14. Paintings worth over $1 billion dollars were discovered in 2013
During the Nazi regime, artwork which the party deemed to be depictions of immorality were banned. The prohibition of “degenerate” art gave Nazi officials an excuse to seize paintings, purportedly to destroy them, but in reality to horde them for a day when their value could be exploited. Hildebrand Gurlitt was a minor Nazi official in Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry who built an extensive collection of such works, as well as those simply seized from Jewish families and facilities. Among them were paintings by Chagall, Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Nearly all of the paintings had long been believed to have been destroyed by Allied bombing when they were discovered by German police in early 2012. There were more than 1,200 paintings in the cache.
When Hildebrand died the paintings which he had collected were taken by his son, who kept them hidden in his Munich apartment. The paintings were not on display, but secreted in a backroom of the apartment, which had evidently been used as a storeroom. German police arrested the son, Cornelius Hildebrand, after he was acting suspiciously on a train and under interrogation the hidden artwork was revealed. Since seizing the paintings the German authorities have attempted to identify their rightful owners, in order to ensure the more than $1 billion worth of irreplaceable artwork is returned. Cornelius Hildebrand died in 2014, after telling the German magazine Der Spiegel of his desire to resolve the case so that he could get the paintings back, which he believed to be rightfully his own.
