Original subtitles

The discovery of a hoard of art in a Munich flat

propelled the world back to World War II.

1945...

Europe lay in ruins.

60 million were dead -

six million of them Jews.

Their property scattered to the winds.

Countless artworks seized in the biggest art-looting raid ever,

taken by the top Nazis,

sold for the war effort,

or squirreled away, lost to history.

The Nazis were going after not just a people,

but the art many of them loved -

modern art, expressionism,

which they labelled degenerate -

as weak and sickly as the Jews who collected it

and hung it in their houses.

This is the story of what happened and didn't happen -

once the war was over.

And of the father and son

whose secretive lives over 80 years

blew this story open.

In less than a decade after the war,

vanished art began to reappear in German museums and auction houses.

For the former owners, it was a war that was not yet over.

David Toren, escaped on the Kindertransport,

never to see his parents again.

That the German government is

wilfully withholding the return of those paintings,

it's just victimising the victims of the Holocaust a second time.

And the owners of this painting, the family of Alfred Hess,

who once had the best collection of expressionist art in Germany.

The Gestapo destroyed artworks

and they threw it into the mud.

Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers,

a German romantic, banished to the wastes of Siberia.

I don't want any hand-outs

for having had a bad childhood, or whatever.

I want my rights!

What a battle they had before them.

In Germany, after the war,

it was business as usual.

Hildebrand Gurlitt had worked for Goebbels

and then got right to the top,

amassing artworks for Hitler's planned Fuhrermuseum.

He was high on the wanted list for Allied soldiers

out to locate and return looted art.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was on the run,

taking along the pictures he'd set

aside for himself,

but leaving far more hidden away.

After the war, in 1945,

when he realised it would all come

to an end with the Nazi regime,

Hildebrand Gurlitt put his family

on a van,

also boxes,

which he collected from several depots

in Saxony, and then went to South Germany to the Castle of Aschbach.

This is where the Americans first interrogated him.

He sought refuge at the castle here

owned by the local Nazi chief,

Baron von Polnitz.

But the Allies tracked him down.

The Americans reached Schloss Aschbach

and also found Hildebrand Gurlitt and his family there,

his wife and the two small children

and, of course, they also found the works of art.

He said that it was the full total of his art,

but there were caseloads of art

that were never found by the Allies.

So we're talking about 136 works,

when, actually, here we are,

with the 1,400 works in his collection

in the apartment in Munich.

His son Cornelius, who was to hide away his father's paintings

for over half a century, was just 12,

at confirmation class in the village,

learning, supposedly, to tell the truth,

while his father faced difficult questions.

The Allies were especially interested

in what he'd been acquiring for Hitler in Paris.

This is the statement of his interrogation.

He was asked to explain his trips to Paris

on behalf of the Fuhrermuseum.

He weaselled his way out of it.

First trip, 1941.

Last trip June, '44.

Total trips about 10.

"The purchases in Paris were perfectly normal.

"No force whatsoever was used.

"I have never bought a picture which was not offered voluntarily to me.

"I did not need to, as I had enough offers.

"I always avoided meeting high Nazi officials in Paris."

He engineered a clever defence,

making the most of the fact

that he'd been sacked as a museum director,

well before the war.

"Was dismissed 1933 on account of my anti-Nazi feelings.

"I arranged exhibitions of modern art,

"unpopular with the Nazi movement.

"I incurred the enmity of the Nazis.

"My wife and I were never a member of the party

"or any other Nazi institution."

And his trump card was that he was a Jew.

Well, a quarter Jew.

Father... through mother of Jewish descent.

Under German law, he was Jewish.

He had a Jewish grandmother.

But he disregarded his Jewish grandmother

and gave over all these stolen paintings for sale

in foreign countries for hard currency,

which Germany needed, a lot,

to pay for the iron ore of Sweden

and ball-bearings in large quantities.

What do you make of this man, was he doing it just for money?

Was he just very....

No, he said - and I believe him -

I saved my life by collaborating with the Nazis.

That's true.

He was a Jew.

"On account of having Jewish blood

"I could not become an officer in the Hitler Army."

As quarter Jews, they weren't really in danger of ending up

being gassed at Auschwitz.

In his immediate family,

there were a lot of people who had lost their jobs.

Even his father with all his honours,

this great patriarch of Dresden,

suffered humiliation under the Nazis.

So Hildebrand Gurlitt - he was in danger of losing his living.

He was in danger of having to go and work in a munitions factory.

He was in danger of having to go and fight in the war.

All of those things are true.

He was not in danger of his life.

The Americans presented him certain lists

and asked him, where do those works of art come from.

At that point Hildebrand Gurlitt

decided to lie, because for many of those works, er, he said,

"Well, they have already been in the collection of my family before 1933,

"so it's absolutely not possible that this is looted or stolen art."

Some of the pictures WERE indeed in the Gurlitt family collection

before 1933, when the Nazis took power.

But some were not, like this one.

David Toren is claiming back

Max Liebermann's Two Riders on a Beach,

which was seized from his great uncle's house during the war.

Hildebrand Gurlitt says it was acquired earlier by his father.

In the records of the Monument Men,

there's a statement by Gurlitt

that The Riders on the Beach had already been in possession

of his father.

Right.

Which, of course, is a lie.

The Allies dutifully wrote it all down,

but their attention was elsewhere.

The Allies' take on it was a little bit different

from the way we'd see it now.

They weren't so interested in what was looted from the Jews in Germany.

They were interested in what had been taken from France

and from the other occupied countries.

This was the headquarters of the Monuments Men in Munich,

a depot for the looted art they'd tracked down.

Most of the paintings that reached here were Old Masters,

rather than the 'degenerate' art that Gurlitt favoured.

So this is, what?

It used to be the administration building

of the National Socialist Party.

This is the place where the party member files were kept.

And then, since it was one of

the very few buildings in Munich

that were not destroyed,

the Americans simply said,

OK, we're going to use this as the central art collecting point.

They did all the restitution work in this building.

What was the looted art that came?

It was art looted from the Jews, mainly, or taken from museums?

That was the question to sort out.

The Central Collecting Point worked on until 1949.

Attempts at restitution continued for another decade,

by which time the majority of cases would still be unsolved.

Those works of art from the time of National Socialism which

could not be restituted because after all efforts

no owners could be found,

those did not become state property.

But the Federal Republic of Germany

would simply take care of them but not own them...

Ah-ha. ..and give them to the museums,

and then they would have the little label

"On loan from the Federal Republic."

So everything was considered to be done.

Everything was back to normal

and it was usual business.

That's really interesting that even in '50s

the cultural institutions were thinking,

"Right, we can move on now. That's all over and done."

Yes. And, of course, the Gurlitt case

has brought all that back to light again.

I'd say so, definitely.

Hildebrand Gurlitt found people

to really whitewash him

in front of the authorities.

There were artists, there were other museum directors,

there was one of his former secretaries

who said that he was continuously helping Jews,

but the other secretary

saw it from a different angle,

and said he was making huge profit

out of the terrible situation of Jewish people

who had to flee from Germany.

If you want to see it like Hildebrand Gurlitt saw it,

he was helping these people,

but he made a fortune out of their destiny.

And how he could make himself feel comfortable with it,

it's really hard to say.

They took the bait, they believed his story.

He converted this Jewish grandmother

into a billion dollar asset,

by saying to the Monument Men -

"I'm a Jew!

"How could I have been a Nazi?"

One has to look at what was going on at the end of the war

historically, the Cold War.

The Allies turned their attention more and more towards

shoring up Europe against the encroach of communism,

and so issues like art dealing

became, distinctly, of secondary importance.

Some years after the war everything was brought to his private place,

in Dusseldorf then, by the American army.

It was quite a nice service for him.

It was meant to be the end of the story.

Gurlitt became an art historian again,

ran the art society in Dusseldorf,

shook hands with the president of the state

and the writer Thomas Mann.

He was also lending work to museums.

I have here a catalogue, which is an exhibition from 1954

and includes looted works of art in it.

Here's number 42, Two Riders on the Beach,

in the collection Dr Hildebrand Gurlitt, Dusseldorf.

It includes a painting which belongs to a family whom we represent -

a picture of a Berlin beer garden which hasn't yet re-emerged -

we don't know when Gurlitt sold it

or to whom he sold it.

So then the next one we have is

German Watercolours, Drawings and Prints

and Gurlitt had no embarrassment about having his name on them.

We have Max Beckmann, The Lion Tamer

owned by Dr Hildebrand Gurlitt of Dusseldorf.

These works even went to the United States.

There was clearly no appetite - whether it was by the Allies,

but, particularly, in Germany -

to do anything about this. It was a...

It was an open secret.

And it wasn't just Hildebrand Gurlitt.

How much continuity was there between the people

running these museums before the war and after the war?

Were they still in charge?

Buchner, for instance?

Yes, Buchner, the director of the Alte Pinakothek,

he was dismissed in '45...

..but he returned in '53.

He was, so to speak, rehired.

That tells you quite a bit

about the fact that in the 1950s

National Socialism was considered

like archaic past -

we have nothing to do with it,

we have come to terms with it,

all problems have been solved,

artworks have been restituted

and so on and so forth.

Those people who tried to present themselves

as always enemies of National Socialism,

they reconfigured their own biographies

to camouflage what they had themselves been doing

as agents of the looting machinery,

to whitewash your own professional identity and your history.

Hildebrand Gurlitt was just one of many people in the art world

who were active during the Third Reich

and continued to be active after the Third Reich

as if nothing had happened, really.

All of them had a lot to hide, they are all...

under one duvet, as we say in German.

No, how do you say that in English?

A lot of the same people were still in charge of the art trade,

and still running the auction houses.

Some people will talk about almost a black market in Nazi-looted art

that this stuff was still circulating

for decades and decades

and the fact is that it still is.

Many Jewish heirs are still looking for artworks

that are stashed away in private collections all around...

all over the country -

all over the world, actually.

And museums all over the world, as well.

So how could anyone break this magic circle -

complacent and seemingly impregnable?

The heirs to families who'd lost everything, not just their pictures

but their parents, their partners,

their country -

had to fight on alone.

The Hess family, for instance.

Their vast collection with its Kirchners, Kandinskys and Hechels -

decimated.

The family lawyer has a letter written by an art historian in 1939.

Here she writes about the Hess family in Lichtenfels,

that the Gestapo went and entered the home of Tekla Hess's mother,

and they took furniture

and threw it out onto the street

and they destroyed artworks

and they threw it into the mud.

A great deal of the Hess collection was kept in crates

at the Cologne Art Union,

in the basement,

and during the war the building was bombed,

and we found out now

that most of the Hess art collection was looted.

One of the main looters was a superintendent

of the Cologne Art Union

and he took some of these paintings

and sold them to an art dealer

and then he sold them further to other art dealers

and from there they also went to collectors, and also museums.

From exile in England, Tekla Hess, now a widow,

wrote to Julia Feininger,

wife of the artist Lyonel Feininger.

They did stand by her,

unlike many of the visiting artists and poets, who in the '20s and '30s

had signed the family's extraordinary guestbook.

"When I once said to Alfred,

"'If things ever get tough for me

"I'd like to know who of all my friends would be there for me,

"he said, 'All of them.

"'And what's more, things will never be tough for you.'"

"God knows, I had things tough enough,

"and I was proven right -

"but almost no-one stuck around."

This is a letter from the Cologne Art Union -

it was written to Tekla Hess

in 1951.

"Of all your paintings that were deposited here,

"only six were left over."

But this is clearly lies, isn't it?

Well, after everything was stolen

there were only six left over,

so that's probably the truth.

Only six paintings left from this enormous collection

of thousands of drawings and hundreds of paintings.

Right.

This was a claim filed by Hans Hess,

the heir to the Hess art collection,

after World War II with the German authorities

and there was a decision made about this claim

that all of the Hess collection

was lost due to persecution.

It's an amazing list...

Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky,

Marc Chagall, Lyonel Feininger...

The paintings couldn't be found,

so the Hesses were eventually granted compensation

under the post-war restitution rules -

a fraction of the collection's value.

The Hess story had an unusual impact

which would make the art gallery in Leicester

the home of the best collection of German expressionism in Britain.

During the war, the son, Hans Hess, was interned as an enemy alien

and set to work as a farm labourer near Leicester,

where Tekla joined him.

On loan to us from the Hess collection

is this splendid lithograph by Erich Heckel

showing the Bavarian town of Lichtenfels.

Trevor Thomas, the curator/director, petitioned the Ministry of War

to allow Hans to become an art assistant at the museum.

It was an enormously fortuitous friendship

in terms of the history of the museum,

and the history of the German Expressionist collection here.

Hans managed to bring some pictures out

when he fled Germany

and showed them here in 1944.

This is a surviving copy of

the Mid-European Art exhibition catalogue.

It is the work of Trevor Thomas, Hans Hess and Tekla Hess

working together.

And the foreword in the exhibition

is very poignant...

"The rise of Hitlerism destroyed the schools and the spirit,

"exiled and suppressed the men and their works.

"Modern art was persecuted.

"Here we can only show and judge what was attempted

"before this catastrophe overtook

"the creative spirit of a continent.

"We wish to thank all those who have loaned their pictures

"and in the first place have rescued them from certain destruction."

If we remember it was wartime,

so an exhibition of German Expressionism

is quite surprising at this time.

Struggling to survive in Siberia,

searching for artworks seized for the Nazi's Degenerate Art Show,

was another owner - Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers.

She was faced with an impossible task.

She'd gone to Russia in the 1920s with her second husband,

a Constructivist artist, El Lissitzky,

but he died, and in the war

she was banished as an enemy alien.

She'd left her avant garde art collection on loan

to the museum in Hanover.

She lived in very poor conditions.

Very frugal.

She had to share a flat with four families

with one bathroom and one kitchen between them.

Then she tried to make a living from sewing and handicrafts.

She tried, as she'd always done,

to make the best out of everything.

It was her eternal and inner hope

that her art, her pictures,

that she had believed in for a long time,

that they would have been taken care of in Hanover.

Sophie tried to find out

what happened to her collection -

wrote letters to Germany, to the people she knew,

to the museum directors -

to all the connections she had from back in the '20s.

The answers she got back were really very discouraging.

Actually, erm...they were making fun out of her.

"You will have to get used to the idea that your pictures are lost.

"If you should ever find yourself in Hanover,

"I'd welcome the opportunity to say hello,

"but I can't imagine you'd have much reason to come,

"since hardly any of your old friends would still be here."

Shortly before, he was offered one of these

pictures to buy and he didn't dare to buy it.

Those people knew very well where many of these pictures were.

The former director of the Hanover museum,

to whom she actually gave her collection on loan,

who then emigrated to America -

he was offered some of her pictures.

He said as much as he loved these pictures,

he wasn't going to buy them

because it would put him into trouble.

Because one day Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers

will come back and claim her collection.

Gurlitt still had one of Sophie's most precious paintings -

Swamp Legend by Paul Klee,

which Sophie had bought direct from the artist.

Gurlitt acquired it during the war -

it was one of many works he did not declare to the Allies.

Somebody like Hildebrand Gurlitt and his family

knew where the picture was coming from

and they had a good reason to really hide the provenance.

To let some time pass until

they brought it on the market again.

Sophie was working hard to promote the work of her second husband,

El Lissitzky,

and trying to track down her son Kurt, Anita's father,

who had survived a Nazi concentration camp.

It was an eternal search on both sides.

When Sophie finally found the address, it was too late.

My father was already dead.

Sophie would never see her two sons from her first marriage again.

But she did get one visit from her granddaughter.

I went to the Soviet Union just once in 1968.

She was very happy that we came.

On the other hand, it was embarrassing for her...

..because she could barely offer everyone a seat,

let alone serve up anything decent to eat.

She didn't have the means.

She also didn't really get on with the whole regime, any more.

She found it not so very great.

She didn't see eye to eye with it.

Then Sophie died - still having traced none of her pictures.

Almost the very last thing she did

was to write up this list of 13 pictures that were missing.

Klee,

Grosz,

Leger,

Mondrian,

Schmitt Rottluff,

El Lissitzky.

In 1956, Hildebrand Gurlitt died in a car crash.

His family later moved to the flats in Munich

where the pictures were recently found.

Hildebrand Gurlitt's wife, in order to live,

started selling paintings out of the collection

that they had been more or less hiding.

Gurlitt's widow sold Swamp Legend

at a long-established auction house in Cologne,

which had traded throughout the Nazi period -

Lempertz.

Selling was clearly more of a risk than just exhibiting,

as buyers might ask where the pictures came from.

But it seems they didn't.

Stuttgart auction house.

Picasso.

When this was brought to an auction in 1960,

of course, the art dealer could have asked

the Central Collecting Point files

"Has it been found in connection with the National Socialists?"

But that didn't happen at that time

because there was no consciousness for that...for that topic.

So, it's the same work,

in the Gurlitt collection

and then at auction.

She was also still loaning works to exhibitions.

Helene Gurlitt, Munich.

That same year a British newsreel

unwittingly captured on film

two key works of looted art at a show in Berlin.

One was Liebermann's Two Riders on a Beach -

loaned by Helene Gurlitt.

That the Gurlitt collection

has always been hidden and it always a big secret...

I think that's a myth.

They all had an interest not to tell about that,

because that was a great source - it was works of art

which had not been on the market for decades.

The show's title was Berlin - City of Cultural Freedom.

Also on view was the Berlin Street Scene by Kirchner,

lost to the Hess family in 1936.

The Liebermann painting - Two Riders on a Beach -

was taken by the Gestapo from the Breslau home

of David Toren's great uncle.

Now 88 and blind, David Toren escaped Germany

on one of the last trains out, aged 14.

His parents died in Auschwitz.

When he grew up, he found himself doing business, as a lawyer,

with the people who'd destroyed his family.

I'm a kind of schizophrenic person

that I don't like Germans,

but I've made my living for the last, what, 50 years,

by representing German companies.

And I've some good friends among them.

I dislike some of my clients

because I know they were somewhat involved

in the Holocaust.

because it had made the Zyklon B for the gas chambers.

Then, at a dinner, he found himself next to someone from the firm

that processed the gold taken from teeth in Auschwitz.

I nearly fell off the chair.

After the gas chamber,

teams would open the mouth of the corpses

to pull out the gold and silver teeth.

They had pliers -

they broke them out,

and threw them in containers.

They were melted into gold bullions

and silver bullions,

and when Germany needed money and didn't have any,

they used these gold bullions.

Millions and billions of dollars.

As you can imagine.

They killed six million people.

And everyone had one golden tooth -

you figure out how much gold that is.

He looked at me totally aghast.

He hardly spoke after that.

In 1968, Hildebrand Gurlitt's widow died.

Their son Cornelius began his strange solitary life.

He never completed his studies, as far as we know.

Art History, of course, as all the Gurlitt family seems to have done,

and he never really seems to have had a job.

As the years passed, he lay low.

I think this is what also Cornelius learned from his father -

you never have to admit anything you never have to tell

anybody anything, and that's the way how to go through life.

The world outside was changing around him.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down,

opening the East up to restitution claims.

TRANSLATION: The situation changed substantially

after the end of the Iron Curtain.

Not only was it now possible to get into many

archives in the former East Germany,

but the archives in other Eastern Bloc countries

were opened up, and in particular there was

the so-called "Special Archive" in the former Soviet Union,

in which thousands of German files relating to property

looted in the war are stored.

Researchers were able to get in there from the middle of the 1990s.

Monika has been working particularly on tracing the lost Liebermanns

and the Hess family collection.

My assignments in this field got bigger and bigger

after the Washington Declaration was signed in 1998.

It's put the subject back on the worldwide stage.

It was getting harder to ignore the clamour for restitution.

Harder for the sins of the fathers to be hidden away.

At the Washington conference of 1998, 44 countries including Germany

agreed to endorse 11 principles for dealing with Nazi confiscated art.

What they committed governments to was to researching

all their public collections and identifying works

that may or definitively were looted,

publishing those works of art to enable people to know

where they were and to find them.

They committed themselves to opening up all the records

and they also committed to fair and just solutions.

One of the other principles of Washington is that this issue

could not be hidden under the carpet any more.

Everything needed to come out into the daylight.

It had to be transparent.

And in Germany, that hasn't always happened.

The Washington Principles weren't a magic wand

but they were a useful lever in all restitution cases.

At last, the next generation,

Hans Hess's daughter, got back the Kirchner

for which the family had been fighting for half a century.

It had been in a museum in Berlin.

She put it up for sale partly

because she had to pay back the museum, for their cost in buying it.

The outcry against her selling it was immediate.

This article says in the title,

"One says Holocaust but means money."

Yes.

It says, "The real heroes were the museum directors who took care

"of this art after the end of World War II.

I think we are all happy if museums have good art

in their collections, but the Street Scene would never have been sold

if Hitler and the Nazis were not there.

It would still have been part of the family collection,

the collection would have been intact.

One painting has been claimed out of a huge collection,

and the sort of outcry that this shouldn't be possible,

it shouldn't have happened and it's a disgrace,

just makes you sick.

It was Ronald Lauder who bought the restituted Kirchner

at Christie's in New York in 2006

for a then record $38 million.

He put it on display at his gallery in New York

where the 1937 Nazi shows are being restaged.

That same year, Lauder bought this Klimt, for $135 million.

It was stolen directly from the owner's family home by the Nazis

and ended up in the Belvedere Museum in Vienna,

which fought hard against giving it up.

Prices for these pictures have rocketed.

In the '30s, they were going cheap.

Our collectors were before their time.

Now the artists they supported are established as modern masters.

Ever since the '60s, the people who sought to destroy

these paintings have been reclaiming them as their heritage,

lamenting their loss from the museums of Germany and Austria.

After the war, the Austrians often slapped export bans

on works of art. So a family might say,

"You've got our looted works of art, can we have it back?"

and they'd say, "No, you can't because we consider it to be national heritage."

And of course the Woman in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, was Jewish.

That was the great irony of the Austrian attachment

to that picture and their long term unwillingness to return it. Yes.

It is an amazing story that it took so long,

the museums are still resistant, aren't they?

You have it in the British museums,

you have it in German museums, you have it in American museums

and it's important that at some time you go through this,

look at the provenance, and be a strong enough museum to say,

"We'll give it back."

But each battle won doesn't win the war.

The heirs of Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers,

who died in Siberia, are still trying to get her painting,

Swamp Legend, back from a museum in Munich.

The town of Munich doesn't feel bound to the Washington Principles

and has refused to find a fair and just solution

so far for the painting.

The picture is worth millions.

The now former mayor of Munich

feels obliged to rule that a town has to protect

its public belongings rather than

give it away to somebody who claims it.

Yeah, that was their argument for many, many years.

In many cases, the museums or the lawyers who represent

the museums try to find formal mistakes in the heirs' claims.

Like it happened lately in the case of the Swamp Legend,

one of the heirs had died, so it's a formal mistake in the claim

saying there are four heirs, because now it's only three.

The case was turned down.

That's what happens all the time.

Finally, the City of Munich did make an offer.

Was the compensation 100%?

50% of the market value of the Swamp Legend.

I guess, I... I still,

I'm still convinced that this is a very fair offer.

TRANSLATION: The offer was 700,000 euros.

And since the picture had been valued by Sotheby's and Christie's

at between 3 and 3.3 million euros,

the sum of 700,000 was hardly going to be enough.

We turned it down.

But the City of Munich's lawyer doesn't believe the whole value

of the painting should go to the heirs, if they plan to sell it on.

If somebody is really interested in the memory

of the family that he wants the painting back,

hanging back in the living room,

this is what I was ever fighting for.

But if somebody is wanting restitution

and he's putting it straight afterwards into an auction house,

then we are talking about money,

and you can include the current owner in the restitution.

Well, it's like saying to somebody who you give something,

"You're not allowed to sell it," or you're not allowed...

Who makes that decision? No, no, no, no, I'm not saying

he is not allowed to sell it. The only thing I am saying is

you really have to take into account, you have two innocent parties

negotiating with each other,

hopefully in a very respectful and well manner.

The notion that the City of Munich has an equal right to a work

that was stolen by the Nazis from Sophie Lissitzky-Kueppers,

who was then subjected to a life of struggle and penury,

does seem rather far-fetched.

TRANSLATION: The City of Munich did make an offer

on the basis that we do not acknowledge that we are

in unlawful possession of the picture,

but we would want to pay the family compensation

as an acknowledgement of the family's difficult history.

Of course, it goes without saying, we turned that down.

I don't want any hand-outs for having had a bad childhood

or whatever.

I want my rights.

It seems that whatever you do with these pictures,

their past is bound to come back to haunt you.

Richard Feigen is a leading New York art dealer.

He's got entangled in that past and is trying to take it on,

to test the boundaries.

He's suing Lempertz auction house over a painting

that he bought through them in the year 2000.

It had also been auctioned at Lempertz 60 years earlier,

when the Jewish collector Max Stern had to sell up and flee Germany.

Well, I was sent a catalogue of a forthcoming auction,

which says compliments of Professor Hanstein, head of the Lempertz

auction house, and I saw this painting

so I decided to bid on it.

Hanstein answered some questions I had about the provenance

of the painting, and he said Stern is not a Jewish gallery.

Doesn't Professor Hanstein now deny that he was ever asked

that question by you?

Well, I copied this down verbatim on the telephone.

It says, "Hanstein: Stern not a Jewish gallery."

That he guaranteed me that it was absolutely without problems.

He said, you can check with the art loss registry,

which we did and it wasn't listed.

So it wasn't on the list at that point?

Turns out that it wasn't yet on the list

so I felt perfectly free to buy the painting.

But did Lempertz know it was?

Yes, because they conducted this 1937 forced sale.

When it became apparent to you

this was one of those paintings from a Jewish owner, Max Stern,

you were faced with a moral dilemma, I dare say?

No, I didn't consider it a dilemma.

I asked the name of the Stern beneficiary.

I called him up, I made it known

that I had the painting. I wasn't about to start hiding the painting.

So when I told him that,

then he alerted the Department of Homeland Security,

who came here and said this painting is basically Nazi plunder

and they said, we have to seize the painting,

I said, "Well, OK, I don't want to have a painting that was a piece of stolen property."

It's interesting this difference between the American legal system

and the German legal system.

The American legal system has said categorically this is plunder,

it needs to go back to the owners.

Yes, I mean, they basically seized the painting from me.

You were legally obliged to give that painting back. Yes.

So where does that leave you?

Well, it leaves me without the painting, without the money,

involved in a lawsuit against Lempertz in Germany.

I never had any conversation with Mr Feigen.

I never met him in my life.

This must be a misunderstanding.

I believe he had, has been in contact with one of our experts

and the expert at that time didn't know anything about any restitution

on any painting of Stern.

Everything was mentioned in the catalogue, that it was sold

once before with Lempertz in 1937.

I can't follow the opinion of Mr Feigen, of course,

because Stern consigned the stock of his gallery by himself.

He did the sale, he attended the sale, he got the result.

He got compensation in the '60s,

and during his lifetime he never claimed

one of the paintings of the sale.

And when the painting was sold at Lempertz in 2000,

we didn't know anything about any claim or any problem

of any painting of the sale of 1937.

Feigen's case is being pursued in the German courts.

He lost in Cologne and is now taking it to a higher court.

He is represented by a lawyer in Berlin.

Professor Hanstein says that Richard Feigen didn't ask him

if there was a problem with forced sale and he didn't ask him

whether Max Stern was Jewish.

Yes, I know that he says this,

but there also have been faxes from Richard Feigen.

"I would appreciate if you would fax confirmation.

"There is no problem of theft, confiscation or forced sale

"in the painting's history from 1933 on."

And another fax from Lempertz,

I think the sentence is, "The provenance and the history

"of the painting is clean."

And what more can you say?

Our case is purely legal,

but behind this case, there is all this huge moral burden,

and the Gurlitt case shows that something is wrong.

And then in September 2010,

Cornelius Gurlitt was searched by customs officials on a train

returning from Zurich to Munich.

He had too much cash and no tax or social security number.

This is a man who in a sense, like his father during the war,

had been under the radar, who had had no official existence.

He rarely went out.

For such a secretive man, who had kept his pictures in his flat

for half a century, being stopped on the train must have been alarming.

It was in fact the first rumbling of what would become an earthquake.

A year later, he ventured out

to put a picture up for auction at Lempertz.

In 1933, it had been sold by Alfred Flechtheim,

a Jewish dealer desperate to escape, to Cornelius Gurlitt's father.

Now, the Flechtheim family lawyer

spotted it in the Lempertz catalogue.

Gurlitt is a red flag name.

Gurlitt obviously rang a bell.

When you are working this field, obviously these are red flag names.

So we contacted Lempertz, and within days,

we managed to come to some sort of settlement agreement

to everybody's benefit.

At least Cornelius Gurlitt obviously felt that it was

better to reach an agreement,

and be able to sell that piece than go into a legal quarrel about it.

He appeared to have got away with it.

But time was running out.

A full 18 months after he was stopped on the train,

police finally went in to search his flat.

It opened a can of worms - the hoard of his father's pictures.

But the authorities decided to keep their discovery quiet.

Trying to keep it secret was the biggest mistake they could make.

You put yourself under suspicion if you try to hide things

that really should be public knowledge

and should be made available to heirs.

They were hidden from 1945 to, I think, 2012.

Interesting, when it was found in 2012, they thought,

"Hey, this is a tax case."

Frankly, if it had not been for people publishing it,

it still would be staying there.

And he'd have been paying taxes on it.

The pictures they found were taken away.

The plan was to work their way through the vast pile,

trying to establish where they came from.

They appointed one art historian to look into this entire trove,

to look into the provenance of 1,500 pictures,

which is impossible.

It's way beyond the scope of one person.

But then the leak came in November 2013.

Suddenly Cornelius Gurlitt was outed.

But it was, of course, no secret to some.

The fact that this collection existed was not a secret.

Ever major art dealer in southern Germany knew.

The furore is totally exaggerated.

But it was news to the heirs and to the public.

Suddenly details of Cornelius Gurlitt's private life

were splattered all over the world's press.

The son is a mental case.

He's a recluse, he never goes out,

he's never been involved with women.

If he wants to buy a bottle of milk

he takes a taxi out to the grocery store, it's 200 yards away.

And if he needed money, he sold a painting.

It seems that whenever anyone came to the house,

he would not let them in or be very defensive about letting them in.

He didn't want people to see his collection.

And he talked about the paintings as though they were his friends,

as though they were a replacement for lovers, for family.

He spent his evenings with them, he talked to them.

A local lawyer was appointed as Cornelius Gurlitt's guardian,

because he was 81 and unwell.

He was one of very few who visited the flat.

What was he like, Cornelius Gurlitt?

TRANSLATION: A very loving person, easily hurt, full of humour,

also a bit mischievous.

It seemed to me to be a bit like dealing with a child.

He lived very modestly,

there was no luxury except for his music system,

which must have been expensive in the '70s.

He had no health insurance, he had to pay for it himself

and that was always a worry for him, whether he'd find the money.

But he must have had money.

It wasn't just The Lion Tamer he'd recently disposed of.

Four years earlier, he'd sold this painting by August Macke

for some £2 million.

His guardian then appointed another lawyer

to represent Cornelius Gurlitt.

My client Cornelius Gurlitt

promised his father to take care for the collection.

It was a real burden for him.

He is a very reclusive person, a very shy person,

who wanted to live on his own.

He was hiding himself away from the world, with the collection.

He said, "I did nothing bad in my life,

"so why do they chase me?

"And why do they treat me like a criminal?

"Why do they kill my whole privacy?"

But the impact wasn't just personal, it was political.

Not just he, but Germany was challenged

to come to terms with its past.

The embarrassment was huge.

For Germany, the reason that this subject

is so important is that successive governments have devoted

an enormous amount of funding, resources, manpower,

into showing that they can deal with the past responsibly.

Museums devoted to the Holocaust, the Holocaust Memorials,

honouring the victims and remembering the crimes of the Nazis

is a really important part of being Germany today.

It has reaped the rewards of that.

Germany is the world's biggest exporter.

A lot of its erstwhile enemies from the Second World War

are now great allies.

One would have hoped that Germany would have seized the opportunity,

would have understood that what this case had revealed

was that it has this Achilles heel as far as art is concerned.

And this was an opportunity to seize the initiative and to say,

OK, we want to look at, for example, every museum who acquired

works from Hildebrand Gurlitt. They should all do their research

and we want it all published in a certain timeframe.

We want all German dealers that have been disposing of works

from the Gurlitt collection over the years to tell us, to disclose,

as a matter of public interest, what works they've been selling

and what, you know, and when they were doing it,

but there's been none of that.

Families were furious that for 18 months,

they had not been told.

Hello, I'm Alan.

Hi, Alan. Peter Toren, come on in.

I would like to think that my father is immortal.

Obviously he's not, and the idea that the German government

is wilfully withholding the return of those paintings,

at the expense of giving them back to the rightful owners,

I think is just victimising the victims of the Holocaust a second time.

TRANSLATION: When I heard the name "Gurlitt" for the first time,

my ears pricked up because I know that Swamp Legend

passed through Gurlitt's hands.

The hope is that we might perhaps find a few pictures

on this list, in this great find.

And then, this February,

another hoard of the Gurlitts' pictures was discovered,

hidden behind books and in suitcases in this small house

in Salzburg, Austria.

BBC News was allowed to see some of what was there.

Wow, and that's a Renoir. Yes, correct.

This is a Renoir.

Over here, this is a Liebermann.

They would fetch a bit at auction. I guess so.

In Gurlitt's Hansel and Gretel house they found a Courbet,

a Manet, a Monet, and this is just what we know about so far.

Did he have a suspicion about how his father acquired these pictures?

TRANSLATION: As far as we talked about it,

he was convinced that his father had got all the pictures

in good faith.

How far that is to do with the father-son relationship

and how far it is realistic, I can't judge.

Cornelius Gurlitt's lawyers claim that only seven

of the 1,400-odd works found in the Munich flat,

and one from the Salzburg house, are even likely to be looted art.

It is often years of work to really reconstruct

the provenance of a single picture,

and to say such a thing in the first place,

that there were only a handful in the collection questioned

as being looted art is really, for me,

like making fun about the heirs.

To this day, they refuse to make the whole collection public,

which is essential, of course, for provenance researchers

to find out if there is anything in the collection

they have been looking for for decades.

13 of the pictures have been posted online

as belonging to Fritz Glaser,

the Jewish collector who was a neighbour of Hildebrand Gurlitt.

Alfred Hess, whose pictures were looted and thrown in the mud.

Max Liebermann, whose wife killed herself under the portrait

her husband painted of her.

It still hangs in a Bavarian museum,

the Liebermann family still claims it back.

David Toren, whose great uncle's whole collection

was taken away on trucks, just as his parents were.

Sophie, whose Swamp Legend is still in a Munich museum.

Flechtheim, who fled on day one of the Third Reich

under threats to exterminate him.

And they're still discussing whether these were forced or free sales.

RADIO: With the death of Cornelius Gurlitt,

no-one knows exactly what will happen with this 81-year-old's art collection.

On May 6, 2014, six months after his sudden outing,

Cornelius Gurlitt died.

They found a Monet in a suitcase he'd taken into hospital with him.

TRANSLATION: He's a poor old man.

A poor old man who was probably told as a teenager or a young man,

"That's your treasure, you must guard it."

Really a poor old man, who despite all his treasure,

can't do much with it.

I wanted to know what you feel now we know Cornelius Gurlitt has died.

Well, I feel awful. In fact, I was thinking of going to the funeral.

LAUGHTER

He left his pictures to a little known private art museum

in Switzerland, not in the Germany he felt had treated him so badly.

Bern has not yet decided whether to accept this poisoned chalice.

Perhaps Cornelius Gurlitt was the one who drank deepest from it.

I think he was overwhelmed with the past

and with having to judge his father.

He heroised his father and it was really very difficult for him

to distinguish between the good things his father did

and the bad things.

It's obvious that he suffered a lot by all that happened during the last months,

but whether he really could understand that

what his father did was injustice, in many ways, we will never know.

There are certainly still hundreds of Gurlitts in Germany

who have works of art which have been bought at forced auctions

between '33 and '45.

It would be possible to trace them

because the Nazis were very bureaucratic

and they asked every auction house and every art dealer

to write down what they auctioned or what they sold.

All those papers still survive the war.

What the state did with Gurlitt, name his address

and name his name and name the works of art,

theoretically would be possible with everyone who bought

works of art between '33 and '45 in Germany.

Germans see themselves as very connected to art.

Art is part of their identity of who they are. They've created great art.

And somehow it's the last part of themselves

it seems they want to hold on to.

Somehow, a part that isn't implicated by what happened

during the Nazi period, although of course it is.

Germany has made huge efforts to come to terms with its past

and perhaps this is its last hurdle.