kraków (it was not until the middle of that century that sermons at St Mary’s Church began to be delivered in Polish rather than German) led, among other things, to accusations that the Polish burghers were unwilling to contribute to the construction of the altarpiece. The selective use of sources – regardless of whether they contained clearly false information – provided the Nazis with yet another argument that they had every right to take possession of Stoß’s work and transport it back to where the artist came from – to ‘the most German of all German cities’.

Kraków, 1938

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A group of women at an exhibition of works by Veit Stoß at the Emperor Frederick Museum are looking at a photographic model of the altarpiece from St Mary’s Church in Kraków, 1941, Berlin, photo: National Digital Archives (NAC)

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Europeans learnt from the Spanish Civil War what consequences a war involving bombers dropping incendiary bombs could have for European cities. Already back then, some governments began to consider measures to protect historical monuments, particularly those that could be moved. Although France proved unprepared to repel the German invasion in 1940, preparations to evacuate its cultural treasures were already underway shortly after General Franco’s military coup. By 1937, the most important works had been catalogued and hiding places selected. Plans to evacuate individual collections were also drawn.

In Poland, planning proceeded at a slower pace. In the second half of the 1930s, guidelines on security measures were issued, and requests were made for lists of the most important objects, but it was not until June 1939 that the calls became urgent. However, they remained discreet – confidential correspondence regarding the hiding of works of art was sent to the administrators of estates and churches. Landowners in areas closer to the western border were also to evacuate their livestock further inland.

Karol Estreicher, who worked in the Department of Art History at the Jagiellonian University – and who, after the war, would play the most significant role in the retable’s recovery – did indeed call for the evacuation of St Mary’s Altarpiece shortly after the Anschluss of Austria, but at the time his appeals fell on deaf ears. Estreicher was particularly fond of Stoß’s work. As a nepo baby of the Kraków art history world, he had family ties to the artist – it was his great-grandfather, the classical scholar Ambroży Grabowski, who, in the 1820s, uncovered information about the forgotten creator of the retable.

In March 1938, the Society of Lovers of Kraków’s History and Monuments formed a committee to protect the basilica’s most valuable artefact. However, not everyone believed the monumental Gothic altarpiece should be evacuated. Some simply wanted to reinforce the church’s vaulted ceiling with a reinforced-concrete slab – in case of bombing. Others proposed building a shelter directly beneath the church and placing the retable there. Ultimately, however, the decision did not rest with the Society, but with the authorities. For many months, the authorities failed to respond to calls for action. Estreicher’s idea to send the altarpiece overseas, taking the opportunity to display it at a world exhibition in the US, was rejected at government level. It was a question of morale – the authorities feared that such a move would fuel public unrest. It was easier to believe that, if the worst came, Poland’s allies would come to its aid and that things would somehow work out.

Once it became clear that the state authorities could not be relied upon, Bogdan Treter, the Kraków conservator – who favoured hiding the retable outside the basilica – stepped in. He was seeking a hiding place. One possibility was the spacious Smocza Jama on Wawel Hill. It was a picturesque idea, but it is difficult to regard a cave beneath the castle as a particularly secluded spot. Moreover, the climatic conditions there were not particularly favourable for a wooden piece of art.

Kraków, 1939

The Committee for the Preservation of St Mary’s Altarpiece comprised, in addition to the aforementioned Estreicher, the architect Franciszek Mączyński (designer of, among others, Kraków’s Palace of Art and the House Under the Globe, who had overseen work on St Mary’s Church before the war); the archpriest of the basilica, Józef Kulinowski; the president of the Society of Lovers of Kraków’s History and Monuments, Józef Muczkowski; and local authorities: the mayor, Bolesław Czuchajowski, and the deputy mayor, Stanisław Klimecki.

The plan to dismantle and evacuate the retable was approved by, among others, the researchers Tadeusz Szydłowski and Adam Bochnak. However, one committee member – the archpriest Kulinowski – objected. Fortunately, learning to navigate life with the clergy was one of the fundamental skills for an art historian; so, rather than wasting time on negotiations, the rest of the committee made use of the Church’s hierarchy and secured the approval of Archbishop Adam Sapieha himself. Mączyński thus spent the early part of the last pre-war summer meticulously sketching the retable’s structure, marking all the screws securing the figures.

Dismantling them proved no easy task. The largest three-dimensional sculptures, carved from lime wood, can weigh up to several hundred kilograms. Fortunately, for almost half a millennium, the basilica housed not only the altarpiece but also a winch in the church loft, which was used to hoist the figures into place on ropes. The same equipment could therefore be used to dismantle them. The sculptures were packed into a lorry filled with waste paper from the editorial offices of Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny. The decision to hide them in Sandomierz was made literally at the very last moment. On 29 August, 30 crates containing the dismantled parts of the retable set off on a Vistula barge – just as, a few days later, the most precious treasures of Wawel would do. On the same day, a decision was taken to order a general mobilisation, but under pressure from the West, it was immediately revoked.

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The painter Juliusz Makarewicz at work. Restoration of Veit Stoß’s altarpiece from the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Kraków, 1932, photo: Grażyna Godziejewska / National Digital Archive (NAC)

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Estreicher oversaw the evacuation, distributing the pieces between the Sandomierz seminary and the cathedral. Smaller items remained in Kraków. Packed into boxes, they were hidden in secret compartments at the Collegium Novum of the Jagiellonian University and in the cellar of the painter Franciszek Turek. The ornaments stayed in the basilica, concealed within the archpriests’ tomb. And this was the one hiding place the Nazis would never find.

All that remained on site was an empty altar cabinet. As Estreicher later recalled, there was no thought of dismantling it, because the aim of the evacuation was not so much to hide the retable from looting as to protect it from the potential consequences of air raids:

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The aim was to protect the sculptures from destruction in the event of Kraków being bombed, a fire, or a missile striking St Mary’s Church. No thought was given to the possibility of the altarpiece being looted. It simply did not occur to anyone that such a thing could happen, given that a huge altar cabinet, 13 metres high, was left in place.

Shortly after the invasion of Poland began, Kajetan Mühlmann, a trusted associate of Göring, was appointed Commissioner for the Protection of Works of Art in the occupied territories. ‘Protection’ was, of course, understood in a highly idiosyncratic way – under Nazi policy, Polish culture was simply to be eradicated, and any artefacts that could be brought to the Reich were to become its property.

The looting was legitimised by numerous decrees. Perhaps the most categorical of these was the decree issued on 16 December 1939, which authorised the appropriation of ‘all kinds of works of art in the name of the public good’. The inhabitants of the conquered territories were obliged to facilitate the occupiers’ task – by submitting declarations of the collections in their possession – while concealing, selling or removing them was punishable by imprisonment.

Even before the onset of winter 1940, Mühlmann, together with a team of German experts, collected works of art from across the General Government, stored them in Kraków, and published a richly illustrated catalogue detailing each item’s provenance. Not all were intended for relocation – only the most valuable were to be sent to the Reich. Works of lesser artistic merit, on the other hand, were to serve as decorative items for offices and residences in the occupied territory.

The German art historian Hans Posse, who had already begun collecting works from the annexed territories for the newly established museum in Linz (the Führer’s hometown), intended to be a prestigious institution housing Hitler’s personal collection, wrote:

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The inspection confirmed my assumption that, except works of the highest calibre already known to us in Germany (namely the altarpiece by Veit Stoß and the panel by Hans von Kulmbach from St Mary’s Church in Kraków, works by Raphael, Leonardo and Rembrandt from the Czartoryski collection) and a few works from the National Museum in Warsaw, there are not many works there that would enhance the German collection of great paintings.

The fewer valuable works there were in the eyes of the occupiers, the fiercer the battles over them became – prominent Nazis were snatching them from one another’s hands. Mühlmann immediately sent the most valuable works from the Czartoryski collection to Göring, who was decorating his estates with the stolen artworks. However, Governor Hans Frank ordered him to bring them back so they would adorn the royal chambers at Wawel, where Frank himself resided. Frank, who was by no means driven by a love of art but rather by a need to assert his own status, did not really know how to deal with them, however. Mühlmann, admittedly, meekly carried out the order, but later – as, after all, he was a trained art historian – gave his boss a piece of his mind for having hung Leonardo above the radiator. As a consolation prize, he sent Göring a painting by Watteau that had been looted from the Baths Palace.

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The Emperor Frederick Museum, view of the Veit Stoß exhibition, Berlin, 1941, photo: Marek Tempel / National Digital Archive (NAC)

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Peter Paulsen, an archaeologist with the Ahnenerbe – an organisation set up by Himmler to study Germanic heritage – managed to get his hands on the part of St Mary’s retable that was hidden in Sandomierz. SS-Untersturmführer Paulsen – in civilian life a professor at the University of Berlin – orchestrated the looting even before Mühlmann’s arrival, with whom he would soon have to contend over the right to ‘protect’ the artefacts.

The interrogations of people who might have known the hiding place of the altar figures were conducted by Robert Weissmann, who later became head of the Zakopane Gestapo. Archbishop Sapieha revealed the hideout to him, hoping to spare those being interrogated from torture and that the retable would return to occupied Kraków. Initially, Stoß’s sculptures did indeed end up there – but only briefly. From the General Government, they were taken to Berlin, where, as early as 14 October 1939, they were deposited at the Reichsbank.

London, 1940

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Karol Estreicher, Kraków, 1978, photo: Grzegorz Rogiński / FORUM

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Preparations for the post-war recovery of artworks proceeded more efficiently than efforts to protect them from German aggression. As early as November 1939, a secret Commission for Recovery and Compensation was established in Warsaw. It was headed by Antoni Olszewski, a former Minister of Industry and Trade who had held the post briefly in 1920. He had experience in this field – in the early days of the Second Polish Republic, he had been involved in recovering property plundered by the Soviets during the Partitions. The commission met in Olszewski’s flat to gather detailed information on what had been looted. Among its members was Stanisław Lorentz, director of the National Museum in Warsaw. The government-in-exile also urged the inhabitants of occupied Poland to keep detailed records of the crimes committed – both against people and against culture. Because the Nazis, despite all their meticulous bookkeeping, did not leave receipts for the items they plundered.

In the spring of 1940, in London, Karol Estreicher was appointed head of the Commission for the Registration and Restitution of Polish Cultural Property. The art historian, whose achievements included a highly regarded guide to Kraków and collaboration with Aleksander Brückner on the Encyklopedia Staropolska (Encyclopaedia of Old Poland), was forced, in the new historical circumstances, to act more like an intelligence officer than a university scholar. Across Europe, he recruited a network of collaborators who, under the guise of ordinary academic work, scoured antiquarian bookshops and museum collections in search of traces of looted works.

He was particularly committed to the cause of St Mary’s Altarpiece, which he himself had evacuated from Kraków just a few months earlier. The reality of quasi-intelligence work was, however, a far cry from the Bond films. Estreicher did not find his work particularly exciting; he wrote to his fiancée, who was still in occupied Poland: ‘I’m living well and comfortably; my work is boring, but it satisfies the passion you know I have – the St Mary’s Altarpiece. That, apart from you, is my only passion.’

Nuremberg, 1941

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Conservators (State Conservation and Painting Workshop, led by conservator Marian Słonecki) during the conservation of Veit Stoß’s St Mary’s Altarpiece, Kraków, 1948, photo: PAP

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The Lord Mayor of Nuremberg, Willy Liebel, who had joined the NSDAP as early as 1925, planned to have Stoß’s altarpiece brought to the sculptor’s hometown and placed in the 13th-century Church of St Lorenz. Hitler supported these plans – the crates deposited at a Berlin bank and the empty altar cabinet, which still remained in Kraków, were transported to Nuremberg on Hitler’s personal orders.

The monumental retable was dismantled under the supervision of Eberhard Lutze – author of the catalogue for the 1933 Stoß exhibition in Nuremberg – who had been sent to Kraków specifically for this purpose. The sculptor’s biographer ensured that the SS soldiers did not cut up the work with saws. The priests at the basilica were unable to prevent the plunder, but they could at least be sparing with the information they gave – for example, by not telling the occupiers about the medieval winch still in the attic, which had facilitated the evacuation in August 1939. The Germans had to struggle to set up their own crane.

Parallel to the dismantling of the remaining parts, the search for the other hidden fragments of the altarpiece continued. Even without reassembling the whole, the Nazis realised from the markings on the confiscated crates that something was missing. They began their search at the Jagiellonian University’s Department of Art History – they knew that Estreicher, who had been employed there before the war, had been involved in the retable’s evacuation. Metre by metre, they tapped the walls and floors. At last, they came across what were clearly newly laid floorboards. Once these had been torn up, the German soldiers’ eyes were met with treasures from the university and Wawel, and the much-sought-after fragments of the predella from St Mary’s Altarpiece. They also located some boxes in Turek’s cellar. However, one hiding place at the university remained undiscovered, as did the ornaments concealed in the tomb in the basilica itself.

In Nuremberg, however, there was no place to reassemble the altarpiece. Although the Royal Air Force’s large-scale bombing raids did not begin until 1943, the city had already been the target of isolated air raids as early as 1940. The retable, like the imperial regalia looted after the Anschluss of Austria, was stored in a bunker built specifically for this purpose – air-conditioned and heavily guarded – located beneath the castle hill.

Bern–London, 1940-1941

From September 1940 to April 1941, Estreicher travelled through Switzerland and Spain. The Poles were unaware of the altarpiece’s current whereabouts, but whilst in Switzerland, the researcher came across a lead. He was reportedly told about the Nuremberg bunker beneath the castle hill by Polish forced labourers who had escaped from there and had worked on its construction. An antiquarian from Bern confirmed the information.

All information and credible evidence were documented. The London office, headed by Estreicher, maintained files on looted artworks. These files, intended to assist with post-war restitution, contained not only information about the works and their images but also the names of people believed to have information about their status. In the case of St Mary’s Altarpiece, the list contained 12 names. At first glance, it looked like a bibliography – it featured not soldiers, but German art historians, distinguished scholars holding professorships and doctoral degrees. Among them was a promising lead: Dr Eberhard Lutze.

Nuremberg, 1945

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An altarpiece created by Veit Stoß between 1477 and 1489, photo: Paweł Migasiewicz

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Ołtarz wykonany przez Wita Stwosza w latach 1477-1489, fot. Paweł Migasiewicz

When, in the face of the Nazis’ inevitable surrender, the Allies were negotiating Germany’s post-war fate, the restitution of stolen works of art was one of dozens of issues to be resolved. A unit of the Polish government-in-exile was working with Allied bodies, including the Vaucher Commission in London and the Roberts Commission in the US. The latter was established, in part, as a result of Estreicher’s several-month stay in the US and his series of lectures and discussions, in which he made Americans aware of the scale of the looting. In 1943, Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives was established – a group comprising researchers and conservators, among others, of which Estreicher was also a member.

On 2 January 1945, the Allies dropped 2,300 tonnes of bombs on Nuremberg’s old town. The payload required several hundred aircraft and had a yield roughly one-sixth that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima a few months later. In the ruined city, locating the looted works of art was difficult. Liebel, who knew best what had become of the retable, died on 19 April, the day before American troops entered the city. It is not certain whose hands this happened in – most likely, he pulled the trigger himself in the bunker, not wanting to fall alive into the enemy’s hands. Crucial information about the location of the treasures was provided by an unassuming witness: the German prisoner of war Wilhelm Kron, captured on 8 March in Antweiler. His father was in charge of the bunker’s heating system, and the entrance to the bunker was located in the cellar of a Nuremberg painter’s house.

When the Americans broke into the underground hideouts, they discovered what were essentially underground cities, complete with a police station and car park. The air-conditioned and fortified hideouts were so densely packed beneath the ground that the search for St Mary’s Altarpiece lasted for many weeks. It was Emeryk August Hutten-Czapski, a politician and diplomat, who found its trail. The location was, in a sense, symbolic – the entrance to the bunker was situated opposite Albrecht Dürer’s house. On 7 June, the American military confirmed that the retable had been traced.

More warehouses were discovered, yet there was still no agreement among representatives of the ‘Big Three’ on restitution policy. Initially, therefore, the Americans carried out a limited, one-off restitution: the most famous works from public collections, whose status was beyond doubt, were returned to the liberated countries. The Ghent Altarpiece by the van Eyck brothers, for example, was returned to its rightful place. The St Mary’s Altarpiece – one of the most famous looted artefacts – should also have been returned: its status was clear. But the status of Poland itself – not necessarily.

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Restoration of Veit Stoß’s altarpiece from the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Kraków, 1932, photo: Grażyna Godziejewska / National Digital Archive (NAC)

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Tensions were mounting between the government in London and the new communist authorities, who were not yet based in Warsaw – which had been razed to the ground – but in Lublin. Józef Czapski, already involved in the matter of the altarpiece, wrote to the President of the Republic of Poland in exile, suggesting that its discovery should not be publicised and that it be sent temporarily to the US, as ‘it would be safe across the ocean’. However, this proposal, like a similar idea put forward by Estreicher a few years earlier, did not find favour. The Americans, on the other hand, in good faith, publicised the discovery of the altarpiece.

The first attempt at restitution took place – directly to the Polish Church, bypassing the state’s shambles. While the altarpieces were being loaded onto lorries, Paweł Sapieha oversaw the diplomatic side – a participant in the September Campaign, later a distinguished soldier in the US Army, and, incidentally, the nephew of Archbishop Sapieha of Kraków, to whom he had set out from Nuremberg on a mission. The Church undertook to handle the unloading logistics, while the loading report in Nuremberg was signed by Colonel Jan Kaczmarek, a representative of the Polish authorities in London. However, on 5 July, the British and Americans jointly withdrew their support for the London government, and Paweł Sapieha hastily evacuated from Poland.

Towards the end of July, Estreicher returned to Poland. He wished to continue his work on restitution under the new arrangements, as a delegate of the officially recognised communist authorities. He succeeded – as early as August, he travelled to London, where, a few years earlier, he had headed the government-in-exile’s restitution unit. He then sought to travel to Nuremberg, which, at that point in history, was more difficult than ever. Preparations for the trials of Nazi war criminals were underway, and entry to the city was strictly controlled by the American occupying forces.

On 15 November, five days before the first trial began, Estreicher finally reached the place where the altarpiece was stored. After six years, he saw the sculptures with his own eyes once more. The usually eloquent researcher was at a loss for words. In his diary he wrote: ‘They are here, standing there, and there are so many of them. The statues of the apostles… the Madonna… the bas-reliefs… a deeply moving sight.’

In December, everything was well underway. Estreicher sent a letter home, noting, however, the logistical complexity of transporting Stoß’s sculptures – now that, unlike in 1939, they could be properly secured rather than hurriedly sent down the Vistula. He was still awaiting authorisation to collect the works from the Americans. He received it in February. At the end of April 1946, a train carrying the priceless cargo set off for Kraków.

Kraków, 1946

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Karol Estreicher with ‘Lady with an Ermine’ at Kraków railway station upon his return to Poland, photo: Monuments Foundation

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The train comprised no fewer than 27 carriages. In addition to the altarpiece, the convoy carried, among others, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine, Rembrandt’s Landscape with the Good Samaritan, and the Balthasar Behem Codex. The convoy was commanded by Lieutenant Frank P. Albright; travelling alongside the American soldiers were Estreicher and Karol Małcużyński, a correspondent for the PPS-affiliated newspaper Robotnik.

They travelled in luxury – in a converted carriage once belonging to Ribbentrop. The train passed through Czechoslovakia, stopping en route in Katowice, where, alongside ministerial officials, it was greeted by the art historian Adam Bochnak – the very same man who, in 1939, had supported the dismantling and evacuation of the retable. In the middle of the night, former colleagues from the University of Kraków finally raised a joyful toast with ‘some American vodka’, as Bochnak would later write in a letter to his mother-in-law.

The train arrived in Kraków on 30 April. This was accompanied by the usual celebrations – a band, an honour guard from the cadet school, speeches and an enthusiastic crowd. However, the timing was unfortunate – after all, 1 May, a holiday of particular significance to the new authorities, was just around the corner. The official reception was postponed until 5 May.

Meanwhile, 3 May proved to be a particularly critical day. The official celebrations marking the anniversary of the adoption of the constitution were cancelled at the last minute; however, a patriotic demonstration marched through the streets of Kraków, only to be brutally suppressed and end in mass arrests. Admittedly, senior American military officers had been strategically taken on a trip to Zakopane at that time, but a handful of privates remained.

Robert King, the train’s security commander, was informed that his men had been involved in a shootout with the w (MO). A bullet casing from an American weapon found at the scene was said to prove this. This symbolic triumph could quickly have turned into a serious diplomatic scandal. After the official ceremonies, King therefore ordered his men to move from the hotel to the train they had arrived on, just in case – the train had extraterritorial status and served as a sort of embassy on rails. An injured MO officer identified a young American private as the assailant who had shot him. The private did not admit guilt, pointing to witnesses who attested that he had remained in his quarters during the clashes with the militia. The MO commander remained unconvinced; the train was surrounded and immobilised. Just as the American commander was about to agree to the interrogations, another private broke down and confessed that he was the one who had fired the shots – allegedly in self-defence after being attacked by officers in plain clothes.

The Americans, however, devised a clever plan – the guilty soldier’s testimony was classified, and the accused private allowed himself to be arrested. The plan was that after a few days he could be cleared of the charges and released, while in the meantime the real culprit would be taken out of Poland. However, instead of a few days, Private Curtis Dagley spent four months in a Kraków prison, treated as a valuable bargaining chip, before finally being released in a prisoner exchange.

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Conservators (State Conservation and Painting Workshop, led by conservator Marian Słonecki) at work on the figures of the Virgin Mary and St James from the Dormition of the Virgin Mary scene (central panel), part of Veit Stoß’s St Mary’s Altarpiece, Kraków, 1948, photo: PAP

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At the time, only the statues of the Virgin Mary and the apostle from the Dormition group were brought to St Mary’s Basilica for the ceremonial installation of the retable. Conservation work, supervised by Marian Słonecki, began shortly afterwards and continued until 1949. However, the altarpiece had to wait even longer to return to the basilica. It remained on display at a post-conservation exhibition at Wawel until 1957.

Its return from this ‘internment’ was made possible by the political thaw and the subsequent relaxation of policy towards the Church. It took its place on the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary – in accordance with the Church’s patronage and the retable’s main iconographic motif – 12 years after its return to Poland. History rhymed again: Veit Stoß had devoted the same number of years to its creation.

Bibliography:
Stanisław Waltoś, Grabież ołtarza Wita Stwosza, Warsaw 2015;
Agata Wolska, Zagrabiony, odzyskany. Historia powrotu ołtarza Wita Stwosza do Krakowa, Kraków 2019;
Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, transl. by Barbara Sławomirska, Kraków 1997;
Marta Grzywacz, Obrońca skarbów. Karol Estreicher: w poszukiwaniu zagrabionych dzieł sztuki, Warsaw 2017.

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

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