Cracking the case of the Nazis' stolen art

The discovery of a huge cache of plundered paintings in a flat in Munich brings hope that the thousands of treasures looted in the war may not be lost for ever By Martin Gayford "During a war", Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering informed his interrogators at Nuremberg, "everybody loots a little bit". It was a statement so preposterously self-serving as to be darkly comic.

Goering had profited from perhaps the greatest organised art theft in modern history, one that continued for years and was supervised by an agency of the German state, and removed colossal quantities of paintings, sculptures and other items from occupied Europe (26,000 railway wagons of it from France alone). Yet more was snatched from museums and collections in Germany itself. A significant quantity of this lost art may just have come back into view.

Last week, German investigators revealed that more than 1,400 works had been discovered last year, hidden in a Munich apartment. Obscurity still clouds this astonishing discovery, which, in total, has been tentatively valued at more than pounds 1 billion.

Although some spectacular examples have been listed - by Matisse, Picasso, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann among others - it is still unclear just what was squirreled away in that flat, or where it originally came from. What is obvious, however, is that almost 70 years after the end of the Second World War, the artistic consequences of Nazi looting are still with us. Some of what was presumed lost forever may now be recovered, and it seems there is even more still to be restored to its owners - or their heirs - than previously thought.

This Aladdin's cave of art was found last year in the flat of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of an art dealer, Hildebrand Gurlitt, who assisted Josef Goebbels in selling off work seized as "degenerate" from collectors, dealers and museums. The facts about the ownership of the art in Herr Gurlitt's apartment are not yet resolved, but it seems likely that Hildebrand Gurlitt kept a portion of the loot that passed through his hands.

It is being claimed that some of the works were plundered from a prominent Jewish art dealer, Alfred Flechtheim. Nazi art thefts were linked to a genuine, though malign, interest in the subject - even, on the part of several prominent party leaders, an obsession. Hitler, himself a failed artist of phenomenally meagre talent, was an avid art enthusiast.

On a three-hour visit to the Uffizi in 1938, he reduced Mussolini - who was obliged to accompany him - to an exasperated muttering of "Tutti questi quadri!" ("All these pictures!"). Both he and - apparently - Goering intended to found great museums with their ill-gotten masterpieces.

Hitler planned a magnificent Fuhrermuseum in his home town of Linz. Among other sensational items of loot, he intended Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece, Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna and two of Vermeer's greatest paintings for this collection.

As is grippingly narrated in Robert Edsel's book, Monuments Men - a film of which will be released next year, starring George Clooney - all of these and thousands more works were discovered after the war in an Austrian salt mine. They narrowly escaped total destruction at the hands of a fanatical local gauleiter. When it came to old masters and antiques, the Nazi approach was straightforwardly acquisitive.

In the case of modern art, it was more complicated. In the early Thirties, there was an internal Nazi debate on the subject, with one group led by Alfred Rosenberg, the party's ideologue on racial matters, denouncing all modernism as "degenerate". But another, led by the Berlin League of National Socialist Students argued that Expressionism had "Nordic roots" and was an integral part of the Nazi revolution.

In the end, Hitler came down on the anti-modern side. As a result, more than 15,000 works were confiscated from German museums, over 1,000 from Hamburg alone. Among these were truly great works by such artists as Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and Chagall.

In July 1937 an exhibition of Entartete Kunst - Degenerate Art - opened in Munich, then went on tour round Germany. Its purpose was to hold Modernist art up to vilification, deliberately jumbled together in galleries under such categories as "Destruction of the Last Vestige of Race Consciousness" and "Complete Madness".

This was to be, by the blackest of ironies, one of the most successful art shows of all time. Over two and a half million visitors saw it in Munich alone, wallowing in the opportunity to denigrate and ridicule. The Nazi attack on modern art is reminiscent of the witch craze of the 17th century.

Chagall's painting The Rabbi was paraded through the streets of Mannheim, where it had been in the Museum's collection, with a photograph of the director on its back together with how much he had paid for it. In a speech, Hitler advanced the menacing argument that degenerate artists were either suffering from eye disease - in which case something should be done to stop this hereditary problem being passed on - or they were deliberately deceiving the public, which evidently was a criminal matter.

Such painters were forbidden even to buy art materials; a whiff of turpentine in their studio might render them liable to arrest by the Gestapo. Nonetheless, not everyone in the Nazi power structure dutifully hated modern art. Some of the "Entartete Kunst" was eventually auctioned off in Switzerland; powerful figures such as Goering took what they wanted of the rest.

The residue - including at least a thousand oil paintings - was apparently burnt in the yard of the Berlin Fire Brigade in 1939. Doubts have been expressed, however, as to whether this really happened. A great deal of "degenerate art" may simply have vanished, some objects, perhaps, to turn up in that apartment in Munich.

Though spectacular, this is not the only example of art reappearing many decades after the war. In March 2007, a man named Bruno Lohse died aged 95. Afterwards, in a safe-deposit box of his in Zurich, three paintings were discovered.

One, a Pissarro, had been stolen by the Gestapo in Paris in 1938. Before his death, another 14 pictures - their identity unknown - had been removed from the box. Lohse had been in an ideal position to grab plundered art for himself.

During the war, he acted as Goering's representative at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, used as a clearing house for stolen treasures by the ERR or Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a taskforce headed Alfred Rosenberg and dedicated to grabbing cultural valuables. On one occasion, a French curator saw Lohse secreting four paintings in his car.

There were many opportunities for others to do the same, particularly in the chaos of the war. It was at that point that one of the most spectacular works still on the missing list was last seen. Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man (1513-14) was one of the great masterpieces of the Czartoryski collection in Krakow, along with Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine.

Both were seized, with much else, to form part of the Fuhrermuseum. Towards the end of the war, Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland, was allowed to have the Czartoryski pictures to decorate his residence at Wawel Castle, in Krakow. He fled back to Germany as the Russian army approached, taking the art with him. When he was arrested by the Americans in Bavaria in May 1945, Frank had the Leonardo - but not the Raphael, which has never been seen since.

It is possible, however, to guess what might have happened, Nazi bigwigs evidently regarded stolen art as a useful hedge in case of hard times. Goering indignantly described a small Memling Madonna taken from the Rothschild collection as part of his wife's "nest-egg".

In August 2012 a representative of the Polish Foreign Ministry told the Art Newspaper that they knew through "a reliable source" that the Raphael was in a bank vault in "a certain country". It was not known, however, exactly where it was. There seems some possibility, then, that the world will once again see what looks from photographs to have been one of Raphael's finest portraits.

There are glimmers of hope for a long list of works in the category "lost or destroyed". One which I personally would dearly love to see is Van Gogh's The Lovers, which Vincent produced during a fury of creativity in Arles in October 1888.

This, too, passed through the hands of Alfred Flechtheim before being confiscated from the Berlin National Gallery as "degenerate" in 1937. Another superb Van Gogh, Trees with Ivy, was last photographed being inspected by Goering at the Jeu de Paume in 1940-1, his fingers caressing the paint surface proprietarily. Both of these masterpieces - and many more - disappeared, but might, just might, return to view from some bank or hiding place. This week the chances of that happening suddenly seem a little better.