Spoils Of War: Recovering Stolen Art | The Liberators (Full Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] so when did you become mayor of white right texas eight of 1984 and aided for 30 years did you know the meadow family oh yeah i knew all of the sisters the him the uncles the son the nephew the whole bunch and had you seen the treasures before this whole crazy story broke no i i didn't in fact no one knew i was coming in from work and i seen all these cameras and pictures and people running all over town they said they waiting on you to come and i said what they said they just found the treasure in town i said what what do you mean treasure an astonishing turn today in a trail that leads from europe in the final days of world war ii to a small desolate texas town near the oklahoma border and perhaps to a treasure trove of masterpieces [Music] [Music] [Music] my name is willy corte and what i've been doing for a living for the last 30 years is recover stolen art klaus goldman told me that at the end of world war ii half of the treasure disappeared during the occupation by the americans and that he had some documents and what i was interested to have a look at it and could possibly research more about this story i mean the cued limb book treasures of course are you know tremendous religious historical value it's not just another painting you know or another museum's piece it is something that has a history of over a thousand years and and and um i couldn't think of any any other case that i could ever pursue you know for the rest of my life that would have that kind of significance the treasure was known to me because i'd visited kweilenberg as a graduate student but knowing that parts of it had been lost during the war many of the earliest objects in the treasure a wonderful ivory comb that is very exotic and its carving almost took on a reliquary and holy status at a very early date once they arrived in quedlenberg these objects took on their own beauty and life and sanctity there's a story from a saints life where a famous autonian woman hathamoda had one of these hanging over her bed and there was a miracle associated with it so they were seen as almost miraculous stuff and they were things that to some extent in the private possession of these queens these princesses etc they're really very very precious objects most books are are composite objects they comprise all kinds of different materials like textiles and wood and ivory and parchment and obviously medieval manuscripts are a very special category that can involve you know precious stones and gold and metals but when they have these fantastic treasure bindings on them the books can be difficult to handle safely in a way that preserves both the cover and the illuminations inside these are medieval manuscripts are often extraordinary works of art [Music] my father was in a precious metal business at the end of the war when he had to flee from dresden on the soviet occupation he hid a good deal of gold and silver before he he fled so once german reunification takes place we could go back and dig up the treasures i grew up with with the idea that the family has a treasure in a place that is inaccessible and one day we should be able to go there and and recover it and i actually went to east germany to recover the treasure but but it was gone well this is the national record center in siouxland maryland and at the time when i did the kudlenberg research it also had a reading room for the national archives and the military records which were the ones that were most relevant for my research were actually in this building so this is where i did all the essential research on the quedlinberg case the job that i initially had from klaus goldman was to go through the records of the u.s military government pertaining to the knowledge in those documents as far as the fate of these missing museums because they had evacuated pretty much everything when i started the research in 86 we still had a full-blown east germany so i i didn't know what what records existed in cretelenburg and and the only place i could go to was the national archives and do the research on the unit that was in queensland work at the time and from there try to find out who the thief or the thieves could have been i needed and received the help of klaus goldman who then introduced me to bill hornan at the new york times well bill holland from the new york times initially was rather skeptical of the whole story but i think once he had accepted it as a credible story he got very excited about it and we worked very closely together it was really a very productive i think type of sort of secret collaboration for both of us and and i think we we developed a very sort of friendly type of cooperation so i had to go back to washington and we document and sit hours and hours in the archives for weeks and weeks things like the cuddling book treasures works of art are usually stolen by officers because they had privileged access to places you know if if there was a castle full of artworks they are the ones who could go in they are the ones who had the opportunity to uh you know to pick out the pieces and and and they wouldn't be seriously questioned if they would walk out with something because i mean they could be taking it to you know higher headquarters or whatever what i was looking for was information pertaining to the discovery of valuables in or around cuddling work [Music] i had been told at the time that the city moved its most valuable possessions into this cave i was looking for some information in the military documents that reported the discovery of the cave and to find proof that the americans had discovered the cave and secondly find some details on the particular unit smaller unit that either had discovered it reported it guarded it or whatsoever and i read like documents like this and i think it's time to you know turn the page and then somehow something tells me are you sure you read everything carefully then you have to read the whole thing again so so it's it's very time consuming finally i found this entry for april the 20th 1945 cave at and then coordinates are given big room statues and crates two rooms in upper level oil paintings and records fourth squadron once i had these coordinates i could then locate the specific place that these coordinates referred to and that indeed was right there where the cave was in kwedlenburg once i'm in the archives and i have a question in front of me and and it doesn't go very well you know i know there must be something somewhere i have a tendency to not give up easily and and and that kind of an attitude i had at the time where i at least want to find out who was in kwetlenburg [Music] soldiers sailors and airmen of the allied expeditionary force you are about to embark upon the great crusade [Music] the countryside is peaceful green rolling very lazy looking in general there's a very neat little farm off to the left with neat barns haystacks that look like a bread pan full of hot ponds or toadstool patch on the approach from the rear one finds that that sweet smelling haystack stinks with a jerry anti-tank gun inside well the problem is solved fire incendiary at the haystack then we have roasted gerry in about 20 minutes the tradition began um years in september in 1942 the english american started to destroy german towns the his first town was leaving borderlands [Music] a [Music] [Music] [Music] b [Music] when circle has inside that expansion folded their shots then [Music] when american bombardment of germany began in about 1943 himmler who'd fallen in love with them had them uh secreted in this cave didn't himmler think that he was the reincarnation of some past german yes he did uh he was quite a screwball and believed that he was a reincarnation of heinrich the first she said the american came after the world war no they came to finish the war and my native town is on the elk and from the west the american conquered it they came to tangamwinde in the night and the house of my parents is on the town wall they needed this house to look for german soldiers and therefore was a machine gun in our room so they were sitting on the floor and they read a newspaper and i write whose word is that and that was the news on 13th of april 45 [Music] two years after the end of the second world war we had to learn that our own soldiers had done criminality at the top criminality other muslim land of the adults the list of things stolen by the nazis is as broad as anyone can imagine if it had monetary value or historic value it was stolen if it wasn't destroyed beforehand the monuments officers are there to protect it regardless of what country it came from including things that belong to germany their view was dispassionate in that regard despite having very strong passions about the horrific war crimes that they were also witness to here you have this conundrum of the united states government being on the side of the hated ss the most brutal organization uh hitler's nazi germany was not a friendly attitude towards germany and the germans right at the end of the war you will not be friendly you will be aloof watchful and suspicious every german is a potential source of trouble therefore there must be no fraternization with any of the german people looting spoils of war was generally accepted usually these units were stationed in larger buildings outside cities so they were often castles and estates and so forth i sent home the second book it has a hammered gold cover with some 80 jewels and laid in it please store it most carefully for me as it is very valuable in the history of warfare taking of spoils of war was a commonly accepted practice in fact armies sometimes paid their soldiers by allowing them to take the things that they could walk away with that's what makes world war ii such a demarcation line with how wars have been fought in the past that you had the western allies through general eisenhower's orders stipulate that this policy was going to be different than how things have worked in the past these works of art and cultural treasures were not going to be taken and in fact an enormous amount of resources were going to be put into place to try and identify who the rightful owners were and get them back the first thing they did they go into the basement and see what's in the wine cellar after the cognac and the red wine is gone then they go upstairs and they picked out something which they took home from for mother as a souvenir and and it was one piece now joe you know obviously wanted to take more than just one souvenir from mother he wasn't a different devil we'll imagine people going into quindlenburg which was not damaged by the war and the primary draw of people going into the church are these great relics that are gone stolen and even worse by american forces but it brings shame on the american army and soldiers that one soldier would choose to do something like that which is why the soldiers that were able to be identified right at the end of the war were so severely punished was to send the message you know this isn't going to be tolerated our cultural treasures our heritage as a civilization that defines who we are is one of the reasons they were fighting so the fact that one of these soldiers would have stolen stuff from so many other millions of troops were risking lives to try and protect as part of their overall mission is disrespectful and offensive to every one of the troops that served and in particular those that didn't come home because they're buried in europe [Music] i'm perfectly happy that the book got home it is a very valuable thing so care for it there's one more on the way somewhat like it also a chest at the same time except the chest has a bunch of ivory and lay in it life here is most boring nothing to do at all all the high rank takes all the passes to paris to brussels to antwerp to italy to switzerland we just sit here in the woods going nuts slowly you should know that during the cold war we had no real chance to speak with the soviet union or with the united states of america or great britain or france about the returning of treasures which were stolen during the war and i believe personally i believe also the gdr government had no interest no interest [Music] the folks of kwedlenberg complained at the end of the war that numerous pieces were missing ever since the americans were in town so there was this original list that i had of the the pieces that were missing from puedlin book you have to keep in mind when i did the research i couldn't get any research done in cretelenburg which was east germany one of the reasons why the church was trying to keep a low profile because they feared that the government would remove the remaining pieces and put them in a museum the church was always fearful that they would lose the remaining pieces in the beginning it was very risky for everybody my family and me we were observed for several months around our house we had cars with officials of the secret service of the gdr and the people who came to me were controlled by them and i i found also uh in my file of the secretary that they had a lot of people who were responsible to deliver information about my private life my contacts and also my all my activities i came home from school by bus and my boys 14 and 10 were still sitting in front of the television and i said well what are you doing here why aren't you in bed and george my my other son said well the border is open so they were sitting and watching this and i was sitting and watching this i couldn't really believe it because you you weren't prepared for that that it went so that that it went so fast it went really too fast it was my official job to check where are our objects of this museum therefore i had to check what really happened at the end of the war i found that many many published stories are pure lies and now it was an open question where can it be then so i tried to puzzle it together from the records in the archives unfortunately those records were not maintained these records don't come with with rosters so i still didn't know you know who served at that time in which unit the place to go to for personnel related information is not in washington business in lewis so i went to saint louis with the hope of finding the rosters for these units i couldn't just call them up i didn't say listen do you know anything about the quellenberg pressure and what happened to them because i never knew who i was talking to i could have called up one of the thieves that was before the internet anything i wanted to find out i had to call people up i had to send them faxes i had to drive because i didn't have the money for an airplane ticket so i drove down there and and slept in my car and come back empty-handed this was my first contact with willie in this case and and he was driven he drove me he's very good at getting people to do what he wants he was passionate about solving this case it became pretty time consuming and pretty pretty frustrating and i'm not sure how much i much longer i could have continued if that samuel gospel wouldn't have shown up [Music] it had been a 10-year long effort of joe tom meadors brothers and sister to sell this material and to find a buyer for it they've showed these things to 10 private dealers and also christie's the art auction house and christie's didn't think it was necessary to alert the german government it is it is outrageous in my view but that is their opinion and uh so after having kept these treasures two of the most valuable of them the manuscripts for nearly half a year uh ins and and determining beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was stolen property what did they do did they do what you and i would do which is call the police or at least notify the germans as you as you suggested no they didn't they surreptitiously returned them to the presumptive thief s-a-m-u-h-e-l samuel so it's spelled in an odd way but that's but that's just one page of it and it's just wonderful a later carolingian gospel book so each gospel matthew mark luke and john is has a preface of the evangelist sitting there writing his gospels the world is small when it comes to things like this because there are only so many specialists whose opinions might matter if a family is trying to sell or get an appraisal of a an illuminated medieval manuscript for example not to speak of one as valuable as the gospels or the other works that were part of the quinlan work treasures the price tag has been put on them they are said to be worth more than 200 million dollars they were said to be worth more than a van gogh painting and they're just extraordinarily valuable my wife uh who's a religious person um and i think that i'm you know a person sort of lacking faith i said listen don't worry about my my faith i think i'm i'm clearly a person of faith because certain things happened along the way in the quentin brook case that were highly unexpected after the samuel gospels had reappeared i was going to go to see mr falter at h.p krause to whom the samuel gospels had had been offered and i wanted to have a witness with me because mr falter could have told me anything and afterwards could have denied everything bill honan had heard about the rumors of reappearance of the quedlinburg treasures and he referred willie corte to me so willie searched for the treasures and i tried to make sure that no mistakes were made and that a legal claim could be brought if he found them i went back to folder uh and said listen is there anything else you can tell me then i guess falter thought well i mean the story's over so there's nothing for me to gain or lose anymore he gave me a copy of the letter that he had received from the bank offering him the two manuscripts of course it was anonymous so i didn't know from whom the letter came and then falter helped me further by opening in the atlas with a map of texas and then putting a pencil underneath the name of white right i got on the next plane and flew to dallas drove into white right [Music] i stood in front of the bank and the question was how do i go into a bank and and say listen i'm looking for the quinlan book treasure they told me i have to go to denison so i drove to denison we were up in john farley's office one afternoon making some phone calls and the secretary came up and said you have some visitors and it was willie corte [Music] i introduced myself and what i did have at the time was this article from the new york times this front page story the business card he gave us was was just kind of had a bunch of scratch through marks and stuff and so we really didn't know who they were the giveaway was that i gave farley the article from the new york times the front page story that was about the samuel gospels and the way he read it he read it with interest i was convinced that you read it the way somebody reads it who has a connection to what it is he's reading and then he called in sylvester and said hey you gotta come in here listen to this story and close the door so when they left we thought we need to come up with a plan because it had been in the dallas morning news like that monday morning so we contacted a law firm haynes and boone in dallas we hinted at what it could possibly be and could they possibly meet with us the attorney that specialized in art was very excited she said she had seen the article in the paper and it mentioned white right texas so and she said i wondered when somebody would come up with this and she never dreamed that she would have the opportunity to be the attorney working on the case i subsequently got a call to meet with the lawyers in dallas who initially represented the bank and then represent the bank and the family and i think i was sitting across the table with four or five lawyers who pretty much told me young man there is nothing really here to pursue this this is a lost cause and and they gave me i remember all kinds of all kinds of legal explanations why under texas law u.s law international law there was nothing that the church or anybody else could really successfully pursue and and and i listened to all of this and and i just said listen uh to me this looks like just stolen property you know nothing else [Music] bill honen of course was still continuing the research on the thief so he went back to white right and dennison and continued what i had to to give up on which was asking people who amongst you was a world war ii veteran who served in europe and so forth and so forth it was a matter of uh pursuing a whole bunch of leads a lot of telephoning and then finally uh triangulating you might say where i picked up various hints joe did go to north texas he did major in art so he had i don't know that he knew necessarily what these things were but he knew they were pretty i mean he had he had good taste yeah there's you know and i don't know that he knew they were that valuable it wasn't like no i brought them home and they're worth a billion dollars or anything like that you know what any of that sort of thing that's just that's the way it was joe was so happy with his treasures that he wanted really to show them off but he was afraid to most people didn't have any idea what they were they were beautiful but they didn't know where they came from one day this man came in and said he was looking for a picture of joe meador and i said well seems like i remember something in our file let me go see what i have so i pulled the file out and i found i think there were three negatives of him holding some orchids that he grew and so we talked a little while and he said he was from new york and he was doing i remember that he said he was doing something on orchids i said well i don't know that we would need three negatives of this so here you can take one of them and you don't have to worry about bringing it back because he was dead he had died already died and i couldn't see why we would need a picture of a man who was deceased with an orchid so i gave him one of the negatives and the next day it came out in the new york times [Music] the reporter asked me if i had come to school with joe thomas i was incensed i said no you want me to smack you and he really jumped back a little bit and so after that since i didn't know that much about the whole magilla in the first place i'm sure he thought crazy we went to work that morning and everything was fine and all of a sudden we had all these newscasters bursting in the doors and wanting to film in the building and all this out in the other it got to be a mess and then there was one person that lived out in white rock which is a few miles up by my out of here and i knew him very well and i and he used to drive joe meadows to dallas all the time and and i asked him and we called him skunk and i said skunk i said have you heard anything about this so-called treasure stuff around here and he said well i've seen some of it but i didn't know what it was you sit around all the time wanting something big to happen you know big murder case or a big something robbery or something and then when it happens you know you remember it everybody knew joe towns everybody knew mrs mitter and the met her family for pity sex jack gene everybody [Music] he was very well educated he he knew his way around he was worldly before i graduated i was invited up to his one room apartment and while i was there he casually talked about the german jewels they were just out on tables and i don't know how much it was there they were there and he was very open about showing he had a lot of art in the in the apartment and there was a painting that somebody did of him in i imagine the early 40s and it was like a military he wasn't in military guard but it set the style for joe all all along he was he liked to dress fancy he had beautiful hair that he kept perfectly quaffed and one of the things that i remember is towards the end of his life after he had gotten cancer he had to get away but his wigs sort of went askew and we very gently tried to straighten it for him without him realizing because he was a sensitive and proud proud man and vain [Music] [Music] this is some of the stuff that [ __ ] up and they're very artistic and that that's one of hers that is not that is and basically all this over here is from the from the meadow family grandmother used to teach uh art class out here in this this shed behind us my grandmother was very into into painting and she would paint china she was always painting painting something this was this was the the step up to the to the greenhouse you have the uh you know that's where where uh she taught her art classes in that in that building right there i guess the best way to describe joe would be a renaissance man joe was a an intelligent man um didn't say a lot but it was the kind of guy that when when he talked you you listen of course i was a i was a little child and so i i was raised to listen anyway uh but he uh he was very very very seemed like he had a lot of wisdom he always wanted to be the best or he wanted to buy the best um if it meant saving for a long time to buy something he would do that to get the best with his orchids he tended those orchids day in and day out all the time one of one of joel's primary purposes you know during that time period was taking care of his mom and i think that's why he moved back back here later in life simply to take care of her they were very very close but i'm gonna say something awful here aren't most gay men [Music] some people didn't like to think about that but he was he never bothered anybody anybody here in white right and that was his lifestyle and that is fine you know he's grown man i don't well it's just none of my business what he does on the weekend he wasn't it wasn't ever in your face it wasn't ever i'm a gay man and here's here's my boyfriend it was just it was very [Music] he was very discreet with that i remember reading or hearing that joe would walk around and disguise us not to be seen and and dress up in odd characters and that that was so far from the truth then he was you know this this had this dual personality or dual life well he didn't have a dual life he was compassionate he was he was he was true to his word for them to make him out as this you know person that they did this grand arch connoisseur you know it's just it's it's irrational it's it's irrational it's not true joe showed you what he wanted to show you and in many cases i think what he thought you wanted to see now bill honan ended up going to the library in denison where they had this obituaries and there was joe meadow's obituary so bill honan had a most likely candidate but he didn't know what the dual matter you know was that your matter who was in the unit in the archives which is why he asked me so he could put one and one together and then have a story i at the same time was now you know negotiating with the lawyers in dallas who were eager to keep this all confidential so i had a serious problem so all i gave to bill honen was the information from the national archives which is a matter of public record anyway i mean he could have done it himself i gave it to to bill with the the strong request to not run the story until monday of course that didn't happen particularly you know when it's a front-page story and bill rightfully said you know we don't want to lose this story to anybody else particularly the dallas papers so sure enough when we were supposed to meet with the lawyers on friday we had the front page story on the new york times which meant the story was all across the country [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we had half of the country's media in front of the law firm and i had reporters following me to my hotel room standing in front of my door in order to get a follow-up story so we all got together at the adolphus waiting for the lawyers to take us to the warehouse where the remaining pieces were supposed to be including the second manuscript which we were supposed to photograph and send the photos to quedlenberg so they could identify the pieces positively so we waited and waited and waited everybody was sort of scared to to leave because we never knew when when it was time to now go to the warehouse so so you know nobody went for dinner or anything like that and then i think shortly before what midnight vilhonen came and took me aside and said willie i'm gonna run a story tomorrow about the second manuscript which has just been offered in switzerland to the germans we saw that the cultural foundation of the states had purchased the second book and so we felt that we were dealing with people who were capable of anything to sell a book while we were negotiating over it in fact it had agreement about it and so we thought we had to uh take legal action so i was able to reach minister goslar in korlenburg from dallas texas and explained to him what was going on i said listen we need to go to court on monday and i need your authorization so he basically asked me well what do you think i need to do i said you need to authorize me [Music] off dr marie says we can't lead us too and he said well if that's what you think i need to do then that's what i do and then of course he was bit concerned about money i said it's too late for that now so i was now you know properly authorized on the weekend before we went to court but but of course we had no money we went to the courthouse at nine o'clock monday morning and filed a lawsuit and then uh you know we had the hearing with the judge about the temporary training order because now of course we were extremely concerned that if there was anything else it would quickly leave the country it was very important for us to get the depositions on the way because we knew so little about joe matter and the family and their whole involvement in the case there was no basis for trust between the church and the texans they were completely different worlds the wall had just come down there was really no communication between east and west no reasonable expectations the education we had about east germany was minimal education they had about the west i'm sure was all twisted they were very moscow oriented we were very western oriented in this country when willie and i showed up in texas we were vilified particularly and their lawyers the lawyers for the family were extremely hostile yeah willie cartey i didn't really realize it was going to be a depth position i was a little bit little bit annoyed i was a little bit annoyed and i think willie picked up on that pretty big he kept pacing back and forth and standing up and i'm going oh lord huge big long conference table german lawyers on one side our lawyers and myself on the other and it was just question after and they would um they would ask a question and you'd answer and then they'd ask it another way and you'd answer and then they'd ask it in another way the man from germany uh willie court he contacted us i got a letter from somebody one of the priests or something in germany he said if you have these things god will get you and i called the attorney and i said you tell him to where he can put it what do you want me to i don't know where it's at i don't know what happened i don't know how i got there i don't know when they decided to do this there was never a basis for trust between us and the families one of the family members came out and said to me uh a one-eyed ass could have found those treasures they asked where i got the stuff when did he give me this stuff what did he tell me about the stuff it absolutely wore gene and jack out and of course you know and mom too uh you know they were they were up in age at that time and and i honestly do not well matter of fact i can i can pretty pretty vehemently say that if they had known the firestorm was able to later cause this would have this caused they wouldn't have touched it because it was a mess i mean it was it was a mess and it wasn't just a mess for a minute you know mama's mom was talking about if i you know i could go to prison i'm like what for what the story that i understood was that he had uh the priest at the church had approached him and asked him to get this group of valuables out of the country and that he would get with him later and get them back this is where page by page you slowly get to see the depth of the man as chaotic as it was perhaps for him to take all of this from quailenburg germany for whatever reason uh in his own mind you know i i could see it i can see it in his personality that he really believed it he really believed in his own mind that he was saving part of civilization he was an interesting fellow i never knew him but every description of joe meador was that he was very aesthetic and appreciated the historical value and beauty of the things that he took but he did take him this is not really like war booty like captured guns or uniforms or helmets or things like that this was real treasure at the end of the war when he was in the south of france and stole silverware for that he got court-martialed so was he a pathological thief or was it this sort of attitude that the spoils of war go to the victor i i don't know the witness accounts we got were that he was a step beyond the normal souvenir hunting he had been educated in art it taught art when he came home he operated this small hardware store with his brother we had this impression that he and his brother had separate desks at this hardware store in separate entrances and separate safes because the brother disapproved of his homosexuality the pictures that you see of him like from texas monthly show a very complex intelligent well-educated person [Music] was tormented apparently about these treasures tried to keep the queenberg treasures together but maybe lived off other things he stole he didn't necessarily talk about it but he had written extensively letters home if not daily weekly the whole entire time he was in the war and we had read those letters over the years i mean they were there they were beautiful letters he was very descriptive in his writing and i'd read a letter you know at some point in the game that he had mailed home some objects you know put them up and i'll take care of it when i get home and they came in a wooden box with brown paper around it and after everybody died the box was still in the attic i mean we we found it you know and it was written on he'd written on this wooden crate that's apparently how joe got these things back to texas he mailed them two books a box you know it had some other things on the box up in the attic you know i don't even know i don't even know what happened to it so if he mailed things uh you know there should have been things that were mailable in other words it's highly unlikely that he mailed you know large size paintings i'm not trying to justify what joe meador did but a lot of people were doing things like that and he bundled this up and sent it back you know the us army they could have taken a look at it to see what it was maybe they did and just didn't care there were a number of people that were involved in this he couldn't have done it by himself and didn't do it by himself that's not to cast blame on anyone else it's just it's a fact i don't know what i would have done but i very well might have done the same thing but i can't justify what joe did and we're talking about a cathedral a church a thousand-year-old collection you know it just goes and on i knew that my efforts had been somewhat successful in flushing out the second manuscript so to speak but it was in switzerland so there was nothing else to do in dallas now that would that left me with the remaining pieces which indeed i still hadn't seen so by by then we had a temporary straining order on something i had no idea what it was so that's that's why then we went to when we finally went to denison to the bank with the federal marshals all the excitement and tension was back on my shoulders because now it was the moment of truth whether what folly you know was bringing up in his cardboard box from from the file cabinet not from not from the safe but from the file cabinet where he had kept it was actually you know anything that had anything to do with kwadlenburg the judge had an approved list of people who were allowed to attend the inspection and so we had all these attorneys representing the matters we had our attorneys representing the bank and then we had willie corte and the attorneys representing the german church they they brought art handlers who wore all these white gloves and and they very delicately handled all these artifacts their intent was to verify that these were indeed the treasures that were in question and our question was well just because they say these are the treasures how do we know it really is what proof do we have that they have a claim and as it turned out they brought a notebook that had eight by ten black and white photographs that were taken by the germans before the u.s and allied occupation of germany they knew that was coming and to protect art they put all this in a cave and they inventoried it and they took pictures of each item the big box was wrapped so they took it out of the box and the guy then unwrapped it and it sat there the photographer took all these multiple photographs you know from all different sides and of course each time the flash lights went off so it it really put this put the the the the the reliquary in the sort this you know flashing glowing bright light as if it had sort of like a phoenix you know come out of out of the ashes and and reveal itself it's you know something like we have in some of these movies you know where something irregularly appears [Music] i was absolutely flabbergasted at the quality and beauty of these objects here's something as you thought had been lost to history but here they were brought back to life because they survived once willie saw he knew that he had found the treasures it was kind of interesting to watch his reaction i mean years and years of work and and everything was coming to fruition he was almost giddy to to actually be able to see it and touch it after all the work he had put in and i could understand that the treasures came out of the box and we saw that we really had found the quellenberg treasures and we shared a little private handshake that we had really done what we had set out to do and and that was really the moment you know that i had been waiting for all those years basically because now i had confirmation that all this effort all this risk that we all had taken [Music] had been worth it [Music] right over here see the door uh at the back of the bank just across the street is where the wetters and their uh lawyer and their people came out then they loaded them in this van and took off to dallas we were kind of glad to see them go we were afraid you know somebody might hold them up or something you know in them while they were coming out but anyway it was just right across the street well willie and i went to germany together uh several months later and we had a series of meetings in bonn and berlin quentlenberg machterberg because the case needed to be regularized and so i was present at the meeting where he was fired from the case i spoke with the head of the cultural affairs department uh at a time you know when we had reached this sort of level where i had been to texas and and i said now now we have to get serious about it um they try to discourage me they thought it was politically a bad idea to to to do that meaning to for for the germans to pursue an american soldier and accuse him of being a thief so my relationship with the folks who had initially encouraged me and say you know go ahead that would be interesting uh then were the same people who who really didn't want to deal with me after willie was fired he continued to want to talk to me and we communicated once in a while about what was going on with the case but since he was not part of the team i couldn't share client information with him or confidences or strategy and i couldn't stop him from going to the press when we settled the case he made it known that he was not enthusiastic about the settlement so i think he he maintained his own independent posture i can't say that i know everything he was doing though [Music] i went to the this federal trial that they had at sherman we had an old judge up there named brown and he asked that prosecutor how come he was that long getting it done she says well that was wasn't any rush on it they suggest they are the statute's limitations it says it's done run out he dismissed the case and boy you talked about somebody mad that gal was mad she lost her case right there in front of everybody and the whole town was in that courtroom just about the statute of limitations had run and that's a law that's written to guard against prosecutions when the case has become so old that the witnesses have lost their memory or evidence is hard to come by or memories fade and evidence goes away it was not easy it was a very close call but i'm i'm proud to say that he did exactly what was right in the fifth circuit agreed you know people and honen did it he said well it's a technicality but the old the old saw among lawyers is a technicality is a law that the other side didn't research and we did the law is the law it's not a technicality [Music] well mother always laughed and said the big pickle building downtown the big building downtown dallas with the green lights on that we bought five floors so yeah the lawyers got a big chunk of that and then the rs got a big chunk so so it wasn't as lucrative as as it looks like on paper maybe [Music] joe had given me a heart a silver heart and i had a house down in east texas that we rented and it laid on the coffee table and was decoration on a coffee table in my rent house for about two years and when i got the call that said hey they're gonna they want anything and everything that joe ever gave you or anything that might be and by that time we had a list of what the items were and there was a silver heart listed and so i had to call my renter and say hey you know you might take that heart and put it in a drawer until i can get down there and get it and you know it had had a little cloth on the inside and i'd push on the cloth you know try to figure out what it said and now i probably have damaged things i shouldn't have but oh well [Music] you know like one of the final numbers was 354 million dollars at one point that's what they said and it's like for this wow you know we had it all these years who knew who knew it normal people don't have that and so if we were normal people and we had it so it's like how do you how do you even wrap your head around that kind of number those kinds of decisions would not be made today there's absolutely no basis for a government to reward someone by purchasing back things that were stolen clearly from an important church within their country i really felt like the whole thing was was meant to be i felt like it was meant to be returned to to the church and i felt like even though joe meador took it he protected it and most of it was returned had it fallen into other i think he had an appreciation for art and by having that appreciation he protected it and it didn't had it gone to someone else who knows what would have happened to it there was no physical damage as i remember at the time i took extensive notes on it but i i think there was the damage was minimal considering the harsh treatment they had it was surprising they did survive so well [Laughter] [Music] it's not like we were trying to be sneaky and be crooks and you know go around and make a whole bunch of money it's just there were some financial issues maybe these are worth something and we can't this will help and so to be done settled and done yeah yeah how can you how can you describe somebody that you don't know you know from what you read or what you hear if you don't know the person what gives you the right to judge that person it's called gossip gossiping hearsay it's just my opinion there's always another part of the story i have found that frequently good people do bad things and that doesn't make them bad people i have an attitude about that that even though someone may have committed a criminal act that they deserve consideration for the way that they've lived the rest of their lives what's not not right that this young american lieutenant took the the things from the treasure but on the other hand there were so many dreadful things that happened during the war so many people who lost their lives that well let him take those old bibles at least i like to think about a progression of culture to greater and greater levels of humanity in spite of what we learned in the 20th century and i think the cultural expressions of people are preserving them and appreciating them trying to understand them is one way for us to do that scholars who have studied the movements of relics have have noticed that saints have power over their relics and they can move when they want to uh they don't think they're getting enough prayers or have enough federation from the local populace so they want to go somewhere else where where they're they're going to be more important and they can go where they want to people say well why should i care about cultural treasures one they belong to you whether they're in iraq whether they're in syria whether they were in soviet union during world war ii they're the shared cultural treasure of everybody which is why joe tom meador's theft of the quinlanberg treasures is offensive on all levels it didn't belong to him it didn't belong the united states didn't belong to his family and it really doesn't belong to quinlenberg it just happens to be there within that church available for people around the world to go and see these things and understand something that's important going back to the 9th century about western civilization but it belongs to everybody so when you steal something like that you're stealing it from you and me and anybody else that's out there you don't own things like this they own you if you steal them i had no reason indeed from a my professional situation at the time nor my personal qualifications [Music] to do this i mean i was not an story in pursuing you know aspects of museums losses honestly i didn't really bring anything in particular to the table which on the other hand may have been a good thing because if i would have been sort of knowledgeable in this area i may have not had this curiosity this desire to find out [Music] [Laughter] [Music] i wanted to talk a little bit if you're comfortable about um there were the two items that were still missing and what you think might have happened to one of them are you comfortable talking about that i don't know i'm not sure okay on camera i don't know um just because i don't want any i don't know that that's what happened it's just kind of a speculation as to what that that's what happened but it's not anywhere that you it's not in the family oh no no no no no no no no go check the goodwill i don't know i won't say a name how about that there is a possibility that it was given in a sack of other costing jewelry to some employees how's that that's good [Music] you

Channel: Perspective

Views: 18,821

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, full length documentaries, the liberators, watch the liberators, the liberators documentary, artifacts discovered, medieval treasure, nazi gold, german treasure, wwii treasure, treasure hunter, cassie hay, cassie hay documentary, spoils of war, war treasures

Id: POB5X56Du_Q

Length: 67min 28sec (4048 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021