OF ALL JAUJARD’S actions, perhaps the most daring was planting a spy in the Germans’ midst. His spy was even more daring; she faced the daily risk of imprisonment and execution if discovered. In early October 1940, the Germans had asked for space at the Louvre in which to store the art, furniture and other items seized from Jewish collectors. Three weeks later, when the three allotted rooms in the sequestered section of the Louvre overflowed, they wanted still more space, this time the entire small Jeu de Paume Museum, located across from the Louvre in the northwest corner of the Tuileries Garden, bordered by place de la Concorde and rue de Rivoli. The small building, constructed in 1861 as a games court for Napoleon III, had housed various temporary exhibitions and a permanent collection of modern foreign art. The location was perfect for the ERR’s looting operation since it was isolated from the street and curious eyes on two sides by the walls of the Tuileries Garden, allowing trucks to discreetly come and go. The building was also easy to protect since it was almost right across from the Hôtel de Crillon, the German military headquarters. Göring would also have the building heavily guarded by Luftwaffe and Gestapo officers.
MUSÉE DU JEU DE PAUME, LATE 1940S, LOUVRE IN BACKGROUND
In ceding use of the building, Jaujard had one condition—that the French and Germans would make parallel lists of seized items. To make the French list, Jaujard designated Rose Valland, an unpaid worker with several degrees in fine arts and art history. She had volunteered at the Jeu de Paume since 1932 and had been the museum’s administrator from just before the declaration of war in September 1939 until the Germans arrived in Paris the following June. In addition to assigning Valland responsibility for the list, Jaujard gave her another mission: to find some way—any way—to remain at the Jeu de Paume, in hopes of keeping track of what the Germans were doing. Jaujard knew that many of the seized assets would be sent to Germany and the French could not prevent it, but he hoped that by identifying items as they were brought in and possibly learning where they went, the information might help in their recovery after the war.
TRUCK IN LOUVRE’S COUR CARRÉE, BRINGING SEIZED ASSETS TO SEQUESTERED AREA OF THE MUSEUM (BUNDESARCHIV B323 BILD-311-009/O.ANG.)
On November 1, Göring’s Luftwaffe men rushed more than 400 crates of seized assets into the building. The following morning, they roughly unpacked them, haphazardly stacking paintings against walls as Valland began to prepare the French list as best she could, assisted by several colleagues. It quickly became evident to her that the Germans had no intention of preparing a dual inventory. Had there been any doubt, it was eliminated just after noon when Hermann Bunjes—nominally a Kunstschutz employee but in practice an enthusiastic aide of Göring—came along, slapped closed the notebook in which the French were making their list and told her and her colleagues to leave and not come back. The others left but, following Jaujard’s instructions, Valland simply ignored his order, taking the position that it did not apply to her since the permanent collections of the museum still needed tending and the building’s maintenance staff still needed supervision, both of which had been her responsibilities before the Occupation. Baron Kurt von Behr, chief of the ERR’s operations in France, made the mistake of allowing her to stay.
The first several days in the new Nazi art depot were a frantic blur of activity. Valland soon learned why: Hermann Göring was coming from Germany to inspect the booty. On November 3 he arrived, accompanied by Luftwaffe men, ERR authorities and his own personal art curator, Walter Hofer. Sporting a long overcoat and a wide-brimmed fedora, his trademark cane in hand, Göring spent the entire day at the museum. Two days later, in addition to feasting his eyes on the Belle Allemande at the Louvre, he returned to the Jeu de Paume, where he joyfully examined the spoils again. By day’s end, Göring had indicated the disposition of various items. One category comprised artworks he had set aside for Hitler; a second category was a list of artworks for himself. Further items were tagged for German museums or elsewhere.
Before long, under Valland’s watchful eyes, the fruit of additional confiscations of Jewish-owned assets arrived; most were then catalogued and prepared for shipment to Germany. By the end of January, the German military commander of France felt compelled to write to his superior of his disapproval of Göring’s actions, noting among other things, “[T]he whole question of the confiscation has already stirred up plenty of dust. I myself am of the opinion that it ought to stop now, and that any further seizure ought to be refrained from.” But Göring had Hitler’s support and just several days after the commander’s protest, Göring was back at the Jeu de Paume to pick more fruit. On February 5, Wolff Metternich and his assistant Tieschowitz arrived and announced that they were, as representatives of the Supreme Army Command, responsible for the safety of the sequestered works. Göring made them leave.
ROSE VALLAND AT MUSÉE DU JEU DE PAUME
Several days later, a train with twenty-five baggage cars loaded with looted artwork, antique furniture, Gobelins tapestries and other items took off for Berlin. The top masterpieces handpicked by Göring—nineteen crates designated for Hitler and twenty-three for himself—were loaded into two baggage cars hitched to Göring’s private train. As his train headed to Germany, the roar of its Luftwaffe-provided fighter plane escort echoed through the French countryside. Aboard were Vermeer’s Astronomer and works by Rembrandt, Fragonard, Boucher and other masters. Göring’s hand-written instructions for the shipment sounded like a restaurant order: “All the paintings marked ‘H’ are for the Führer …. Everything marked “G” is for me.”
By the summer of 1941, Valland was getting a salary for the first time and Göring had made five additional trips to Paris and arranged for perhaps three-quarters of the war’s entire plunder to be shipped to Germany. He made four more trips to the Jeu de Paume in 1942; all carefully noted by Valland. In mid-1943, seizure activity slowed considerably when Hitler removed Rosenberg—and thus also Göring—from control over the ERR. Most of the subsequent activity at the Jeu de Paume would involve cataloguing seized items still on the premises and preparing their shipment to Germany. All told, between March 1941 and July 1944, 4,174 crates holding almost 22,000 pieces of pillaged art left France for Germany, not to mention hundreds of thousands of other items, including jewelry, tapestries, antique furniture, and other treasures taken from individuals and libraries.
As seized items arrived at the Jeu de Paume and as they were shipped off to Germany, Rose Valland was watching. By day, she found every excuse possible to circulate around the building to observe the Germans’ activities. She looked after the French artwork that belonged to the museum before the war and checked the electric and fire protection systems. Plain-looking and plainly dressed, the quiet 42-year-old with the large round glasses drew little attention from the Germans as she moved about, making careful mental notes of everything she saw. She plucked documents out of wastebaskets. She eavesdropped on conversations as the Germans spoke freely in front of her, unaware that she was fluent in German. The locations of the German depots were noted in a book that was always left on a table and, above the table, a list was posted with the day’s shipping orders and destinations. And the records being compiled by the ERR were not locked up. Valland made good use of her access to all of these. She also got hold of the watchman’s logbook.
HERMANN GÖRING AT MUSÉE DU JEU DE PAUME
Valland also had other sources of information. The guards told her whatever seemed interesting and she befriended the head packer and one of the drivers to find out what they were doing. Two guards in the Louvre passed along information about ERR processing activities in the sequestered rooms of the Cour Carrée, where she was forbidden to go.
By night, she used her spectacular memory to make secret notes of her findings. She also sometimes managed to sneak out negatives of ERR archival photographs and had prints made, then slipped them back in the following morning. Every few days, Valland passed along some details during her normal meetings with Jaujard or his assistant Bouchot-Saupique. Jaujard managed to relay some location information to members of the Louvre’s resistance network, who in turn passed it into Allied hands. As a result, before the war was over, the Allies knew where some of the looted art had been initially transferred and avoided bombing these locations.
From the moment she began spying at the Jeu de Paume, Valland knew the great personal risk involved; had she been caught, she would have been imprisoned or sentenced to death. Yet she would continue her deception for four years. In February 1944, she would have a particularly close call when a Göring representative at the Jeu de Paume caught her trying to decipher an address. Looking her straight in the eyes, he told her that she could be shot for speaking about the building’s activities. Ever calm, she simply responded, “Nobody here is stupid enough not to know the risks.”
While the overwhelming majority of the looted artwork went to Germany to enrich the collections of Hitler and Göring, other items—particularly those not in keeping with Nazi ideology—were sold to obtain hard currency or to obtain works considered more desirable. Certain other works were traded with the same goal. By far the biggest category of unacceptable art was what Hitler called entartete Kunst, or degenerate art. This included modern art, especially abstract works, but also more generally art from Impressionism forward, plus works by any Jewish artist. Among the many artists producing work considered “degenerate” were Klee, Picasso, Modigliani, Kandinsky and Chagall, but also Vincent van Gogh. In 1937, Nazi officials purged German museums of over 16,000 “degenerate” works. “Degenerate” artists were removed from positions as teachers and were forbidden to exhibit or sell their work or even to buy art supplies. In many cases they were not allowed to paint or sculpt at all and many of their works were seized and destroyed.
The same fate was in store for some of the stolen “degenerate” art stored in the sequestered rooms of the Louvre alongside furniture and other items that had been ripped from Jewish homes. On July 19, 1943, a group of ERR agents met in the sequestered rooms to convene what amounted to a trial of the “degenerate” art. They set aside some paintings—including works by Courbet, Monet, Degas and Manet—to trade for more “acceptable” ones and designated other paintings for possible sale, among them works by Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse, Braque and Dufy.
The rest, considered “dangerous,” were slated for destruction. On July 23, 1943, in the sequestered rooms of the Louvre, Nazi agents with knives in hand slashed more than 500 paintings, from Jewish family portraits to works by Miro, Klee, Ernst, Picasso and others. Then they loaded a military truck with the debris, hauled it to the Tuileries Garden and set it ablaze. The column of smoke rising into the Paris sky remained visible for hours afterwards, until it disappeared into the inky darkness of the nightly German-ordered blackout.