After checking the internal temperature of the turkey, she returned to her laptop and did a new search using the words “Band of Brothers,” “Wyoming soldier,” and “Major Dick Winters.”
No mentions of Dick Kizer came up, but there were plenty of quotes from Major Winters and many more items about the Band of Brothers television miniseries and the book by historian Stephen Ambrose.
A photo of Major Winters showed him to be a strikingly handsome and masculine man. After the original Band of Brothers book and series came out, he’d apparently written a book of his own titled Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters.
She did a new search, this time using the words “Band of Brothers,” “WWII,” “Easy Company,” “Dick Kizer,” and “Wyoming.”
Again, nothing with Kizer’s name appeared, but another highlighted name came up several times. The name was Alton More.
She continued down this rabbit hole until she found several quotes from both Ambrose’s book and Winters’s memoir. They were in regard to the fact that Alton More was one of the very first soldiers to enter Hitler’s Alpine Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden in 1944.
According to Ambrose, American soldiers looted the Nazi sanctuary room by room, scooping up everything they could find. Alton More located two of Adolf Hitler’s personal photo albums and pilfered them. The albums were reportedly filled with original photos of the famous politicians of Europe who had been guests of the Führer. When a superior officer learned of the find, he ordered More to hand over the albums, and later a high-ranking French officer demanded the same thing. Winters, who had commanded More across all of Europe, blocked the orders. He told More he could keep what he’d found.
According to Winters in his memoir, he protected More and his loot from being confiscated by French, Russian, and British high command. Since More was his personal driver, the two of them concocted a scheme in which More could keep the albums hidden out of sight in a secret compartment in Winters’s Jeep until he could smuggle them back to the States.
Winters himself was proud of what he’d liberated, and wrote, “We walked into the main dining room where we encountered one very brave waiter . . . Today we are still using the silverware from the Berchtesgaden Hof in our homes.”
Marybeth dug deeper.
Alton More, like Dick Kizer, returned to Wyoming immediately after the war. More went back to his hometown of Casper, where he married and went to work as a traveling salesman for Folger’s Coffee. As word got out that he had in his possession two of Hitler’s photo albums, he was approached by both private collectors and the German government to sell them. Before he could decide what to do with the albums, More was killed in 1958 when his car hit a horse seventeen miles outside of Casper. He was thirty-eight years old.
What happened to the albums?
There the internet trail went cold. There was speculation that More’s widow sold them to a private party, and additional speculation that she’d been swindled and the con artists had vanished into the ether. There were additional photo albums owned by Hitler and their sale by international auction houses, but nothing on the specific albums More had brought home.
Top Nazis were apparently very big on photo albums of themselves.
“So,” Marybeth asked herself out loud, “if Alton More came back with two of Hitler’s personal photo albums, maybe fellow Easy Company soldier Dick Kizer returned to Saddlestring with Julius Streicher’s?”
It was not the craziest coincidence she could come up with.
She felt Tube suddenly scramble to his feet and growl.
That’s when Marybeth sensed a foreign presence and looked up to see a man’s face staring at her through the window over the kitchen sink. She gasped and felt her throat constrict. When their eyes met, the man turned away quickly and vanished.
She screamed and swept her arm, accidentally knocking her tea off the table with a crash.
* * *
—
Joe thundered down the stairs and rushed to her.
“What happened?”
“There was a man outside looking in at me,” she said. “He looked like a damned gargoyle. It scared me to death.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why would I tell you otherwise?”
“Sorry.” Joe approached the window and looked out. “He’s gone. Do you know who it was?”
“I don’t,” she said. “He was . . . not a good-looking man. Probably late thirties, early forties. He was bald and had very scary eyes.”