Original subtitles

The 9th of August 1945,

the American armed forces interrogate Gisela Limberger,

personal secretary to reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.

She said,

"Goering used to select the objects for himself and for the Fuhrer.

My duties included compiling the lists of paintings,

tapestries and pieces of furniture, attending auctions,

and keeping the masterpieces safe in the air-raid shelters,

until February 1944,

when everything was handed over to Walter Hofer."

Walter Hofer...

Goering's personal art agent and director of his collection.

One thousand three hundred seventy six paintings, 250 sculptures

and 168 tapestries.

Here he is, just after the surrender to the Americans.

He cooperated eagerly and helped to catalogue Goering's hoard.

Interrogated by lieutenant colonel hinkel on the 6th of November 1945, he said,

"I bought art in Goering's name.

My reward was to keep the works he didn't want."

And when asked where the money to buy these works came from, he replied,

"I can't be sure, but I think the money belonged to the state."

We will meet several men like Hofer in this story,

an army of curators, critics,

historians and even artists,

who placed their talent at the service of the Nazi regime,

and participated in the raids,

especially on the homes and galleries of Jewish collectors.

Six hundred thousand artworks were purloined from private owners,

museums, churches and galleries.

One hundred thousand are yet to be found.

Of the rest, little or nothing is known.

This is the story of how Hitler looted the great beauty of Europe.

And how he stole not just human lives

but the artistic flowering of an entire culture.

It was more than just an obsession for art.

It was an obsession to wipe out an entire culture.

They were looking to destroy Jewish people.

It was a weapon for them.

Another weapon to the Germans.

Every one of these pictures has a story.

And the backdrop to this great looting is the holocaust.

Now, over 80 years later,

these recovered works have been put on display at four exhibitions.

In Paris, France. In Bern, Switzerland.

in Bonn, Germany. And in deventer, the Netherlands.

Many owners and institutions

are still battling to regain what once was theirs.

Some people maybe don't understand the connection between

the theft of our art,

and families like mine actually losing their lives.

The two things are very directly connected.

In many cases, they had collections seized,

merely saying that the owners were "away" or "on the run".

But often, the Nazis themselves had deported them to the camps.

So it was sophistry, macabre sophistry.

It all began in 1937.

Two exhibitions took place in Munich.

The first, on "degenerate art,"

the works and the artists the Nazis decried.

From Marc Chagall to Wassily Kandinsky.

The cubist style of the spaniard Pablo Picasso was frowned upon, too.

Matisse, monet and the impressionists fared no better.

Their works were requisitioned and auctioned off

through amenable dealers and collectors, especially in Switzerland,

and were used by the regime as an investment and to raise cash.

The other exhibition is this one.

The great German art exhibition,

in which the Fuhrer took a personal interest.

It marked the start of the great obsession with classical art,

that would see Goering and Hitler locking horns

for the heritage of the occupied countries.

We have met many people. Researchers, historians,

and the descendants of those who were robbed and often killed.

They have all helped to reconstruct a story...

That still today has yet to end.

By doing all the work that we do to document what happened,

we're also restoring to the historical record

people who've been erased from it.

They stole everything. Thanks to the Mobel Aktion

they looted entire apartments, with pendulum clocks, bed linen,

children's toys and cars, and then the paintings.

Does evil have a face?

Can you see it in someone's eyes?

Charlie Chaplin was born in the same week

of the same month of the same year as Hitler.

In 1940, when he parodied him in the great dictator, they were both 51.

One was a star of Hollywood. The other was devastating a continent.

Edgar feuchtwanger was seven years old when he met Hitler in 1930.

The future Fuhrer was 41, they were neighbors in Munich.

Edgar remembers him in his book.

"He's right in front of us, outside his apartment block.

I see that he has shaved his beard, as my father sometimes does.

He has blue eyes. I never knew.

You can't see in the photos.

I thought his eyes were completely black.

I've never seen him so close. He has hairs in his nose and ears.

He's shorter than I thought. Shorter than my father.

The passers-by stop, so do we.

He looks at me. I ought to look away.

But I can't. I stare at him.

Perhaps I should smile at him?

I am his neighbor, after all! Does he recognize me?

Does he know I watch him from my bedroom?

Does he know I'm a Jew?

I don't want him to hate me. Or my father. Or my mother."

Because it's very difficult...

About a person you've actually seen like that.

The idea that he will turn the whole world upside down,

is something... you can't grasp.

"I have now decided before the closing of my earthly career,

to take as my wife that girl, who after long years of faithful friendship,

entered of her own free will a practically besieged city,

in order to share her destiny with mine.

At her own desire, she goes as my wife with me to death."

On the marriage certificate signed by them both,

Eva braun corrected her surname to Hitler.

On the 29th of April 1945,

Adolf Hitler dictated his private will to his secretary.

Then he put a pistol to his right temple and fired.

By his side, Eva braun had taken her own life with poison.

She was wearing her black wedding dress.

The destiny of the Fuhrer's art collection featured prominently in his will.

"What I possess belongs to the party.

Should this no longer exist, to the state.

Should the state too be destroyed,

no further decision on my part is needed.

I have acquired collection of paintings over the years,

not for my private enjoyment,

but solely out of a desire to endow a picture gallery in my birthplace, Linz."

The Fuhrer had planned the ultimate museum for Germany,

the louvre of Linz, the city where he grew up,

where he had begun his mediocre painting career,

rejected twice by the Vienna academy of fine arts.

Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy,

also left a record of his own obsession with art,

a catalogue, listing all the works in his collection,

ordered with teutonic discipline from 1933 onwards,

with the artist, provenance,

description, date, dealer and location.

After the war, the manuscript would be used as evidence against him.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, holocaust scholar and lecturer at Manchester university,

has reconstructed the journey of the Generalfeldmarschall's collection.

He has edited the French edition of the manuscript,

with historians and archivists from the Quai d'Orsay.

Goering's gallery was valued in 1944 at 50 million deutschmarks.

In today's money, that's 18 million Euros.

He had a kind of hunger, a bottomless gluttony for riches.

He was one of the greatest looters in history,

even more so than Hitler.

This is confirmed

by the statement of the party newspaper's most important art critic, Robert Scholz.

He worked for the err, the special Nazi unit

led by Alfred Rosenberg that looted the occupied territories.

"Goering had asked Hitler for permission

to examine the collections confiscated so far and to decide what to do with them.

Hitler received about 40 masterpieces,

including works by Vermeer, Rubens, Boucher.

Most of them belonged to the rothschild collections.

Hermann Goering kept around 700 works for himself,

including paintings by Van Dyck, Goya and Van de Velde."

It was the finest art collection bar none in the Nazi era.

All the greats of European painting, of European heritage,

were there. Leonardo da Vinci, Tiepolo, Titian.

There was a real fixation with Cranach.

Carinhall, a residence 60 kilometers north of Berlin,

was Goering's gallery of wonders.

This place, in the heart of the imperial forest,

became a hedonists' heaven...

With dinners and hunting parties,

where Goering entertained the German and international aristocracy,

at Hitler's behest.

The Nazis were possessed with status.

And art is a traditional means of...

Rising status.

People who dread power, try to look as much as they can,

on the old power.

Germany had this tradition of high nobility,

connected to the German emperor, old family ties.

And the Nazis were just bourgeois.

So they built hunting lodges because the nobility liked to hunt,

they'd buy hunting scenes.

They do everything to show the old power

that the new power speaks the same language.

Which they don't, eventually.

Goering had blue blood from his mother,

and felt at ease in the role of an aristocrat.

His first wife was Danish baroness, carin Von kantzow.

He worshipped her,

and after her premature death in 1931, aged just 43,

he dedicated the villa to her as a mausoleum.

Here, surrounded by portraits of carin, Goering lived with his second wife,

playing with his train sets, always on a diet, always obese.

He was a very complex, childish character.

He liked to wear make-up, as the photos show,

and dressing up, we see him in various outfits.

At one point, he was likened to a brothel manager, a pimp.

All very odd yet he was also a powerful, highly intelligent man.

Goering was consumed by his passion for art and money.

In January 1945, when the Russians were already at the gates of Berlin,

he waited to the last minute

before ordering his gallery to be evacuated.

Before giving the order to blow up carinhall,

he had the bronzes by arno breker, the sculptor of the reich,

thrown in the waters of the wuchersee.

The special trains that had brought artworks to the villa over the years,

were now packed with statues and paintings and sent to secure hiding places.

Amid the peaks of styria, in Austria, lies altaussee salt mine.

From August 1943,

giant racks were built in chambers hewn from the rock by the miners,

to keep thousands of artworks safe for the Fuhrer's museum.

Here, in may 1945,

the Americans found part of Hitler's treasure trove.

Six thousand five hundred paintings, statues,

coins, weapons,

antiquarian books and pieces of furniture.

There were Michelangelo's Madonna and child, stolen in Bruges,

the imposing Ghent Altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers,

removed from the cathedral in Ghent and dismantled to fit through the tunnels,

and one of the paintings that Hitler craved the most.

The astronomer by Jan Vermeer,

plundered from the rothschild family, the ultimate symbol of the Jewish enemy.

Along with the works in Hitler's hoard,

there were several masterpieces from Goering's.

They included Titian's Danae...

A Madonna by Raphael...

The blind leading the blind by Brueghel the elder...

And Antea by Parmigianino.

The paintings, now all in the museo di capodimonte in Naples,

had been placed in montecassino Abbey for safekeeping.

The German troops in Goering's division stole them and brought them to Berlin,

as the reichsmarschall's 51st birthday present.

The American army had set up a special unit in Washington

made up solely of art historians, called "the Monuments Men",

enlisted soldiers who monitored all artwork movements around Europe.

The monuments men worked in the field in war-torn Europe,

while in New York, in this library,

other experts planned the efforts

to safeguard the cultural heritage of the countries involved in the conflict.

Here, they studied maps and art history manuals,

they compared photographs and street plans,

and marked out the monuments to save.

Churches, museums,

historic buildings and archaeological sites.

They gathered together here at the frick art reference library,

partly because it is this institution

that had the resources to help them get this information together.

And then eventually prepare maps to give to the army air corps,

that would allow the pilots to avoid important monuments in Europe,

in the many, many bombing raids they launched during 1943 and '44.

In merkers, north of Frankfurt,

the us troops under generals eisenhower and patton,

found the reichsbank's hoard of gold and cash in a potassium mine.

It was worth over 520 million dollars.

Piled up in a corner were 400 paintings evacuated from some Berlin museums,

including in the conservatory by eduard manet,

and goya's carnivorous vulture.

One of the caves contained 207 sealed containers,

part of the SS Booty,

not yet laundered by the Reichsbank,

full of valuables,

seized from concentration camp deportees.

Coins, silverware and jewelry.

And the prisoners' gold teeth.

It would emerge, that all the transactions for the SS Haul

went through an account in the name of Max Heilinger,

aka Heinrich Himmler,

the architect of the genocide.

Five hundred kilometers to the south, in Berchtesgaden,

home to Hitler's retreat, the eagle's nest,

the statues and paintings transported by Goering's trains

were found hidden in another salt mine.

That is where the paintings of Jacques Goudstikker also ended up,

thanks to Goering.

Goudstikker was a respected Amsterdam art dealer.

This is a catalogue of his exhibition from 1930.

He was Jewish,

and when the Nazis invaded Holland on the 10th of may 1940,

Goering and his dealer, Hofer,

had already earmarked 1,240 of his works for themselves.

Goudstikker's story

typifies how these affairs dragged on for decades,

leaving the grandchildren the task of achieving closure with the past.

In an apartment in New York, in a central district built in the 1930s,

the walls are hung with some of the masterpieces

from the Goudstikker collection, recovered after protracted legal battles.

Charlene Von Saher is Jacques's granddaughter.

She lives here with her mother, Marei.

After the war, Goudstikker's wife had asked the Dutch government

for her husband's collection to be returned,

but only part of it came back.

The bulk of the collection had been declared

"national property of the Netherlands," and shared among the country's museums.

In 1997, a journalist from Rotterdam,

who was investigating the non-return of assets after the war,

tracked down Charlene and her mother here in New York.

With his help, and thanks to the gallery labels

that her grandfather had put on the back of the pictures,

she decided to make a new claim...

A step towards reuniting the collection of paintings

that goudstikker had exhibited many times in nyenrode castle,

before the Nazi occupation.

He used the castle to display his art.

He brought his customers from Amsterdam on the amstel on the boat,

to the castle, and showed them

all the beautiful paintings he had acquired.

What a great way to display art.

Nyenrode castle stands in the utrecht countryside.

It's now a university.

In 1930, Jacques Goudstikker had bought it

to hold cultural soirees and charity events.

Every room was furnished in the style of a different era.

It was at one of his big charity parties

that he called vienen an der werkt,

where he created Vienna on the werkt river

brought in a big orchestra and oriental carpets,

and chandeliers with candles and invited my grandmother,

Desi Von Halban, a soprano, from Vienna,

to sing at this party.

And that's where they first met.

And they fell in love and were married shortly afterwards.

Charlene's grandmother desi was Jewish, originally from Poland.

The castle's rooms were her stage,

which she graced with elegance but without ostentation.

She loved the skies and clouds of Holland and singing Puccini arias.

She and Jacques were a wealthy, happy couple.

After 1938, many Jews living in the Netherlands

had begun to leave the country.

Jacques put off the decision and continued to run his gallery,

meanwhile, their son, eduard, was born.

Before leaving, he tried to save his vast, cherished art collection,

especially the masterpieces of the great flemish masters,

and the Italian baroque.

To no avail.

Of those 1,240 works,

three hundred ended up at carinhall,

fifty paintings were given to Hitler. The rest were put up for sale.

Hermann Goering showed up on the doorstep of my grandfather's gallery,

the minute they left.

But he knew well in advance what was there.

They all did their research before the war.

Jacques, Desi and their son, aged just a few months, fled westward.

They wanted to reach england and then the usa, but they had no visas.

At the north sea port of Jmuiden,

a soldier recognized Desi, who had often sung for the troops.

He helped them to board the last ship before it left, the bodegraven.

They were safe.

But there would be no American dream in store for Jacques.

He went up for some air, and it was dark,

and he fell into a trap hole in the deck,

and he was killed instantly.

And my grandmother waited and waited for his return,

and he never came back.

Normally, they would throw people overboard, but...

My grandmother was lucky she could plan a funeral for my grandfather in Falmouth.

She planned the funeral,

but she was not allowed to attend the funeral.

And she wanted to make sure they sang, Cole Porter's "night and day."

Desi was left with a babe in arms,

and a little black book found by her husband's body.

It listed all the works he owned,

many of which were already in Goering and Hitler's hands.

On his 45th birthday, the Reich air force minister, General Goering,

was awarded numerous decorations and honoured by a visit from the Fuhrer,

who gave him a priceless painting

that would have pride of place in his house.

Hitler and Goering were great friends,

they had both fought in World War I,

they were side by side in the Munich beer hall

during their attempted coup of 1923.

And they were together on the 30th of January 1933,

the day Hitler became chancellor of the reich.

But when the great looting of Europe's art heritage began,

they became rivals,

vying for the finest pieces.

A great rivalry emerged between Goering and Hitler,

they even tried to pinch works from under each other's noses.

Hitler himself, who had only recently realised

that he could exploit the situation,

issued an order that the Fuhrer had first choice of the works.

For the leaders of the reich,

the need to build a strong, absolute identity,

became an obsession that was increasingly bound up with art.

The process of constructing the Nazi narrative

also involved the quest for an absolute aesthetic

harking back to the classical ideals of perfection.

The relationship between art and politics,

thus became central to the organization of the new German empire.

Propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels,

led the campaigns against anyone, who was out of step.

The Nazis knew full well how effective art is in the public domain,

and they exploited art for propaganda purposes - with great success.

The Day of German Art in Munich.

Chancellor Hitler attends the impressive parade

commemorating German art over the centuries.

On the 18th of July 1937,

Munich celebrated the opening of the house of German art

designed by Paul Ludwig troost,

one of the Fuhrer's favorite architects.

It was a triumph of swastikas,

floats and virile power.

The parade included a model of the new building.

Hitler had just opened the great exhibition on German art there,

"the art of the people," as he termed it in his speech.

"Majesty and beauty,

purity and wellbeing

to counter the last elements of our cultural decay."

The next day, the 19th,

the exhibition of degenerate art opened in the hofgarten.

And so in Munich, a few hundred metres apart, began the clash

between what was now to be the official art and the art that...

yes, it's no exaggeration to say, that was to be destroyed.

The exhibitions were polar opposites,

as art historian berthold hinz explains.

One featured expressionism, impressionism, surrealism, cubism

the art of the "isms," as the Fuhrer scornfully dismissed it:

Fleeting fashions, deviancy, chaos.

The other was about classical art,

with its reassuring, beautiful, immortal works,

like the paintings of Adolf ziegler,

delegated by Hitler to curate the exhibition.

In no other city were these two extremes so dramatically expressed.

Distortion, expressivity, radical questions, on one hand,

state-endorsed classical beauty, on the other.

Joseph goebbels also appointed Adolf Ziegler

to select the works of the "degenerate" artists,

from Paul Klee to Oskar Kokoschka,

from Otto Dix to El Lissitzky.

In just over two weeks, 650 paintings and sculptures

were commandeered from 32 German museums.

The exhibition would tour to another 12 cities

in Germany and Austria.

It would be seen by an audience of over two million people.

A remarkable success.

Many of the works were hung haphazardly, askew,

some without frames, to make it all look especially ugly and chaotic.

Freedom of expression and the extreme languages of modern art

were presented to the public as a threat to the aesthetic of the reich

and to Hitler's ideology.

That exhibition marked a point of no return.

Some artists were Jewish,

but so, moreover, were many collectors of the avant-garde.

And anti-semitism was at the root of Nazi doctrine.

Teacher and architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg

published a book, "Art and Race",

which depicted human clinical cases alongside modern artworks.

He was trying to create a visual link between

artworks and disease, enfeeblement and racial inferiority.

This text, first published in 1928,

served as a reference for the exhibition on degenerate art.

But the origin of this term is quite ironic.

It was coined in 1892 by a Jewish doctor, Max Nordau.

He had studied modern social phenomena and the decadence of the ruling classes.

He admired lombroso and his theories of physiognomy.

He believed that the artists of his era

had been seduced by the neuroses and madness of the times,

and that their works were the expression of a terrible epidemic

that had led to a degenerate art.

So, the Nazis made the most of this.

And since the new artistic trends were supported,

above all, by the Jewish dealers...

The connection became tragically clear.

The Nazis' love for art

entered the realms of the absurd with the sculptor Rudolf Belling.

His works actually appeared in both the 1937 exhibitions.

His expressionist sculptures the triad and head in brass,

featured in the degenerate exhibition,

the boxeur, a portrait of boxer Max Schmeling, in the German one.

- Max Schmeling.

In may 1936 in New York,

the German boxer Max Schmeling knocked out the American Joe Louis,

nicknamed the "brown bomber."

For the regime, Schmeling became the Aryan symbol to show the world,

in the year when Germany hosted the Olympics in Berlin.

Two years later, when Schmeling returned to America for the rematch,

he was the fighter with the swastika.

Louis knocked him out.

Schmeling was no longer of use to Hitler.

But in 1937, the year of the two exhibitions in Munich,

he was still the lord of the ring.

This is surely also why the Rudolf Belling bust

was allowed to remain in the exhibition.

Indeed, this provides an interesting end to the whole story.

"The Triad" and "Head in Brass" were removed from the degenerate-art exhibition

so that Max Schmeling could stay in the other one.

Schmeling found himself amid the swastikas,

lauded as an Aryan man and portrayed like a Greek god.

This and the next seven editions of the great German art exhibition

were a paean to rustic life, to the old crafts and trades,

to bucolic landscapes, to the family and motherhood.

It was simple rustic painting;

naturally, the mother and child now became a strong theme,

and nudes were painted, incredibly, that verged on the obscene.

This was clearly supposed to encourage mothers to "give"the Fuhrer,

as they put it, many children.

Healthy, handsome, blond children.

Genes to improve the race, in life and in the museums.

Those who failed to meet those standards were to be eliminated

from art and from the world.

But even the most rigid ideology can be prey to contradictions.

Emil nolde, a Nazi party member and diehard anti-semite,

found his expressionist works among the degenerate artists.

Yet Goering would keep collecting his paintings.

The same applied to Max Beckmann.

His art was suppressed,

yet it still hung in the parlors of Berlin's elite,

frequented by the party's leading lights.

In those tumultuous days, many important German Jews

deplored the Nazi party's ingrained anti-semitism...

While valuing the idea of a strong, stable Germany.

They all felt German.

Soon, they would become just Jews.

This is what happened to Fritz and Louise Gutmann,

Simon's grandparents, and his father, Bernard.

The affair would rear its head many years later,

as a huge delivery of boxes came from Germany

to invade his life in the usa.

The boxes arrived at my brother's house in the valley.

And he called me over, said, "you have to come.

All these things have just arrived. What are we going to do with them?"

Simon knew that there was something unspoken in his family.

His father had always been sad and pained.

Now he was dead,

and here in front of him, a mountain of old papers,

letters and exhibition catalogues that had arrived in Los Angeles.

It all revolved around Fritz and Louise Gutmann, his grandparents,

and those all-too-brief years between the wars.

They lived here in the Bosbeek estate, near the hague.

In that endless garden full of centuries-old trees,

Simon's dad and his sister, Lili,

played with a mini Bugatti pedal car

surrounded by all their white terrier dogs.

The Gutmanns were German,

they belonged to a dynasty of bankers.

They had established the Dresdner bank.

The founding father, Eugen, a convert from judaism to catholicism,

had assembled the world's most extraordinary collection

of renaissance gold and silver objects.

Eventually I discovered even the kaiser was jealous

of our renaissance gold and silver collection

he muttered to Bismarck, "this is fit for a prince."

The most priceless items included three bracket clocks

with remarkable, perfectly preserved mechanisms,

now kept in the landesmuseum Wurttemberg, Stuttgart.

They measure the time and the movements of the stars.

They are extraordinary objects,

like this piece where monkeys, stags, lions,

elephants and unicorns listen, spellbound, to the music of orpheus.

The ostrich flaps its wings on the hour,

and the little bear beats the drum, you know like a clock.

After the great war, Fritz Gutmann left Germany

and settled in the Netherlands.

He was entranced by Guardi and Cranach the elder,

Memling and Bosch.

But he also loved modern art.

In Paris, he bought Le Poirier by Renoir in 1928,

Femme se Chauffant by Degas in 1929,

and an another Degas, Paysage, in 1931.

Meanwhile, the family decided

that he would become the trustee of the renaissance collection.

But peace would quickly end.

And, as we have seen with the Goudstikkers,

the Netherlands would fall very soon to the German army.

Fritz and Louise still believed

that the rules of the civilized world applied to the Nazis, too.

They stayed put in Bosbeek.

Then, the visits from Goering's intermediaries began.

There was Walter Hofer again,

with Alois Miedl and Julius Buhler, Jr.

The three of them came to part the Gutmanns

from their gold and silver at knock-down prices.

Fritz agreed to sell some of it in return for a visa to leave the country.

When he went to the bank to deposit the money from the forced sale,

he found his account frozen and no visa in sight.

In march 1941, a new dealer knocked at his door.

Karl Haberstock.

He left with the Memling, Van Goyen,

all sorts of wonderful pieces.

Somebody like Karl Haberstock when was arrested after the war, you know,

quite plainly declared to the American soldiers,

"I didn't do anything wrong. It was just normal business.

I had commissions, I had to find out for my clients."

His clients were the biggest mass murderers in history, but...

Gutmann had seen what was coming

and transferred the administration of the collection to his brother-in-law,

the Italian fascist senator Luca Orsini,

whom his sister had married and moved to Florence with.

He was the official owner, and the Germans didn't dare touch him.

Their retaliation was to declare gold and silver to be state assets,

to be locked in a depository in Munich. Gutmann tried to hold firm.

There were several occasions, where they tried to make him...

Because if he revoked that transfer, the shares would come back to him.

And then it would be a Jewish company again.

And then they could just legally, under Nazi law,

confiscate everything as "abandoned Jewish property."

On the 26th of May 1943,

a black Mercedes with two ss men picked up the Gutmanns from their home.

They promised to take them to Berlin and on to Italy,

where the brother-in-law had negotiated safe passage.

But in the German capital, they were greeted by Goering's henchmen.

Fritz rejected their offers once again.

And that was it.

They were put on a train, bound for the theresienstadt concentration camp.

After another ten months,

and refusing yet again to sign away all their property,

on the 13th of April 1944,

the Gutmanns were told that they would be freed.

It was the final insult.

Fritz ended up at the "small fortress," run directly by the gestapo.

And I found the cell that Fritz was locked up in,

for the last three or four weeks of his life...

And it had no window.

It just had a little hole at the bottom of the door,

where they could slide some stale bread and things.

There was no light.

And from what I can deduce...

The last day of April 1944, the guards drag him out...

And they were quite sadistic.

They drag him through this awful dank corridor,

that follows inside the old castle walls,

which housed all these prison cells.

And he was taken out by this...

They call it the "killing fields,"

and he was strangled.

By one report, he was garroted with a wire,

by the captors, the guards.

And his body was thrown away.

So he doesn't have a proper burial, a grave site.

His wife, my grandmother...

Was also in a cell, but she wasn't in solitary confinement.

I don't know which is worse.

She was crammed into the women's cell in the next section,

where about 40 women were locked in a room half this size.

And they were there for about a month...

Until they were put on a train to Auschwitz,

where she was killed the day she arrived.

They always say that the Nazi past is history,

that we must let it lie.

But once again, the Gurlitt case shows otherwise,

that our present and our future is conditioned by the Nazi past every time.

In 2012,

fifteen hundred works that had vanished without a trace,

reappeared in the Munich apartment of an elderly gentleman...

Cornelius Gurlitt.

He was the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, faithful art dealer to the Fuhrer.

Masterpieces by Rodin, Matisse, Monet, Renoir,

Kandinsky, Klee and Dix came back to life.

It is the greatest rediscovery of recent years.

Now, for the first time, two exhibitions

have put some of the works, now restored, on display.

It is often hard to establish how and when these paintings,

drawings and sculptures

became part of the collection.

It's about the provenance of the works

the history, the biography of an artwork.

Gaps are a risk, of course, especially between 1933 and 1945,

for then you wonder how the work changed hands.

On show at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn

are old-master prints, seascapes and portraits

all genres that are easy to appreciate and to sell.

Here in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn,

we focus on works that could have been stolen. There are suspect cases.

In Bern, the city of bears,

the Kunstmuseum mainly exhibits works on paper.

The works we see here in Bern

were all legally owned by Cornelius Gurlitt.

The German state - the Nazis -

had confiscated them from their own museums.

We are showing them in the context of the Degenerate Art campaign.

The Gurlitt affair has been shrouded in mystery from the outset.

We didn't know his name, we didn't know exactly what he was called,

and we didn't know where he lived, as he wasn't registered anywhere,

in any office, or in any document.

Gurlitt was a person who did not exist in Germany.

He simply wasn't there.

Cornelius Gurlitt ceased to be a ghost

one day in September 2010,

on the Zurich-Munich train.

In a random check,

customs inspectors found 9,000 Euros in 500-euro notes in his pocket.

Suspicions were raised, and his Munich home was searched.

It was dirty and untidy.

Gurlitt had lived alone for years,

kept company by a huge wealth of paintings,

officially lost in the bombing of Dresden in February 1945.

The bavarian authorities decided not to reveal the find.

But focus, a German weekly, found out.

After a year and a half of checks and research,

the paper was ready to break the conspiracy of silence

in November 2013.

They published.

The scoop caused a scandal.

The state was forced to confirm it was true.

The works belonged to him,

and the suspected tax offences could be forgiven.

The state knew it had found a real treasure trove

but couldn't really lay hands on it.

It hoped to reach some kind of deal with Gurlitt.

Gurlitt was to agree to bequeath the paintings to Bavaria after his death.

Various ideas of restitution

had been to restitute the Nazis.

But not their victims.

You know the Germans have done so much to address the wrongs of the past.

But the art is a field that they've really...

It's their achilles heel.

You know they have never quite dealt with it.

The art hoard kept by Cornelius was inherited from his father, Hildebrand,

who, before becoming one of Hitler's dealers,

was an art historian and supporter of the modern painters,

especially the expressionists and the "die bruecke group."

That was enough to lose him his job as a museum director

not once but twice.

A quarter Jewish, he became an accredited mediator with the Nazis

when the racial laws were issued,

thus keeping himself and his family clear of any persecution.

Hildebrand Gurlitt acquired works mainly in France,

and in 1942 he became director of the museum in Linz.

He was stopped and questioned by American soldiers in June 1945.

He said.

"I have never told anyone, in Paris, about what I bought,

because the art business is generally very secretive."

Gurlitt always used a broker in all of his dealings,

to avoid any direct responsibility.

He said.

"In all, I have bought about 200 paintings in France.

My earnings have grown steadily,

with the acquisitions in France,

my income for 1943 reached 200,000 marks."

That is the equivalent of 720,000 Euros today.

But what was interesting was,

that when the Gurlitt collection was found by the allies

after the end of the war, and they interrogated Hildebrand Gurlitt,

and they said to him,

"we've got a 148 paintings we found of yours.

Do you have any others?"

And he said, "No, I had others, but they were bombed and destroyed."

But actually he had another 1,100 up the road,

in the castle belonging to friends of his in Bavaria,

Hildebrand Gurlitt can't have been the only one,

who had 1,100 paintings hidden somewhere else,

and so they didn't exist.

So the size of those collections have not yet been properly established.

Hildebrand continued to work serenely as a dealer

until his death in a road accident in 1956.

The paintings that he hid,

and that would be found at the home of his son, Cornelius,

included femme assise, a masterpiece by Matisse

seized from parisian gallery owner Paul Rosenberg.

In fact femme assise did not even have a stretcher on it.

It was laid flat in a drawer...

Amongst valuable works of art in fruit.

Some were kept in suitcases amidst boxes of rotting food,

in cabinets and cupboards.

It was a horrendous way to live, and a horrible way to store art.

After the scoop in focus, Paul Rosenberg's descendants realized

that the family's Matisse was among the confiscated works.

The legal battle to reclaim it began.

They appointed an American lawyer based in venice, Christopher Marinello,

an expert in recovering stolen artworks.

After protracted negotiations,

he reached an agreement with Cornelius' lawyer.

During that period, a horrible thing happened.

Mr. Gurlitt passed away.

And then, it was a complete disarray.

We discovered of course that there was a will.

He was angry with the German authorities for stopping him on a train,

for seizing his assets, for questioning him,

for disturbing his very bizarre lifestyle.

So he left everything to the Kunstmuseum in Bern.

Femme Assise by Henri Matisse

was one of the ill-starred works exhibited at 21 Rue la Boetie,

where Paul Rosenberg, a sophisticated art dealer and Jewish collector,

had opened his gallery in 1910.

His heirs were among the first

to raise the taboo topic of restitution in the international courts.

Almost 80 years on, his granddaughter Anne Sinclair

succeeded in paying tribute to her grandfather

with an exhibition in Paris, which was named after that street.

There were 70 modern art masterpieces,

from Picasso and Leger to Braque, Matisse and Laurencin.

In the early years of the 20th century,

Rosenberg collected the most innovative painters.

He was friends with Braque, Matisse,

and especially Picasso, whom he called, simply, "pic."

The two were neighbors in Paris,

they talked of pictures, payments and commissions from the kitchen window.

Picasso lived at number 23, Rue la Boetie.

From 1932 until the war,

the only agent to represent him was Rosenberg.

His gallery was furnished like a lounge.

The avant-garde artists on the first floor,

the established masters, romantic painters and impressionists on the second.

Paul loved paintings like people,

he documented their form and genealogy on dedicated index cards,

he had them photographed one by one.

And so they appear today, impressions on old glass plates.

Black and white, dusty and as fragile as memory.

This is the Rosenberg fund,

donated by his heirs to the French culture ministry.

When the Germans entered Paris on the 14th of June 1940,

Paul Rosenberg was fleeing to Spain with his wife and daughter.

On the 17th, they boarded a Polish ship, "the batory", which took them to America.

A few days later, Hitler, accompanied by architect Albert Speer,

and the regime's favorite sculptor, Arno Breker...

Visited the freshly conquered capital like luxury tourists.

Paris was deserted.

La Madeleine...

Place de la Concorde...

Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile.

A view of the Eifel tower.

Professor Speer is to the Fuhrer's left.

France's cultural heritage was already being monitored from 1937.

Paris, for the Nazis the ultimate city of culture and good living,

was the key battleground for art.

The ERR, the Nazi intelligence organization

that appropriated property and led the looting of France,

was run by Alfred Rosenberg - no relation to the parisian gallery owner.

It operated alongside the ss

in all countries occupied by the German army.

It requisitioned books, artwork, and political material.

The texts were used by the institute for study of the Jewish question,

founded by Rosenberg in Frankfurt in 1940.

The aim was to ideologize anti-semitism

and to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race.

There were dozens, hundreds of art historians,

specialists and antiquarians. The finest. This is awful.

Those who worked for the Nazis were the best...

they all worked for the ERR.

up to 2,000 people, in the end.

The paintings now recovered

after being stolen by the ERR from Paul Rosenberg's collection

also include baigneur et baigneuses by Picasso

and Profil Bleu Devant la Cheminee by Matisse.

Everything was seized. Sometimes, the outcome was oddly ironic.

the Rosenberg gallery, for example,

was requisitioned as the Institute for Study of the Jewish Questions.

As you can imagine, it was not an academic

but a racial, racist undertaking.

At 21 Rue la Boetie,

in place of the Matisses and Picassos

appeared the poster promoting the exhibition "Jews and France,"

which opened on the 5th of September 1941 at the Palais Berlitz.

It invited spectators to recognize the physical traits of the "Jewish enemy,"

described as a vampire with a long beard,

fleshy lips, and an aquiline nose,

who was corrupting the French institutions,

and every field of culture.

Meanwhile, Paul Rosenberg had opened a new gallery in New York,

and was working with what would become

the most important contemporary art museum of the 20th century. Moma.

The fact that so many people had to flee Germany, France and Europe,

and so many paintings came to the United States,

definitely influenced the migration of art,

and the center of the modern art market,

and the modern art world from Paris to New York.

In 1942,

Paul Rosenberg had an exhibition in New York on Vincent van Gogh.

It included the portrait of Dr Gachet.

The painting had been confiscated in 1938 at Goering's behest

from the Staedl museum in Frankfurt and sold to a German banker.

The work was resold and came to America in the early 1940s.

The story has been pieced together by Cynthia Saltzman,

a scholar of the Dutch painter.

Many modern-art masterpieces reached America

through auctions in Switzerland, as she explains.

On June 1939, they had the fischer auction...

In Luzern,

that was advertised in art news in the United States.

And Americans had people bidding at the auctions.

The art world was conscious of it,

except for people who I think just wanted not to know.

In lot 49, for example, is a self-portrait by Van Gogh.

The Van Gogh self-portrait that he painted for Gauguin

in October 1888,

it made the highest price there, 175,000 Swiss francs.

The painting is now in Boston, in the fogg art museum at Harvard.

The Nazi occupation

had often unexpected effects on Europe's art heritage.

The walls of a house in the Boston countryside

hang with priceless paintings...

Including a flemish altarpiece...

And 17th-century works by Sebastiano Ricci,

Alessandro Longhi and Alessandro Magnasco.

The owners are Tom Selldorff and his wife.

He is the grandson of Richard Neumann,

a textile industrialist and Jewish collector from Vienna.

Tom proudly shows his pictures of his grandfather,

who fought for the kaiser in World War I,

and was then betrayed by his own country.

When the Nazis annexed Austria...

Neumann left many of his paintings behind and went to Paris.

Then he was able to leave Austria with 38 paintings.

And so those are the paintings, which wound up in the louvre,

and others have just disappeared in the fog of post war.

One reason we were able to recover them,

was that the custom's declaration listed all these paintings.

So they were clearly identified as having belonged to him,

at the time he left Vienna for Paris.

Many of his paintings were channeled via the ERR

to the collections of the future Fuhrer's museum in Linz...

Or to Goering's residence, Carinhall.

A period photo shows the deputy leader of the reich

examining two matisses seized from gallery owner Paul Rosenberg.

Alongside Goering is dealer Walter Andreas Hofer.

Holding the paintings is Bruno Lohse, critic and art dealer.

The photo was taken in 1941 at the Jeu de Paume.

The parisian museum was used to house the sequestered Booty.

Goering often went there to choose the best pieces.

Another dealer, Gustav Rochlitz, told under interrogation

how Goering wanted to buy from him for a staggeringly low price

a portrait by Titian and a still life by Jan Weenix.

Bruno Lohse, Goering's man,

forced Rochlitz to accept an exchange with works of degenerate art.

These are his words.

"You must exchange the pictures. That's what Goering wants,

and when he gives an order, it must be executed,

or you will pay the price."

The err hierarchy regularly sent Hitler

leather-bound albums with photos of the stolen objects...

Many belonging to the French arm of the rothschild family.

They would be submitted at the nuremberg trial

as evidence of what the ERR had done.

These 39 volumes, which are before me,

contain photographs of works of art, secured by the "Einsatzstab,"

and are volumes, which were prepared by members of the Rosenberg Stab.

And I offer them in evidence.

The aisles of the Bergkerk,

the medieval church of Deventer in Holland,

hosted an exhibition of 75 paintings,

that had been earmarked for the Fuhrer's museum

and Goering's collection.

Hitler would receive the 16th- and 17th-century works,

paintings of flemish families and couples,

still lives with animals, books and fruit,

bucolic scenes and Dutch landscapes.

The Reichsmarschall would get the hunting scenes and nudes,

the venuses, the three graces.

Art historian Eva Kleeman and her husband Daaf Ledeboer

curated the exhibition after extensive study of the Dutch art archives.

They realized that while part of the paintings

had been returned to their rightful owners,

many others were still in museums and galleries.

The exhibition also presented thousands of police reports

compiled straight after the war,

including the list of items reported missing by the victims.

Difficult is, when people want to reclaim their own goods,

they had to provide ridiculous proofs.

"Can you prove? Do you have a ticket that you bought it?"

"Do you have a photograph that you can show it on?"

People coming back from the camps.

Ridiculous questionings, but it was done.

The exhibition included Christ and the adulteress by Vermeer.

Goering had yearned for one of his works for years.

He bought it for himself in 1942 through his usual dealers,

Alois Miedl and Walter Hofer.

Unfortunately, it was a forgery.

He was very happy to acquire it.

However, it was forged. It was made by Han Van Meegeren

from the city of deventer, which is where we are now.

He managed to forge it by using a particular technique.

He used bakelite.

He mixed pigments with bakelite, and he baked it off.

And he used an actual 17th century painting,

he stripped the paint off.

There was a lot of craquelure he got by baking it off.

And then he put ink in the crackles.

It was exactly the colors that Vermeer used,

the yellow of Vermeer, the blue of Vermeer.

And to every art historian in Holland, it seemed like this was the real Vermeer.

Van Meegeren was one of the most skillful forgers

of the 20th century.

After the war,

he was accused of collaborating with the Nazis,

and risked the death penalty.

In his defense, he confessed to making the forgery.

The court did not believe him and made him paint a new work,

under close supervision.

Thus he proved that he really had painted the Vermeer

that had fooled Goering.

He got away with a minor conviction,

and for duping the Nazis,

he even became a national hero.

Goering sold many of his works

to amass more than 1.5 million guilders of that period,

and to buy this forgery.

And before he died, he was told that it was a forgery.

So he was quite unhappy, of course, at that point.

Many of the paintings in the exhibitions in Paris,

Bern, Bonn and deventer...

Have an often difficult and painful restitution story to tell.

Tracing an artwork entails identifying it,

discovering whose hands it has passed through,

whether the title or artist's name has been changed to cover its tracks,

and whether it is in a museum or about to be auctioned off.

With museums, there is a balance to be struck

between public interest and personal claims.

As Anne Webber well knows, she and her staff in London

have been on the trail of missing artwork since the early 1990s.

Often they say that these works of art

are better in public collections than in private collection,

I think obviously there's a point that museums are there to keep,

to look after the art, not to give it away, but,

museums are also repositories of our values,

of our values of societies.

And our societies don't believe in theft,

and theft when it is associated with murder as this was.

In Paris, Elizabeth royer, an art expert and gallery owner,

began investigating the provenance of the missing works in the mid 1990s.

Some say it's only about money. It's not.

Some heirs do it for the money, but most don't.

A young woman came to see me.

She told me her family had been robbed

with the Mobel Aktion (the Furniture campaign),

there were very few artworks.

three paintings and a drawing, nothing very important.

But her father had spent his whole life and everything he had

in the hope of seeing one of them again.

Many stories have not been heard.

Many people have preferred to forget

to resume their lives,

almost to blank out the horrors and wrongs of the past.

For over 80 years, Edgar Feuchtwanger,

whom we met at the start of this story,

never spoke of the man who lived in the block opposite in Munich.

When Hitler became leader of the third reich in 1933,

Edgar's desk mate at school stopped speaking to him, because he was a Jew.

In the evening,

his mother signed his homework in his exercise books, red-eyed.

I was told, "Do what the teacher tells you."

And she straight away put out all this Nazi stuff.

This is the most striking picture.

Normally, on labor day.

This was labor day, 1933.

One would have hammer and sickle...

And here we have hammer and swastika.

And I used to draw it with my own hand.

I was told to do what my teacher told me, so I did.

In November 1938, the gestapo knocked on the Feuchtwangers' door.

Furniture and books were seized. His father was taken to Dachau.

Edgar played the piano with the soft pedal every afternoon after school,

until his father returned home a month later,

in a sorry state, but alive.

The Feuchtwangers soon sent Edgar away, before joining him in England.

Rarely in the history of our people has there been a time of peace

so fervent as these 5 and a half years,

which from that memorable day of 30 January 1933

have inaugurated the era

of National Socialist government for our people.

Hitler, Edgar's neighbor...

Opened the first three great German art exhibitions,

held every year from 1937 to 1944, with a speech.

He waxed lyrical about the Aryan art "of the sublime and the beautiful,

a vehicle of the natural and the healthy."

He declared war on the artists guilty of the country's cultural disintegration

and railed against cultural bolshevism and the Jewish dealers.

The cultural programme of the new Reich

is of a magnificence without precedent in our history.

Many in the art world followed him.

Historians, intellectuals and academics made a pact with the devil

and opted to serve the Nazi regime and the great looting of Europe.

All the art dealers whom we have mentioned in this story,

returned after the war to resume their former profession,

as if nothing had happened.

Timothy Garton Ash has made an extensive study

of how people act in a dictatorship.

I did not find a single, truly evil person.

I found people like you and me,

weak human, all too human.

But I found a big evil.

So it's a way in which an evil regime

can exploit and manipulate all our weaknesses,

to build what was essentially a kind of orwellian regime.

The head of the labor movement of the Nazis said,

"the only time when someone is a private individual,

is when they are asleep."

So a Mark of a totalitarian regime is. Every area of life,

every area of art has to be controlled because they're all dangerous.

And they are.

Art is often a key...

A trojan horse...

A brush that helps to portray and to erase dictatorships.

Its power is immense yet contradictory.

Art can be a means and an end...

It can Redeem and Condemn.

Be a tool of subversion and a vehicle for consensus,

an expression of freedom and the face of totalitarianism.

In Nazi-despoiled Europe...

Many Jewish families saved themselves

by selling their entire collections for an exit visa that meant staying alive.

Millions of others were exterminated in the concentration camps.

One day, while all this was happening,

a gestapo official was visiting Picasso's studio in Paris.

The painter told the story

on the 24th of march 1945 to journalist Simone tery.

On the table was a postcard of his painting, Guernica.

The officer asked, "did you do this, maestro?"

"No," replied Picasso,

"this is your work."

Later in the interview, he said to tery,

"what do you think an artist is?

An imbecile who has only his eyes if he's a painter,

or ears if he's a musician, or if he's a boxer, just his muscles?

An artist is a political being, alive to the heart-breaking,

passionate or happy events of the world.

How can one be indifferent to other people?

Painting is not done to decorate apartments.

It is an instrument of war for attack and defense

against the enemy."