7 Masterpieces Looted from France in World War II That Have Never Been Found

Between 1940 and 1944, nearly one-third of France’s privately held art changed hands against its owners’ will. Some of it came back after the war, but a great deal of it did not. So much French artwork looted by the Nazis in WW2.

More than 100,000 objects were looted from French Jewish families alone, cataloged by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg at the Jeu de Paume, and shipped east by the trainload. Around 60,000 came home. Roughly 2,000 of those sit in French national museums today, labeled MNR, still waiting for the families they were taken from.

The Woman Who Spied on the Nazis at the Jeu de Paume

The Jeu de Paume was the Nazis’ sorting office, and for 4 years one woman watched everything that passed through it.

Rose Valland was born in 1898 in Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, a village in the Isère, the daughter of a blacksmith. She won a scholarship, studied art in Lyon and Paris, and in 1932 started working at the Jeu de Paume in the Tuileries garden as an unpaid volunteer. When the Germans marched into Paris in June 1940, she was still there.

That fall, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg turned the museum into a warehouse for art seized from Jewish families. Rose stayed on, reporting everything she saw to Jacques Jaujard, the director of France’s national museums, the man who had already emptied the Louvre and sent the Mona Lisa into hiding in the countryside.

The Germans saw a quiet French curator who looked after the building. They had no idea she understood German, and she never let on. She listened to the drivers, guards, and packers, noted where every crate was headed, and secretly kept the carbon copies and drafts the Germans threw away.

Hermann Göring came more than 20 times to pick out paintings for himself and for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz, and Rose watched him do it. She came close to being caught twice, and if the Germans had found out what she was up to, she would almost certainly have been shot as a spy. 

In 1943, she also had to stand by while somewhere between 500 and 600 modern paintings the Nazis called degenerate went up in flames at the Jeu de Paume.

The Train That Never Left Paris

Her big moment came in August 1944. With the Allies closing in on Paris, the Nazis loaded one last train with looted art, and Rose got hold of a copy of the shipping order. She passed it to Jaujard, who handed it to the Resistance.

Train 40044 carried 148 crates holding 967 paintings, along with 48 wagons of furniture and belongings taken from Jewish homes. It broke down at Le Bourget, got no further than Aulnay-sous-Bois on the edge of Paris, and French troops secured it on 27 August.

It sounds like the scene from a wartime movie, and it was. The Train, starring Burt Lancaster in 1964, was loosely based on her memoir, and Cate Blanchett played a character inspired by her in The Monuments Men in 2014.

At first, her reward was arrest. After the Liberation, she was briefly held as a suspected collaborator because she’d spent the war working alongside the Germans. Once she was cleared, she trusted almost nobody with her notes. 

The American Monuments Man James Rorimer spent months winning her over, and when she finally shared them, they led the Allies to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, where the Nazis had hidden more than 20,000 stolen works.

Rose joined the French First Army as a captain in 1945 and spent the next 8 years in Germany tracking down what had been taken. A French Senate report in 2013 credited her with helping to find a large share of the art that came home. 

She died in 1980 and is buried in Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, the village where she was born.

7 Masterpieces Looted by the Nazis in WW2 Still Not Found

The 7 pieces of artwork below are the ones even Rose Valland couldn’t bring home.

1. Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man

Raphael painted the Portrait of a Young Man around 1514, probably in Rome, and it’s widely considered one of the great missing paintings of the Renaissance. 

It belonged to the Czartoryski family in Poland, but its wartime journey runs straight through the French looting apparatus and the German dealers who handled it, which is why it appears on every French and Polish lost-art list.

Hans Frank, the Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland, took it for his private residence at Wawel Castle in Krakow. When the Red Army closed in during January 1945, the painting disappeared. Months later, Frank was arrested at his villa in Bavaria; the Raphael wasn’t with him.

Today, you can see the empty frame in the National Museum in Kraków, hung as a deliberate reproach. There are credible postwar sightings in private hands, and the Polish Ministry of Culture still lists it as actively sought.

2. Courbet’s Stone Breakers

Gustave Courbet painted The Stone Breakers in 1849, and it’s the painting that essentially invented Realism as a movement. Two laborers, one old and one young, breaking rocks at the roadside near Ornans in the Doubs, where Courbet was born. 

In February 1945, during the Allied bombing of the city, it was being evacuated by truck toward Konigstein when the convoy was caught in the firestorm. The painting was destroyed, or at least that’s the official position of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

Some French scholars have never accepted the destruction account, pointing to the lack of physical remains and the chaos of the final weeks, when Soviet trophy brigades were moving German museum stock east. 

Either way, no one has seen the greatest Realist painting ever made by a French artist since February 1945. 

3. The Rothschild Silver

The Rothschild family in France was targeted more systematically than any other collection in the country. The ERR stripped Edouard de Rothschild’s house at 2 rue Saint-Florentin, Maurice’s at 41 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, and Robert’s at 23 avenue de Marigny between 1940 and 1941 under its direct supervision, with Hermann Goering personally selecting the best pieces for his collection at Carinhall.

The family lost more than 5,000 works. They recovered most of the paintings, but not the decorative arts. Entire sets of 18th-century French silver, Sevres porcelain services, Boulle furniture and tapestries were broken up, sold through intermediaries in Switzerland, and absorbed into the postwar European market.

The Louvre still displays a handful of pieces returned by the family and labeled with their provenance. You can see them in the decorative arts rooms on the first floor of the Richelieu wing. 

Everything else, which runs into the thousands of objects, is scattered across private collections and auction houses, mostly unidentifiable now.

4. Monet’s Water Lilies Panel from the Musée de l’Orangerie Annex

Claude Monet gave the state 8 large Water Lilies panels, installed in two oval rooms at the Orangerie in 1927, the year after his death. They’re still there and are one of the most visited rooms in Paris. 

Less well known is that Monet produced related large-format Water Lilies for the project that were never installed, and several were kept in private hands and in a storage annex when war broke out.

One of those panels, roughly 6 feet by 14, was removed from storage during the occupation and has never been located. Records are thin, as they often are for works in transit when the Germans arrived in Paris in June 1940, and the Monet estate itself was in disarray through the war years.

If you go to the Orangerie today, the panels in the oval rooms give you an idea of the scale of what’s missing. 

5. Degas’s Portrait of Mademoiselle Gabrielle Diot

Paul Rosenberg was one of the most important modern-art dealers in Paris. His gallery at 21 rue La Boétie represented Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, and his personal collection included more than 400 works. 

In September 1940, with Rosenberg already in exile in New York, the gallery and his storage at a bank vault in Libourne were raided by the ERR.

The Degas pastel Portrait of Mademoiselle Gabrielle Diot, painted around 1890, was among the pieces taken. It’s a portrait of a young woman in a dark dress, exactly the kind of intimate work Degas made in his later years.

It resurfaced in 1974, when a Hamburg dealer advertised it for sale. Rosenberg’s heirs moved immediately, but by the time lawyers reached the dealer, the painting had been sold on, and the buyer refused to be identified. It hasn’t been seen publicly since. 

The Rosenberg family and the Monuments Men and Women Foundation still list it as actively sought, and it’s one of the better-documented cases of a painting known to have survived the war and then vanished again.

6. Van Gogh’s Painter on the Road to Tarascon

Vincent van Gogh painted Painter on the Road to Tarascon in August 1888, during the extraordinary months in Arles that produced the Sunflowers and the Yellow House. 

It shows the artist himself, dressed in a blue smock and straw hat, walking a dusty Provencal road with his easel strapped to his back and his shadow pooling at his feet.

In 1945, during the final weeks of the war, it was moved for safekeeping to the salt mines at Stassfurt, part of a huge German program of hiding art from Allied bombing. The mine was in the Soviet occupation zone when the war ended, and the painting was never recovered.

It’s almost certainly either destroyed or sitting in a private Russian collection, two options debated for 80 years without resolution. 

Francis Bacon later made it the basis of a series of his own paintings in the 1950s, working only from reproductions, which is now the main way most people have ever seen the image at all.

7. The Schloss Collection

Adolphe Schloss, a Jewish financier, built one of the great private collections of Dutch and Flemish Old Masters in Paris between the 1870s and his death in 1910. His heirs hid 333 paintings in a chateau at Chambon, in the Corrèze, when war broke out. 

In April 1943, French police working with the German embassy tracked the collection down and seized it.

They took the paintings to Paris, then to Munich, for Hitler’s planned Führer Museum in Linz. After the war, they recovered 162 from the Munich Central Collecting Point and returned them to France. A further handful trickled back over the following decades. 262 are still missing.

The Schloss list is one of the most actively worked lost-art dossiers in the French Ministry of Culture, and paintings from it still occasionally surface at auction. 

If you ever see a 17th-century Dutch cabinet picture coming to market with a gap in its history between 1943 and the 1950s, there’s a reasonable chance it belongs to the Schloss heirs.