Huge hide of Nazi art plunder found

[Magda Hassan]

According to the BBC news the father mentioned in the below article was part of a Nazi art dealer network centred in Bavaria and was personally engaged in the looting of art during the war.


The BBC expert who was interviewed adds that there are some additional important questions to be answered, including the fact that this horde was discovered two and a half years ago, but has been kept quiet by Bavarian authorities. The latter also haven't returned the art to respective owners who have been searching for it for 75 years.


All told there were 1500 paintings in the horde at a value of 1 billion euros.

Wow! Huge amount!

The works, which would originally have been confiscated as "degenerate art" by the Nazis or taken from Jewish collectors in the 1930s and 1940s, had made their way into the hands of a German art collector, Hildebrand Gurlitt.

The Nazis were perfectly aware of their value then and would not just confiscate them but sell them, mostly overseas, and keep the money.

Gurlitt, who had not previously been on the radar of the police, attracted the attention of the customs authorities only after a random cash check during a train journey from Switzerland to Munich in 2010, according to Focus.

What do they mean by a random cash check? Did his cash cheque bounce? Were they seeing how much cash every one had on the train? And why would that matter anyway? Confused...

Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had been a museum director in Zwickau until Hitler came to power, lost his post because he was half Jewish, but was later commissioned by the Nazis to sell works abroad. The discovered loot may show that Gurlitt in fact collected many of the artworks himself and managed to keep them throughout the war.
After the war, allied troops designated Gurlitt a victim of Nazi crimes. He reportedly said he had helped many Jewish Germans to fund their flight into exile, and that his entire art collection had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.

Clearly, money is color blind for some Nazis. He probably did help a few families but I think he charged a very high rate. I wonder if he claimed insurance for the loss of them in the bombing?