NEW YORK.- The City of Berlin recently returned the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting "Berlin Street Scene" to the heirs of Alfred and Tekla Hess. The painting, created in 1913, was lost by the Hess family during the Nazi era in Germany due to Nazi persecution.

Alfred Hess was a Jewish businessman who lived with his wife, Tekla and son, Hans, in Erfurt, Germany. He owned a important shoe manufacturing business and owned a villa in Erfurt. With the profits from his business, he and his wife supported the local art museum, Angermuseum, and supported many German expressionistic artists, including many from the Brücke art movement, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Pechstein, Nolde, Klee, Kandinsky, Marc, Chagall, Feininger and many more. The Hess family supported their art and frequently invited the artists to stay at their home, which became a meeting place for expressionist artists. They had one of the most comprehensive collections of German expressionistic art prior to the Nazi period. The collection consisted of approximately 4,000 works of art, including about 80 paintings by the premier artists of the expressionistic period in Germany.

Alfred Hess died in late 1931. Following the rise of Hitler in 1933, the Hess family was eventually forced to leave Germany. Hans Hess lost his job at the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin when the firm fired its Jewish employees in 1933 after Hitler came to power. Hans Hess was thus forced into exile and lived in Paris and then later London. He later he was interned in Canada during most of WWII. After her son left Germany due to Nazi persecution, Tekla Hess first tried to stay in Germany and moved to Bavaria in order to be with relatives. However, while staying with her relatives, she was visited by Gestapo agents who questioned her regarding the whereabouts of the Hess collection and threatened to take actions against her relatives if the collection was not returned to Germany. In an affidavit signed by Tekla Hess on April 1, 1958, she stated the following:

"In 1936 during the late evening hours two agents of the secret police from Nuremberg, coereced me under threat to have the pictures in the Hess collection being kept at the time at "Kunsthaus (Gallery) Zurich" returned to Germany immediately. Even though I understood fully that this threat could result in the complete loss of the entire collection, I had no choice other then to give into the pressure being exerted by this all-powerful agency of the government in the hope that my own life and that of my family would not be further jeopardized."

In the then current climate in Germany a visit from the Gestapo often meant deportation to concentration camps and probable death. Responding to these threats, Tekla Hess requested the return of the collection to Germany, although she knew this would probably be the end of it.

Having been threatened by the Gestapo, Tekla Hess made preparations to leave Germany. In the course of her leaving Germany, the collection was scattered about. Having been left behind in various locations and with various persons, most of the collection was either lost or sold for a mere pittance of its value. At the time, Germany also had strict monetary controls, which effectively prevented Jewish exiles from tranferring funds outside of Germany and which penalized those who did so with the death penalty.