All language subtitles for Imagine 2014 The Art That Hitler Hated 2of2 720p HDTV

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.