One of the Monuments women survives, Anne Olivier Popham Bell, of Sussex, England, a 97-year-old Virginia Woolf scholar who handled logistics for the team in Germany. In a telephone interview, she spoke of the “enormous amounts of damaged works to be cared for,” among them thousands of medieval church bells seized by the Nazis that were to be melted into armaments.

Image Anne Olivier Popham Bell who had handled logistics for a team of Monuments Men in Germany. Credit... Monuments Men Foundation

Of course, sorting through so many bells, many of them unmarked, was no easy task.

“These pastors would arrive and say ‘Can I have my bell back?’ ” she recalled. “It seemed rather absurd. We decided to let them organize how it was to be done.”

By 1945, the Monuments section, operating in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Germany, consisted of curators, scholars and architects, some of them hurried into battle zones with little military training, as well as a few G.I.s. They found underground chambers where fleeing Nazis hid tens of thousands of paintings and sculptures, and they prevented the advancing Allies from bombing ancient monasteries. After months of detective work aided by Ms. Valland, they found a castle in Bavaria where thousands of stolen works once warehoused by the Nazis in the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris had been hidden.

Before Germany had surrendered, two members of the section were killed near the front lines. After the war, the teams set up collection points where they sought to undo, artwork by artwork, the catastrophic pillaging by the Nazis. As the movie depicts, it took Germany but a few years to convert the art treasures of Europe into a cultural diaspora. It took decades of postwar legwork, much of it by the Monuments women, to restore order.

“Our attitude was that we were not there to take spoils of war but to give them back,” said Harry L. Ettlinger, 88, of Rockaway, N.J., who worked as a driver and translator. A German-born Jewish refugee, Mr. Ettlinger, then 19, helped empty salt mines in Germany of thousands of paintings hoarded during the war.