[Illustration: The Central Collecting Point at Munich, formerly the Administration Building of the Nazi Party. The director of the Central Collecting Point was Lieutenant Craig Smyth, USNR.] [Illustration: A typical storage room in the Central Collecting Point at Munich. The racks for pictures were built by civilian carpenters under the direction of American Monuments officers.] When he returned fifteen minutes later he was in high spirits. “There’s a bathroom all right and it’s got hot water,” he said, “but you have to be a combination of Theseus and Daniel Boone to find it. Come along, I’ll show you the way.” It was clever of him to find it a second time. I took a piece of red crayon with me and marked little arrows on the walls to show which turns to make. They were a timesaver to us during the next couple days. After breakfast the next morning, we telephoned 12th Army Group Headquarters in Wiesbaden and talked with Lieutenant George Stout, USNR, who, with Captain Bancel La Farge, was in charge of the advance office of MFA&A in Germany. Stout suggested that we come on over. It was a pleasant drive along the Autobahn, with the blue Taunus mountains in the distance. Parts of Wiesbaden had been badly mauled, but the destruction was negligible compared with Frankfurt. Although many buildings along the main streets had been hit, the colonnaded Kurhaus, now a Red Cross Club, was intact. So was the Opera House. We found George on the top floor of a dingy building in the center of the town. I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years but he hadn’t changed. His face was a healthy brown, his eyes were as keen and his teeth as dazzlingly white as ever. George was in his middle forties. His oldest boy was in the Navy but George didn’t look a day over thirty. The Roberts Commission had played in luck when they had got him. Of course he was an obvious choice—tops in his field, the technical care and preservation of pictures. He was known and respected throughout the world for his brilliant research work at Harvard, where he presided over the laboratory of the Fogg Museum. “Bancel’s got jobs lined up for you fellows, but I think he’d like to tell you about them himself,” George said. “He ought to be back tonight.” “Can’t you tell us in a general way what they are?” I asked. “I think one of them is going to be in Frankfurt and the other will probably be in Munich. You see, all the stuff from the Merkers mine is in the vaults of the Reichsbank at Frankfurt and it ought to be moved to a place where it can be permanently stored.” The “stuff” he referred to was the enormous collection of paintings and sculpture—comprising the principal treasures of the Berlin museums—which George himself had brought out of the Merkers mine in Thuringia. He had carried out the operation virtually singlehanded and in the face of extraordinary difficulties just before the end of hostilities.