And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (29 page)

Ignoring protests from Jaujard, the Germans felt free to seize 130 cases of art from the David-Weill collection that had been bequeathed to the French government and were stored at the Château de Sourches. A similar fate awaited other Jewish-owned art collections guarded by French curators in the Château de Chambord and the Château de Brissac, in western France. Jaujard even created the Comité de Liquidation et Séquestration to buy threatened works
under a law authorizing the government to preempt any sale or export. It recorded a few successes but, after Laval returned to office in April 1942, it was frequently overruled by Abel Bonnard, the education minister, or by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the unhinged anti-Semite who took over the General Commission for Jewish Questions and who himself had an appetite for looted art.

One important collection managed to remain undiscovered until after Germany took over the unoccupied zone. Built up by Adolphe Schloss in the nineteenth century, it comprised 333 centuries-old Dutch paintings and was hidden by his heirs in the Château du Chambon, in central France. The Germans had been searching for it since late 1940 and, thanks to French police and an infamous informer named Jean-François Lefranc, in April 1943 they finally tracked it down and arrested two members of the Schloss family.

Soon afterward, the collection was seized at Chambon by armed members of the Rue Lauriston gang, a band of French criminals who freelanced for the Nazis and themselves became known as the French Gestapo. The convoy carrying the art was halted by French gendarmes, and the paintings were taken to a Banque de France vault in Limoges. Abel Bonnard then stepped in, ordering that the collection be handed over to the Germans. Complicated negotiations followed, with Jaujard insisting on his power of preemption. In the end, while France was allowed to keep 49 of the paintings, the remaining 284 were never fully accounted for and, to this day, have not all been found. As payment for his help in finding the collection, Lefranc was given 22 paintings, which he promptly sold. After the remaining 262 oils were transferred to the Jeu de Paume, where Darquier de Pellepoix was part of the reception committee, only 230 were recorded as having been shipped to Germany, with 32 presumably misappropriated by ERR officials.

These maneuvers took place almost secretly because the ERR’s pompous Paris chief, Baron Kurt von Behr,
^*
who liked to feign military rank by wearing a grandiose uniform of the German Red Cross, had declared the Jeu de Paume off-limits to all French officials, including Jaujard. The single exception was Rose Valland, a frumpy-looking forty-two-year-old spinster who had studied at the École du Louvre and liked to paint as a hobby. She had worked since 1932 as a
curator of foreign modern art at the Musée National des Écoles Étrangères Contemporaines, which at the time occupied the Jeu de Paume. When the Nazis took over the gallery in October 1940, Jaujard ordered her to stay on to administer the building. The Germans acquiesced, presumably because Valland seemed harmless.

In reality, along with Jaujard, Valland would become one of the art world’s few heroes of the occupation. By good fortune, she knew shorthand. And she used it to keep a record of all art entering and leaving the building, noting its provenance and likely destination, even establishing which trains were carrying looted artworks to Germany. One scribbled note sent to Jaujard on January 3, 1943, said that “75 bottles of champagne, 21 bottles of cognac, 16 Flemish and Dutch paintings left the Jeu de Paume at the request of M. Göring to celebrate his birthday.”
¹
To prevent these convoys from being blown up by railroad saboteurs, she passed this information to Jaujard and, through him, to resistance groups. Further, because Valland never disclosed to the ERR officials that she spoke German, she was able to eavesdrop on their conversations and report their plans to Jaujard. Still more daringly, when the Germans photographed their art booty, she would “borrow” the negatives overnight to make prints for Jaujard.

On four occasions, Valland was ordered to leave, but each time she talked her way back into the building a few days later. In the summer of 1943, she was the only French witness to the burning in the Jeu de Paume garden of between five hundred and six hundred “degenerate” paintings by Picasso, Miró, Léger, Ernst and others. “Impossible to save anything,” she noted in a message to Jaujard on July 23.
²
On occasion, she also stood her ground. For instance, when ordered to sign an oath not to reveal anything of what she knew or saw, she refused, arguing that as a
fonctionnaire
, or civil servant, she was forbidden to sign any agreement with a foreign power. Once, in February 1944, when she was seen copying an address, von Behr’s deputy, Bruno Lohse,
^*
warned her against violating the rules of secrecy. Valland recalled, “Looking me in the eyes, he said I could be shot. I replied calmly that no one here is stupid enough not to know the risks they are running.”
³

But Valland could do nothing to prevent art from leaving France.
The record shows that between April 1941 and August 1944, 4,174 cases, containing some 20,000 works of art, were shipped from the Jeu de Paume to Germany. With bureaucratic exactitude, the ERR itself claimed in August 1944 to have confiscated 203 collections and seized 21,903 art objects. Robert Scholz, an ERR official and art critic, exuded pride in his report covering art seized between March 1941 and July 1944, stating, “The extraordinary artistic and material value of the seized art works cannot be expressed in figures. The paintings, period furniture of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Gobelins, the antiques and renaissance jewelry of the Rothschilds are objects of such a unique character that their evaluation is impossible, since no comparable values have so far appeared on the art market.” He went on to mention “absolutely authenticated signed works” by Rembrandt, Rubens, Frans Hals, Vermeer, Velázquez, Murillo, Goya and Sebastiano del Piombo along with such French masters as Bouchard, Watteau and Fragonard. “This collection can compare with those of the best European museums,” he boasted.
⁴

Still, on the eve of the liberation of Paris, with the Germans determined to empty the Jeu de Paume, Valland was able to save what would have been the last convoy of art. She learned on August 1, 1944, that five cars of train No. 40,044 were being loaded with 148 cases of art, much of it modern art that until then had been ignored by the Nazis. She tipped off the resistance, which kept the train from leaving Aulnay, on the outskirts of Paris. Then, after Paris was freed, the train itself was liberated by a unit of the French army led by Alexandre Rosenberg, the son of the exiled art dealer Paul Rosenberg. For her bravery, Valland was named an
officier
of the Légion d’Honneur and was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance in France, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit by West Germany and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the United States. She died in 1980 at age eighty-two.

The Nazis’ reach, however, extended beyond Jewish art collections. Soon after the fall of Paris, the Germans demanded to know the whereabouts of the 3,691 paintings taken from the Louvre in 1939 and dispersed around the country. Some of these were moved several times: having been taken from Chambord to Louvigny in November 1939, the
Mona Lisa
went to the Abbey of Loc-Dieu, east of Bordeaux, in June 1940; to the Ingres Museum, in nearby Montauban, in October 1940; and finally, in March 1943, to the Château de Montal, in southwestern France, where the treasure spent the rest of the war
under the bed of a Louvre curator. Other paintings had a more settled time, stored in a single château—for the most part, Chambord—throughout the occupation, their whereabouts known to German investigators. When paintings had to be moved, word was sent to London by the resistance to warn Allied bombers to avoid the convoys; confirmation that the message had been received would come from the BBC with the code words “Mona Lisa is smiling.”

The German authorities, though, were divided over how to respond to art owned by French museums. Count Metternich did his best to carry out the Kunstschutz’s mandate of safeguarding monuments and artworks in a time of war, but Ambassador Abetz wanted to give Hitler a free hand to choose whatever art pleased him. At the same time, Berlin seemed reluctant to ignore totally the 1907 Convention of The Hague, which protected French museum collections. In the end, because of both firm opposition by French curators and an uncharacteristic Nazi wish to appear to be acting legally, surprisingly little art was transferred from French government hands to Berlin.

The most scandalous exception involved a treasure from Belgium, the early-sixteenth-century Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck. This extraordinary polyptych panel painting, also known as
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
, had been sent to France shortly before Germany occupied Belgium in May 1940. But because it included some panels recovered from Germany under the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, Hitler himself wanted the entire altar. The operation to seize it in July 1942 was carried out secretly, with an envoy of the Führer’s demanding it from curators guarding art kept in the Château de Pau, in the French Pyrenees. The chief curator in Pau refused to release it, but he was overruled by Laval. Belgian curators, who learned of the heist only after the altarpiece reached Neuschwanstein Castle, in Germany, felt deeply betrayed by France. The painting was returned to Ghent after the war, but it had suffered damage.

With other art coveted by the Nazi leaders, Germany suggested circumventing the Convention of The Hague through diplomatic art exchanges. And here there was a recent precedent. In 1940, to encourage General Franco to maintain Spain’s neutrality, Pétain approved the return of Murillo’s
Immaculate Conception
, the fourth-century
B.C.E
. bust known as the
Lady of Elche
and some other antiquities in exchange for
La Reine Marie-Anne d’Autriche
by Velázquez and
his studio and El Greco’s
Portrait of Antonio de Covarrubias
. The Louvre considered it a poor exchange for France.

Among the Germans, the first to propose a swap was von Ribbentrop, who wanted Boucher’s
Diane au bain
. The painting was even taken to Germany, but it was returned to Paris after Berlin museum officials refused to offer Watteau’s
L’Enseigne de Gersaint
in exchange. Göring was more successful. He demanded ten early German works of art and obtained nine of them, including a late-fifteenth-century wooden statue by Gregor Erhart of Mary Magdalene, known in France as
La Belle allemande
. France received nothing in return.

In one high-profile case, however, where the Kunstschutz again took France’s side, Jaujard and his colleagues fared better. By threatening to resign en masse from their posts, they blocked the transfer of a priceless eleventh-century gold bas-relief known as the
Basel Antependium
, which Bonnard had promised as a personal gift from Pétain to Hitler. This did not please Vichy: in early 1944, Georges Hilaire, who had replaced Louis Hautecoeur as secretary-general for fine arts, began planning to fire Jaujard. He was unable to do so before the liberation. Indeed, thanks to Jaujard’s good relations with the Kunstschutz, in July 1944 Metternich’s successor, Baron Bernhard von Tieschowitz, obtained the release from Drancy of Jaujard’s former secretary, Suzanne Kahn, who, as a Jew, faced likely deportation.

Already busy plundering the French economy, the Nazis were still not satisfied. Valuable books appealed to them. As early as October 1940, ERR officials seized the Turgenev Library, created by Russian exiles in Paris in 1875, and sent some 100,000 books to Berlin. Tens of thousands of books were taken from the Symon Petliura Ukrainian Library and the Polish Library, as well as 28,000 volumes from the “ownerless” private collection of the Rothschilds. The ERR also shipped off 40,000 books from the library of the Universal Israelite Alliance, which it now occupied. Among Jewish artists and intellectuals, the libraries of Léon Blum, André Maurois, Marc Bloch and Tristan Bernard were pilfered, as were those of the musicians Arthur Rubinstein, Darius Milhaud and Wanda Landowska. Pianos stolen from Jewish families were stored in the basement of the new Musée d’Art Moderne in the Palais de Tokyo.

Then, in December 1941, Alfred Rosenberg, the ERR’s chief, won Hitler’s approval for the Möbel-Aktion—literally, Furniture Plan—under which furniture and other possessions found in “abandoned”
Jewish homes in occupied countries would be seized and sent to Germany. Initially, the objects were intended for use by the Nazi authorities in occupied lands to the east, but as Allied bombing of Germany intensified, they were also given to homeless Germans. Over the next thirty months, according to the ERR, M-Aktion trucks carried away everything from 38,000 Jewish homes in Paris alone and from a further 31,000 elsewhere in France. The Germans opened several internment camps inside Paris where some seven hundred Jewish captives sorted out the booty into different categories, while others repaired furniture, watches, shoes and clothes. Photographs taken in M-Aktion warehouses confirmed that nothing was considered worthless: piled up alongside beds, clocks, wardrobes, tables and chairs were collections of crockery, coat hangers, bottles, clothes, bed linens, fur coats, lamps, bicycles, children’s toys, even food. In a report dated August 8, 1944, von Behr boasted that the efficiency of his office had enabled it “to succeed in providing for the use in Germany even of things which appeared to have no value, such as scrap paper, rags, salvage, etc.”
⁵

Flush with money, much of it provided by the French treasury, the Germans were also ready to buy art, sometimes privately, not infrequently at Drouot auctions, but most often through commercial art galleries. And, as always, Hitler and Göring were the best clients. Hans Posse, a German curator who until his death in 1942 was charged with filling the museum in Linz,
^*
was in touch with numerous German dealers who were always on the lookout for rare objects or good bargains. Prominent among these was Karl Haberstock, who did extensive business in France before the war and was quick to return after June 1940. One of his first actions was to travel down to Aix-en-Provence to negotiate with Georges Wildenstein with a view to buying some of the dealer’s classical art in exchange for allowing modern paintings to be sent to the United States. Serving both Hitler and Göring, Haberstock grew immensely rich during the occupation.