Original subtitles

In no other modern country has the forest feeling

remained as alive as it has in Germany.

Each individual tree is always taller than a man

and goes on growing until it becomes a giant.

Its steadfastness has much in common with the same virtue in a warrior.

The German took the rigidity

and straightness of trees for his own law.

In September 2010, on a train crossing the border from

Switzerland to Germany, an old man was searched by customs officials.

They found 9,000 euros in cash.

Their suspicions would be the start of a journey back in time -

to a hoard of art hidden away since the Third Reich.

It has reignited passions that seemed long spent.

The art we are talking about is covered in blood.

Sadness, tragedy, brutality -

all those terrible experiences that people had.

These weren't old masters but new -

works which the Nazis came to regard

as just as sickly and degenerate as the Jews themselves.

They tried to wipe out both.

When you're walking through a great museum,

it's possible that a painting you're walking by and looking at was stolen

from a Jewish family and you'll never know it and they can't talk.

Every one of these paintings has a story

and each story means something.

It was on this street in a quiet, well-to-do neighbourhood in Munich

in November last year,

that a scandal erupted that rocked the art world

and which has implications that will resonate for years to come.

Investigations of the man on the train brought the police

to that flat, where over 1,000 priceless artworks were unearthed.

They'd been squirreled away for over half a century.

And much of it was suspected to be Nazi-looted art.

Amazingly, the German authorities then kept their discovery secret.

It only became public at all because it was leaked to a news magazine.

They revealed that it was the Nazis' art dealer, Hildebrand Gurlitt,

who had amassed this collection of modern art,

including Matisse, Monet and Picasso.

The man who hid himself away along with the pictures

was his son, Cornelius Gurlitt.

A strange, rather sad-looking man.

Sad, perhaps, because of the weight of history on his shoulders.

It was all over the news, especially in Germany.

TRANSLATION: Two days after the revelations

about the Munich art find,

the State Prosecutor's Office has made an announcement

about its proceedings against Cornelius Gurlitt.

In February 2012, customs investigators rang the doorbell

with a search warrant.

An art collection thought to be worth a billion euros

was not what they were expecting to find.

It took three days to pack up some 1,500 artworks

ready to take them away.

It was quite painful for many families.

It opened up this hope of recovering their art, which had been

dormant for so long, because they tried and tried and tried

after the war. Every country that they'd asked had said,

"We've no idea where it is",

and suddenly, here was this treasure trove.

I call these paintings the last prisoners of World War II.

Every piece of art that was stolen from Jewish families

is connected with a death.

The people, the collectors who had them, most of them died.

TRANSLATION: Why the State Prosecutor's Office

hid the discoveries from the public for almost two years

remains their secret.

David Toren was still a boy

when his family lost the painting, Two Riders on a Beach.

A little closer.

Good.

I'll let you go across that one...

When it was announced it had been found but not returned,

a well-wisher sent David, now blind, this 3D version.

One picture I remember had two horses with people riding on sand.

He has come out. That's the one I used to look at.

When that press conference happened, what was your reaction?

I was elated.

But I was also angry when I heard that they had been dilly-dallying

18 months, knowing that the heirs to the owners,

like me, are old people.

18 months is a long time.

Since then, since that press conference, I dream.

And I dream all kind of things that happened in my childhood,

which I thought had disappeared from my memory, they come back.

I liked to sit in front of that picture

which was in a small room next to a winter garden.

A kind of indoor garden.

There was a little room ahead of that

and there were chairs to sit on

and I sat in one of those chairs and looked at the picture

and I liked that, because I liked horses.

The paintings were owned by his great-uncle David,

a successful businessman.

What kind of a man was David Friedman, your great-uncle?

He was a very, business-wise, aggressive man,

but privately, rather sweet and meek.

Didn't talk much.

Half a year, he lived on his agricultural estates.

Lots of land.

There were about 10,000 acres.

He had been in business with my grandfather.

They had had a brick factory together.

I don't know what happened to that.

There were lots of people around with the cows and the horses

and the pigs, and some guy taught me how to ride.

I was small at that time, I liked it.

The painter of Two Riders on the Beach, Max Liebermann,

was probably the most successful German artist of his time.

He had this summer house built in 1910 and designed its gardens.

It was on the banks of the fashionable Lake Wannsee,

just outside Berlin.

It was possible at the time for a Jewish artist

to be absolutely at the heart of the German establishment.

In 1884, he married Martha, whom he often painted.

He was hugely influenced by his French contemporaries.

He had a collection of French Impressionist paintings, I gather?

Yes, he loved the French.

He was very inspired by the French painters, especially by Manet,

he loved Manet's painting,

and he had in his collection

around about 17 paintings of this French master.

Of Manet? Of Manet. Amazing.

And he has all those paintings by Degas and other Impressionists.

He's a Jewish painter, he's also a great collector

with very good taste, and this house is full of paintings.

He was president of the Prussian Academy,

he was a grand gentleman of the arts and culture.

Indeed. He was a citizen of honour of Berlin

and he has all awards you can imagine.

After '33, all that awards, all that honour, meant nothing

because he was a Jew.

Another German art collector whose work was to fall

into the hands of Hildebrand Gurlitt was Sophie Lissitsky-Kueppers.

Sophie was not Jewish, though her second marriage would be to a Jew,

El Lissitsky, one of the great figures of Russian constructivism.

As a young woman she bought Paul Klee's Swamp Legend,

just one of a vast collection which would be stolen from her.

She ended up banished to Siberia

while art dealers and museum directors in Germany

made hay with her art collection.

Sophie's granddaughter Anita and her daughter Marita

are now fighting to get her pictures back.

They live near Dresden, in former East Germany.

TRANSLATION: The photo, the ancient photo.

That's the only photo we still have of my grandmother and me,

the first time she came to see us in Dresden.

She was a proper, nice granny.

I was still a child,

and I was really happy to finally have a second grandmother.

She was very cultured but also very natural.

Simply this nice, elderly lady, just as you imagine such a person

to be, without saying anyone wasn't on her level. That wasn't her way.

These toys here came from our granny Sophie,

from far away Russia, I was told.

This hare always fascinated me, so as a child

I really loved it.

It's also a wonderful memory of a woman

I never met, but who nevertheless played a big role in my childhood.

Art runs through her whole life like a red thread.

She never deviated from that and she sacrificed a lot for that.

She always trod her own path.

She was a stubborn child and young lady who knew very well

what she wanted, and her life was all about art.

Whenever she had trouble with her mother who had different ideas

for her in mind, she would flee into the Alte Pinakothek.

She would dive into the world of Old Masters.

She would strengthen herself by looking at these pictures,

It was really her world.

She particularly liked the Rubens.

When her mother tried to forbid her to study the history of art,

she would move the world to do it anyhow.

She met Paul Kueppers, her later husband, in Munich,

where he studied as well.

They were both focused on Old Masters in the first place,

but they very soon turned to modern art.

Sophie's family was against the relationship

because of his poor health.

Sophie and Paul had to keep their relationship secret.

So they would go to the gardens of the Nymphenburg Castle.

It has a Versailles-like entrance,

but then you find all these hidden walkways.

They would meet without being seen.

We can only guess what they were talking about,

but must have been art!

I started to work on this subject, actually out of anger,

about the way the press reported restitution cases.

It was all about how Jewish heirs want to make money out of the past,

want to rob German museums or Austrian museums

and nobody really asked where these pictures came from,

to whom they belonged in the past.

And, really, we wanted to give a face to these art collectors and to what

they achieved in the past before they were being robbed by the Nazis.

Their gallery was their home.

The walls of their rented flat in Hannover.

They didn't have money, really, but Sophie inherited some money

from her uncle and she spent it immediately into modern art.

So they were really addicts.

Instead of a deer head hanging over the fireplace there was a Kandinsky.

For many people, that must have been unsettling.

Lots of these pictures that we're still searching for

were gifts to her from the artists.

Or they bought them from the artists

so the artists could make a living.

It wasn't the case that they got rich from their pictures,

For example, the Klee.

"Paul Klee, whom we both adored," said Sophie.

Klee was an artist-in-residence in Munich

in the early 1920s, and he had a studio in a castle.

Sophie and Paul Kueppers were coming from Hannover to Munich

especially to visit him

and they bought the Swamp Legend straight from his studio.

And he dedicated it especially to them.

"Everything is strange here, entwined with childhood dreams,"

said her husband.

"Secrets are embedded in the scribbled, twitching lines."

"But for anyone who doesn't feel its beauty in his heart,

"words are but an empty echo."

Sophie had the expertise, really, to be a museum director,

but it was impossible in her times, as a woman, to be put

in this position, so she was really very disappointed.

It was the avant-garde scene of the time,

really opening up Germany

for a completely new understanding of art.

But their charmed life came to an end.

With rampant inflation in Germany, their money dissolved,

said Sophie, "Into the thin air, like soap bubbles."

Her husband Paul died of TB.

Sophie grew close to one of the many Russian artists

who used to drop in to their open house.

TRANSLATION: Soon after the death of her husband, Paul,

Sophie fell in love with El Lissitzky

and decided to follow him to Moscow.

And left the two boys in a boarding school in Hannover.

Every now and again they were put on a train to Moscow

and were allowed to live with their mother during the holidays.

The little one was six and the big one eight.

Look at them here, the two of them.

The boy on the left is Anita's father, Kurt.

Something else Sophie left behind in Hannover in 1926

was her art collection.

She couldn't possibly have taken it with her to Moscow.

She left it on loan to the local museum.

But it would turn out not to be in safe hands.

Right in the centre of Germany lived perhaps the most important

collector of German Expressionist art, Alfred Hess.

Not as Bohemian as Sophie, he was an industrialist

who made his money from shoes in the ancient town of Erfurt.

The most publicly debated painting from his once huge collection,

now scattered to the winds,

has been Street Scene, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Here lived, it says,

Alfred Hess, shoe manufacturer and arts patron.

It was called Hotel Hess, and many of the artists who he patronised

and looked after would make pilgrimages here.

The Hesses would invite artists to stay and they would

all sign a unique guestbook, which is now kept at the Bauhaus archive.

Oh...

"Alfred and Tekla Hess - husband and wife.

"To dear friends in the "beautiful new guestbook -

"from their loyal painter Lyonel Feininger.

"Kind-hearted little ghosts."

Thank you. This is another beautiful Feininger.

"To work better, that's always a good reason

"to let yourself be put up in Erfurt. Erich Heckel."

'It became a Who's Who of expressionist art.'

Wassily Kandinsky.

'And of the whole avant-garde scene in Germany.'

Paul Klee - I mean, how long did he spend doing that?

Poets and philosophers came, and musicians.

Paul Hindemith.

Hindemith brought his quartet to play.

"A Duet In Friendship To Hess."

"Is there no telephone?"

"From Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill.

"And the shark has sharp teeth, dear."

From the Threepenny Opera.

"To the Hess house in sincere friendship, Kurt Weill."

Friedrich Friedl.

Christian Rohlfs.

Pechstein.

"Kurt Weill's first stage success was at the city's theatre,"

wrote their son Hans.

"not entirely without the help of my father,

"who bought a few hundred tickets

"and filled the otherwise empty seats by inviting everyone he knew.

"Our house was well known as a colourful place -

"and it was probably even more colourful than people knew."

See the face there?

I'm sure that would have gone down badly with Adolf Hitler.

HE CHUCKLES

Robert Huth, 1919.

This could be some terrible scene from the battlefield.

TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN: His interest in art

only developed after the First World War from his wartime experiences.

And when he came back to Erfurt with these

experiences of war - the destruction of war

and the mass hatred...

..his life changed dramatically.

There would have been housepainters

scurrying about, as well as artists.

They showed pictures like these.

TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN: They created rooms for individual artists.

And painted the walls in bright colours.

There was the blue room, the yellow room.

Whenever new art works came into the collection,

they moved all the pictures around.

The pictures wandered from the ground floor to the top floor.

He had a Kirchner room -

he had five or six or seven Kirchner pictures.

And together with the director of the local museum

he devoted himself to expressionist art in a big way.

This is the rather grand local museum in Erfurt, which is

a provincial town, once part of East Germany.

After the First World War this was a hotbed of German expressionism.

It was also, of course, a place where National Socialism thrived

and where anti-Semitism was exceptionally strong.

There were the two sides

so it was really a big fight - it's difficult to imagine nowadays.

This is typical for whole Germany at that time,

that the situation was polarised.

There were strong left-wing groups and strong right-wing nationalists.

This is really interesting, anti-Semitism

and anti modernism, anti modern art, so, to me, it is

rather remarkable, the Bauhaus is down the road in Weimar.

You have people like Kandinsky and Klee who are spending time there,

visiting Erfurt, and you have demonstrations against this museum,

against the idea of modernism and against the

Jewish philanthropist, who, this man, who is the patron of all this.

Yeah. Alfred Hess gave every year one painting to the museum.

He was a very important art patron for Erfurt

but he was acting very silently. He didn't want everybody to know

he was the patron. He supported the museum but in a quiet way.

Maybe also to cause no conflict, not to, as we say,

not to put more oil into the fire.

The Shoe Jew, as he was known,

had his house attacked as early as 1923, as did the museum director.

The local museum commission called their support for modern art

"an artistic mass psychosis."

Lists circulated with the name of every Jew in Erfurt.

All over Germany, battle lines were forming as to what art was

suitable for the German people.

As early as 1892, it was, ironically, a Jew,

an early Zionist and physician called Max Nordau

who was the first to apply the medical term - "degenerate" - to art.

He dismissed art that he saw as, "post industrial,

"urban and unhealthy",

as opposed to the solid, earthy, craftwork of the folk.

The attack on "sick" expressionism gathered momentum.

A young museum director, one quarter Jewish himself,

was having trouble hanging on to his job.

His name was Hildebrand Gurlitt.

He had a Jewish grandmother, which must have made him insecure.

But, by all accounts, the main reason he was under threat

was because of his love of modern art.

He had an illustrious family background in art history.

Cornelius Gurlitt, not the one that we

know about, but his grandfather who was Hildebrand's father,

was a patriarch of Dresden and the rector of the university there.

He specialised in architecture and town planning

and art and he was a great advocate of the baroque architecture that

Dresden was so famous, but at that time was not at all fashionable

and not loved, so he did a great deal to promote Dresden.

But his son, Hildebrand, turned to expressionism.

He described going to the first

exhibition of the Brucke artists in 1912 with his mother

when he was still a schoolboy. And he described how shocked

he was by that art, that it was so brash, the colours were different.

That became the art that defined his life.

And he became the director of the art museum in Zwickau where

he promoted exactly those artists he had grown up with.

In the '20s there were a lot of campaigns

in the press against degenerate art - Entartete Kunst.

Hildebrand Gurlitt, of course, got into trouble as early as 1925

because he was showing these modern artists -

that was against the conservative mainstream in Zwickau which

was a provincial industrial town.

As still today, there are a lot of people who are afraid of modern art. They don't understand it.

They think they're being taken for a ride and that was the case then.

People would say, "They call this art? They can't even draw!"

And this then became political when the Nazis won power.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was sacked from his job in Zwickau in 1930

and another in Hamburg soon after.

CROWD CHANTS

CHEERING

Storm clouds were gathering.

In a way, Alfred Hess was lucky - he died in 1931,

just before the storm broke.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, the noose tightened on Jews.

The leading German impressionist and collector of Manet, Max Liebermann,

President of the Prussian Academy, was stripped of all his honours.

He was deeply depressed, couldn't understand it -

but, like Alfred Hess, he died before he knew just

how bad it would get.

The Nazis knew which people they hated.

But it wasn't immediately clear

what art they would ban.

Until 1936 there was a huge movement among the students,

for example, but also Goebbels, who personally liked that kind of art,

to establish German expressionism as official art of the state.

Hitler let it happen until the Olympic Games of 1936 because he

wanted to behave like a liberal and world open leader, but immediately

after the Olympic Games had finished he said, "Well, now we have to

"define what is art appropriate to the German...taste and thoughts."

"A new human type, which we saw last year

"during the Olympic Games.

"This is the 'type' of the new age.

"But what do you manufacture?

"Deformed cripples and cretins.

"Women who inspire only disgust,

"men who are more like wild beasts, children who,

"if they were alive would be regarded as God's curse."

Albert Speer even says in his memoirs

how he did up the Goebbels' apartment in Berlin.

He put Emil Nolde watercolours on the wall of the apartment.

Fantastic flower paintings.

Pictures like these.

The Goebbels were absolutely delighted with it.

Hitler came round, inspected the new apartment, took one look

at the Noldes and said, "They've got to go, they're terrible!"

And that was it, they went.

So, until 1936, Goebbels was the one

who'd tried to establish expressionism.

And a little bit like Hildebrand Gurlitt,

Goebbels changed his mind immediately

when he saw what Hitler liked and what he did not like.

And then was the moving power

behind the Degenerate Art action

which meant that, from 1937 on,

everything which did not fit with Hitler's taste

was removed from German museums.

That's actually a bit unfair on Hildebrand Gurlitt.

He didn't change his taste for degenerate art,

but he found a way of putting it to his own use -

working both for the Fuhrer and for himself.

This is the palace where the art the Nazis hated would be stored.

'Unrolling now was a state campaign against state-owned modern art.'

So, this is a picture taken in this room.

It says the entire ground floor

served as storage for degenerate art,

which had been robbed from museums and private collections.

'It's ironic that the daring and the scandalous

'have been replaced by elegant, 18th century portraits.'

'Hildebrand Gurlitt had special access here

because he was chosen by Goebbels as one of four dealers

commissioned to sell degenerate works seized by the Nazis,

and to buy approved paintings

to fill the gaps left on museum walls.

Later, Gurlitt described his role here.

"A great many works of modern art

"passed through my hands," he writes,

"from a depot of confiscated art in Niederschoenhausen," here,

"where if you had enough courage

"you could buy very beautiful paintings

"with the same foreign currencies

"that were otherwise illegal to possess

"and could land you in jail.

"What wasn't sold for cash,

"some 80,000 works of art,

"I believe was burned by the SS."

It's actually thought to be far fewer.

And then he goes on, in a self-justifying manner,

"I was able to save many of these paintings from destruction

"and pass them on to great collectors."

Of course, many he kept for himself.

But before the bonfire of those deemed worthless,

came the ridicule.

The paintings were displayed for public contempt.

The most notorious exhibition was held here, in Munich, in 1937.

Christian.

Hi. Good afternoon.

So here we are, this is where it all happened,

the Degenerate Art show. Right.

I've brought two illustrations.

So that's where we are, is it? Yes, exactly.

There's quite a crowd in this picture. Yes.

So was it popular, this Degenerate Art Exhibition?

It was popular. But, as you see,

there were no entrance fees,

at a time when every museum and every exhibition

you had to pay ten Pfennig or something.

There was quite a bit of media hype around it.

The newspaper reported,

"Those are the real atrocities of the world

"and you won't believe it until you see it."

"Take Dada seriously! It's worth it."

A quote from George Grosz,

not meant to be taken seriously.

They say it themselves -

"We act as though we're painters or poets

"but we're just delighting in taking the piss,

"bringing a giant swindle into the world

"and breeding snobs who'll lick our boots."

The Dadaist Hannah Hoch went to the show

and wrote in her diary...

"The most important works from the post-war years are here.

"After the public persecution,

"it's astonishing how disciplined the audience is.

"There are a lot of closed faces

"and you can see opposition in many of them.

"Barely a word is said."

And just round the corner,

Hitler staged another exhibition

of art that good Germans should like.

The idea behind it was that if we have a sort of negative foil

then the good German art will be seen in even a better light.

And when you managed to be exhibited here at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst,

you'd made it.

Because you have all the collectors from the National Socialist elite

who would compete with each other

for the best works of art that were being offered here for sale.

And Hitler himself was the biggest buyer. Really?!

I think his artistic tastes were indeed shaped

by turn of the century Vienna

and by artists that he himself considered the best,

like Rudolf von Alt.

So he organised a looting campaign

to get all Rudolf von Alt water colours and paintings

for his own collection.

Taken from Jews or taken from...? In Vienna.

Taken from Jews in Vienna. Yes, yes.

Perhaps the art school in Vienna

should take some of the blame for this,

as it was they who turned down Hitler as an art student

not just once, but twice.

This year, in New York,

the two shows - one degenerate,

the other with the Nazi stamp of approval -

have been restaged.

The works now sit side-by-side in one show.

"Works of art which cannot be comprehended

"will no longer be foisted upon the German people."

So these are the famous queues to get into the exhibition, then?

Yeah. So, this is the line standing in front of the venue in Hamburg

one year after the opening of Degenerate Art show in Munich.

Because it was a travelling show,

this exhibition also had several venues.

In Munich, it was really a blockbuster.

Two million people visited the show over five months.

I mean, that's an extraordinary number,

two million people visiting an exhibition of art which was despised

and which was there to say, "This is what we can do without."

And it's interesting, here, that in this exhibition

you clearly decided that you wanted to tell two stories,

not just one.

Here we have the Beckmann triptych,

which is an example of degenerate art, big time,

and then on the right-hand side, a painting by Ziegler

which was Hitler's favourite painting, was it not?

He selected this triptych, the Four Elements by Adolf Ziegler.

He'd installed it over the fireplace in his Fuhrerbau in Munich.

It makes clear what Hitler's taste was about.

That it had to do something with a naturalistic way

of depicting something...

with racial ideals.

It has also something to do with classical nudity

and classical antiquity.

You can see that Ziegler was taught at an academy.

And that was also very important for the Nazis.

The idea in this gallery is to bring the visitors of our exhibition

to the historical situation in the summer of 1937.

So that you as a visitor can really judge

what was going on there, and what is the contrast.

"Art does not create a new age, it is the fighters,

"those who truly shape and lead peoples, who make history."

"When the people pass through these galleries,

"they will recognise in me their own spokesman and counsellor."

"Our young artists will recognise the path they will have to take."

Yeah, the Beckmann picture for our exhibition

was extremely important

since in the first years of the Third Reich

he was working on that piece.

And he's reflecting the political circumstances in that painting.

On the side panels, you can really see very brutal scenes

of torture and violence.

And in the middle panel, he is opening the space,

he's showing us something totally different.

Beckmann was telling people that the central panel

is dealing with freedom.

It was a very important point to make for him,

in Berlin, in the mid 1930s, under the rule of the Nazis.

Adolf Ziegler gave the opening speech at the Degenerate Art show.

He said, "You see here aberrations of madness,

"dilettantism and decadence.

"It causes us all who see the show shock and nausea.

"Trainloads will be needed to rid the German museums of this rubbish."

That very day, Max Beckmann left Germany to go into exile.

It's surprising for people

that there were artists in this exhibition

who were allies of Hitler, in many ways.

There's Nolde over there... Yeah.

..who was himself very much a Nazi.

He was probably the artist who was affected the most

by the confiscation campaign of the Nazis.

More than 1,000 works of him were confiscated

from German state museums.

He was aggressively attacked by the Nazis

although he became, in the early 1930s,

a member of the Nazi party.

Other artists found different ways

of accommodating to the new order.

Kirchner had tried to justify his Street Scene

as "genuinely German."

"How much genuine German drawing skill is required

"to paint such a picture?," he wrote.

"The way the movement of the passersby

"is rendered in the rhombus of the heads.

"This picture would be interesting to look at alongside one by Durer.

"I certainly believe it would hold its own."

But his self justification was to no avail.

A total of 639 of his works

were seized from museums during the Third Reich.

32 were ridiculed in the show.

Kirchner started this self portrait in 1932

but altered it in 1937, the year of the Degenerate Art show.

He blurred his face. You can only see one half of a face.

He added these yellow stripes which are blocking his hands

so he is no longer able to work as an artist.

There is a red swastika behind Kirchner,

he is reflecting how he is affected

by the cultural policy of the Nazis.

Maybe it was one of the most significant reasons for him

to commit suicide in 1938.

The proud owner of the Kirchner Street Scene,

which once hung at the Hotel Hess, is now Ronald Lauder.

Heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune,

he started collecting Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt

when he was just 14.

He bought this painting by Klimt in 2006.

It was looted by the Nazis during the war

and the family who owned it fought for years to get it back.

The Klimt and the Kirchner are now on show

at Lauder's gallery in New York.

There's tens of thousands of missing pieces,

and they're somewhere.

Some were destroyed.

And we are looking at paintings from the film

and we have no idea where they are.

In 1987, I was in Austria as ambassador.

Someone told me, "Go to a convent, outside of Vienna."

And I went there.

They unlocked the door, all of a sudden,

look inside, and there's row after row of paintings, furniture,

silverware, pottery, rugs.

I realise this was the depository

of all the things stolen from Jewish homes

that frankly no-one wanted, or no-one had the time to take.

And I said, "This is important.

"This is like time stood still."

It didn't look any different, I'm sure, in 1945, when the war was over.

Someone just closed the door, put a key, locked it and left it.

I bought 14 frames, empty frames.

They didn't want to transport the frame cos it was too big,

so they took it out of the frame and they left the frame,

they took the picture.

We'll never know what pictures were in there.

We put in the frames the names of paintings that are missing,

that are most likely destroyed by the Nazis.

And they must have been great paintings.

There's one Beckmann of a beach scene that we never have found.

Now, either it was destroyed or it's in someone's home.

Germany's brightest and best were exiled or killed during those years.

Not just Jews and artists but radicals, scientists, dreamers.

Germany has been haunted by their absence ever since,

clinging on to what they created or collected,

as if to its own essence.

Claiming their legacy as its own.

A thriving art world was decimated by the Nazis.

Collectors and dealers were very often Jewish.

One rather callous collector said, "In these times,

"a collection of modern art that must be sold quickly

"is nearly always a Jewish one,

"whose owner had to pick up his walking stick."

And someone was always on hand when they did -

someone most of them already knew -

the sacked museum director turned art dealer, Hildebrand Gurlitt.

His collections would fill the flat in Munich

in which his son was discovered some 80 years later.

He began buying from Jews who were in trouble.

There are two ways of seeing this.

After 1938, the Jews were not allowed to sell art,

and Hildebrand Gurlitt was a risk taker,

so he bought from them, under value,

but, you know, they may not have been able to sell it at all

if he hadn't bought it.

So was he doing them a favour, or was he ripping them off?

Both, I guess.

One of the first to leave, in 1933,

just as the Nazis took power, was Alfred Flechtheim.

A real promoter of the avant garde,

Flechtheim championed Picasso, Braque, Van Gogh

and had a dozen Max Beckmanns.

The plaque reads, "In this house lived from 1923 to '33,

"Alfred Flechtheim,

"art dealer, publisher and supporter of modern art."

Flechtheim's descendants are now trying to reclaim

the art he sold in a hurry as he grabbed his walking stick.

These drawings they got back and then gave, on loan,

to this museum in Cologne.

The family's lawyer has also been involved in the restitution

of another of Flechtheim's artworks,

The Lion Tamer by Max Beckmann.

It was painted in 1930 and it was given

to Alfred Flechtheim,

the famous art dealer, who represented Beckmann at that time,

in order to pay off Beckmann's debts.

But now it was Flechtheim who needed money.

inflation and then the depression had damaged his business,

but far more importantly, he needed money to get away.

He knew his days were numbered.

The Nazis hated him not only because he was Jewish

but especially because he represented

what the Nazis later on called degenerate,

and so he was in the headlines,

and the Nazis called for his extermination.

As Flechtheim was preparing to flee,

shortly before selling the bulk of his collection at auction,

he sold Beckmann's Lion Tamer to Hildebrand Gurlitt.

In all these cases, the question to be answered is,

was it a forced sale, a sale under duress?

Would they have sold were the Nazis not in power?

If it's a forced sale, they should be given back.

If someone was selling in 1933,

it's far harder to prove that they were selling under duress,

than if they were selling in 1938.

It's very likely that they were.

The usual argument to refuse restitution

is that people would have sold anyway,

Nazis or not, even if, like Flechtheim,

they were on a Nazi death list.

These sales come back to haunt people

working in the art trade today,

including firms like this one.

Lempertz is an auction house that was established in the 19th century.

It's the Hanstein family firm.

It continued to trade throughout the Nazi years.

Max Beckmann's Lion Tamer would pass through their hands later,

like a poisoned chalice.

But when it did, they put it up for sale

with no suggestion that its origins might be tainted.

Today the head of the family firm is Henrik Hanstein.

Flechtheim had to leave Germany in 1933

because he was bankrupt and a Jew,

and, well, he left, fortunately, on time.

But he sold, in the beginning of 1933,

the gouache of Max Beckmann, directly to Hildebrand Gurlitt.

You don't think that sale was a sale under duress?

Hard to say. I don't know.

QUESTION ASKED IN GERMAN

I don't know. Maybe.

More and more extortionate taxes were imposed on Jews,

as harassment and persecution increased.

Including a hefty emigration tax.

And this is Max Stern - another major Jewish art dealer,

who had a fabulous private collection.

In 1937, Max Stern decided he had to get out.

And it was Lempertz auction house that held a final sale.

The Max Stern sale wasn't a forced sale.

He was under stress to sell, but it wasn't a classical forced sale.

He gave by himself the order to sell the collection,

he wrote the catalogue, he attended the preview,

he attended the auction and he got the result of the sale.

And even when I had contact with him

he also gave me the impression

that he has been in a very thankful position against Lempertz

and he said, "I'm very thankful

"that your grandfather did this sale for me."

And he visited my grandfather after the war,

thanking him for doing this sale for him.

Here it is. This is the image of the work.

And this is one of the paintings

that Lempertz sold for Max Stern in 1937.

Of course it was a forced sale.

Because if he had not been forced to liquidate his business

to flee the country, he would not have sold his works.

How could Professor Hanstein then say it wasn't a forced sale?

He made it sound like it was rather a civilised exchange, really.

Yeah, this is something that I cannot really understand,

I'm astonished that he's still denying it.

The fact that Max Stern apparently knew the then-owner,

Hanstein, that he participated in preparing the auction,

does not... It's not an argument for saying that it's not a forced sale.

It simply shows that he was trying to

make the best out of a very bad situation that he had been in,

not voluntarily.

Lempertz benefitted from the persecution of Max Stern

by conducting this auction,

because they get their buyer's premium on every sale.

One can say that the auction houses are always on the winning side.

The crucial issue that we face with auction houses like Lempertz,

they only argue legally,

and they never take into account the moral aspect.

Lempertz sold the art collection of Albert Speer,

who was one of Hitler's main helpers.

Of course it might have been legally correct,

but is this something one should do? I don't know.

Hildebrand Gurlitt succeeded in navigating

these dangerous and conflicting currents.

The Gurlitt family home was a fine house on this site,

bombed out of existence in 1945.

Just round the corner lived another Jewish collector

under pressure to sell up - the lawyer Fritz Glaser.

When Hildebrand Gurlitt was a museum director,

Glaser would lend him pictures.

As well as works by Klee, Kandinsky and Nolde,

Glaser had 60 by Otto Dix, who painted this portrait of the family.

Besides being Jewish and collecting degenerate art,

Glaser had defended communists,

which didn't go down well with the Nazis either.

He managed to hang on in Germany longer than most

as his wife was not Jewish.

It was a so-called "privileged mixed marriage".

TRANSLATION: Glaser was actually one of the first lawyers

who lost his right to practise, in October 1933.

So that meant he was no longer allowed

to make an income from his profession.

So he had to begin to sell his artworks.

Sabine Rudolf is now trying to track down his pictures.

13 have surfaced in the Cornelius Gurlitt hoard.

But her task is made much harder by the lack of records.

TRANSLATION: As you know, from 1938,

it was forbidden for Jews to sell artworks themselves.

That's why Glaser left no invoices and receipts.

Because he knew the Gestapo would come to his house,

the Gestapo would go through everything.

And if they found a receipt,

they'd know he'd broken the law and he'd be deported.

The Nazis seized 1,000 paintings and drawings

from the Angermuseum in Erfurt,

of which Alfred Hess had been such a strong supporter.

So these are the pictures confiscated in 1937.

Here's a Kandinsky, there's a Feininger,

Alfred Hess, Emil Nolde,

again from Alfred Hess, another Nolde,

Hess, that's Pechstein.

In 1937, the Gestapo come in here,

they take the cream of your collection,

but there is one great work of art you still have -

you have the Heckelraum. Yes.

The Heckel room - like a chapel,

covered in murals by the expressionist Erich Heckel,

a symbolic response to the First World War

made possible by Alfred Hess.

This is a miracle that this is still existing.

The temporary director of the museum

had the idea to protect the Heckelraum

by closing the whole space with a wall,

and she put a medieval angel before it, guarding the Heckelraum.

So when the Nazis came, they missed it.

The angel may have saved the mural,

but was not so successful with people.

Tekla Hess's brother would be sent to Dachau.

The family lawyer and the director of the shoe factory

ended up in Buchenwald.

The Hess's son Hans suffered persecution too -

he lost his job at a Berlin publishing house in 1933,

when all the Jews there were sacked.

And he narrowly escaped arrest.

TRANSLATION: He lived with a colleague of Bertolt Brecht.

She was also under observation and subject to persecution.

So their flat was raided and vandalised.

His flatmate Elisabeth Hauptmann was taken away.

They said they'd be back for the other one.

Hans Hess fled Germany.

His mother, Tekla Hess, struggled to save the family's art collection.

She sent it on loan to a museum in Switzerland, for safe-keeping.

Then she too had a visit from the Gestapo.

Under pressure, she brought almost all the pictures back to Germany.

It was the beginning of the end of their collection.

TRANSLATION: The works had barely reached Cologne

when the news spread through the German collector scene like wildfire.

"Here there are now totally wonderful great works

"up for grabs at low prices."

A chance to get highlights from Kirchner for a low sum,

and the collectors came and snapped up these pictures.

"They probably belong to Jewish people who had to get out,"

said Kirchner, whose Street Scene went to a non-Jewish collector.

Tekla Hess moved to Bavaria to escape the Erfurt Nazis.

Then in 1939 she fled, and joined her son Hans in England.

The final place of exile for many Jewish refugees

was the United States.

It's home to David Toren,

one of the last to get out of Germany before the war.

He's the boy whose great-uncle's painting

Two Riders on the Beach turned up in Cornelius Gurlitt's flat.

Until Kristallnacht in 1938, David Toren was at a mixed city school.

With another kid, we were the only Jews in the whole school.

We were bullied by the other kids,

and the teachers were awful, some of them.

I got lots of what's called in German Ohrfeigen -

slaps in the face.

There was a history teacher whom I disliked intensely

and he said that Eden,

that was the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain at the time,

had a sister who was married to Stalin

and they were planning, Eden and Stalin, to conquer the world.

So in my innocence I piped up and said, "I don't think that is so,

"I don't think that Eden has a sister that's married to Stalin."

The guy got furious.

He asked me to come to the front of the class

and he gave me Ohrfeigen left and right

and told me not...

To shut up and not to talk about things I knew nothing about.

So I never said anything more in that class.

I left in August of '39.

My father was convinced that war would break out this year

and he wanted to get me and my brother out of Germany.

So he found a place in a Kindertransport to Sweden.

So David and his brother escaped.

His great-uncle David and his parents were not so lucky.

First, the Gestapo came after the art collection.

"Breslau, December 1939. Subject: Securing Jewish holdings of art."

The letter starts out by saying there's still some rich Jews left

who, um, have rich art collections.

And as first example he says

"There's a Jew called David Friedmann,"

and even gives the address.

It was in the villa in the city.

Friedmann has a very good art collection

and he starts listing it.

French impressionists,

like Pissarro, Rousseau, Courbet,

Rafaelli, and then he says he has

two Max Liebermanns.

One is called The Basket Weaver, the other one

is called Riders On The Beach.

The letter ends by saying,

"I have warned David Friedman not to

"dispose of any of this art until I come back."

Just along the lake from the artist Max Liebermann's summer house

is the mansion where the Wannsee conference was held in January,

1942, declaring the final solution.

The total elimination of the Jews.

Both David Toren's parents were gassed in Auschwitz, in 1943.

They actually sent me a postcard the day before...

that they would be resettled in the East,

that was the term, "resettled".

That's what the German used to tell them

what would to happen with them.

So I had, in Sweden, I had a vision of nice little houses with

flowerpots outside where they would live, you know?

But I hadn't the foggiest idea that these were death camps with

the gas chambers and crematoriums.

His great uncle, David Friedmann,

died just before he could be deported.

His art collection was taken away on trucks.

Liebermann's Two Riders on the Beach ended up with Hildebrand Gurlitt.

Liebermann dies 1935, what happens to his wife then?

His wife has to suffer all this injustice

all German Jews have to suffer that time.

She has to give up this house in 1940.

She sits in her flat with some of his pictures, what she's got left.

Yeah yeah...and more and more alone!

The only chance for her not to be deported to Theresienstadt

was suicide in '43.

A deplorable situation.

TRANSLATION: The last portrait Max Liebermann painted of his wife

was one of the pictures left in the flat after Martha Liebermann

killed herself there.

He painted it in 1930 with the title "Martha Liebermann In The Armchair."

You could say that Martha Liebermann

ended her own life under this portrait.

Sophie Lissitzky-Kuppers' art collection,

left on loan to the local museum, when she went

to Russia in the '20s, was seized for the Degenerate art show.

Her two sons from her first marriage had joined her in Siberia.

She'd had another son with the artist El Lissitzky,

who was now very ill with TB.

Her son, Kurt, Anita's father, couldn't get on with Lissitzky.

TRANSLATION: At some point they are

said to have pulled guns out on each other.

But that's all hearsay and long ago.

All I knew was that this relationship was not

particularly happy.

So in 1935, as a teenager, Kurt went back alone to Germany.

He returned just as others were struggling to get out.

TRANSLATION: He'd come from the Soviet Union

and thought, "I'll go back to my old homeland."

When someone came from the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany,

he never thought that he would be so conspicuous...

..and that lots of people would be

paying attention to what he said and what he got up to.

To start with he was sent to a work camp.

And then he was sent to a concentration camp,

due to his refusal to fight in the war and his pro-Soviet propaganda.

During the war, Lissitzky died of pneumonia

and Sophie was sent to Siberia.

TRANSLATION: The Germans were expelled from Moscow.

They were the enemy and had to be sent a long way away,

so they were all deported.

She was given two days' grace and allowed to take her son,

I mean, Jen Lissitzky, with her.

At that point he was still small.

And she also took a canary and a blanket.

That was all she had to start a new life in Siberia with.

She always told the story about the way

she got sent away with the boy, a canary and a blanket and that

the bird died on the journey.

It froze to death.

The other son died in the Soviet Union, in an internment camp,

because he was a German.

So both boys had bad experiences.

Although, what could have been right at that time?

That's the proof that you can take different paths

and nonetheless end up with the same fate.

All the horrors of the 20th century are summed up in Sophie's

family story.

All the more grotesque, then,

that back in Germany, Hildebrand Gurlitt and the other dealers

were already making hay with Sophie's art collection.

After the Degenerate art show,

it should have been returned to her as it was her private property.

It was robbed by the Nazis. They didn't do

anything against it, since she was a German enemy, as a communist living

in Russia, they looked at her as a

betrayer of national socialism.

Paul Klee's Swamp Legend,

which Sophie and her first husband had bought

direct from the artist in his Munich studio, was picked up by Gurlitt.

Hildebrand Gurlitt bought the Klee

and many other paintings far below the market value, because it

was degenerate art, because the Nazis wanted to get rid of it.

And that's how Gurlitt and people like him made their profit.

Another of Goebbels's four appointed dealers, Ferdinand Moeller, bought

the Kandinsky that used to hang in Sophie and Paul's flat in Hannover.

Gurlitt was running his own gallery in Hamburg.

He was selling art to collectors, secretly, clandestinely.

He had one room full of all the 19th century artworks

that was acceptable to the Nazis

and then a backroom where he dealt in all this expressionist art.

There were still collectors, amazingly,

still brave enough to buy this art.

He ran that gallery until he got bombed out

of his Hamburg apartment...

..and he moved back to Dresden.

And Dresden was the centre of power for the art world in Nazi Germany.

He climbed up the career ladder

and became one of the main art dealers to buy

art from all over Europe for the planned Fuhrer Museum.

This was Hitler's pet project, though it never came to fruition.

This museum in his childhood hometown of Linz was to

display the wealth and grandeur of the Thousand Year Reich.

The masterpieces of the whole world - largely looted,

or bought in exchange for degenerate art.

But in February 1945, Dresden too was bombed.

The Russians were advancing from the East.

Hildebrand Gurlitt fled.

Ironically, the Dresden bombing saved the life of his neighbour,

Fritz Glaser.

It came just as he was to be sent to Auschwitz.

The end of the war would prove a false dawn for those whose

art had been plundered.

Next week, in Sins of the Fathers, we follow the trail

of the lost art and of Hildebrand Gurlitt.

How did it happen that his son was found 60 years later, holed up

with his father's treasure trove?

TV: Nearly 1,500 priceless paintings have been

discovered at a house in Germany...

The week after the story broke, the Deputy Director

of The Belvedere Museum, in Vienna said, "I don't know what all

"the fuss is about, everybody knows about the Gurlitt art collection."

It indicated this huge division that there is between those

people in the art world who know where the bodies are buried.

And those people who've been searching for their art for so long

who have no idea where it is and nobody will tell them where it is.

It's a story of complicity, cover up and denial.