All language subtitles for Imagine 2014 The Art That Hitler Hated 1of2

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.