1bn euros worth cache of 'looted art' by Nazis found at art dealer's home in Germany

A cache of looted paintings by the Nazis before the World War II has been reportedly found at an 80-year-old art dealer's home and has been estimated to be worth whopping one billion euros.

The 'lost art' includes some 1,500 works by world-renowned artists including Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and Klee.

According to the Independent, Bavarian customs police discovered the art treasure from the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of pre-war art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt and had hoarded the paintings in his Munich apartment for over half a century.

The expensive art lay in the apartment which appeared to be an abandoned mess, where some of Picasso's works were wedged between cans.

Germany's Focus magazine stated that the authorities had in fact seized the works in 2011 but their existence had not been revealed until now.

The magazine revealed that the paintings were categorised as 'degenerate art' by the Nazis, who either confiscated them or stole them from Jewish art collectors and the customs raid had to be clandestine to retrieve them.

The report said that one of the stolen works was reported to be a Matisse painting previously owned by the Paris art collector Paul Rosenberg and his granddaughter, Anne Sinclair, the French TV journalist and ex-wife of the disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss Kahn, has campaigned for years for the return of looted Nazi art.

The Munich art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt was said to have bought the paintings at what would have been knock-down prices after the Nazis came to power in 1933 and his son Cornelius, subsequently kept the works in his home, the report added.