Entartete Kunst — the Degenerate Art Exhibition

The Nazi regime hung 650 confiscated modernist works, Kirchner, Nolde, Marc, Beckmann, Chagall among them, crowded and mock-labelled, as an exhibition of 'degenerate art'. More than two million people filed through, making it the most-visited modern art exhibition ever staged, as an act of destruction.

German museums were stripped of modern art; artists were banned, exiled or driven to despair, and the exhibition became the permanent emblem of state war on art.