Strike brings Greece to a halt

6 November 2013 Last updated at 15:43 GMT How is Greece faring under its international obligations?

Workers in Greece are holding a 24-hour general strike over continuing cuts as international lenders decide whether to unlock further bailout money.

Flights and other transport are being disrupted by action in both the public and private sectors, and schools and hospitals are also affected.

But torrential rain in Athens has limited public protests, with both main unions cancelling their rallies.

Greece has held more than 30 general strikes since early 2010.

Unemployment stands at nearly 28% after massive public sector cuts and tax rises to reduce its fiscal deficit.

Greece has been granted two bailouts totalling about 240bn euros (£202bn; $323bn) to help cover holes in its financing, and there is speculation it will need a third package of at least 11bn euros next year.

Ferries remained moored in the port of Piraeus, near Athens. Suburban railway stations shut down. Trade union posters urged support for the strike in Athens. There were angry scenes in front of the finance ministry on Tuesday when troika auditors visited.

At issue just now is the latest instalment from the second bailout, worth 1bn euros. The payment must be approved by the troika of lenders: the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The troika says there is a budget gap of 2.5bn euros for next year that may require more austerity but the government argues the country cannot take any more.

Greece has predicted that it will emerge from its six-year long recession next year, in a sign it may be finally recovering from its debt crisis.

However, recovery for Europe's sick man remains a slow and painful process that could yet take years to achieve, the BBC's Mark Lowen reports from Athens.

Two separate protest marches to parliament in Athens were called off due to bad weather.

But smaller groups of mainly Communist Party supporters still braved the driving rain, according to reports.

Meanwhile thousands of people marched in Greece's second city Thessaloniki.

Ferry, rail and some air services are still being disrupted by Wednesday's action. Air traffic controllers have stopped work for several hours.

"Workers, pensioners and the unemployed are going through an endless nightmare," port workers said in a statement.

"The government and the troika are destroying this country."

The public sector union Adedy said in a statement: "United we can stop them, we can topple them."

When troika auditors arrived at the finance ministry in Athens on Tuesday, a protester flung coins at its leader, Poul Thomsen. The attacker was arrested but reportedly later released.

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The unfinished art business of World War Two

4 November 2013 Last updated at 19:36 GMT By Godfrey Barker Art market expert and journalist Manet's Wintergarden - stolen by the Nazis - was found by US troops in 1945, hidden in a salt mine The astonishing find in a Munich flat of 1,500 paintings missing since 1939 points to two art crimes.

The first is Adolf Hitler's crusade to fill his Fuehrermuseum at Linz, Austria, with the supreme paintings of the world - looted, confiscated and purchased by the Nazis in the occupied countries of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia.

The second is the crime of covering up the truth ever since.

Cornelius Gurlitt, 80, whose hoard of paintings in Munich was allegedly hidden behind a wall of ancient cans of food, has kept his secrets for 68 years.

What they tell us about Hitler is more important than what they reveal about Gurlitt.

His pictures descend from his father, Hildebrand, one of four senior Modern Art dealers in Germany who were appointed in March 1938 to the Nazis' Confiscation Committee - with orders from Hitler and Herrmann Goering to sell "degenerate art" (entartete Kunst) for foreign currency.

Hildebrand Gurlitt, Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Moeller and Bernhard Boehmer set up shop in Schloss Niederschonhausen, just outside Berlin, to sell the near-16,000 cache of paintings and sculptures which Hitler and Goering removed from the walls of German museums in 1937-38.

They were first put on display in the Haus der Kunst in Munich on 19 July 1937, with the Nazi leaders inviting public mockery by two million visitors.

Propagandist Joseph Goebbels in a radio broadcast called Germany's degenerate artists "garbage".

Hitler opened the Haus der Kunst exhibition with a speech, at the end of which saliva fell out of his mouth in rage. In it he described German art as suffering "a great and fatal illness".

The Nazis put modern art deemed "degenerate" on show in Berlin in 1938

Hildebrand Gurlitt and his colleagues did not have much success with their sales, mainly because art labelled "rubbish" had small appeal.

So on 20 March 1939 they set fire to 1,004 paintings and sculptures and 3,825 watercolours, drawings and prints in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Department.

The propaganda act raised the attention they hoped. The Basel Museum in Switzerland arrived with 50,000 Swiss francs to spend. Shocked art lovers came to buy.

What is unknown after these sales is how many paintings were kept by Gurlitt, Buchholz, Moeller and Boehmer and sold by them to Switzerland and America - ships crossed the Atlantic from Lisbon - for personal gain.

Shady business

Gurlitt was arrested by the Allies near Bamberg in 1945, hiding in the castle of Baron von Pollnitz. He turned down an offer from the baron to hide his art collection in a new secret place. Or so he let a writer know.

What we now know is that he did successfully hide more than 1,000 paintings - or his teenage son did.

It is possible they were cached in France. Gurlitt's chief job on the Confiscation Committee was to work in Paris during the war, where he lived from 1941 to 1945 in the Hotel de Jersey.

He had two ways of collecting for Hitler's Fuehrermuseum. One was to visit abandoned Jewish homes and remove their artworks; his licence was a Nazi law declaring that French nationals who had fled had lost French citizenship.

The other was to spend Reichsmarks at the Drouot auction house in Paris, where distress sales were big business.

Gurlitt was no small buyer. He paid more than one million French francs for the four most expensive paintings in the highest-value Paris sale of the war - the Georges Viau Impressionists auctioned by Etienne Ader between 11 and 14 December 1942, which fetched £922,000 in wartime values.

The sale's top price of 5m francs was paid by Gurlitt for Cezanne's Vallee de l'Arc et Mont Sainte Victoire. It demonstrated Nazi purchasing power. Unfortunately the tiny painting, for which Gurlitt gave 94 times the then record for a Cezanne, proved to be a fake.

French connection?

So what was stored in his son's Munich flat? It is highly likely that pictures acquired in France are foremost and it is French families who will emerge to make claims for them.

But there must also be German museum confiscations of Picasso and Matisse and paintings taken from Jewish owners in both Germany and Austria.

In 1945 US forces used a church in Ellingen to store some Nazi-looted art

Gurlitt would have intimately known their value. The top price for Matisse reached £2,600 at auction in 1941, that for Picasso was £880 (paid for a Blue Period Blind Man by the Toledo Museum in Ohio). Gurlitt did not set fire to these nor hand them over. He kept them for himself.

Art is the last unfinished business of World War Two. Though the Allies uncovered large numbers of stolen paintings in 1945 in the Alt Aussee salt mines near Salzburg, and in a castle south of Munich, an unknown number have been lost forever. Russia holds more than 120,000 wartime art objects in three museums round Moscow.

In many cases, the quality of vanished art was the highest. An important Raphael - Portrait of A Young Man - taken from Catholic owners in Poland heads a list of missing art which amounts to a small National Gallery: paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt to the fore.

Five years ago Austria revealed the existence of more than 10,000 paintings and sculptures, hidden since 1945 in monasteries along the Danube and in state institutions.

Continue reading the main story

In 1937, the Nazis staged an exhibition to ridicule modern art - it went on to be one of the best attended modern art exhibitions of all time.

Their Jewish owners had not been traced; how hard the Austrian government had tried to trace them was not made clear.

An Austrian list exists on the internet for descendants of the original owners to come forward - if, that is, they can prove the ownership of Jews in concentration camps, or who fled in panic without documents or photographs as Nazi forces approached.

London dealers close to the "restitution" business predict that 100 to 150 paintings will come off the walls of German museums in the next 25 years and be restored to the families of their original owners.

As paintings washed around Europe in the 1950s without clear ownership, German museums whose collections of the 20th Century had been wiped out by Hitler bought what they could, at cheap prices, without asking too many questions.

The past now catches up with the present. Lawyers in Vienna and Berlin now offer "no win no fee" deals to the descendants of concentration camp victims.

The Nazis and their art collecting will continue to make headlines.

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VIDEO: Dutch call for Greenpeace release

Lawyers representing the Dutch government have appeared in court in Germany, to ask judges to order Russia to release the crew of the Greenpeace vessel, the Arctic Sunrise.

The crew are being held in a Russian jail, after they protested over the presence of an oil rig in the Arctic.

The Dutch government intervened because the ship was sailing under a Dutch flag.

Anna Holligan reports.

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VIDEO: European Commission

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VIDEO: 'Few believe worst behind Greece'

In Greece civil servants are set to walk out on a 24-hour strike.

Those taking part include air traffic controllers, hospital workers and teachers. Their action comes as international lenders are in town to see if it qualifies for the next tranche of bailout money.

Mark Lowen takes a look at how Greece has fared so far under the international obligations.

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VIDEO: French farmers angry at 'eco-tax'

Farmers in Brittany have joined growing protests against President Hollande's plan to restore public finances by raising taxes.

The farmers are unhappy about a "green tax" on the heavy goods vehicles used to transport their produce from farm to buyer.

Over successive weekends the protests have led to violence, with signs that the unrest is spreading further across France.

Christian Fraser reports from Brittany.

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VIDEO: Media scrum at Bolshoi attack trial

The artistic director of Russia's Bolshoi ballet fought his way through a media scrum to testify during the trial of a dancer accused of ordering an acid attack.

Sergei Filin, who suffered severe burns to his face and damage to his sight, spoke of the "terrifying pain" he experienced following the January assault.

Pavel Dmitrichenko has denied arranging the attack, in a case that revealed bitter infighting at the Bolshoi.

Steve Rosenberg reports.

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VIDEO: Olympic torch ready for space trip

On Thursday a torch for the Sochi Winter Olympics is due to blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on board a Soyuz rocket.

Three cosmonauts are taking it to the International Space Station where - carefully tethered in case it is lost - it will become the first Olympic torch to go on a spacewalk.

It is all part of the elaborate preparations for Russia's first Olympics since the Soviet era.

Moscow Correspondent Daniel Sandford is in Baikonur for the launch and has been watching the preparations.

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VIDEO: Rain pours as Greeks stage strike

Workers in Greece are holding a 24-hour general strike over continuing cuts, as international lenders decide whether to unlock further bailout money.

Flights and other transport have been disrupted by action in both the public and private sectors, and schools and hospitals have also been affected.

But torrential rain in Athens limited public protests, as the BBC's Mark Lowen explained.

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VIDEO: The mystery of Berlin's pink pipes

Anyone visiting Berlin is likely to notice the giant pink pipes that snake through the city for miles on end.

The brightly coloured tubes form elaborate shapes as they make their way through the German capital, many of them above head height.

But what are they and why are they there?

Our correspondent Stephen Evans followed one of the pipes to its source to find out.

The Close-up series focuses on aspects of life in countries and cities around the world. What may seem ordinary and familiar to the people who live there can be surprising to those who do not.

Video journalist: Suraj Patel

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VIDEO: Venice to limit cruise ship size

The size and number of cruise ships passing through Venice will be limited from the start of 2014, the Italian government has said.

From January 2014, the number of cruise ships allowed through Venice will be cut by 20%, and from November 2014 ships of more than 96,000 tonnes will be banned from its centre.

Catharina Moh reports.

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Why Hitler put 'degenerate' art on show

6 November 2013 Last updated at 10:15 GMT By Lucy Burns BBC World Service This week it was revealed that a huge stash of modern art had been found in a flat in Munich. Many of the paintings were considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, who staged an exhibition especially to ridicule them. Why did Hitler hate abstract art so much?

In July 1937, four years after it came to power, the Nazi party put on two art exhibitions in Munich.

The Great German Art Exhibition was designed to show works that Hitler approved of - depicting statuesque blonde nudes along with idealised soldiers and landscapes.

The second exhibition, just down the road, showed the other side of German art - modern, abstract, non-representational - or as the Nazis saw it, "degenerate".

The Degenerate Art Exhibition included works by some of the great international names - Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky - along with famous German artists of the time such Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde and Georg Grosz.

The exhibition handbook explained that the aim of the show was to "reveal the philosophical, political, racial and moral goals and intentions behind this movement, and the driving forces of corruption which follow them".

Works were included "if they were abstract or expressionistic, but also in certain cases if the work was by a Jewish artist," says Jonathan Petropoulos, professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College and author of several books on art and politics in the Third Reich.

He says the exhibition was laid out with the deliberate intention of encouraging a negative reaction. "The pictures were hung askew, there was graffiti on the walls, which insulted the art and the artists, and made claims that made this art seem outlandish, ridiculous."

British artist Robert Medley went to see the show. "It was enormously crowded and all the pictures hung like some kind of provincial auction room where the things had been simply slapped up on the wall regardless to create the effect that this was worthless stuff," he says.

Hitler had been an artist before he was a politician - but the realistic paintings of buildings and landscapes that he preferred had been dismissed by the art establishment in favour of abstract and modern styles.

Farmstead, painted by Hitler in 1914

So the Degenerate Art Exhibition was his moment to get his revenge. He had made a speech about it that summer, saying "works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the German people".

Continue reading the main story Paul Klee was dismissed from Duesseldorf Academy and left Germany for SwitzerlandMax Beckmann lost his job at the Academy in Frankfurt and fled to the Netherlands, then the USOtto Dix was sacked from the Dresden State Academy, drafted by the Nazis in 1945, and captured by the FrenchErnst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide a year after hundreds of his paintings were removed from public collections - he had earlier suffered from mental illnessMax Ernst had already moved to Paris, but later fled to the US and eventually returned to France The Nazis claimed that degenerate art was the product of Jews and Bolsheviks, although only six of the 112 artists featured in the exhibition were actually Jewish.

The art was divided into different rooms by category - art that was blasphemous, art by Jewish or communist artists, art that criticised German soldiers, art that offended the honour of German women.

One room featured entirely abstract paintings, and was labelled "the insanity room".

"In the paintings and drawings of this chamber of horrors there is no telling what was in the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or the pencil," reads the entry in the exhibition handbook.

The idea of the exhibition was not just to mock modern art, but to encourage the viewers to see it as a symptom of an evil plot against the German people.

The curators went to some lengths to get the message across, hiring actors to mingle with the crowds and criticise the exhibits.

The Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich attracted more than a million visitors - three times more than the officially sanctioned Great German Art Exhibition.

Some realised it could be their last chance to see this kind of art in Germany, while others endorsed Hitler's views. Many people also came because of the air of scandal around the show - and it wasn't just Nazi sympathisers who found the art off-putting.

Female Dancer by Marg Moll was in the Degenerate Art Exhibition

Fritz Lustig was a young Jewish apprentice who went along to see the works of art. He says "they didn't seem to mean very much - if they were portraits they seemed to distort the faces... if they were things, they seemed to be quite different from what the things really looked like - I mean the word degenerate seemed to me to apply".

The exhibition went on tour all over Germany, where it was seen by a million more people.

Some of the art was later burned by the Nazis, and for many of the artists this was only the beginning of very hard times ahead.

But Petropoulos says that for some, being banned by the Nazis turned out to have a positive side.

Max Beckmann triptych being hung at London's New Burlington Galleries, July 1938

"This artwork became more attractive abroad, or certainly in anti-Nazi circles it gained values because the Nazis opposed it, and I think that over the longer run it was good for modern art to be viewed as something that the Nazis detested and hated."

Some of the artists featured in the exhibition are now considered among the greats of modern art.

Lustig, who later fled the Nazis to settle in England, now enjoys the art that he once thought was degenerate.

"Well, I have grown up since that - I was pretty young and I hadn't seen all that much art - I've changed my mind since then," he says.

"I can appreciate modern art much better now than I did then. It's not meant to be beautiful is it?"

Lucy Burns was reporting for Witness - which airs weekdays on BBC World Service radio. You can hear her report on degenerate art here.

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