Word: valland
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...Rose Valland looked nondescript - an ideal trait for a spy. Gray and unglamorous, with black-rimmed glasses that gave her a perpetual frown, she was virtually invisible to the Nazis who, in 1940, were using the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris as a depot for thousands of plundered art masterpieces on their way to Germany. While working in a menial maintenance job, Valland eavesdropped on her Nazi bosses as they catalogued looted Vermeers and Rembrandts, and shipped them off to the private collections of top Nazis. Choice pieces were earmarked for the grand Führermuseum, which Adolf...
...largely through Valland's clandestine work that France was able to recover more than 100,000 works of art - 60,000 immediately after the war, and 40,000 over the next decades - and return them to their rightful owners. But some art slipped past Valland's gimlet eye; the Nazis amassed so much loot that they had to set up other clearing houses to process the flood of paintings and objects, many of which belonged to Jewish families killed in the Holocaust. Some of the art changed hands many times; Nazis collected and traded "degenerate" art - Picasso and the Impressionists...
DIED. Rose Valland, 81, art curator who was awarded France's Médaille de la Résistance for foiling Nazi plans to plunder European art during World War II. Valland recorded the destinations of thousands of appropriated paintings and sculptures, thus facilitating later recovery. She also managed to delay a whole trainload of art from leaving the Jeu de Paume in Paris until the city was liberated by Allied troops...
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