E nd of October, 1940. German sentries watched as a seemingly unflappable, dark-haired woman walked up to the entrance of the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Rose Valland’s heart may have fluttered, but she revealed nothing in her expression.
SS soldiers, rifles in hand, stood guard outside, wearing helmets and knee-high black boots. For identification, she showed her Ausweis pass and was let through. Her name was typewritten on the card, her last name with an extra space between all the letters as if for impact: Rose V a l l a n d.
The Germans took little notice of this woman. “Remain at all costs at the Jeu de Paume museum.” That was what Louvre director Jacques Jaujard ordered her to do. Jaujard knew he could trust Rose to keep watch.
For months, Otto Abetz, Germany’s ambassador to France, was being undermined by those within the Nazi political machine who wanted to get in on the looting game. Alfred Rosenberg’s Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and the German Army, which had administrative powers in France, aligned themselves against Abetz, foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Foreign Ministry. In mid-September, Hitler unambiguously pronounced that he had given “the right of confiscation” to the more ideologically driven ERR and gave Rosenberg authority to remove items to Germany for “safekeeping.”
This was the first directive that allowed for the extradition of cultural objects and a decisive win for the ERR, which turned around and immediately liquidated the Parisian mansions of the Rothschild family, their châteaux all across France, their bank vaults and even the warehouses of shipping companies where their art was already packed and ready for shipment to the United States. This process was repeated for collections belonging to the Seligmann family, Alphonse Kann, David David-Weill and Moïse Lévy de Benzion.
Another directive ordered that all the looted objects stored at the Germany embassy be relocated to the Louvre, to remove it from Abetz’s jurisdiction. From the German Army’s point of view, this would be more proper since the Kunstschutz, charged with protecting art and architecture in occupied countries, was under its purview.
Kunstschutz head Count Franz von Wolff-Metternich approached Jacques Jaujard with the scheme, convincing the museum director that it would be better to keep the stolen art in the Louvre instead of with Abetz, who was already in the process of shipping the art to Germany. Nearly all of Abetz’s plunder—a profusion of paintings, statues, furniture and carpets mostly from the Édouard de Rothschild and Alphonse Kann collections—disappeared through his front gate.
The ERR also seized 200 of Abetz’s crates of stolen art, which were sitting in the warehouse of the Schenker Transport company, the preferred shipper of the Nazi regime. The shipment was about to depart for Germany. Three rooms on the ground floor of the Louvre, normally occupied by Near Eastern antiquities, were allocated for the works of art coming in from the German embassy but were quickly filled.
Baron Kurt von Behr, the director of the ERR in Paris, then asked to requisition the Jeu de Paume museum, hoping for more space and more autonomy to do business away from prying eyes. The stand-alone museum was a perfect fit, with convenient truck access, but its use required Louvre director Jaujard’s approval since the French national museums were under Vichy rule.
Jaujard met with von Behr and Wolff-Metternich, and the Germans verbally agreed that if the Jeu de Paume was used for ERR art storage, the French could make a parallel inventory of everything transferred there. Conveniently, Jaujard had someone perfectly positioned to do it: Rose.
Now, Rose crossed the threshold of the Jeu de Paume to find a chaotic scene. The ordinarily quiet museum was a hub of activity. Soldiers paced back and forth in confusion, blocking the way to the white marble staircase that led to her office.
From a window, she watched as truck after truck loaded with art arrived from the Louvre and the German embassy. Military escorts from the Luftwaffe accompanied each convoy. They marched through the museum, moving hundreds of boxes into the offices and exhibition rooms. The clap of their boots on the parquet floors and the clatter of the wooden crates made jarring new sounds, which echoed, as Rose later ruminated on in her memoir, “without restraint between these walls accustomed to other echoes.” The Germans were taking over the museum—her museum.
The remaining paintings and sculptures from the Jeu de Paume collection were still piled up in the basement for Rose to watch over. She thought a lot about how she could possibly fulfill Jaujard’s command and stay on at the museum. Protecting the artwork might not be enough of a cover. Her unofficial role as curator of the museum seemed ludicrous, given that the art collection was in the basement. Perhaps she could emphasize her managerial role, coordinating the guards and staff, and continue the work she already did handling building maintenance. The Germans might need to keep someone around who knew how everything worked and could speak French with the staff. She could pass herself off as a lowly but indispensable employee.
That evening, as Rose got ready to leave the museum, she looked around at the disarray. For all the rumors of German orderliness, the rooms were a mess. She was under orders to return, no matter what, and see what would unfold. The information she reported to Jaujard would be sent on to the Resistance and de Gaulle in London. She was so devoted to the art that she had agreed to Jaujard’s request without thinking much about her own safety. It was certainly more exciting than the documentation work she had been doing, but also far more dangerous. If she was discovered spying on what the Germans were doing, she could be arrested or even shot.
T
he next day, November 1, Rose was seized with trepidation as she approached the sentries. Ausweis bitte, demanded a guard in front of the museum. She showed her identification card and, to her relief, the soldiers let her pass. Would she ever get used to this? Her 42nd birthday was starting out ominously.
Twenty soldiers were in the process of opening all 400 cases of art that arrived. Canvases of the Old Masters—Vermeer, Rembrandt, David Teniers the Younger—passed from soldier to soldier down a long line. “The Luftwaffe wasted no time!” Rose later noted. She cringed as a few paintings were dropped and stepped on. A magnificent portrait of a woman holding a scepter by Jean-Baptiste Santerre suffered a long tear. Nobody was writing anything down or checking the paintings, which were now piling up against the walls of the museum.
There were new Germans, too. Soldiers with brown uniforms and red swastika armbands walked back and forth inside the rooms like merciless policemen looking for misconduct, particularly on the part of the French workers. Packers accompanied the cases of art that had arrived from the German embassy on rue de Lille, just across the Seine. The Kunstschutz, the German Service for the Protection of Works in France, sent three art historians to help.
“A real agitation permeated the atmosphere,” Rose observed. “Go quickly!” the Luftwaffe soldiers were instructed. Everyone seemed to be panicking, but why? German art experts in white coats chatted quietly in hushed tones, looking on smugly at the quality of the artwork they were setting up for display.
Nobody in the museum knew this, but Rose could read and understand German, thanks to the love of her life, Joyce Heer, a British citizen of British and German parentage who worked at the U.S. embassy in Paris. (Not only was Joyce considered an enemy alien by the Nazis, but homosexuality was codified under Vichy French law as an “unnatural act.” Any misstep could lead to imprisonment, deportation or worse for both Rose and Joyce.)
Rose pieced together that the Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring himself was coming to the Jeu de Paume. There was no man closer to Hitler than Göring. No wonder the boxes were being opened so hastily and sorted through. Speed was of the essence—a whole exhibition needed to be curated and hung by the next day.
The legality of the ERR’s takeover of the Jeu de Paume was contingent on the creation of the duplicate inventory, which would allow the French the opportunity to document the art that was looted. Rose simply settled down where she could, scribbling in a notebook anything she could glimpse. Moving around the canvases to get all the information was like an acrobatics act. It was strange, but she could swear the German soldiers were purposely increasing their speed now that she had started working.
Rose was surprised that no other expert had started the German inventory—was this diplomatic task only important to her? Nobody around her seemed to care. So, amid the hustle and bustle, she did what she was trained to do: make lists as complete and precise as possible. She feistily wanted to “show these Germans that a French woman also knows how to obey orders.”
At noon, a uniformed ERR officer arrived. He cut a long figure, his countenance severe and tight. He looked on edge, and Rose felt sure that not a single drop of kindness could emanate from the man. He brusquely grabbed her notebook and shut it closed in an authoritative gesture. “We cannot proceed with the request of the French civil servants to make inventories,” he said. “Moreover, our German scholars are capable of doing them perfectly themselves.” This chilly man was Dr. Hermann Bunjes, a Harvard-educated art historian and SS officer. It would not be the last time Rose would encounter Dr. Bunjes at the Jeu de Paume.
S
everal colleagues from the Musées Nationaux also showed up to help Rose with the inventory, but Bunjes commanded them to leave. Rose then made a calculated decision. Bunjes’ order did not affect her since she worked specifically for the Jeu de Paume. “My intention was fixed, I would endeavor to stay,” she professed later. “I did not yet understand very clearly the reasons that were pushing me to this decision, nor in what way I could be useful and justify my presence since there was no longer any question of a French inventory. Only my determination not to leave the place was clear.” It was as if some greater force was pushing her to remain at the museum, propelling her into action before her rational self could process the reasons. Jaujard’s support removed any last doubts in her mind.
Since she could no longer write anything down in her notebook, she would have to keep track in her head. It was a good thing she had an almost photographic memory. “Everything had to be surveilled and remembered because you never know in the moment the detail that will matter later,” she recalled.
Adding to the confusion that day was the dramatic, unwelcome return of Rose’s boss, André Dezarrois, who believed he had a right to verify the status of the works entrusted to his care as the curator of the Jeu de Paume. His timing, on the very day the Germans took over the museum, was particularly unfortunate. Dezarrois lost his temper at the sight of the Nazis invading the museum and tried to force his way into his old office and the storage rooms, where the locks were broken, undoubtedly by German soldiers. He also loudly protested the fact that the artworks on the walls of the museum consisted of stolen, Jewish-owned art. German soldiers forcibly removed him from the museum, searched his apartment and interrogated him. He was prohibited from setting foot inside the museum again at the risk of arrest.
Jaujard recommended that Dezarrois leave Paris for his own safety. But Jaujard had another motivation: an unruly curator would disrupt the delicate political maneuvering he had already set in motion.
If that was not enough turmoil, ERR director Baron Kurt von Behr also swept into the museum, his dark-green-wool military coat adorned with a collar of wolf’s hair. Rose thought he looked very much the part of a triumphant German warrior. For extra gravitas, he insisted on wearing his World War I German Red Cross uniform, affixed with two medals and a long row of military decorations. He also donned a visored Red Cross officers’ cap, which had the great advantage of shading his glass eye.
The French spy service had known about von Behr since at least 1936, when he was already working for the Gestapo in Spain in support of the Fascists in Mallorca.
“Tall, handsome … not lacking in charm and spoke French well,” Rose noted of her first impression. She was also wary of him. Rose knew right away that von Behr knew nothing about art. He liked only the expensive and flashy.
Rose, the unassuming employee at the Jeu de Paume, found herself having a mundane conversation with von Behr. It was a social conversation, and he was attentive to what she was saying. “As they were still in the euphoria of their victory, the conquerors were friendly, to convince us that they were not savages,” she later wrote of this encounter. If all went well, maybe von Behr would let her stay on at the museum. When she looked back decades later, she seemed to criticize her somewhat lackluster resistance to such obvious evil that first day. She explained, we “kept many illusions to try to control the conqueror. Our efforts, already ill-suited to the whole situation, were even less in tune with the concerns of the moment. We French could only cut a sorry figure in the celebration which was being prepared.”
The German art historians, meanwhile, were almost ready with the last-minute exhibition for Göring. The sheer caliber of the artwork hurriedly put on display was astounding. Some of the most famous paintings in the world hung on wire from tracks on the ceiling. “The Astronomer” by Vermeer, owned by the Rothschild family since 1886, was on one wall. A Rembrandt painting was on another. Tapestries, sculptures and precious furniture were in each room. Gothic and Renaissance paintings with thick, heavy wood frames were hung together. Dutch and Flemish Master painters were given special attention. Rococo paintings were in one room, and British portraiture in another. Neoclassical paintings and French history paintings were placed side by side.
Rose saw works by Gauguin and Renoir carried past her. On the second floor, in a room in the far back of the museum hidden behind a curtain, Rose saw paintings by Dalí, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Van Gogh, Matisse and others. It was a room just for “degenerate art.”
At the end of his visit, von Behr made it clear that Rose was allowed to stay at the museum. Jaujard planned to directly address the question of the inventory with Wolff-Metternich, the head of the Kunstschutz, the next day.
That evening, the Jeu de Paume closed its doors to anyone—French, German or otherwise—who did not have an Ausweis from von Behr himself. Rose was now one of the only French eyewitnesses to what would become the greatest art theft in history.
From the book “The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland.” Copyright © 2025 by Michelle Young. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Fernand Léger’s 1921 painting “La Jeune fille au bouquet” was auctioned at Sotheby’s New York on May 13. It was among the pieces held at the Jeu de Paume and restored to its righful owner after the war, thanks to Valland’s efforts.
