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Paris - 23 -

others enabled me to track down the official German art looters and to engage intelligently in that part of the whole picture in which I was to have a role in Germany.  Mlle. Rose Valland is the heroine of this book.  This rugged, enthusiastic, painstaking, deliberate scholar was an assistant at the Jeu de Paume when the Germans arrived and turned the building into the central clearing house for the finest of the confiscated works of art.  She made the simple, concrete statement that the Germans, from what she had observed, had taken one third of the privately owned art [[strikethrough]] of [[/strikethrough]] [[inserted]] from [[/insertion]] France.  She stayed at her post as acting director in the absence of all others throughout the war.  The Germans had repeatedly tried to discourage her presence in the Museum where in peace time she had arranged many a [[inserted]]^ memorable [[/insertion]][[strikethrough]] fine [[/strikethrough]] exhibition.  Several times they led her to the door.  She came back the next day.

It was not a simple matter to gain the confidence of Rose Valland who had risked her life working with the French Resistance.  She had not confided her most valued information to anyone, including the French.  An English intelligence operator, Lieutenant Colonel McDonnell, and some of her French friends began to mistrust her stories and wondered if she really know as much as she said she did.  The President of the Commission de Recuperation Artistique [[inserted]] ^ who had told me of discovering fifty-two tons of inferior canvases left behind by the Germans [[/insertion]] was willing that I ferret out the information the Allies wanted.  Mlle. Valland had hinted at enticing bits of information such as having [[inserted] ^ recorded [[/insertion[]] [[strikethrough]] been present on [[/strikethrough]] Goering's sixteen visits to make selections at the Jeu de Paume of works of art for his collection.  Other important Nazis has also been there.
Early in August, while the Germans were still in Paris and gathering up the last [[inserted]] ^ remains of their loot [[/insertion]][[strikethrough]] stories of their foul play [[/strikethrough]], Mlle. Valland notified members of the French Resistance that fifty-one railway box-cars had been loaded for shipment to Germany.  The train was shunted about from [[strikethrough]] place to place [[/strikethrough]] [[inserted]] siding to siding [[/insertion]] on one pretext or another and never left the Paris region.  The five cars with the best objects were unloaded in September, immediately after the Liberation, and the contents were taken to the Jeu de Paume.  Included were Picassos and Braques and many other modern paintings, more than a thousand in all, and rugs, tapestries, furniture, sculpture, and rare books.  When I heard that the other forty-six cars were still standing unloaded in a freight yard Mlle. Valland and I first began working together.