The Art Spy

The book opens during the battle for the liberation of Paris in August 1944. Rose Valland, a 45-year-old French art historian, peers from a window of the Jeu de Paume museum as gunfire erupts across the city. For four years, under orders from Jacques Jaujard, director of France's national museums, she has secretly spied on the Nazis, who seized the museum as headquarters for their art looting operation, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). Rose and two guards are the only people left inside. German soldiers have fortified the terrace, and a sentry trains his gun on the entrance. Unbeknownst to Rose, Colonel Kurt von Behr, the former ERR head, has ordered that she be made to "disappear."

From this crisis, the narrative traces Rose's origins. She grew up in a working-class family in eastern France, the daughter of a blacksmith. Despite childhood illness that delayed her schooling, she excelled academically, earning degrees from institutions including the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the École du Louvre. Henri Verne, director of the national museums, repeatedly blocked her career, writing that hiring her "would not appear desirable." In 1932, Rose took an unpaid position at the Jeu de Paume, a museum specializing in international and modern art, where she essentially ran operations for seven years without compensation.

Rose lived with her partner, Joyce Heer, a British citizen who worked as a translator at the US embassy. They never acknowledged their relationship publicly; homosexuality was criminalized under Vichy law, and Joyce's citizenship made her an enemy alien under German occupation.

The narrative introduces two parallel threads. Hitler's hatred of avant-garde art traced partly to his rejection from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As chancellor, he ordered modern art purged from German museums and in June 1939 appointed Dr. Hans Posse to lead the Sonderauftrag Linz, a special commission to build a vast Führermuseum in Linz, Austria. Meanwhile, Paul Rosenberg, a preeminent French art dealer who represented Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, dispersed his collection to London, New York, and the French countryside as war loomed.

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Rose supervised the evacuation of hundreds of paintings from the Jeu de Paume. Germany invaded France on May 10, 1940, and the country fell within weeks. Rose spent harrowing days walking toward the art depots, surviving aerial attacks and witnessing civilian carnage. She heard Charles de Gaulle's Appeal of June 18, his BBC broadcast calling on the French to resist. Meanwhile, 19-year-old Alexandre Rosenberg, Paul's son, was separated from his family at the Spanish border, escaped to England, and enlisted with de Gaulle's Free France within days.

Rose returned to occupied Paris in July 1940. Hitler had issued directives using euphemistic language about "safeguarding" privately owned art. Ambassador Otto Abetz looted Paul's gallery at 21 rue la Boétie and 14 other mostly Jewish-owned galleries within days. When the ERR requisitioned the Jeu de Paume for storage, Jaujard agreed on condition that the French maintain a parallel inventory and placed Rose as his spy.

Rose found the museum overrun with soldiers from the German air force unpacking crates of stolen art. When an SS art historian banned her notebook, she memorized what she could not write down. She reported to Jaujard regularly, duplicated keys, smuggled photographic negatives, and built a network of informants. Joyce helped decipher German documents. On November 2, 1940, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring made his first visit, selecting paintings for his country estate and establishing a hierarchy of plunder: Hitler first, Göring second, then German museums.

Joyce was arrested on December 5, 1940, in a mass roundup of British women and interned at Besançon, where conditions were appalling. Rose left no written record of her fears, likely to protect them both. The US embassy secured Joyce's release in February 1941.

The looting escalated through 1941 and 1942. The Gestapo seized paintings from the Rosenbergs' rented villa and bank vault, and the family home at 21 rue la Boétie was converted into an anti-Semitic propaganda institute. By summer 1941, the Germans had seized over 10,000 objects from Jewish collections in France. Bruno Lohse, a cunning German art historian, became central to the operation, exchanging modern art for Old Masters through collaborationist dealers and generating foreign currency for the war effort.

Rose was expelled from the museum four times but talked her way back each time. She sabotaged ERR operations through deliberate errors. The persecution of Jews intensified alongside the plunder: the July 1942 Vel' d'Hiv roundup saw over 11,000 people, including 3,625 children, arrested by French police and deported to Auschwitz. On July 22 and 23, 1943, German officials slashed hundreds of modern paintings at the Louvre and forced a guard to burn the remnants in the Jeu de Paume garden. Von Behr revived his order to have Rose deported and executed. When Lohse warned her she could be shot, she replied that no one present was "stupid enough not to know the risks they are taking."

After D-Day on June 6, 1944, the ERR packed its remaining art. Nearly 1,000 paintings, 50 sculptures, and furnishings were loaded onto trucks heading for a train bound for Czechoslovakia. Rose copied the dispatch information and contacted Resistance operatives who coordinated with the Résistance-Fer, the railway resistance network, to sabotage the train. After days of engineered delays, the train stalled at Aulnay-sous-Bois, only five miles from its starting point.

Alexandre, now serving with General Philippe Leclerc's 2nd Free French Armored Division, landed at Utah Beach on August 1 and fought through Normandy. The Resistance launched its Paris uprising on August 18. Hitler ordered Paris reduced to ruins, but General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German military commander of the city, delayed the destruction. On August 24, a French armored detachment entered Paris. Rose heard Notre-Dame's bells from the museum.

On August 25, Rose stepped into the doorway and flashed her expired German identity card at a sentry aiming his rifle at her, gambling that her presence would prove no troops hid inside. He did not fire. Alexandre's battalion entered Paris to jubilant crowds. Von Choltitz surrendered. Two days later, Alexandre received orders to secure the art train. Opening the cargo cars, he found crates stenciled "MODERNES PICASSO" and "P.R. PARIS," containing paintings he had last seen in his family home. Of the approximately 1,000 paintings, at least 151 belonged to his father. The train's intended destination was later bombed and the castle gutted by fire, confirming that Rose's persistence saved the collection.

Rose gradually shared her intelligence with Lieutenant James Rorimer, an American art curator serving in the US Army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section. In May 1945, she received a mission order as a French fine-arts service officer and headed to Germany, where her intelligence enabled the recovery of hundreds of thousands of looted artworks. She spent eight years tracking and restituting art, locating The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a Van Eyck masterpiece, in the Altausee salt mine alongside over 6,500 works rigged for explosion. Von Behr committed suicide. Göring killed himself before execution at Nuremberg. Lohse was acquitted at trial despite Rose's testimony, but when he died in 2007, dozens of looted paintings were found in his possession.

Rose published her wartime memoir, Le Front de l'Art, in 1961 and sold the film rights for what became The Train, starring Burt Lancaster. She faced professional setbacks on returning to France, denied the rank she earned in Germany and demoted to assistant curator. She and Joyce remained together until Joyce's death from breast cancer in 1977. Rose died in obscurity in 1980 at age 81; she is buried with Joyce. One of the most decorated women in French history, Rose received the US Medal of Freedom, the French Légion d'Honneur, the Medal of Resistance, and Germany's Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit. The author argues that Rose planted the seed for modern art restitution and predicted that looted art would keep resurfacing, a prediction strongly borne out in the decades since.