The discovery, when it was made, came entirely by chance. On September 22, 2010, a stooped, white-haired man in his late 70s taking an evening train from Zurich to Munich was asked by customs officers why he was crossing the Swiss border. The gentleman, Cornelius Gurlitt, responded with such nervousness that he triggered the officers’ suspicions. When they searched his person, they found an envelope he was carrying that contained 18 brand-new 500-Euro notes—9,000 Euros in total.
The cash itself wasn’t a crime; Gurlitt had reportedly visited Switzerland to sell a picture to a gallery in Bern. But the strangeness of the situation led to further investigation of Gurlitt’s finances, and a search warrant for his Munich apartment that in February 2012 uncovered one of the most extraordinary stashes of art since the end of World War II. Inside a small flat in a boxy white building, hidden in filing cabinets and suitcases, investigators found more than 1,500 works by artists including Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Liebermann, Chagall, Durer, and Delacroix. The German authorities were investigating Gurlitt for tax evasion; what they found instead was an amassment of art that was immediately, incontrovertibly suspicious.
In the decade leading up to 1945, it’s estimated that the Nazis stole one-fifth of all the artworks in Europe. The scale of such theft is hard to comprehend, and even harder to quantify. The figure usually touted is 650,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, books, and other works, taken from museums and churches and private collections across the continent. But smaller numbers also offer some sense of the absurdity of the plundering. In 1938, as Susan Ronald writes in her book Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures, a warehouse on Köpenikerstrasse in Berlin was filled with so many items (more than 12,000) stolen from Germany and newly invaded Austria that it qualified by default as one of Germany’s largest museums.
For more read the full of article at The Atlantic
