Hildebrand Gurlitt

Hildebrand Gurlitt was a Nazi German art historian, art gallery director and subsequently, Nazi-associated art dealer, and war profiteer, who traded in "degenerate art" during the Nazi era, and purchased paintings in Nazi-occupied France, many of them stolen from their original owners, for Hitler's planned Führermuseum and for himself. He also inherited family artworks from both his father and his sister, an accomplished artist in her own right. Following World War II and the denazification process he became Director of the Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, until his death in a car accident at the age of 61. His personal collection of over 1,500 items, including works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Eugène Delacroix, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Franz Marc, Marc Chagall, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Rodin, Otto Dix, Edvard Munch, Gustave Courbet, Max Liebermann, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, among many others, remained virtually unknown until it was brought to public attention in 2013 following its confiscation from the possession of his son, Cornelius Gurlitt, who, although never reunited with the collection, bequeathed it upon his death in 2014 to the Museum of Fine Arts Bern in Switzerland.