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A random 2010 check on a train from Switzerland to Munich first got police interested in Cornelius Gurlitt, in whose attic a recent raid uncovered 1,500 works of art previously assumed lost after the Nazis confiscated them as “degenerate.” The collection, which includes works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, has been valued at more than a billion dollars. But Gurlitt, who inherited them from his father, simply put them in storage: “The artworks are thought to have been stored amid juice cartons and tins of food on homemade shelves in a darkened room.”
