Hildebrand Gurlitt
German art dealer authorized by Third Reich to sell looted art, historian
Hildebrand Gurlitt (15 September 1895 – 9 November 1956) was a German art historian and art gallery director who dealt in Nazi-looted art as one of Hitler's and Goering's four authorized dealers for "degenerate art".
A Nazi-associated art dealer and war profiteer, during the Nazi era Gurlitt traded in "degenerate art", purchasing paintings in Nazi-occupied France, many of them stolen, for Hitler's planned Führermuseum (which was never built) 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 artworks by Impressionist, Cubist, and Expressionist artists and Old Masters, 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.
Early life
Gurlitt was born into an artistic family in Dresden in 1895. His father Cornelius Gurlitt (senior) was an architect and art historian, his brother Willibald a musicologist, his sister Cornelia a painter, and his cousin Wolfgang was an art dealer as well. His grandmother Elisabeth Gurlitt was Jewish, which would prove problematic under Nazi rule: he was considered a "quarter-Jew" under the Nuremberg laws. After completing his schooling, he showed an interest in art history and registered to study this subject at the Dresden Technical School, where his father was Chancellor; however, in 1914 World War I commenced and both Hildebrand and his elder brother Wilibald volunteered to join the German army of the day. Hildebrand served and was wounded at both the Somme and in Champagne, and later served as an army press officer in Vilnius and Kaunas in Lithuania, where he remained until 1919.
“Hildebrand Gurlitt” enters the record as german art dealer authorized by Third Reich to sell looted art, historian. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hildebrand, Gurlitt and German can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15126735. VIAF identifies the subject as 59848458. The Library of Congress control number is no2002000447. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1956, 2013 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hildebrand Gurlitt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.