The jewels of the House of Hesse

In November 1945, in the cellar of Schloss Friedrichshof at Kronberg, near Frankfurt, an American officer found a box buried under new concrete. The castle belonged to the House of Hesse, a German princely family. US forces had occupied it in April 1945 and made it an officers’ club. The officer was Captain Kathleen Nash of the Women’s Army Corps, who ran the club’s mess. Accounts of the find differ. One says a fresh patch of concrete gave it away. Another says a German employee gave a tip. A third says a soldier knocked through a wall.

The family had hidden the box a year earlier. In October 1944, during air raids on Frankfurt, Prince Wolfgang of Hesse and his relatives buried the family jewels there, with an inventory. The US National Archives says the box also held the property of several relatives. It held tiaras, necklaces, bracelets, loose gems, gold and silver tableware, and bibles. There is no single “crown jewel”. The name comes from the press and the Army records. The Archives put the value at over $2.5 million. TIME reported $3 million in June 1946.

Nash told Colonel Jack Durant, an Army Air Forces staff officer who was also a lawyer, and Major David Watson, his assistant. The three took the contents. Fred Borch, a historian of the US Army’s legal corps, writes that they broke up the jewellery and pried out the stones. They sold or pawned gold, silver and gems in Belfast, Bern, Basel and Zurich. Borch says about 30 boxes went to the United States by Army mail, to relatives of the three.

The family found the loss in early 1946, when a servant went to fetch jewels for a wedding. Borch gives February. The National WWII Museum gives January. Countess Margarethe, the dowager Landgravine, went to the provost marshal in Frankfurt, and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division took the case. Nash and Durant married in Chicago on 28 May 1946. Agents arrested them in a hotel on 3 June. The Archives says the marriage was meant to stop one spouse testifying. Borch does not think the timing was chance. On 7 and 8 June the War Department showed recovered items in Washington. The Associated Press gave their value as $1.5 million.

All three officers were convicted by Army courts-martial. This account follows issue 2 of The Army Lawyer, where the same historian corrects issue 1. Nash was convicted in 1946 of larceny, with Durant and Watson, and was sentenced to dismissal and five years at hard labour. Her appeal on jurisdiction failed in 1948. Durant was convicted in 1947 of larceny and conspiracy. The panel gave him 15 years, and the reviewing authority cut it to 14. Watson was cleared of larceny in 1946 but convicted of conspiracy to receive and transport stolen property. He received three years. President Eisenhower pardoned him on 31 July 1957.

On 1 August 1951 the Army and the Treasury returned more than 270 items to the family. They filled two Army safes. Countess Margarethe, then 79, took custody at the US Consulate in Frankfurt. Borch values what was flown back at about $600,000. He writes that more than half the jewels, and most of the gold and silver, were never recovered, and that no one knows where they went. HistoryNet reports that the stones lost most of their value when the settings were destroyed.