Making a Killing (2000)

Directed by Anne Webber, Chair of the European Commission on Looted Art, this documentary is a compelling detective story about one family's 50-year quest to recover their missing art collection set against a backdrop of murder, greed, and corruption. In 1943, Friedrich and Louise Gutmann, members of a prominent German-Jewish banking family living in Holland, refused to sign over their valuable collection to the Nazis. The Gutmanns were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where they were interrogated and murdered. In Holland, their house was stripped bare. After the war, the Gutmanns' children, Lili and Bernard, searched unsuccessfully for their family's stolen art. In 1994, Bernard's sons took up the mission, joined by "art hunter" Willi Korte. The story culminates in the discovery of a stolen Degas painting and the controversial legal battle to reclaim it, revealing the international art world's complicity in dealing with the Nazi plunder.