In occupied Paris, during WW2, amid the systematic plunder of Jewish collections and French museums, a little-known museum curator, Rose Valland, became one of the most effective resisters of Nazi cultural theft. Working almost alone in the Musée du Jeu de Paume, she persistently saved tens of thousands of artworks from disappearing into the Reich.
Born in 1898 in a modest family in rural Isère, Valland studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the École du Louvre. In 1932 she joined the Jeu de Paume as an unpaid attachée, assisting with administration and organizing exhibitions of modern art, including a pioneering 1937 show devoted to women artists across Europe. This marginal, underpaid status would later prove an unlikely shield: the Nazis underestimated her, viewing her as an unimportant functionary.
When Germany occupied France, the Jeu de Paume was requisitioned by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi unit in charge of looting Jewish and other “enemy” collections. From 1940 to 1944, the museum’s galleries, once filled with impressionist masterpieces, became a sorting depot where more than 22,000 looted objects passed through on their way to Hitler’s projected museum in Linz or to Göring’s private collection. Crates from families such as the Rothschilds, David-Weill and Seligmann were opened, inventoried, photographed, and then shipped to secret depots in Germany and Austria.
Valland chose to remain at her post when the Nazis took over the building. Officially she was a compliant French employee facilitating their operations; in reality she was a clandestine intelligence officer. The Germans did not know that she understood their language. Day after day, she listened to conversations, memorized names of collectors, deciphered codes on crates, and copied shipment lists and railcar numbers, recording origins and destinations with near-obsessive precision.
Working alone, she compiled underground inventories of looted works, noting not only titles and artists but also the train convoys, depots and mines where they were stored in Germany. These notes were hidden at great personal risk; if discovered, she could have been shot as a spy. Her information sometimes reached the French Resistance, which could then avoid bombing certain trains or target strategic rail junctions without destroying the art cargo they carried.
At the Liberation of Paris in 1944, Valland revealed to French and Allied authorities the precise locations of caches across Germany and Austria. In May 1945 she was formally attached to the staff of General de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army, receiving the rank of lieutenant, later captain. Armed with her wartime notebooks, she traveled to sites such as Neuschwanstein, Buxheim and other depots, identifying French-owned works among the mountains of plundered art.
Valland played a crucial role in the Commission de récupération artistique (CRA), created in November 1944 to recover cultural property looted from France. Thanks largely to the documentation she had assembled under occupation, approximately 60,000 artworks were brought back to France, of which around 45,000 were soon restituted to their rightful owners or heirs. The remainder entered a special category known as Musées nationaux Récupération (MNR), works held in trust by French museums until their legitimate ownership can be established.
Even after the CRA’s work was scaled back and public interest in restitution waned in the 1950s and 1960s, Valland continued investigating provenance and pushing for returns, often in isolation. She finally received official recognition as a conservator of the national museums only in 1952, at the age of fifty‑three, and became one of the most decorated women in France, yet remained relatively unknown outside specialist circles.
Her legacy endures both in the thousands of artworks that escaped permanent loss and in the archival trail she left behind. The modern database known as the “Base Rose Valland” continues to catalogue MNR works and their histories, serving ongoing efforts to identify and restitute looted art to families who are still seeking justice decades after the war.
Further Reading
http://docproj.loyola.edu/jdp/index.html
https://jeudepaume.org/a-propos/histoire/rose-valland/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_plunder
https://www.messynessychic.com/2025/05/14/the-artful-spy-who-stopped-hitler-from-emptying-the-louvre/
https://www.culture.gouv.fr/actualites/Rose-Valland-portrait-d-une-femme-engagee
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
