The Ghent Altarpiece, taken from Pau in 1942

On 3 August 1942, German officers took the panels of the Ghent Altarpiece out of the Chateau de Pau, in the south of France. Ghent had sent the altarpiece there two years earlier to keep it safe from the war. According to Noah Charney’s 2010 book, the curator at Pau had asked for written orders from the Vichy government, and a telegram signed by Pierre Laval, the head of that government, then arrived.

The altarpiece was set up in a chapel of what is now St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent on 6 May 1432. A verse on the frame names Hubert van Eyck as the starter and his brother Jan as the finisher. How the work was shared between them is unclear. Its history was already troubled. Napoleon’s troops took the central panels to Paris in 1794, and they were back in Ghent in 1816 without the wings. The wings were sold the same year and reached the king of Prussia. They came back from Berlin under the Treaty of Versailles. In 1934 two panels were stolen from the cathedral, and one, the Just Judges, is still missing. Another story covers that theft.

The altarpiece left Ghent on 16 May 1940 in three lorries, bound for Pau. A plan to send it on to the Vatican was dropped when Italy entered the war, according to several secondary sources. In June 1942, Charney writes, the Germans gave a written guarantee that the art at Pau would not be touched.

At the end of June, Ernst Buchner, director of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, received an order from an official of the Reich Chancellery to fetch it. Buchner told US interrogators in 1945 that the order called it protection from air raids, not confiscation. The convoy reached Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria on 7 August, in Buchner’s account. A German page says 8 August. Neuschwanstein was the main depot of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the Nazi unit that seized art in occupied countries. Charney reports that Count Wolff-Metternich, a German army art-protection officer, objected and lost his post. Graham, writing in the International Journal of Cultural Property, says Hitler meant to place it in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. It is usually assumed it was meant for his planned museum at Linz.

In 1944 it was moved to the Altaussee salt mine in Austria. In April 1945 the regional Nazi leader, August Eigruber, had crates of bombs brought to the mine. US forces reached Altaussee on 8 May. Captain Robert Posey and Private First Class Lincoln Kirstein of the Monuments Men, the Allied unit that protected art, entered the mine on 13 May. They found the altarpiece among about 6,500 paintings.

It went to the Munich Central Collecting Point and was flown to Brussels on 21 August 1945, the first work returned from Munich. The Americans delivered it to the Royal Palace on 22 August. The formal handover to the regent, Prince Charles, took place on 3 September. Sources disagree on the day it reached Ghent: 30 October, or 6 November 1945.

Buchner was arrested by the Americans on 18 June 1945 and removed from his post. He was classified as a follower in the denazification proceedings, in 1948 according to some sources and mid-1947 according to a study. No disciplinary proceedings followed. He was reinstated on 1 April 1953 and retired in 1957. The altarpiece is in St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, where the central Lamb panel now hangs in the Sacrament Chapel after a restoration begun in 2019.