During the six years of World War II in Europe, Nazi officials and their collaborators looted some 650,000 works of art. Competing Nazi bureaucracies sent agents throughout the Continent, plundering museums and private Jewish-held collections alike. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who was Hitler’s second-in-command for much of the war, was the most prominent of the thieves. But other leading Nazis, especially ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, and several Nazi and French collaborationists in Paris played central roles as well. To track and record their activities, an heroic French art historian agreed to spy on the bandits. Author Michelle Young tells her astonishing story, and that of the Nazi thieves, in The Art Spy.
The spy looked like a shy bookkeeper
The hero of this story is Rose Valland (1898-1980). For much of the war she was a volunteer assistant curator at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. This despite the fact that she held the most advanced credentials in her field from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, the École du Louvre, and the Sorbonne. This unassuming woman looked like a high school teacher or a bookkeeper, and a shy one at that. But that mask concealed fierce determination and courage. She was one of the most decorated women in French history.
Rose served as a spy for both Charles de Gaulle’s Free French and for the French Resistance. At war’s end, the French army made her a captain as her hunt for the missing treasures began. Later, as she roamed throughout post-war Germany to locate and return the stolen art, the Americans commissioned her as a lieutenant colonel. She dedicated her life to preserving, tracking, and rescuing many of the world’s greatest art treasures. And she succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. “Rose and her team were responsible for the restitution of more than sixty-one thousand works of art in the decade after World War II,” Young reports. She received the highest-possible civilian awards from the French, the Americans, and the Germans.
The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland by Michelle Young (2025) 400 pages ★★★★★
Her job was to spy on the thieves
When the Wehrmacht entered Paris on June 10, 1940, Rose was not caught unawares in her post at the museum. “Her boss, Jacques Jaujard, the director of the Musées Nationaux—the French national museums—immediately ordered her to ‘remain at all costs at the Jeu de Paume museum’ and covertly spy on the Germans.” And it was an order she eagerly accepted.
Nearly every one of the German accusations was true
That decision led to her interrogation on numerous occasions and, later in the war, to a determined effort to ship her off to a death camp in the East. “The Germans had accused Rose of everything in their arsenal: sabotage, theft, and signaling to the enemy,” Young reports. “They subjected her to invasive interrogations and searches, and even expelled her from the museum on several occasions. But she talked her way back in every time.” Rose was cool and persuasive under the most intense pressure. Yet “nearly every one of the German accusations had been true.”
And all the while “Rose was also concealing another dangerous secret: she had been living for almost a decade with the love of her life, Joyce Heer, a British citizen who worked for the US embassy.”
Recording the who, what, when, and where of every theft
Rose’s principal task during the German occupation of her museum was to construct a record of every painting, sculpture, tapestry, and other objets d’art the Germans stole. She noted the date and source of each object, who had owned it, where in Germany it was designated to be sent, and in what rail car or truck it would be shipped. When she was unable to record the details in writing, she committed them to her memory, which was nearly photographic. By war’s end, her apartment contained stacks of notes she was able to compile into an organized record of the thievery. And that record proved to be the key to rescuing tens of thousands of art treasures and restoring them to their rightful owners.
Rose Valland’s story, but others enliven it
Under direction, Rose and her staff at the Jeu de Paume began shipping art out of Paris on August 25, 1939, days before Nazi troops invaded Poland. “By the beginning of November, over five thousand crates of art had left Paris from the national museums.” Similarly, the major private collectors such as the Rothschllds, the Lévys, and the Bernheims, and France’s leading art dealer, Paul Rosenberg (1881-1959), took steps to sequester their holdings in chateaux, castles, and bank vaults scattered throughout the country. Yet it was all largely in vain. With dogged persistence, the Germans—usually, under the personal orders of Hermann Göring—tracked down nearly all of it and sent it off to hiding places in Germany.
The Art Spy is for the most part Rose Valland’s story. But Paul Rosenberg plays a supporting role throughout as well. He represented Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse, and numerous other modern artists. Some in the art establishment regarded him as the world’s foremost dealer. Young traces his related departure from France with his extended family and the fate of the many enormous collections of art they left behind in hiding. Also playing a key role in the story is Rosenberg’s eldest son, Alexandre. A teenager when war broke out, he defied his father and made his way to England to join General de Gaulle and the Free French in London. And in the closing days of the war in France, his life and Rose’s intersected in a dramatic fashion. That story alone is worth the price of the book.
About the author
Michelle Young‘s bio on Amazon reads in part as follows: “Michelle Young is an award-winning journalist, author, and professor whose work has appeared in The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal” and other publications. “She is a graduate of Harvard College in the History of Art and Architecture and holds a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is a Professor of Architecture. Young divides her time between New York City, Paris, and the Berkshires, MA.”
For related reading
Check out 10 true-life accounts of anti-Nazi resistance and 10 top WWII books about espionage.
Rose was a character in the book The Monuments Men by Robert Edsel. And Hollywood made a film of the book in 2014 under the same name featuring Rose Valland. The 2014 film starred George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Bob Balaban, and Cate Blanchett, who played Valland. George Clooney directed. Half a century earlier (1964), one of the most dramatic episodes in Rose’s career as a spy became the basis for the Burt Lancaster vehicle, The Train. It was that episode in the closing days of the war in France that brought together Alexandre Rosenberg and Rose Valland.
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