The Curator Who Spied on the Nazis to Save 20,000 Masterpieces

Hermann Göring walked through the Jeu de Paume more than twenty times during the German occupation of Paris, picking out paintings for his private estate like a man shopping in his own gallery. The middle-aged French woman watching him from across the room never wrote anything down in front of him. She didn't have to. Rose Valland was fluent in German, and nobody on the ERR staff had any idea. For four years, she stood inside the Nazis' main art-looting warehouse and quietly built the record that would bring twenty thousand stolen works back home.