The Degenerate Art exhibition, Munich 1937

Visitors crowd in under the banner Ausstellung 'Entartete Kunst' and through narrow rooms, past the Dada wall, Gies's crucifix, Beckmann, Kirchner, Mondrian and Nolde, each work labelled with its museum price.

Outside, a long banner on the rough stone wall announces Ausstellung 'Entartete Kunst' Eintritt frei while people walk in and out and cars pass. Inside, visitors look up at Ludwig Gies's gaunt carved crucifix and push through narrow galleries hung frame to frame: men with hands clasped behind their backs, women in summer hats, a man in uniform and peaked cap among them. A wall carries the words Nehmen Sie Dada ernst! es lohnt sich, signed George Grosz. Otto Freundlich's blocky plaster head rests under the label KOPF, Max Beckmann's Der Strand hangs near the expressionists of Room 4, and people stand silent before a painting of decorated, mutilated war veterans. Labels give the prices museums had paid: Mondrian's Komposition, Landesmuseum Hannover, RM 420; Nolde's Christus und die Sünderin, Nationalgalerie Berlin 1929, M 25000, below the slogan Sie hatten vier Jahre Zeit.

The show opened on 19 July 1937 in the gallery building by the Hofgarten, a day after Hitler inaugurated the nearby House of German Art. On Goebbels' orders Adolf Ziegler had stripped German museums of modern works; hung crookedly beside sneering slogans, they drew more than two million visitors in Munich, more than any exhibition of modern art before it.