“Colonel von Behr,” a soldier had said, breaking his gaze. von Behr had turned with a glare. “The trucks are almost full, sir.”
“Get more, fool,” he growled.
Before he could turn back to her, Rose Valland had slipped away. It wasn’t her place to taunt von Behr, and she was certainly no assassin. Her role was to spy, to be the quiet mouse that slowly but surely chewed a whole in the foundation of the house. Four years of occupation was ending in a matter of days, if not hours. If ever there was a time to lie low, this was it.
But her persistence, as usual, had paid off. The trucks leaving the museum with the last of the looted French artwork weren’t heading straight for Germany. In her trek through the museum, Valland had learned they were going to the Aubervilliers train station on the outskirts of Paris to be loaded onto railcars. Trucks would have been nearly impossible to track; a train was easier. Especially since she had discovered the railcar numbers.
The next day, August 2, 1944, five railcars containing 148 crates of stolen paintings were sealed at Aubervilliers. The ERR had rushed to pack the final shipment from the Jeu de Paume, but a few days later the railcars still hadn’t left the station. The art train was scheduled to contain forty-six additional cars of looted objects obtained by another Nazi looting organization controlled by von Behr, “M-Aktion” (M stood for Möbel, German for furniture). Much to von Behr’s disgust, those cars weren’t yet loaded.
Train no. 40044 was still parked at the rail station a few days later when Rose Valland paid a visit to her boss, Monsieur Jaujard. She had copied the Nazi shipment order which contained the train and railcar numbers, destinations of the crates (Kogl castle, near Vöcklabruck, Austria, and Nikolsburg depository in Moravia), and their contents. Wouldn’t it be wise to try and delay the train, she suggested. The Allies could arrive any day.
“Agreed,” Jaujard said.
As von Behr huffed on the train station platform, berating the armed guards and the privates trying desperately to load the other cars, Jaujard’s contacts in the French Resistance set out to stop the train using the information Rose Valland had obtained, and subsequently relayed to them by Jaujard. By August 10, the art train was packed, but by then a thousand French railroadmen had gone on strike, and there was no way to depart Aubervilliers. By August 12, the tracks were again open, but instead of departing for Germany the art train was shunted to a side track to make way for other trains carrying personal possessions and terrified German citizens. The German guards, exhausted after ten days, walked nervously back and forth, wishing they were already home. The French army, it was being whispered, was hours away. And yet small technical problems kept cropping up, pushing the train to the end of the priority line. The French army never showed. The young men sighed with relief. After almost three weeks, the train finally began its journey home to Germany.
But it only got to Le Bourget, a few miles down the track. The train, fifty-one cars packed full of loot, was so heavy that it caused a mechanical breakdown (or so went the excuse), necessitating a forty-eight-hour delay. By the time that problem was solved, it was too late. The French Resistance had derailed two engines at an important bottleneck in the rail system. The art train was trapped in Paris. “The freight cars with their 148 crates of art,” Valland wrote to Jaujard, “are ours.” 6
But it hadn’t been so simple. When the Second Armored Division of the Free French army arrived a few days later, the Resistance alerted them to the importance of the train. The detachment sent by General Leclerc found several crates broken open, two crates pillaged, and an entire collection of silver missing. They decided to send thirty-six of the 148 crates filled with important works by Renoir, Degas, Picasso, Gauguin, and other masters to the Louvre. It was the bulk of the collection of Paul Rosenberg, the famous Parisian art dealer, whose son by coincidence was the division commander of the Free French troops who inspected the train. But much to Rose Valland’s regret and frustration, almost two more months would pass before the rest of the crates were removed from the train and returned to the museum. Even in the cold snow of December, waiting for the stationmaster to show her the last contents of the train, it was an oversight that gnawed at the corner of her mind.
“We’d like to see the stationmaster, please,” James Rorimer told the attendant at the Gare de Pantin, blowing on his hands against the winter chill. Behind him, Rose Valland took a long drag on her cigarette, deep in her own thoughts. “I know it’s a vice,” she had told him during one of their first conversations, “but if I can smoke, nothing else but my work matters.” 7
She was mysterious like that, always saying sly, inscrutable things. He could never, for the life of him, understand exactly where he stood with her. They had a good relationship, he was confident of that. It wasn’t just that Henraux, who like Jaujard had urged Rorimer to learn what he could from Valland, agreed that she had been watching and admiring him. It was what Valland said to him the week before, on December 16, when he turned over to the commission several minor paintings and engravings found in an American military installation. “Thank you,” she had said. “Too often, your fellow liberators give us the painful impression they have landed in a country whose inhabitants no longer matter.” 8 It was about as personal as Rose Valland ever got.
But how good was their relationship? And how much did Valland really trust him? He thought of the story Jaujard had told him: Rose Valland alone, holding her ground against the French crowds that stormed the Jeu de Paume in celebration on the day General Leclerc liberated Paris. She wouldn’t allow the mob into the basement, where the museum’s collections had been stored during the occupation.
“She’s sheltering Germans!” someone shouted.
“Collaborateur!” The cry rang through the building. “Collaborateur!”
Calmly, despite the gun at her back, Valland had showed her fellow Frenchmen that the basement was indeed empty of everything but boilers, pipes, and artwork. And then, despite their protests, she kicked them out. She was no pushover, that was for sure. She was strong, opinionated, easy to underestimate and misunderstand. She had her own ideas about duty and honor, and she kept to her principles even with a gun in her back. Rorimer wasn’t sure if Jaujard had told him the story to explain her secretiveness and determination, or to draw a subtle line between the two of them. Jaujard, after all, had been threatened by his own countrymen, too.
But he had made progress. While he was delivering the recovered objects to Valland at the Jeu de Paume on December 16, Rorimer had visited Albert Henraux, director of the Commission de Récupération Artistique. He informed Rorimer of the locations of nine ERR storehouses and also told him about the unopened traincars. Henraux encouraged him to work with Valland to investigate the locations. “She knows more than she has revealed to us, James. Perhaps you can find out what it is.”
Rorimer had heard the story of the nine locations from Rose Valland as they traveled together to inspect them. While working as a spy at the Jeu de Paume, she had compiled the addresses of all the important Nazi storehouses in Paris, as well as the home addresses of all the important Nazi looters. She had provided the information to Jaujard in early August. He, in turn, had given the addresses to the new French government to investigate. Although a few objects had been returned to the Louvre, nothing further had been heard. This was her first visit to the Nazi storehouses she had worked so hard to uncover.
They didn’t find much. One site contained thousands of rare books; a few others held minor pieces of art left behind during the French government sweep of the building. In some ways, it was simply another dead end, another setback. And while he still professed in his letters home to love his job, Rorimer’s satisfaction was being undercut by crosscurrents of doubt and frustration.
For one thing, he was homesick. In England, he had agreed not to send sentimental letters home because they would “only cause the writer and the recipients unnecessary emotional disturbances.” 9 For six months he had dutifully obeyed this
rule. But in late October, he had broken down, writing his wife that “I think of your problems often, perhaps even constantly. It is not that I do not want to help you lead your life with you these days, but rather that I know how foolish it would be to do anything but plan for our happy future years together. I do not ask about our child, nor tell you how I long to see Anne. That would not be fair. It’s for this same reason as I have told you before that I do not write very personal, sloppy letters about wasted emotions. When I see the concierge’s child at our apartment I realize how deprived I am of these moments which we should be having together.” 10 Anne was eight months old, and her father had never seen her. And he had no hope of doing so anytime in the near future.
He was worn out, absolutely dead worn out. And the difficulties of the job—the ceaseless dead ends, the brutal bureacracy, the endless small disturbances, the isolation from family and friends—were building up. What finally pushed him over the line in late November was small: His beloved typewriter, which he had purchased on his crossing to France, was stolen. Seemingly minor, maybe, but there were no other typewriters available, and he couldn’t find one to buy, and he had to write home to ask his mother to send him one, which required special army permission. His mother wanted letters, letters, letters, and how was he to compose them without his typewriter?
Looking back on it weeks later (but still without a typewriter), he didn’t understand why he had exploded. He didn’t know it was a deeper, more fundamental issue. Despite the dinners with society figures, Paris’ glorious monuments, and his belief in the work, he had slowly come to realize that Paris wasn’t central to the monuments effort. The important work was not here, but in Germany, and Rorimer hated to be too far away from the important work. He would not have acknowledged it, because he probably did not yet know it himself, but he viewed the war as an opportunity to perform “what is called a service to humanity,” and he was eager to make his mark. 11
That’s why the lack of material in the ERR storehouses didn’t faze him. As he stood there, looking at those empty rooms, he could see that they were merely entry points into another world. For the first time in months, he felt himself being drawn into something larger. Just seeing the warehouses the Nazis had filled with “confiscated” items brought home to him the size and complexity of their looting operation. This wasn’t accidental damage or angry retaliation, but an enormous web of deliberate deceit that stretched all over Paris and down all the roads back to the Fatherland and all the way to Hitler’s office in Berlin. Jaujard had pushed him into this web. He was the orchestra conductor, the man at the center of his own circle of intrigue, the one person who had the connections and foresight to effectively counter, as much as possible, the Nazi will to possess. He had protected the museums and state-owned collections, but by comparison he could do little to save the private artistic wealth of France—the invaluable cultural objects held by her citizens. Jaujard had opened a door into that lost world, but Rose Valland, James Rorimer realized, was going to be his guide.
The first nine locations Valland had identified were buildings. The tenth, and clearly the most important to her, was the art train. Thirty-six of the cases she had identified during the last harrowing days of the Nazi occupation had been returned to the Louvre for safekeeping in August, but by early October the other 112 cases were still believed to be on the train… somewhere. And despite Jaujard’s freqent requests, no one would tell the art community their status. Someone, somewhere, knew down which track the remaining cars of the art train had been shunted, but the information wasn’t being communicated through the bureaucracy. The mystery was finally solved on October 9, when the municipal police in Pantin contacted the Louvre. They had made frequent requests to the government, but nobody had done anything about the train parked near the Pantin railyard under the Edouard-Vaillant Bridge. The municipal police didn’t have enough men to guard the valuable art; and besides, the train was parked dangerously close to freight cars filled with ammunition. The museum community once again sprang into action.
On October 21, Rose Valland sent a memo to Jacques Jaujard telling him that, between October 17 and 19, the last 112 cases of “recovered paintings” had finally been transferred to the Jeu de Paume. Several had been opened and pillaged, she noted, and she feared that “most of the freight cars in this convoy transporting the expropriated goods of Jews have been similarly looted.” 12 It was these forty-six railcar loads that she and James Rorimer were back to investigate.
“I’m Monsieur Malherbaud,” an older man said, stepping out of the door of the station. “I am the stationmaster.”
“Are you the man who routed the art train, the one carrying the Cézannes and Monets?”
The man looked warily at Rorimer’s uniform, then at the commonplace woman smoking a cigarette behind him. There were still plenty of German spies and saboteurs in Paris, and most were specialists in retaliation. It was wise to be cautious.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m Second Lieutenant Rorimer of United States Army, Seine Section. This is Mademoiselle Valland, from the Musées Nationaux. She informed the Resistance of the shipment.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The artwork was cleared. There was nothing left.”
“We’re looking for the rest of the train.”
The man looked surprised. “Then follow me.”
The railcars had been unloaded into a nondescript warehouse. “Here goes nothing,” Rorimer said to Valland as the stationmaster pulled open the warehouse door. The previous nine Nazi storehouses Valland had identified had been mostly cleared by the time the two of them arrived; this one promised to be full. Rorimer was excited by the prospect of what they would find.
The sight that greeted him in the cold warehouse was not at all what he had expected. He didn’t know exactly what he had expected, but it certainly hadn’t been an enormous, jumbled pile of ordinary household items. For there before him, at least twice as tall as he was, rose an endless pile of sofas, chairs, mirrors, tables, pots, pans, picture frames, and children’s toys. The amount was staggering, although in reality it was nothing, only forty-six railcars full. M-Aktion, it was determined after the war, had shipped 29,436 railroad cars full of such ordinary household objects to Germany.
They delayed the art train for this? Rorimer thought, his heart sinking inside him. It’s all worthless. It’s all just junk. Then he stopped himself. It wasn’t worthless; these objects were people’s belongings—the detritus that had made up their lives. The Nazis had gone into people’s homes and simply cleared them out, all the way down to the family photographs.
“It’s not what you were expecting, is it?” Valland said, shoving her hands into her pockets.
The hidden message in her simple statement struck him like a thunderbolt. She had known the boxcar numbers where the valuables were hidden; Rose Valland had known, or at least strongly suspected, there wasn’t anything else important on that train. But she had wanted to see for herself. Stopping the art train was a great personal triumph for her, but she had never been allowed to see it for herself. She was nothing more than a minor government bureaucrat, a woman. Valland had the information, but as a U.S. Army officer Rorimer had the access. He was her entry into places she had never been allowed before—places she had risked her life to discover.
He thought of the information she might possess. She was the key to understanding the whole Nazi looting operation; her cooperation provided the only real possibility of finding what had been stolen and bringing it back. But she was stuck at the bottom of an endless pyramid of functionaries, and she needed him as much as he needed her.
“You know where it is,” he said. “The stolen artwork.”
She turned and started to walk away.
“You know where it is, don’t you, Rose?” He jogged to catch up to her. “What are you waiting for? Someone you can trust?”
“You know enough,” she said with a smile.
Rorimer grabbed her by the
arm. “Please share your information with me. You know I will use it only as you wish: for France.”
She pulled out of his grip, no longer smiling. “I’ll tell you where,” she said, “when the time is right.” 13
CHAPTER 22
The Bulge
The Western Front
December 16–17, 1944
Robert Posey couldn’t wait. He had intended to keep the last Christmas present in the shipment from his wife, Alice, the big one marked “With love from your family,” until Christmas Day. 1 But he had waited six days, and it was only December 16. He simply couldn’t wait any longer. So he ripped open the box and dug eagerly down into the packing material. Eventually, his fingertips touched cold plastic. He lifted the present out of the box. It was a phonograph record.
“The greatest surprise of all,” he wrote Alice later that night, “was the record letter Christmas greeting. I immediately raced over to the Special Services company where the sergeant put on one of those radio-victrola hookups and I sat in another room and heard it come over the radio. It is the finest present one could have. Your voices were perfect; even the off-the-record instructions you gave Dennis to ‘say anything you want’ came over without a syllable dropped. It was the same as a re-broadcast over the radio with the two of you joining together in the program. By simply turning the knob I could make it louder or softer as the case required. The little song was delightful. It was very reassuring to hear the two of you together. I do not note any change. I had sort of expected to hear Dennis’ voice older than when I saw him last; but from the sound of it now he is still a little boy and the Kitten [Alice] is still a bit shy.” 2