59. Women At War BONUS: The Witness (Rose Valland)

by Diana S. |
Rose Valland poses next to a stack of canvases

 

Surprise! I know I said I was done with Women At War, but then I immediately sat up in bed one night and smacked myself in the forehead. This series is the perfect opportunity to tell the story of my favorite unlikely heroine of all time: Rose Valland. 

What better way to wrap up the fourth year of this podcast than an adventure story? Intrigue, stolen masterpieces, underground Rèsistance, and a happy ending! Please enjoy this little bonus episode, delivered just in time. 🙂

Episode 59: “Women At War BONUS: The Witness (Rose Valland)”

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Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire. I’m your host, Diana, and I have to confess something: I lied! I said that last month’s episodes were the conclusion of my series on Women at War, but I realized that I’d missed the perfect opportunity to tell one of my all-time favorite stories. This story has everything: espionage, famous art, dastardly villains, an unlikely heroine and a happy ending. So consider this a bonus episode, an extra present from me to you, just in time for the show’s 4th birthday today! Before we kick off another year, let’s put a bow on this one by paying tribute to one of my favorite French women of all time: Rose Valland.
On May 8th, 1945, Europe embarked on one of the most ambitious projects in human history: cleaning up the wreckage of World War II. The continent was in shambles: bombed out, burned down, busted. No matter where you stood, from the United Kingdom to the Ukraine, everything was chaos, and the task of putting all the pieces back together again seemed impossible. There was so much to do: cleaning up rubble, distributing food, capturing Nazis on the run – but there was one task that was more urgent, and more overwhelming, than all of these: getting everyone back home. The most universal experience of World War II wasn’t physical violence, or even hunger: it was displacement. 60 million people were displaced over the course the war, whether they were evicted from their homeland, deported to a concentration camp, deployed to the front lines, or forced to flee an invasion. By the time the ink dried on Germany’s surrender, 11 million Europeans were located outside their home country. Many of them would never return.
 
But it wasn’t just people who had been displaced during the war. For the past six years, the Third Reich had looted its way through Europe. Everything disappeared into the Reich’s gaping maw: jewelry, luxury cars, gold bouillon, designer clothes, family heirlooms, and above all else, priceless works of art. Led by the world’s most famous art school reject, Nazi leaders treated the museums and galleries of Europe like a giant buffet, helping themselves to grand masters and lining their own hallways with ancient sculptures. In the best case scenario, a world treasure sat hidden in a German study or bank vault. In the worst case scenario, it got melted for scrap. From the empty rooms of the Louvre to the piles of charred canvases in Berlin to the stripped walls of Saint Petersburg, every curator and collector in Europe asked the same, staggering question: where did all of the art go? And would it ever come home again? In France, one person held the key to solving this mystery – but after six years in the shadows, who could they trust with their secrets?
Rose Valland wasn’t the kind of woman who attracted the world’s attention. Born in a teensy, tiny town southeast of Lyon, Rose was the daughter of a blacksmith. With no money to her name, Rose pursued one of the only career paths available to women intellectuals: teaching. When she won a spot at the fine arts academy in Lyon, it was a tremendous accomplishment for a woman of her socioeconomic background. But she didn’t stop there: building on her success in Lyon, Rose Valland won a spot at the prestigious Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris, and went on to earn another degree at the Ecole du Louvre. By the age of 33, Rose Valland had better credentials in art history than many professionals in the field, but there were three strikes against her: she was a woman, she had no money, and she came from the middle of nowhere. So in 1931, Rose began volunteering at the Jeu de Paume museum.
 
If you begin walking from the courtyard of the Louvre down through the Tuileries gardens, you’ll encounter two buildings on your left and right. On the left side is the Orangerie, originally, you guessed it, the spot where the last king of France grew his oranges. On the right side is the Jeu de Paume, or Palm Game gallery, where the last king of France played tennis. By the 1930s, both royal annexes were transformed into galleries for the type of art that didn’t fit in to the Louvre’s own collection of classic works. The Jeu de Paume specialized in contemporary art from international artists. Even though she was classified as an unpaid volunteer, Rose was essential to the museum’s day-to-day operations – managing the museum’s records, preserving and restoring pieces of the collection, writing exhibition catalogues and organizing exhibitions. Rose possessed an astonishing brain, capable of remembering everything about the Jeu de Paume’s collections. If you had any question about any piece of art – who painted it, where it could be found, when was it painted, when was the last time it had been displayed – Rose was your girl. In a story that will surely sound familiar to anyone working in the museum world today, most unpaid volunteers were wealthy, able to afford to give their time to the museum for no pay. But Rose juggled her museum duties with her daytime teaching job, all while pursuing her studies even further at the College de France. Despite her incredible institutional knowledge, academic credentials and years of experience, by the summer of 1938, the Jeu de Paume still wasn’t paying Rose a cent when they asked her to help them with one of the most important projects in the museum’s history: the evacuation of the Louvre.
 
While the French government waved aside the threat of German invasion, pointing to the Maginot Line and twiddling its thumbs, the French art world took no such chances. Two years before the Nazis crossed the Ardennes, French curators and archivists took proactive measures to ensure French national treasures were safe, secure, and well-hidden. From the offices of the Jeu de Paume, Rose and her colleagues had spent the past decade watching Hitler upend the German art world. Museum collections had been picked over by Nazi leaders, with great works stolen off gallery walls and shipped off to the country estates of men like Herman Goering. At the same time they confiscated artwork they loved, the Nazis destroyed artwork they despised: slashing canvases depicting Jewish men and women, burning modernist works that Hitler found ugly, even organizing exhibitions of so-called ‘degenerate’ art to teach Germans what kind of work was acceptable and unacceptable to the Fuhrer. The French were determined to make sure their own national treasures didn’t receive the same treatment. Museum directors began stockpiling sandbags. Carpenters created hundreds of special cases to hold large paintings and frames. Across the country, the great Gothic cathedrals of France shielded their stained glass windows with cement and hid their relics out of sight. And at the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie, it was time to begin evacuating one of the world’s largest art collections…in secret.
 
Like everyone else leading France at the end of the 1930s, the French art world decided to fight the last war. Sure, they started preparing ahead of time – but they made dangerous assumptions about the war to come. First, the experts decided the front would be located at the Maginot line, and the further away the art was from the Maginot line, the safer it would be. Second, of course, they assumed France would win. They didn’t assume the Germans would occupy France, so they assumed artwork would be safe so long as it was located in the French countryside. They were worried about bombs falling on museums in large cities, not intentional, systematic plunder. I cringe reading some of the plans drawn up during 1938 and 1939 – over and over again, artworks were designated for evacuated to some enormous chateau in the countryside. These vast, luxurious estates were considered suitable hiding places for art. Maybe it’s just me, and maybe it’s just my 2020 hindsight, but does it seem like a palace is a bad place to hide precious artwork? Isn’t that exactly the kind of place you would look if you were searching for precious artwork? It feels like when people hide the spare key to their house by placing it under the Welcome mat. I’m no superspy, but that’s probably going to be the first place I look if I want to break into your house.
 
As 1939 ticked along, Rose worked harder and harder to prepare the Louvre’s artwork for transport. As Hitler marched through Czechslovakia, the Louvre revised its lists. 4,000 paintings alone were designated for transfer, each one tagged discreetly with a color coded sticker to denote how prestigious or high-priority that piece was. Fifty of the paintings received two red stickers: these were the crown jewels of the collection. One painting was so precious it received three red stickers: the Mona Lisa. As horse drawn wagons pulled up to the Louvre carrying the straw that would cushion the delicate canvases during the journey, workers began digging in the Tuileries Gardens. Every day, Rose reported for her still-unpaid position by stepping carefully over trench, in which fragile scuptures were lowered, one by one. At the end of August, the Louvre received a message: the time had come. Start the evacuation.
 
At the moment the doors closed to the public on Friday, August 25th, Rose and her colleagues snapped into action. While a sign hung outside announcing that the museum was closed for repairs, inside, the long-laid plans were finally put into practice. After months of planning, color coding and supply gathering, the paintings were coming off the walls at last. In every room of the museum, workers and volunteers outlined a painting on the wall, so they’d know where it belonged. Once the painting was removed from the wall, it was removed from its frame as well. Working by flashlight so as not to violate blackout rules, the workers performed a delicate dance, balancing the need for speed with the delicacy required for handling such priceless artifacts. Rose wasn’t the only volunteer on hand – the director of the Louvre knew it was all hands on deck. Evacuating the Louvre took a village, and the director began rounding up any large, strong men he could find outside. One woman remembered walking into a gallery to find a bunch of employees from a nearby department store packing up medieval paintings in their work uniforms, like something out of a dream. By September 3rd, as France formally declared war against Germany, the army of the Louvre evacuated the last of its most important works. Men held their breath and hauled the enormous, delicately reconstructed Winged Victory of Samothrace down the famous staircase. Workers hammered the last of the paintings into their crates, falling asleep on the museum floor. Tall trucks from the Comedie Francaise, which were normally used to move around enormous scenery backdrops, pulled up to move the biggest canvases. While the Louvre had taken pains to measure the heights of bridges and overpasses on their escape routes, they had neglected to account for power lines. At one point in its journey to the countryside, the Raft of the Medusa got caught on a wire and knocked out power to an entire town. Moving through France in the middle of the night, without headlights, drivers who had never been outside of Paris city limits transported France’s most important national treasures to safety. The Mona Lisa smuggled herself out of Paris in the back of an ambulance, guarded by a curator. After traveling 125 miles in the hermetically sealed ambulance, by the time the Mona Lisa arrived at her destination, the curator sitting next to her was unconscious.
 
With the nation’s treasures scattered to the wind, Rose and her colleagues had nothing to do now but wait. With the Jeu de Paume sitting empty, Rose Valland became the building’s administrator. Within a year, she would be back to work color-coding and organizing shipments of art. Instead of saving the art from enemy hands, however, she’d be delivering it straight to their doorstep. But little did the enemy know: Rose Valland had a plan.
One year after the great evacuation, the Louvre was unrecognizable. After the fall of France, Nazis rolled into Paris and wasted little time before sacking the nation of its treasures. Just as they’d done in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, Nazis began seizing paintings from Jewish art collectors and dealers, confiscating works from political enemies, auctioning off so-called ‘degenerate’ art at rock-bottom prices and selecting the most valuable art for their own personal collections. Any French nationals who fled the country between May 10th and June 30th were stripped of their citizenship, and their property was forfeited. In September 1940, Hitler ordered the military to give all possible assistance to the ERR, which was basically his official art looting service. Under the orders of the ERR, all of France’s confiscated artwork made its way to the Louvre – but first, it passed through the Jeu de Paume.
 
“The rooms and offices were immediately occupied,” Rose Valland recalled. “The Luftwaffe soldiers carried in the crates that they had been escorting…The unpacking started the next morning. Paintings by Old Masters were passed from hand to hand until the human chain ended at a support wall. Some of them were dropped and ended up underneath the boots, but the order was to proceed as quickly as possible”
 
There weren’t any more paintings on the wall, but they were pretty much everywhere else: leaning against one another, stuffed into closets, even stacked on the floor. With so much artwork to process, the ERR grew overwhelmed. By October, the ERR had confiscated more than 400 cases of artwork and objects stolen from the greatest Jewish collectors in France. There was so much art to go around that the ERR worried they might lose track of a masterpiece destined for Hitler or another high ranking official. The looters needed a system, and reluctantly, they turned to the French for help. The ERR seized the Jeu de Paume as its new headquarters, and as Rose wrote, her beloved museum had become “a strange world where works of art arrived with the sounds of jackboots.” The ERR needed someone to help organize and catalogue the artwork on their hands. But who? The Germans wanted to hide their plunder from the French, not share their secrets. At some point, a suggestion was made: what about Rose Valland? The mousy, aging, unmarried lady who managed the empty museum hardly struck the Nazis as a threat. Yes, they said, she may stay and help us catalogue the artwork. The ERR thought she was little more than a glorified secretary. They didn’t know she had two decades of training as an art historian. They didn’t know she spoke German. And most importantly, they didn’t know that she possessed a special gift: an extraordinary, photographic memory.
 
In the fall of 1940, one German bureaucrat declared, “all access to the Louvre must be refused, as we do not wish the French services to know of our organization and its functions, and because it would be vulnerable to espionage.” As it turned out, he was right: the one French person the ERR allowed inside the Jeu de Paume, the dowdy and unremarkable Mademoiselle Valland, wasted no time at all before she began working against the ERR. In October 1940, Jacques Jaujard, her boss, took her aside and told her to accept the Nazi’s secretarial position and never leave it, “no matter what.” She didn’t need to be told twice. “I was determined never to leave. I had no doubt what I had to do.” As Rose put it, it was her chance to “save a little bit of the beauty of the world.” She had one mission which she would pursue with unwavering passion and attention for the entire war: Rose Valland needed to find out where the Nazis were taking French art. Sitting at her desk, pretending to focus on the endless paperwork passing across her desk, Rose eavesdropped on the conversations around her. Assuming she couldn’t understand them, ERR employees spoke openly about the day’s shipments – this cart was heading to a monastery, this huge shipment was heading towards the Austrian border. Rose observed as Herman Goering, the Nazi leader and voracious art collector, made no fewer than twenty visits to the Jeu de Paume, hand selecting pieces for Hitler’s future art museum, and selecting just as many pieces for his own personal collection. Rose spoke to truck drivers and movers, museum guards and secretaries, and plucked out useful details that they let slip. Every night, she hurried home to write down everything she’d learned that day in a small notebook: A list of every piece of art that left the Jeu de Paume that day, the license plate of the truck it was carried in or the number of the boxcar it was packed inside, and if she was lucky, the artwork’s final destination. Rose’s value wasn’t simply her memory, it was her incredible knowledge of art history, acquired through decades of study and practice. Another spy in her place might have written down notes like “painting of man with a globe – Germany” but Rose instantly recognized Vermeer’s masterpiece, The Astronomer. Day after day, Rose dutifully recorded her notes, as her little notebooks began growing into an enormous cache of secrets. 
 
As the war progressed, Rose began taking more chances. When the Nazis took photographs of a painting for their archive, she’d sneak the negatives out at night, develop the photos with the help of a friend, and return the negatives again the next morning. As the German war effort collapsed and ERR officials paid more attention to their own fate than that of the artwork around them, Rose snuck entire files out under her coat to copy back home. She met regularly with her former boss, the director of the Louvre, Jacques Jaujaurd, who was now an active member of the Resistance. Together, they might help the Resistance prevent art from leaving the country, or at least avoid destroying it by accident during acts of sabotage. Again and again, Rose pushed the envelope, and she was dismissed from her position at least 4 times over the course of the war. But every time, she’d simply wait until things calmed down and return to work again, talking about the building’s maintenance or whether the museum needed repairs to its heating system. Miraculously, Rose Valland remained at her post for the entire war, from the fall of France to the liberation of Paris. As the Allies began chasing the Germans out of Paris, however, Rose knew she’d have to act fast to prevent disaster.
 
In August 1944, another exodus took place in Paris: this time, it was the Germans hitting the road. Train 40044, bound for the heart of the Third Reich, contained the last of the German plunder. 48 cars were filled with furniture and home decor looted from the homes of wealthy French Jews, most of whom were waiting for liberation from concentration camps, if they were still alive. But, Rose told her former boss, there were five more cars, about to be hooked on to the train. Inside these cars were the so-called degenerate artworks the Nazis hadn’t had time to sell or destroy. 967 paintings were sitting in crates, about to pull out of the station. Jaujaurd put the word out to the Resistance: do everything you can to stop that train – but don’t hurt the treasures inside. The chaos of war delayed the train’s departure, even as the Allies got closer. Back at the Jeu de Paume, the officers were emptying their desks and fleeing town. Rose wrote in her diary, “It would be preferable that they were not here for the last acts of the Occupation. They would have the temptation to erase, not only evidence of their actions, but also their witnesses.” By August 12, the ERR was gone – but the train remained. Railway workers in the French Resistance went on strike. When the train finally left the station, it was so overloaded with loot that the train broke down only a few miles outside of Paris. By the time German workers repaired the train, the Resistance had derailed not one but two trains on the tracks ahead. As the train sat on the tracks, boiling in the sun, the Second Armored Division of the French Army finally arrived.
 
Alexandre Rosenberg, a young French lieutenant, approached the train slowly. He signaled to the men behind him to hold their fire. As the doors slid open, a few German soldiers stumbled out, their arms raised overhead, and Lieutenant Rosenberg looked inside. Opening up one of the endless crates stuffed into the boxcar, a series of paintings spilled out. You and I would recognize these paintings at once, because they were modern masterpieces: paintings by Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Picasso and more. But the young lieutenant recognized them for another reason: they used to hang on his own wall. Lieutenant Rosenberg’s father, Paul Rosenberg, was one of the world’s greatest Modern art dealers. In 1940, the Nazis took the Rosenberg collection, right down to the paintings displayed in their living room. Four years later, none other than Paul Rosenberg’s own son took them right back.
 
Back in Paris, Rose Valland quietly finished the final entry in her secret notebooks. The Nazis were gone. The Jeu de Paume was empty, and the keys were in her pocket. The Allies were almost here. The ERR no longer existed. She had outlasted them all, and as she’d promised Jaujaurd, she had never left her post. At long last, Rose Valland had nothing left to write. The final sentence in her secret archive was one word: “Ouf!”
 
By the end of the war, Nazi Germany successfully seized, sold, or otherwise displaced one fifth of all Western art in existence. While the Allies began repatriating millions of displaced Europeans, a special team focused on repatriating millions of displaced artworks. At first, the famous Monuments Men – trained art historians and curators attached to the Allied Army to protect and restore European treasures – didn’t know where to begin. It was as though they were detectives assigned to a quarter of a million cold cases. While many national museums had kept decent records of their own hiding places, how could these art officers even start tracking down the artworks plundered from personal collections and galleries? For James Rorimer, the Monuments Man assigned to Paris, there was only one place to start: the ERR. Sitting empty for the second time in five years, the Jeu de Paume nearly became an Allied post office before Rorimer intervened. Slowly, with a great deal of haggling, Rorimer managed to get the army to move its jeeps and tanks out of the Tuileries gardens. Walking across the garden to the Louvre, he met with Director Jaujard to seek his advice. 
 
Director Jaujard was busy: as soon as the Nazis skedaddled, he gave the magic go-ahead to his network across the country: it was time for the nation’s hidden treasures to come out of hiding. As the paintings and sculptures slowly made their way out of monasteries, chateaus, attics, basements and barns, the Louvre itself underwent renovations. During the liberation, one group of Germans fleeing an angry mob managed to hurl themselves through the windows of the Louvre. When a search party located them at last, a few of the men were curled inside the grate funeral vase of Ramses III. Repairing the windows was just one of the repairs needed to the beleaguered museum. Meanwhile, the galleries slowly refilled. The Raft of the Medusa managed to make it back without tripping the town’s circuit breakers. The Winged Victory of Samothrace slowly wheeled back up the staircase. The Bayeux tapestry emerged, miraculously preserved in the Louvre’s basement. And in a suburb of Toulouse, stored away in a rural chateau, the Mona Lisa poked her head out at last. She’d had a more adventurous war than Jaujaurd had hoped: she was nearly crushed by a ceiling beam, and almost washed away in a thunderstorm. She’d moved five times during the war. But she made it through, undamaged and ready to return. On June 16, 1945, she made it back under the Louvre’s roof, and on October 6, 1947, the day of the Louvre’s grand reopening, she resumed her rightful position on the walls. Focused on the state collection, Jaujard was nevertheless able to offer Rorimer a bit of advice about tracking down those private collections: “You should meet Rose Valland.” 
 
Like so many others, James Rorimer was unimpressed by Rose at first. Taking her for a secretary, he didn’t think a woman like her would know much. “That’s what the Germans thought, too!” the director laughed. He described the fate of Train 40044: “Rose Valland probably saved more important paintings than most conservators will work with in a lifetime.” Saved from its post office fate, the Jeu de Paume was a once again a clearinghouse for art on the move, and once again, Rose Valland was running the show. But Rose Valland had lived by one code during the war, and it had served her well: trust no one. She was polite but distant to the American arrival, and months into their acquaintance the only thing Rorimer knew about Valland was that she liked to chain smoke. Rose had good reason to distrust someone like Rorimer: after years of German looting, French art was now subject to American looting as well. Thousands of Allied soldiers pocketed treasures as souvenirs, or war booty. In November, Rorimer himself discovered a number of paintings and engravings in a U.S. military building. Without thinking twice, he immediately turned the artwork over to the Jeu de Paume. “Thank you,” Rose said, looking uncharacteristically surprised. After that day, Rose began sharing bits and pieces of what she knew, to see whether Rorimer could be trusted. A few days after returning the art from the military building, James and Rose teamed up for a curious tour of Paris. Rose had a list of nine addresses, which she said were used by the ERR. The tour didn’t turn up very much, but it gave the pair a chance to know one another. James soon came to appreciate just how dangerous, extensive and invaluable Rose’s espionage had been: four whole years of working right under the Nazi’s nose. In return, Rose came to trust James as a man who would return French art to its owners, not his own attic. That Christmas, James invited Rose over to his apartment for dinner. He shared his good news: the Army was transferring him to Germany, to track down hidden art within the remains of the Third Reich itself. It was an enormous honor, and an incredible opportunity, and he suspected Rose Valland had been pushing for him behind the scenes. Smiling at the news, Rose leaned in: Come to my apartment. I have something to show you.
 
In March 1945, while Hitler spent his last days in a Berlin bunker, James rode his bicycle over to Rose’s apartment in the fifth arrondissement. As he stepped in the door, before he could take in the surroundings of this intensely private woman’s personal space, she thrust a stack of photographs in front of his face. Here was a who’s who of every art thief James needed to know. Goering was there, of course, but here was a photograph of the head of the ERR. The commandant in charge of the Jeu de Paume. The biggest Nazi art broker in Paris. The art historian who helped price looted artwork. Remember their names and their faces, she told him. In Germany, you may be able to arrest them. A few minutes later, Rose returned with another, bigger box. Peering inside, James saw an extraordinary makeshift catalogue: an exhibit of all the paintings the Nazis had smuggled out of the country. Vermeer, Rubens, Rembrandt and more. But there was more in the box besides photographs: receipts she’d smuggled out of the trash can, train manifests, notes scribbled down from her prodigious memory at the end of a long day. James couldn’t believe it. Where once he’d been desperate for a lead, he now found himself overwhelmed with clues, maps, lists, and names. There was only one thing he didn’t have: time.  At any moment, Hitler might order the destruction of all his treasures. “Scorched earth” was his modus operandi – he’d pulverized most of the treasures of Poland, and Rose had personally witnessed bonfires of ‘degenerate’ art in the garden of the Jeu de Paume. Rorimer needed to travel fast, and she knew where he needed to travel first.
 
Neuschwanstein (noy-SCHVAN-schtein) Castle is a big fairytale fortress in the German mountains, rising out of the mist like something out of a dream. Nowadays, we recognize it as Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland. The castle was built for the mad King Ludwig II, and according to Rose Valland, it now served as a storage facility for Hitler’s most cherished artwork. Taking his leave of Rose Valland, and Paris itself, James Rorimer left a few weeks later to join the Seventh Army in Germany. He had no time to waste.
 
In May 1945, the Seventh Army captured Neuschwanstein. Crossing the threshold into the castle grounds, James followed the castle’s custodian up flight after flight of steep steps. The men passed through one door after another, each opened with an ancient skeleton key, until they made their way into the heart of the castle. There, just as Rose had promised, were the plundered treasures of the Third Reich. Feeling as though he must be hallucinating, each room only unlocked a new type of spectacle. Here in this room were thirteen hundred paintings from a Bavarian museum. The next rom might contain ancient Roman sculpture. Behind this door? Priceless jewelry dating back to the Renaissance. In the fireplaces, James found the charred remains of Nazi uniforms, but they’d left the most important documents untouched: thirty nine photo albums containing the most valuable works in the collection, prepared for the pleasure of the Fuhrer. Underneath the photo albums were card catalogs, photo collections, and records of the Third Reich’s collection. Thanks to Rose Valland’s hard work, thousands and thousands of treasures, belonging not only to France but from the whole world, were on their way home.
 
Ten days later, another figure approached Neuschwanstein Castle: Rose Valland herself. Soon after James accepted his transfer, Rose knew her watch over the Jeu de Paume could finally end. What else could she do but enlist as a so-called Monuments Man herself? Traveling as a fine arts officer with the French First Army, Rose served in Germany until 1951. For years, James, Rose, and the rest of the Monuments Men uncovered one Nazi hiding place after another. In the tiny village of Altaussee, a salt mine hid the famous altarpiece of Ghent, Michaelangelo’s scupture, the Madonna of Bruges, works by Titian, Botticelli, El Greco, and Raphael, and one painting Rose Valland had documented years ago, on its journey through the Jeu de Paume: Vermeer’s The Astrologer. Herman Goring didn’t make it far, and when he and his wife were captured, they found rolled up masterpieces stuffed in her handbag. A few weeks later, the 101st Airborne found his secret bunker, filled with all the treasures he had so painstakingly selected during his visits to the Jeu de Paume. The grand estates of the Third Reich revealed even more paintings, sculpture, jewelry and priceless furniture. Over and over again, officers followed the path of Rose’s notes, and sometimes of Rose herself. She oversaw the transfer of twenty thousand works of art from Neuschwanstein Castle. Packed into 1,400 crates, the priceless collection made its way to the Allied army’s clearinghouse. Where else but the Jeu de Paume? 
 
By the end of 1951, more than 350 men and women served as officers in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives program. Most of them returned home to illustrious careers in the art world, including James Rorimer, who reunited with his wife and children in New York, and became the curator of the Cloisters and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After returning to France, Rose accepted a position as conservator of the French national museums. In 1953, her old boss Jacques Jaujard offered Rose the role of a lifetime: the head of the Works of Art Protective Services, located in the Louvre. After more than 30 years working with fine art, Rose was a curator at last.
 
Rose returned to her apartment in the 5th arrondissement. Shortly after, she met Joyce Heer, a secretary at the U.S. embassy. The couple lived together on the rue de Navarre for thirty years. During this time, Rose racked up honor after honor, receiving the highest civilian honors of three nations: the French Legion of honor, the German Republic’s Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit and the U.S. Medal of Freedom. In 1965, the story of Train 40044 was turned into a film called The Train, starring Burt Lancaster. But after this postwar recognition, Rose’s story faded from public memory. She wrote her memoirs, lived quietly, and retired from the Louvre at the age of 70. When she passed away in 1980, her biographer notes, “not a single official representative attended her funeral in her hometown, in spite of the fact that she was an officer of the Legion of Honor.” 
 
But I told you this story has a happy ending. In 1994, Lynn Nicholas published “The Rape of Europa” – the magisterial history of Nazi art theft during the war. The Rape of Europa received countless awards, garnered Nicholas the Legion of Honor, and kicked off two decades of interest in Rose Valland and her fellow art officers. In books, TV shows and movies, Rose’s story is finally receiving the attention it deserves. She even got portrayed by Cate Blanchett, which is enough honor to satisfy most mortals. But perhaps the greatest tribute to Rose took place in 2005. That spring, the French government unveiled a commemorative plaque dedicated to Rose Valland “in tribute to her act of courage and resistance.” It is located, of course, on the wall of the Jeu de Paume. Through her careful documentation and years of postwar service, Rose Valland is now personally credited with the return of over 60,000 works of art. Through her bravery, and her lifelong dedication, this modest, unassuming woman fulfilled her life’s ambition: she saved a little bit of the beauty of the world.
 
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! At long last, Women at War is really, truly at an end. If you’re still hungry for more, I’ve created a new page on Bookshop, with a curated list of my favorite books about France during World War II. You can find the list at bookshop.org/shop/thelandofdesire. The documentary adaptation of The Rape of Europa is available to stream on Amazon Prime, and it is my favorite documentary of all time. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Next time you hear from me, I’ll be celebrating The Land of Desire’s fourth birthday! I can hardly believe it, can you? I can’t wait to celebrate with everyone! Until next time, au revoir!

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