The Monuments Men (28 page)

And then came the war.

In 1939, she had helped Jacques Jaujard, the patrician director of the National Museums, with the evacuation of France’s state-owned artwork. She had fled Paris with the rest of the citizens as the Germans advanced in 1940, stuck in the terrible traffic outside the city as Luftwaffe bombers roared overhead and the cows lowed pitifully in the fields because there was no one left to milk them and relieve their pain. But she had returned as soon as the fighting was over, back to her unpaid position and the museum that had become her home.

And then, in October 1940, her life had changed. With the Nazi occupation only four months old, Jaujard had personally ordered her to stay in the Jeu de Paume to observe the Nazis’ activities and report anything important back to him. It was quite a request, to ask a minor employee to remain,
unpaid
, in the hazardous position of spying on the Nazis, but Valland jumped at the chance. She had planned to stay anyway—she was one of the few French staff still coming to the museum every day—but Jaujard’s trust lifted her mission to a higher level. It provided the opportunity to contribute in a way that was meaningful for both her and France.

Soon after, Jaujard approached her again with a special project. He and the “good” Nazi Count Wolff-Metternich had negotiated the transfer of looted objects from the German embassy to three rooms at the Louvre. Now those rooms were full. Colonel von Behr and Hermann Bunjes, the corrupted art scholar then in the employ of Wolff-Metternich’s Kunstschutz (a convenient cover for a man not yet discovered to be a scoundrel), had come to Jaujard requesting additional storage for confiscated art. It was chaos in those early days, just after the fall of the city, and every Nazi organization was grabbing what it could. Jaujard saw the wisdom of consolidating it in one place, so he arranged to place the Jeu de Paume at the disposal of the Nazi officials. But with one condition: that the French be allowed to inventory everything. He wanted Rose Valland to create that inventory.

Sometimes
, Rose Valland thought as the snows of December 1944 floated down around her,
your destiny is thrust upon you
.

That assignment had not gone well. She was aware, almost from the start, that something was terribly wrong. On the first morning of the Nazi occupation of the Jeu de Paume, November 1, 1940, she arrived expecting bureaucrats. The Nazis came with an army.
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They had it all prepared. She could see that immediately. Truckload after truckload of artwork arrived, unloaded and carried in by soldiers in uniform under Colonel von Behr’s command. It was stunning to hear, in that formerly quiet museum, the sound of military boots and the guttural bellowing of German orders. Even more stunning to see soldiers with crates lined up all the way to the front door, and trucks full of crates lined up outside.

The soldiers returned the next morning. They tore open the crates with crowbars and passed the paintings hand-to-hand to the back galleries, where they were stacked five or six deep against the wall. The activity was violent, feverish. Paintings were dropped, canvases torn, only natural in such a storm. The officers shouted only “
Schneller, schneller
.” Faster, faster. When a room was full, the paintings were stacked in another. Rose Valland walked the museum in a daze. She saw great works of art, many without frames, others damaged from the hasty moves, and witnessed them trampled beneath German boots. The officers yelled only, “
Schneller, schneller
.” By the end of the day, more than four hundred cases had been offloaded and placed in the museum, many bearing the names of their owners: Rothschild, Wildenstein, David-Weill.

The next day Valland, along with several assistants, set up a desk in a hallway. As the artwork passed by, they wrote down, as quickly as they could, the name, artist, and origin. Vermeer. Rembrandt. Tenier. Renoir. Boucher. Many of the paintings were so well known as to be instantly recognizable, but they passed so quickly she couldn’t write them all down. She was deep into her work when suddenly she realized a uniformed man was standing over her, staring down at her list. It was Hermann Bunjes, the corrupt Kunstschutz official who had schemed with von Behr to requisition the museum. He was stern and unkind, very young but already stooped beneath the weight of his perpetual disgust. Bunjes, who had been a minor scholar so much like Rose Valland herself, had sold out everything he believed in for the illusion of Nazi power. He would work hand in hand over the next few years with Lohse and other ERR officials who schemed and stole and abused and threatened. But on that first day he simply looked down at what she was writing—the very inventory he and von Behr had told Jaujard they would accommodate only two days before—and slammed her notebook shut.

“That is enough,” he said. Three words, and Jaujard’s inventory was finished.

But they didn’t throw her out. Colonel von Behr, with the generosity of the untouchable warlord, allowed her to stay as guardian of the museum’s permanent collection, which with modern art, like
Whistler’s Mother
, was detestable to the Nazis anyway.
Destiny is not one push
, she thought as she waited to cross a quiet street on that cold Paris evening years later, but a thousand small moments that through insight and hard work you line up in the right direction, like a magnet does with metal shavings.

She did not have to wait long for her destiny to arrive—only three days, in fact, after her assignment by Jaujard. On the first, the museum was empty. On the second, it was filled with artwork piled into every nook and cranny. On the third, it housed an exhibition fit for a king. Paintings and tapestries were hung tastefully on the walls, with complementary statuary between them. Couches for viewing were arranged in every gallery, with expensive rugs beneath them on the floor. Champagne on ice sat almost unnoticed in the corners. The guards stood at attention, red armbands and black swastikas against brown uniforms. Colonel von Behr, Hermann Bunjes, and the other leaders of the museum wore uniforms, too; some even wore helmets. Helmets, as if this was an army and they were going to battle. To see all those Nazis in their high polished boots, standing at attention, was an impressive and terrifying sight. They were waiting, Rose Valland knew, for their king.

The man who arrived was not Hitler. And it was not Alfred Rosenberg. The looting operation at the Jeu de Paume may have been run in the name of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg—Reich Leader Rosenberg’s Special Task Force—but only in name. Rosenberg was a die-hard racist intent only on proving Jewish degeneracy. He had no interest in art. He couldn’t see the potential of the blank check Hitler had given him: the right to transport to the Fatherland anything that would aid in his research into Jewish inferiority. Valland remembered one of Rosenberg’s rare visits from Berlin to the Jeu de Paume. By that time, late 1942, he must have realized that he had lost control. He shuffled through the museum accompanied only by a few associates. The only accommodations made for his visit were pots of chrysanthemums in some of the rooms. It smelled like a funeral.

It was so different from the visits of the true kingpin who had risen up to exploit the ERR opportunity. For him, personal exhibitions were set up with exquisite care, selected to match his personal taste. Champagne bottles weren’t just opened, they were “sabered,” a dramatic and theatrical process in which the force of a saber, slid along the body of the bottle toward the neck, snaps the collar from the neck of the bottle, leaving the cork intact but the bottle open. The obsequious ERR officials toasted his tastes and his triumphs, then followed on his heels, hungering for his every compliment and laughing at his foolish jokes. And the kingpin adored the attention, for Hermann Göring, the Nazi Reichsmarschall and Hitler’s second in command, was a vain and greedy man.

Rose Valland knew she would always remember his excesses. He had dozens of specially tailored uniforms, most with gold stitching and braided silk, each with more epaulettes, tassels, and medals than the last. He carried emeralds in his pockets and jingled them with his fingers like other people jingle loose change. He drank only the finest champagne. When he came to rifle the Rothschild jewelry collection in March 1941, he took the two finest pieces and simply shoved them in his pocket, like he was shoplifting licorice whips. When he stole larger works of art, he simply added another railcar to the back of his private train and hauled it away, like Caesar hauling the spoils of war behind his imperial chariot.
2
On the way to Berlin, he would lounge in an enormous red silk kimono weighed down with heavy gold trim.
3
Every morning, he would luxuriate in his red marble bathtub, built extra wide to contain his girth. He hated the rocking of the train. It made his bathwater slop. When Reichsmarschall Göring was in his bath, his train stopped on the tracks. This, in turn, forced the stopping of every other train in the nearby rail system. Only after the Reichsmarschall had bathed could the shipments of armaments, equipment, and soldiers proceed to their various destinations.

But that would come later. On his first day in the Jeu de Paume, in the midst of all the glory set up by the ERR, the rotund Reichsmarschall slouched through the museum in a long brown overcoat, a battered fedora pulled low on his head, dressed in the suit of a dandy accented with a bright colorful scarf. She remembered her first thoughts upon seeing him that day: fat, flamboyant, pretentious, yet strangely mediocre in his tastes.
4

She would find out why later. In addition to being Reichsmarschall, Göring was the head of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. He had staked his reputation with Hitler on the fact that the Luftwaffe would knock Britain out of the war. When he appeared at the Jeu de Paume on November 3, 1940, the Luftwaffe had been fighting the Battle of Britain for four months, and blitzing London for three. And they were losing. For the first time, the tyrants were losing. And Göring was responsible.

At the same time, Göring’s personal battle for the plunder of Western Europe was not going well. For the rapacious Reichsmarschall, this was an equal or perhaps even greater setback than the battle over the English Channel. After the Nazi blitz, the art markets of the Netherlands and France burst open. They were hives of vermin, full of collaborators, opportunists, and shady middlemen with no qualms about stealing, pawning, swindling, and exchanging artwork for visas out of Europe. There were hundreds of Germans with their hands out, trying to take advantage of the upheaval of the century. Göring was ruthless, efficient, and powerful, but he was also conceited and easily duped. He was spending a vast amount of his time and energy dealing with art agents, and he still wasn’t getting even half of what he wanted. He had come to Paris to banish his depression with a buying spree.

On this cold winter day at the Jeu de Paume, November 3, 1940, his representatives showed him not just the kind of artwork he coveted; they showed him a new world. That was their genius. They showed him a tiny speck of the riches of France, and how easy it was to attain the rest. Why buy it? Why negotiate and haggle and try to outmaneuver his fellow Nazis when Rosenberg had been given a loophole to steal? In hindsight, Rose Valland could see that it was all a stage. Colonel von Behr, Hermann Bunjes, and Göring’s personal art curator Walter Andreas Hofer had set it up for him. They knew what the Reichsmarschall wanted, and they knew they could give it to him. All they had to do was show him that now all things were possible. In their own way, those vile Nazis had also seized their moment. They had lined up the metal filings of their own destinies like so many dastardly magnets. They said to him: We are your men, your organization, and this is what we can provide. All you have to do is ask.

When Göring returned to the Jeu de Paume two days later, on November 5, 1940, he was a new man. Valland could see the wolfish pleasure in his eyes, the triumph. He discussed the works of art loudly and boastfully with his experts, espoused the virtues of his favorite pieces, took paintings off the wall so he could examine them more closely. By then, in just two days, he had worked it all out. He even had a proclamation already drawn. From then on, by order of the Reichsmarschall and approved by the Führer, Hitler would have first choice of the ERR confiscations. Göring would have second choice. Rosenberg was third. Rosenberg complained, of course, but Hitler sided with Göring. They had no respect for Rosenberg at Nazi headquarters. The whole world, Valland thought, hated that man. And of course Hitler was happy with first choice. The Reichsmarschall, far from alienating himself from the Führer through his power grab, had ingratiated himself with his patron. And at the same time, he had gotten power over the patrimony of France.

After that, the pattern was set. The ERR operation in Paris, for all intents and purposes, was Göring’s personal looting organization. He came twenty-one times to the Jeu de Paume, always feted by personal servants: Colonel von Behr, Hermann Bunjes, and later the reptilian art dealer Bruno Lohse, Göring’s personal representative to the ERR. They were drawn in because, in a Nazi world, the position of Reichsmarschall came with all the trappings of power. Real power, the kind where you can make a fortune, take people’s lives, and change the world. The men at the Jeu de Paume swallowed it all. They thought they were serving in the court of the king. The greedy Lohse tried to make money wherever possible. The social-climbing von Behr was elevated to the highest ranks of society in occupied Paris. The power-hungry Bunjes was given a position.

When Wolff-Metternich found out Bunjes was undermining the Kunstschutz mission, he fired him. Göring gave Bunjes an officer’s commission in the Luftwaffe and named him director of the SS Kunsthistorisches Institut in Paris. Before, Bunjes was a minor functionary and scholar; now he ran a prominent institution. That was the power of the Reichsmarschall. And the corrupt young souls of the Jeu de Paume, Bunjes and Lohse especially, idolized that power.