On the outbreak of the Greek-Italian war in 1940, Karouzou and her husband (along with other archaeologists, museum guards, and their families) packed away the museum's collections for safety during World War II. Karouzou later recalled that "It was with pride for our people that I was assured, in the end of the war when the boxes were opened and the antiquities received, despite [the] fatally insufficient supervision [of the packing process] not a single gold object, no precious gem was missing". When Athens was occupied by the German army in 1941, the Karouzous were the only archaeologists in Greece to withdraw their membership of the German Archaeological Institute in protest. After the end of World War II, they were responsible for reinstalling the museum collections, using the catalogues Karouzou had made; this reinstallation was completed in 1947.