1938-1945 : War and decline

In 1936, Jenny Finaly left Florence, leaving the library in the charge of a young German librarian until 1943. She retired to Neuilly, where she died a short time later on the 24th October, 1938.
Her son Horace, was forced to leave Paris during the war and became a refugee in New York. He died in 1945. The inheritors decided to leave a large part of the library and the art collections to the city of Florence, on condition that the collection was kept together. Because of a shortage of space, the city entrusted the collection to the National Library of Florence, which created the Landau-Finaly collection, catalogued in 1997.