60 Minutes (1968) s46e27 Episode Script
Season 46, Episode 27
The magnitude 9 earthquake that struck Japan on March 11th, 2011, not only shook the ground, it shook the Japanese people's faith in their government and the nuclear power industry.
You can see the impact of the disaster in the towns right around the plant -- only you can't get there.
The earthquake did some damage, the tsunami did more.
But the reason many of them are empty -- and off limits today -- is because of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima power plant next door.
The whole area is now a radioactive wasteland and the people who lived there don't know if they'll ever be able to go home.
Many don't know if they'll want to.
Three years later, the events of March 11th darkened their lives so deeply that many speak of it simply as 3/11.
The hell that broke loose on March 11, 2011, was the strongest earthquake in Japan's history.
When the shaking stopped, a tsunami raced towards shore with as much fury as nature can muster.
Almost all of the more than 18,000 people who died that day on Japan's northeast coast, died in the flood.
The quake didn't do much damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station but the tsunami shut down the reactors' emergency cooling systems and they started to melt down.
Hydrogen gases inside the buildings then exploded spreading radiation into communities more than 25 miles away.
Today, in the town of Tomioka, the radiation levels are considered safe enough to allow people in during the day.
Loudspeakers warn visitors that they must leave by 3 p.
m.
We were alone on the day we were there.
The disaster seems to have stopped time.
The clock shows 2:46, the moment the earthquake hit and the damage to shops and homes looks like it could have happened yesterday.
The stack of newspapers we found were dated March 12th, 2011 -- the day after the quake and tsunami.
You can see people had to leave in a hurry -- that was the morning the government told people of this town and neighboring towns to get out quickly.
Welcome to Okuma says the sign.
Population today - three years later: zero.
More than returned.
Bob Simon: Would you ever want to go back to Okuma to live there again? Norio Kimura: Yes, I would like to before I die.
Norio Kimura lived with his wife and two daughters next door to his parents.
The tsunami killed his father, his wife and his youngest daughter, Yuna; a bright and cheerful 7-year-old.
This is what their homes looked like before March And scraps of memories that he keeps in a small box by -- what was once -- the front door.
Norio Kimura: This is a shoe she was wearing that day, which was found in a heap of rubble six months after the disaster.
Because of radiation, Kimura can only visit his former home 10 times a year and stay only five hours.
In February, his allotted day came in the middle of a blizzard.
On each visit, Kimura brings flowers to a small shrine he built to honor his family.
They were among the 111 people who died in Okuma that day.
The remains of 110 have been recovered.
The only one still missing is Norio Kimura's daughter, Yuna.
Ten times a year he goes back home to search for her.
Bob Simon: On Saturday, you were digging again in Okuma.
It was snowing.
It was freezing.
Why? Norio Kimura: To find Yuna of course, and also if I stopped searching or gathering her things, I will lose the connection with her.
To be honest, the reason why I can live my life every day is because I have to find her and her things.
I need to do this to keep my sanity.
Volunteers now help Kimura dig through the piles of debris left by the tsunami.
Everyone's dressed in protective clothing to limit their exposure to radiation.
The digging seems futile, but on this day, Kimura unearthed clothing he says belonged to his surviving daughter, Mayu.
On March 11th, the day of the tsunami, Kimura made a mistake for which he will never forgive himself.
He was at work on a farm and he stayed there.
Bob Simon: Did you think then, that there would be a tsunami? Norio Kimura: There was a radio at my work and my boss told me that the tsunami was going to be three meter tall.
My house is five to six meters above sea level, so I was convinced that our home would be fine, and did not worry about it at all after that.
Bob Simon: Do you think there is anything you could have done to save your family? Norio Kimura: I should have gone home right away.
I regret believing the information easily while my family was in life threatening danger.
Even now, I say to myself, what was I thinking? When radiation forced the evacuation of Okuma, the town leader told Norio Kimura to stop searching for the missing and start caring for the living.
Bob Simon: So he and his daughter moved here to the Japanese Alps where the brisk air and the snow capped mountains made radiation and tsunamis difficult to imagine.
Kimura has traded farming for a guest house he's planning to open.
His daughter, Mayu, talks about her mother more than her missing sister and doesn't ask why her father continues searching for her.
Their new mountain home is 2,000 feet above the perils of the sea and 180 miles from the Fukushima plant.
Ghost towns surround the plant now, but three years later, there are still more than 4,000 workers there, all of them wearing layers of protection.
Because of the exposure to radiation, the men in this building are only allowed to work two and a half hours a day.
They're not producing any electricity.
They're just cleaning up.
Bob Simon: Were TEPCO workers adequately trained to handle the emergency? Dr.
Yoichi Funabashi: I don't think so.
Within months of the accident, Yoichi Funabashi, a former newspaper editor, headed an investigation into what went wrong and why.
It was the only investigation not sponsored by the government and its conclusions were brutal.
Dr.
Yoichi Funabashi: I was very much concerned about the government not telling the truth to the public.
The revelations in Funabashi's report added to the public's anger and dismay.
He wrote that, from the beginning, the government had conspired with the industry to convince people that nuclear power is safe.
Bob Simon: --so the government effort at the time was to convince people that there was nothing to worry about? Dr.
Yoichi Funabashi: Exactly.
Nothing to worry about.
Don't worry.
'Kay, even don't prepare for that-- the-- severe accident, 'kay.
Because that would cause that unnecessary unease and unnecessary misunderstanding.
Bob Simon: And there's no reason to prepare.
Dr.
Yoichi Funabashi: No reason to prepare.
So this avoidance ultimately translated into unpreparedness.
Lake Barrett: Mother Nature threw a real curve ball to the Japanese with that huge tsunami.
Last year, TEPCO hired American nuclear engineer Lake Barrett as an advisor.
Barrett directed the cleanup at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant after its accident in 1979.
Bob Simon: It's estimated that the cleanup is going to take 30-40 years.
To a layman, that sounds very, very long.
Can you explain why that's-- Lake Barrett: To me, that's not long at all.
That's what I would expect for that kinda thing.
It's a huge challenge.
It's a big onsite mess that they have to clean up.
And it's gonna take 'em decades to do it.
It took us Mile Island accident was much simpler-- than they have at Fukushima.
Bob Simon: Are they where you thought they would be three years later? Lake Barrett: I'd hoped they'd be further along.
It's been challenging-- technically, it's been challenging culturally and politically for them.
But they're making good progress now.
Bob Simon: Sounds like you're being a little diplomatic.
Lake Barrett: Well, decision making process in Japan is complicated.
Decision-making in Japan requires consensus and reaching consensus often takes a very long time.
The most difficult job will be to dismantle the melted reactors, but radiation is too high for workers to get there.
For now, TEPCO is inundated with groundwater that leaks into the reactors and gets contaminated.
Every day, 100,000 gallons of radioactive water has to be pumped out before it reaches the ocean.
TEPCO is filling storage tanks almost as fast as it can build them and they're notorious for leaking.
Another enormous cleanup is happening outside the plant.
Entire communities are being cleared of contaminated materials that will have to be stored for generations.
This part of Japan is known for its agriculture, but the only crop growing now is the multitude of black bags holding the radioactive waste, filling the empty spaces in towns like Okuma.
Now, some of the kids from Okuma live and go to school 70 miles away.
Bob Simon: How many of you would like to go back to Okuma, raise your hand.
[Hands go up.]
Everybody.
How many of you think you will go back to Okuma? [Kids look around - no hands up.
.]
Bob Simon: What's keeping you from going back to Okuma now? You can tell me.
Kid: Because there's a lot of radiation there's a lot of radioactive material there.
These kids will be middle aged before the cleanup is finished.
Their homes could have been rebuilt quickly if it had just been an earthquake and a tsunami.
It's the manmade disaster which will take decades to repair.
This is the class that Norio Kimura's daughter, Yuna, would have been in if she were alive.
Her friend Kurea remembers they ate lunch together.
Bob Simon: Where is she now? Kurea: In Okuma.
She's lonely, being alone in the town of Okuma all this time.
I think she must be lonely.
About a third of the residents from Okuma decided to stick together and moved into what the government called "temporary housing.
" Temporary is lasting a long time.
The three generations of Kimuras that once lived together are now split apart.
Norio and his daughter live in Nagano, five hours away from his mother, Tomoe.
She lives in the temporary housing, alone in a cold and cramped room furnished with photographs.
The Kimuras, like many Japanese, have a strong connection to their dead and feel obliged to help them be at peace.
As long as the dead are in limbo, so are the living.
Bob Simon: You've lost so much of your family, why aren't you together with your son now? Tomoe Kimura: I'm with my husband's ashes now.
Once I find a proper place to put him, I'd like to go to Nagano.
Bob Simon: What do you think the right place would be? Tomoe Kimura: Our family cemetery in Okuma is contaminated with radiation now.
I could come back twice or three times a year to burn the incense for him, but my grandchild would not be able to come.
I don't want to keep him where his grandchild whom he used to adore so much can't even come to visit.
Ten times a year, Norio Kimura visits his ancestors in the family cemetery, a place where he thought he would be laid to rest one day and where his children would come to visit him.
But he won't find any peace, he says, until after he finds Yuna.
Bob Simon: Do you think that there is any chance of ever finding your daughter? Norio Kimura: I know that the chance is very slim, but no matter how slim the chance is, I still cannot stop.
From outside looking in, I know that this is very unlikely.
But I still can't stop even if I cannot ever find her.
President Obama announced last week that more than 7 million people have signed up for Obamacare.
But what went unsaid is that almost as many people have been left out.
Millions of Americans can't afford the new health insurance exchanges.
For the sake of those people, Obamacare told the states to expand Medicaid, the government insurance for the very poor.
But 24 states declined.
So, in those states, nearly five million people are falling into a gap they make too much to qualify as "destitute" for Medicaid, but not enough to buy insurance.
We met some of these people when we tagged along in a busted RV called the Health Wagon -- medical mercy for those left out of Obamacare.
The tight folds of the Cumberland Mountains mark the point of western Virginia that splits Kentucky and Tennessee -- the very center of Appalachia -- a land rich in soft coal and hard times.
Around Wise County, folks are welcomed by storefronts to remember what life was like before unemployment hit nine percent.
Teresa Gardner: The roads are narrow and windy curves.
So it's not easy to drive the bus.
This is Teresa Gardner's territory.
She can't be more than 5-foot-4 but she muscles "the bus" through the hollers, deaf to the complaints, of a 13-year-old Winnebago that's left its best miles behind it.
Teresa Gardner: Having problems seeing here.
Scott Pelley: You really can't see.
The wipers are nearly shot and the defroster's out cold.
Scott Pelley: There you go, you can see a little better now.
I understand there's a hole in the floorboard here somewhere? Teresa Gardner: Yes, it's right over there so don't get in that area.
The old truck may be a ruin but like most RVs it's pretty good at discovering America.
Gardner and her partner, Paula Meade, are nurse practitioners aboard the Health Wagon, a charity that puts free health care on the road.
[How many patients do we have on the schedule today? He was going to see what he can free up for us.
.]
The Health Wagon pulls up in parking lots across six counties in southwestern Virginia.
[Y'all come on in out of the rain.
.]
It's not long before the waiting room is packed.
[Hello Mr.
Hank, how you doing?.]
And two exam rooms are full.
With advanced degrees in nursing, Gardner and Meade are allowed to diagnose illnesses, write prescriptions order tests and X-rays.
[Stick it out, ahhh.
.]
On average there are 20 patients a day, that's recently up by 70 percent.
The Health Wagon is a small operation that started back in corporate and private donations.
[Blood pressure a bit high before? Just when I get aggravated.
.]
Scott Pelley: Who are these people who come into the van? Paula Meade: They are people that are in desperate need.
They have no insurance and they usually wait, we say, until they are train wrecks.
Their blood pressures come in emergency levels.
We have blood sugars come in 500, 600s because they can't afford their insulin.
Scott Pelley: But why do they not see a doctor or a nurse before they become, as you call it, train wrecks? Paula Meade: Because they don't have any money.
They don't have money to pay for labs.
They don't have money to go to an ER and these are very proud people.
They, you know, you go to the ER, you get a $3,500 bill.
And then what do you do? You're given a prescription, you can't fill it.
That's why they're train wrecks.
They have nowhere else to go.
Glenda Moore had nowhere to go but the ER when the pain in her leg became unbearable.
Her job at McDonald's, making biscuits, didn't include insurance that she could afford.
Glenda Moore: The only doctor that would see me-- you had to have $114 upfront just to be seen.
Scott Pelley: What does $114 mean to your monthly budget? Glenda Moore: Oh my gosh.
That's half of my weekly pay.
I make $7.
80 an hour.
My paycheck was about after taxes about $475 every two weeks.
The pain was from a blood clot.
She needed Lovenox, a clot buster that cost about $500 for a full treatment.
[Paula Meade: Was she on Lovenox when she was discharged from the hospital?.]
Paula Meade got the call from the ER, which didn't want to bear the cost.
The Health Wagon had the drug for free and there was no charge for some stern medical advice.
Paula Meade: You are going to die if you don't quit smoking and it could be within a week.
You need to stop now! OK? She took the advice to stop smoking and took Lovenox but one day she felt so bad she went back to the ER.
Glenda Moore: And they did a CAT Scan and an X-ray and found the blood clot had went to my lung.
But they also saw another mass on my lung.
And then transported me to a bigger hospital.
They found the lesions in my brain, so I was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer and brain cancer.
Scott Pelley: What are the doctors telling you? Glenda Moore: I start my treatment on Monday, the brain radiation, and he seemed very, I mean he seemed optimistic.
Scott Pelley: Are you hopeful? Glenda Moore: I am.
I have been.
I don't know, I just feel very hopeful.
Hope, especially when the odds are long, has always been essential to survival in Appalachia.
The recovery from the Great Recession hasn't arrived.
In coal these days they just take the top of the mountain and you don't need many men for that.
Around here a thousand were laid off in the last two years.
Twelve percent of the folks don't have enough to eat.
And we met them waiting for their number at Zion Family Ministries Church where a charity called Feeding America was handing out just enough to get through a week -- if you stretch.
for the Health Wagon, Gardner and Meade.
They've known these people and each other most their lives.
Scott Pelley: You've been together since 8th grade? Paula Meade: Eighth grade.
Yes.
Scott Pelley: Why do you do this work? Paula Meade: Because somebody has to.
You know, there's people here, you know, we always, we had dreams.
We wanted to move away from here.
We all, you know, we did.
And then we come back and we saw the need.
And actually there's a vulnerable population here that's different from the rest of America.
I mean there are people, you can replicate this.
But we're kind of forgotten.
There's no one here to take care of 'em but us.
These patients would be taken care of in the The federal government pays the extra cost to the states for three years but Virginia and the others that opted out fear that the cost in the future could bankrupt them.
So the health wagon patients we met have fallen through this untended gap.
[Do you have insurance? No ma'am.
.]
Scott Pelley: Have any of you tried to sign up for the president's health insurance plan? Voices: No-- Scott Pelley: Why not? Brittany Phipps: I can't afford it.
Sissy Cantrell: I can't either.
Sissy Cantrell was laid off from a head start center.
She's been suffering from migraines and seizures.
[I cry for no reason at all.
OK.
Have you been seeing a counselor? No.
OK.
.]
She came away from the Health Wagon with medication.
[I did want to ask you.
.]
Brittany Phipps works more than 50 hours a week, but that's two part-time jobs so there's no insurance for her diabetes.
Scott Pelley: So you're getting your insulin through the Health Wagon? Brittany Phipps: I am now.
Yeah.
Scott Pelley: And if that wasn't available, where would you get the insulin? Brittany Phipps: I don't know.
Walter Laney's diabetes blinded him in one eye and threatens the other.
The Health Wagon stabilized him and set him up with a specialist.
[Hey Walter, this is Dr.
Isaacs, how's it going? Pretty good.
How've you're sugars been? OK.
.]
Walter Laney: They got my blood sugars back under control.
Before this year, I was in the hospital three, four times and this year, I ain't been in none since I've been seeing them.
If it hadn't a been for them, I don't think I'd be here today.
Outside the church where they were handing out food we met Dr.
Joe Smiddy, a lung specialist who's the Health Wagon's volunteer medical director.
Joe Smiddy: This is a Third World country of diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer, and COPD.
Dr.
Smiddy drives a second Health Wagon, a tractor-trailer X-ray lab.
Scott Pelley: I guess they taught you something about radiology and all of that in medical school.
Did they teach you how to drive an Joe Smiddy: I did have to go to tractor-trailer school.
And it took a long time.
Scott Pelley: Was that harder than medical school in some ways? Joe Smiddy: It was very difficult to get anyone to insure a doctor to drive a tractor-trailer.
The insurance companies didn't believe me.
His X-ray screen is a window on chronic, untreated disease including black lung from the mines.
Joe Smiddy: We've seen coal workers pneumoconiosis, emphysema, COPD, enlarged hearts.
There's here today.
Scott Pelley: Just today? Joe Smiddy: Just today.
Scott Pelley: But when they leave your Health Wagon, they still don't have health insurance.
How do they get treated for these things that you're finding? Joe Smiddy: We negotiate.
We can talk to the hospital system.
We don't leave any patient unattended.
We raise money for them.
Scott Pelley: You find a way.
Joe Smiddy: We will find a way.
They found a way to get Glenda Moore radiation for her brain cancer.
But she'd been a smoker for 25 years.
And she died three months after our interview.
Scott Pelley: You don't like this idea of receiving charity? Glenda Moore: No.
Oh, I hate it.
My dad was in the military.
And when he was diagnosed with cancer, he was taken care of.
And I don't know, I just always assumed, you know, that's how it would work.
Scott Pelley: Do you think things would've been different if you'd had an opportunity to go to a doctor more often? Glenda Moore: Oh, definitely.
I know it would be different.
The outreach to all the people like Glenda Moore costs the Health Wagon about a million and a half dollars a year, a third of that is from those federal grants, and the rest from donations.
Doctors volunteer and pharmaceutical companies donate drugs.
But when we were with them [We got no electricity on the health side.
.]
they sure could have used a new truck battery.
[There goes.
Yay! .]
Teresa Gardner: Can we give you all a free flu shot for helping us? Man: Need a free flu shot, Beaver? Nope.
Ok.
Teresa Gardner and Paula Meade apply for grants.
And travel to churches praying for donations and passing the plate.
Scott Pelley: Are there days you say to yourself, "I can't do this anymore.
" Paula Meade: Oh, every day.
Not every day.
I shouldn't say every day.
There are a lot of days you get frustrated because we're writing grants till 10:00 at night.
We're begging for money.
And you're almost in tears because we're like, "OK, what are we gonna do," because I've got a family too.
It gets frustrating, it gets hard.
Scott Pelley: It's enough to wear you out, Teresa.
Teresa Gardner: We're pretty beat down by the end of the day on most days really.
But we do get more out of it then we ever give.
Paula Meade: When you look at it practically, you think, "What in the world am I thinking?" But then I have that one patient that may come in and say, "Couldn't bring you anything, can't pay anything but here's a quilt I wanna give you.
" And I mean when they do that and they're so heartfelt and you just-- and they put their arms around you, "I don't know what I'd do without you" [You're doing a lot better.
.]
Paula Meade: It lets you think, "OK, I was put here for a purpose.
" Teresa Gardner: And you can do it another day.
[You're a blessing to us.
Well thank you all.
You're blessing us.
.]
Teresa Gardner: It's them and that's what touches our heart.
This week in Virginia, there is a crisis at the capital where the new Democratic governor is demanding Medicaid expansion from the Republican House.
But neither side will budge and now there's a threat of a government shutdown in that state.
There's no shutting down the Health Wagon though.
Gardner and Meade have raised money for a new truck and they hope to get it on the road in the spring.
Two years ago, German authorities conducting a routine tax investigation stumbled on the largest trove of missing art since the end of World War II.
The massive collection -- barely a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of artworks still missing -- was discovered in a Munich apartment owned by Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive 81-year-old son of one of Hitler's favorite art dealers.
Most of it was art plundered from museums and from Jewish collections.
For Germans, it was an unwelcome reminder of a bitter history.
To the heirs of the victims, it's perhaps a last chance to recover a small vestige of family history.
The discovery also triggered a legal battle about who really owns that art.
Morley Safer: Did you have any idea that he had so many paintings in that apartment? Ekkeheart Gurlitt: I tell you what.
Nobody had any idea about this.
Really.
How can you live with 1,400 paintings in a flat? A 90 square meter flat, I thought, maybe has 100 or 150 but one thou-- we are laugh everybody was surprised, you know.
Ekkeheart Gurlitt is Cornelius Gurlitt's cousin.
A rather flamboyant photographer now living in Barcelona.
Ekkeheart Gurlitt: His friends were his paintings, right.
And for the last 60 years he was living with his paintings, which was his-- his idea of life, you know.
Morley Safer: Of the 1,400-- Ekkeheart Gurlitt: One thousand four-hundred and six.
Morley Safer: You've got it right down to the last one.
Ekkeheart Gurlitt: I mean, it's different if you have 1,400 Picasso or you have 1,406.
Right? Picasso was just the beginning.
Cornelius Gurlitt's secret hoard of art included modern masters like Matisse, Chagall, Franz Marc and Otto Dix.
Gurlitt's small world fell apart in late 2010 almost by accident.
Traveling back from Switzerland to Germany, a customs inspection brought him under suspicion and triggered a tax investigation that would be his undoing.
Willi Korte: They had caught him on a train with 9,000 Euros in cash in his pocket which made him suspicious.
Then they tried to look him up here in their files and they couldn't find him.
The man didn't seem to exist.
He wasn't registered.
He didn't pay taxes.
He didn't receive any benefits.
So the man just wasn't there.
Willi Korte is a lawyer who specializes in tracking down stolen art.
Willi Korte: I can imagine sort of the conclusions they drew when they saw this old man surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of works of art.
"There's something very fishy going on.
And maybe he's a secret art dealer.
Maybe he's involved in some smuggling activities.
There must be enormous amounts of money at stake.
" It was on February 28, 2012, that agents from the German customs police raided a fifth floor apartment in this nondescript building in Munich.
It's fair to say they were blown away by what they found: 1,400 works of art, some of them worth millions.
They also found 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt, a virtual hermit, who's said the only friends he had in this world were his art.
Art thought to be worth over a billion dollars.
Art piled on shelves.
Much of it art the Nazis declared to be degenerate.
It was art taken from the walls of museums and from Jewish-owned galleries and collectors.
All of it acquired by Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius's father.
He was a leading art dealer chosen by Hitler to sell the art to customers abroad for hard currency.
Much of it featured in a 1937 degenerate art show in which Hitler wanted to show Germans what he regarded as the decadence and depravity of modern avant-garde art.
Art historian Vanessa Voigt, a specialist in art of that era, was called in by police during the raid.
Vanessa Voigt: I saw there Cornelius Gurlitt.
He is an-- a man who is ill.
He was afraid and he didn't speak.
Cornelius sat stunned as agents went through his apartment.
Morley Safer: Did he say anything to you or to the agents from the government? Vanessa Voigt: No.
He was really shocked of this situation, I think.
In this apartment, there were no people for many, many years.
I think there were perhaps an art dealer, but no one else.
Morley Safer: Did he seem to be sane? Vanessa Voigt: Yeah.
He was.
His cousin says after Cornelius' father died he never allowed anyone into the apartment or his crumbling house in Salzburg, Austria, where he kept a collection of 238 works of art of immense value like this painting by Monet.
Ekkeheart Gurlitt: He gave him the whole-- the collection of these paintings as inheritance, right? For-- so to-- to survive.
So every time Cornelius would run out of money, he sold one of these paintings, right? Almost overlooked among the cache was a small drawing of a piano player by the German romanticist Carl Spitzweg.
It is a drawing Martha Hinrichsen has spent the better part of her life trying to track down.
The Nazis had confiscated it from her grandfather, Henri Hinrichsen, along with his entire art collection.
Morley Safer: Before the Gurlitt collection was discovered had you pretty much given up hope? Martha Hinrichsen: I was absolutely stunned.
I wasn't expecting anything like that.
During the raid, agents found Gurlitt's father's records from 1940 which reveal details of a sale of four works once owned by her grandfather.
The sale was really theft by other means.
Hinrichsen never received the money.
In 1942, he was gassed at Auschwitz.
Martha Hinrichsen: Legally, it was a sale.
Morally and ethically is another question.
Morley Safer: But with the seller having no choice.
Martha Hinrichsen: Exactly.
Another painting Gurlitt had was "Two Riders on the Beach" by Max Liebermann now valued at more than a million dollars.
David Toren, now 88 and blind, left Germany on a Kindertransport days before the war began.
He last saw the painting at his uncle's home in Breslau just before his father was arrested by the Nazis.
Both parents were murdered at Auschwitz.
David Toren: There came two guys from the Gestapo-- "We have instructions to-- to take you to Gestapo headquarters.
" That day, I remember every little detail.
I was sitting in the anteroom at the Winter Garden and looked at the picture and that was the last time I saw that picture.
Toren had been searching for any trace of his family's art collection, but all he found was a 1939 Nazi inventory that mentions the Liebermann painting.
David Toren: The letter says that the action to confiscate art owned by Jews has been very successful, but there's still some rich Jews left.
And the first example, he mentions my uncle.
And the letter ends with, "I want the Jew, David Friedman, not to dispose of any of the art objects until we come back.
" After the war the Allies' art recovery unit, "The Monuments Men," found and returned millions of artworks.
They also found Hildebrand Gurlitt hiding out in this Bavarian castle owned by a local Nazi party leader.
Inside were hundreds of treasures Hildebrand and his young son Cornelius had hidden.
Many more were apparently stashed in hiding places all over Germany.
Morley Safer: The Monuments Men took some of his paintings but they let him keep most of his collection, did they not? Willi Korte: That's an unresolved mystery.
I think up to this day he was able to produce one story after another about how he had acquired these before the war and for reasons that I have a hard time understanding is he got away with it.
Among the artworks in that castle was David Toren's uncle's painting.
Hildebrant Gurlitt told the Monuments Men it was a gift from his parents before the war, and that painting--like most of the others-- was returned to him.
Morley Safer: Did he feel any-- did he feel any guilt working for the Nazis? Ekkeheart Gurlitt: I'm sorry, but he had to survive.
So what would you do? I mean, this is-- this is just a thing.
What-- what-- what would you do? Morley Safer: But was he as innocent as he claimed? Vanessa Voigt: Most of these artworks were stolen, I think.
Confiscated from Jewish families or stolen, yeah.
Hannes Hartung and Tido Park, two lawyers who have represented Cornelius Gurlitt, say the sins of the father should not be visited on the son.
Hannes Hartung: Hildebrand Gurlitt wasn't completely innocent.
That's for sure.
And not there are cases we will deal 'em in a fair manner because you know, under German law, morality has nothing to say.
This-- no, I'm sorry to tell you, but the German law, it's a law which has not been made for the horrible outcome of the Third Reich and all that happened.
So now what we are talking about now is about morality and how to deal with moral responsibility.
German law puts a 30-year statute of limitations on stolen property so the works -- by law -- remain the property of Cornelius Gurlitt.
As for the art itself, authorities won't explain why they kept the discovery a secret for nearly two years.
Morley Safer: How strong is the government's criminal case against him? Tido Park: They really don't have a strong case.
They pretend to have a case because they have, of course, to justify the seizure of the whole collection.
Right now the collection is in the hands of a task force which is examining each work for evidence of looting.
Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel heads up the task force.
Uwe Hartmann is the chief researcher.
He says even as Germany was collapsing in 1945 the Nazis were dutifully recording the art thefts.
Morley Safer: Why did they keep these records of the evidence of their own crimes? Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel: You mustn't throw public documents away.
That's what they learned in s-- that's what they did.
Uwe Hartmann: That's the German gré¦ndlichkeit.
To do his duty-- Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel: Yeah.
They weren't allowed to.
Uwe Hartmann: --until the last day.
The task force is initially examining 590 works as potentially looted from Jews -- including this Matisse which was looted from Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg in 1941.
Morley Safer: Beyond the minutiae of legality, there's a larger question and that's the moral question.
Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel: Eighty years after Hitler took over.
Seventy-five years after the synagogues burned in German.
Yes, we know.
That's the moral obligation.
And we take it seriously.
Very seriously.
On the other side, there are the laws.
Morley Safer: So you're not making judgments.
Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel: No.
We are not a court.
We can't.
We mustn't.
Morley Safer: But you could still recommend.
Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel:: Mr.
Gurlitt told me when I talked to him, he said, "What's-- what's been taken away? What had been robbed?" That was his words.
"Has to be given-- back.
" Cornelius Gurlitt -- who is recovering from a heart operation -- says the collection is rightfully his and that his father did nothing wrong.
But he says he is willing to negotiate.
Morley Safer: What a lot of people might wonder is there's nothing to negotiate here.
These paintings were-- either belonged to German museums, and should go back to those German museums, or to Jews who owned collections and were forced to sell them.
Tido Park: Mr.
Gurlitt is absolutely willing to find fair solutions.
But what we need of course is clear evidence.
Because we have some letters addressed to Mr.
Gurlitt saying, "Oh-- look, my grandma had a specific painting nothing.
As for Martha Hinrichsen, she has filed a claim with the task force but has little confidence she or her family will ever see her grandfather's drawing.
Martha Hinrichsen: Quite honestly, I don't believe in my lifetime, because I think this is going to be a long, long battle.
Cornelius Gurlitt is close to an agreement with the German authorities.
He has agreed to give up paintings proven to be stolen and will retain the rest.
You can see the impact of the disaster in the towns right around the plant -- only you can't get there.
The earthquake did some damage, the tsunami did more.
But the reason many of them are empty -- and off limits today -- is because of the nuclear accident at the Fukushima power plant next door.
The whole area is now a radioactive wasteland and the people who lived there don't know if they'll ever be able to go home.
Many don't know if they'll want to.
Three years later, the events of March 11th darkened their lives so deeply that many speak of it simply as 3/11.
The hell that broke loose on March 11, 2011, was the strongest earthquake in Japan's history.
When the shaking stopped, a tsunami raced towards shore with as much fury as nature can muster.
Almost all of the more than 18,000 people who died that day on Japan's northeast coast, died in the flood.
The quake didn't do much damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station but the tsunami shut down the reactors' emergency cooling systems and they started to melt down.
Hydrogen gases inside the buildings then exploded spreading radiation into communities more than 25 miles away.
Today, in the town of Tomioka, the radiation levels are considered safe enough to allow people in during the day.
Loudspeakers warn visitors that they must leave by 3 p.
m.
We were alone on the day we were there.
The disaster seems to have stopped time.
The clock shows 2:46, the moment the earthquake hit and the damage to shops and homes looks like it could have happened yesterday.
The stack of newspapers we found were dated March 12th, 2011 -- the day after the quake and tsunami.
You can see people had to leave in a hurry -- that was the morning the government told people of this town and neighboring towns to get out quickly.
Welcome to Okuma says the sign.
Population today - three years later: zero.
More than returned.
Bob Simon: Would you ever want to go back to Okuma to live there again? Norio Kimura: Yes, I would like to before I die.
Norio Kimura lived with his wife and two daughters next door to his parents.
The tsunami killed his father, his wife and his youngest daughter, Yuna; a bright and cheerful 7-year-old.
This is what their homes looked like before March And scraps of memories that he keeps in a small box by -- what was once -- the front door.
Norio Kimura: This is a shoe she was wearing that day, which was found in a heap of rubble six months after the disaster.
Because of radiation, Kimura can only visit his former home 10 times a year and stay only five hours.
In February, his allotted day came in the middle of a blizzard.
On each visit, Kimura brings flowers to a small shrine he built to honor his family.
They were among the 111 people who died in Okuma that day.
The remains of 110 have been recovered.
The only one still missing is Norio Kimura's daughter, Yuna.
Ten times a year he goes back home to search for her.
Bob Simon: On Saturday, you were digging again in Okuma.
It was snowing.
It was freezing.
Why? Norio Kimura: To find Yuna of course, and also if I stopped searching or gathering her things, I will lose the connection with her.
To be honest, the reason why I can live my life every day is because I have to find her and her things.
I need to do this to keep my sanity.
Volunteers now help Kimura dig through the piles of debris left by the tsunami.
Everyone's dressed in protective clothing to limit their exposure to radiation.
The digging seems futile, but on this day, Kimura unearthed clothing he says belonged to his surviving daughter, Mayu.
On March 11th, the day of the tsunami, Kimura made a mistake for which he will never forgive himself.
He was at work on a farm and he stayed there.
Bob Simon: Did you think then, that there would be a tsunami? Norio Kimura: There was a radio at my work and my boss told me that the tsunami was going to be three meter tall.
My house is five to six meters above sea level, so I was convinced that our home would be fine, and did not worry about it at all after that.
Bob Simon: Do you think there is anything you could have done to save your family? Norio Kimura: I should have gone home right away.
I regret believing the information easily while my family was in life threatening danger.
Even now, I say to myself, what was I thinking? When radiation forced the evacuation of Okuma, the town leader told Norio Kimura to stop searching for the missing and start caring for the living.
Bob Simon: So he and his daughter moved here to the Japanese Alps where the brisk air and the snow capped mountains made radiation and tsunamis difficult to imagine.
Kimura has traded farming for a guest house he's planning to open.
His daughter, Mayu, talks about her mother more than her missing sister and doesn't ask why her father continues searching for her.
Their new mountain home is 2,000 feet above the perils of the sea and 180 miles from the Fukushima plant.
Ghost towns surround the plant now, but three years later, there are still more than 4,000 workers there, all of them wearing layers of protection.
Because of the exposure to radiation, the men in this building are only allowed to work two and a half hours a day.
They're not producing any electricity.
They're just cleaning up.
Bob Simon: Were TEPCO workers adequately trained to handle the emergency? Dr.
Yoichi Funabashi: I don't think so.
Within months of the accident, Yoichi Funabashi, a former newspaper editor, headed an investigation into what went wrong and why.
It was the only investigation not sponsored by the government and its conclusions were brutal.
Dr.
Yoichi Funabashi: I was very much concerned about the government not telling the truth to the public.
The revelations in Funabashi's report added to the public's anger and dismay.
He wrote that, from the beginning, the government had conspired with the industry to convince people that nuclear power is safe.
Bob Simon: --so the government effort at the time was to convince people that there was nothing to worry about? Dr.
Yoichi Funabashi: Exactly.
Nothing to worry about.
Don't worry.
'Kay, even don't prepare for that-- the-- severe accident, 'kay.
Because that would cause that unnecessary unease and unnecessary misunderstanding.
Bob Simon: And there's no reason to prepare.
Dr.
Yoichi Funabashi: No reason to prepare.
So this avoidance ultimately translated into unpreparedness.
Lake Barrett: Mother Nature threw a real curve ball to the Japanese with that huge tsunami.
Last year, TEPCO hired American nuclear engineer Lake Barrett as an advisor.
Barrett directed the cleanup at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant after its accident in 1979.
Bob Simon: It's estimated that the cleanup is going to take 30-40 years.
To a layman, that sounds very, very long.
Can you explain why that's-- Lake Barrett: To me, that's not long at all.
That's what I would expect for that kinda thing.
It's a huge challenge.
It's a big onsite mess that they have to clean up.
And it's gonna take 'em decades to do it.
It took us Mile Island accident was much simpler-- than they have at Fukushima.
Bob Simon: Are they where you thought they would be three years later? Lake Barrett: I'd hoped they'd be further along.
It's been challenging-- technically, it's been challenging culturally and politically for them.
But they're making good progress now.
Bob Simon: Sounds like you're being a little diplomatic.
Lake Barrett: Well, decision making process in Japan is complicated.
Decision-making in Japan requires consensus and reaching consensus often takes a very long time.
The most difficult job will be to dismantle the melted reactors, but radiation is too high for workers to get there.
For now, TEPCO is inundated with groundwater that leaks into the reactors and gets contaminated.
Every day, 100,000 gallons of radioactive water has to be pumped out before it reaches the ocean.
TEPCO is filling storage tanks almost as fast as it can build them and they're notorious for leaking.
Another enormous cleanup is happening outside the plant.
Entire communities are being cleared of contaminated materials that will have to be stored for generations.
This part of Japan is known for its agriculture, but the only crop growing now is the multitude of black bags holding the radioactive waste, filling the empty spaces in towns like Okuma.
Now, some of the kids from Okuma live and go to school 70 miles away.
Bob Simon: How many of you would like to go back to Okuma, raise your hand.
[Hands go up.]
Everybody.
How many of you think you will go back to Okuma? [Kids look around - no hands up.
.]
Bob Simon: What's keeping you from going back to Okuma now? You can tell me.
Kid: Because there's a lot of radiation there's a lot of radioactive material there.
These kids will be middle aged before the cleanup is finished.
Their homes could have been rebuilt quickly if it had just been an earthquake and a tsunami.
It's the manmade disaster which will take decades to repair.
This is the class that Norio Kimura's daughter, Yuna, would have been in if she were alive.
Her friend Kurea remembers they ate lunch together.
Bob Simon: Where is she now? Kurea: In Okuma.
She's lonely, being alone in the town of Okuma all this time.
I think she must be lonely.
About a third of the residents from Okuma decided to stick together and moved into what the government called "temporary housing.
" Temporary is lasting a long time.
The three generations of Kimuras that once lived together are now split apart.
Norio and his daughter live in Nagano, five hours away from his mother, Tomoe.
She lives in the temporary housing, alone in a cold and cramped room furnished with photographs.
The Kimuras, like many Japanese, have a strong connection to their dead and feel obliged to help them be at peace.
As long as the dead are in limbo, so are the living.
Bob Simon: You've lost so much of your family, why aren't you together with your son now? Tomoe Kimura: I'm with my husband's ashes now.
Once I find a proper place to put him, I'd like to go to Nagano.
Bob Simon: What do you think the right place would be? Tomoe Kimura: Our family cemetery in Okuma is contaminated with radiation now.
I could come back twice or three times a year to burn the incense for him, but my grandchild would not be able to come.
I don't want to keep him where his grandchild whom he used to adore so much can't even come to visit.
Ten times a year, Norio Kimura visits his ancestors in the family cemetery, a place where he thought he would be laid to rest one day and where his children would come to visit him.
But he won't find any peace, he says, until after he finds Yuna.
Bob Simon: Do you think that there is any chance of ever finding your daughter? Norio Kimura: I know that the chance is very slim, but no matter how slim the chance is, I still cannot stop.
From outside looking in, I know that this is very unlikely.
But I still can't stop even if I cannot ever find her.
President Obama announced last week that more than 7 million people have signed up for Obamacare.
But what went unsaid is that almost as many people have been left out.
Millions of Americans can't afford the new health insurance exchanges.
For the sake of those people, Obamacare told the states to expand Medicaid, the government insurance for the very poor.
But 24 states declined.
So, in those states, nearly five million people are falling into a gap they make too much to qualify as "destitute" for Medicaid, but not enough to buy insurance.
We met some of these people when we tagged along in a busted RV called the Health Wagon -- medical mercy for those left out of Obamacare.
The tight folds of the Cumberland Mountains mark the point of western Virginia that splits Kentucky and Tennessee -- the very center of Appalachia -- a land rich in soft coal and hard times.
Around Wise County, folks are welcomed by storefronts to remember what life was like before unemployment hit nine percent.
Teresa Gardner: The roads are narrow and windy curves.
So it's not easy to drive the bus.
This is Teresa Gardner's territory.
She can't be more than 5-foot-4 but she muscles "the bus" through the hollers, deaf to the complaints, of a 13-year-old Winnebago that's left its best miles behind it.
Teresa Gardner: Having problems seeing here.
Scott Pelley: You really can't see.
The wipers are nearly shot and the defroster's out cold.
Scott Pelley: There you go, you can see a little better now.
I understand there's a hole in the floorboard here somewhere? Teresa Gardner: Yes, it's right over there so don't get in that area.
The old truck may be a ruin but like most RVs it's pretty good at discovering America.
Gardner and her partner, Paula Meade, are nurse practitioners aboard the Health Wagon, a charity that puts free health care on the road.
[How many patients do we have on the schedule today? He was going to see what he can free up for us.
.]
The Health Wagon pulls up in parking lots across six counties in southwestern Virginia.
[Y'all come on in out of the rain.
.]
It's not long before the waiting room is packed.
[Hello Mr.
Hank, how you doing?.]
And two exam rooms are full.
With advanced degrees in nursing, Gardner and Meade are allowed to diagnose illnesses, write prescriptions order tests and X-rays.
[Stick it out, ahhh.
.]
On average there are 20 patients a day, that's recently up by 70 percent.
The Health Wagon is a small operation that started back in corporate and private donations.
[Blood pressure a bit high before? Just when I get aggravated.
.]
Scott Pelley: Who are these people who come into the van? Paula Meade: They are people that are in desperate need.
They have no insurance and they usually wait, we say, until they are train wrecks.
Their blood pressures come in emergency levels.
We have blood sugars come in 500, 600s because they can't afford their insulin.
Scott Pelley: But why do they not see a doctor or a nurse before they become, as you call it, train wrecks? Paula Meade: Because they don't have any money.
They don't have money to pay for labs.
They don't have money to go to an ER and these are very proud people.
They, you know, you go to the ER, you get a $3,500 bill.
And then what do you do? You're given a prescription, you can't fill it.
That's why they're train wrecks.
They have nowhere else to go.
Glenda Moore had nowhere to go but the ER when the pain in her leg became unbearable.
Her job at McDonald's, making biscuits, didn't include insurance that she could afford.
Glenda Moore: The only doctor that would see me-- you had to have $114 upfront just to be seen.
Scott Pelley: What does $114 mean to your monthly budget? Glenda Moore: Oh my gosh.
That's half of my weekly pay.
I make $7.
80 an hour.
My paycheck was about after taxes about $475 every two weeks.
The pain was from a blood clot.
She needed Lovenox, a clot buster that cost about $500 for a full treatment.
[Paula Meade: Was she on Lovenox when she was discharged from the hospital?.]
Paula Meade got the call from the ER, which didn't want to bear the cost.
The Health Wagon had the drug for free and there was no charge for some stern medical advice.
Paula Meade: You are going to die if you don't quit smoking and it could be within a week.
You need to stop now! OK? She took the advice to stop smoking and took Lovenox but one day she felt so bad she went back to the ER.
Glenda Moore: And they did a CAT Scan and an X-ray and found the blood clot had went to my lung.
But they also saw another mass on my lung.
And then transported me to a bigger hospital.
They found the lesions in my brain, so I was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer and brain cancer.
Scott Pelley: What are the doctors telling you? Glenda Moore: I start my treatment on Monday, the brain radiation, and he seemed very, I mean he seemed optimistic.
Scott Pelley: Are you hopeful? Glenda Moore: I am.
I have been.
I don't know, I just feel very hopeful.
Hope, especially when the odds are long, has always been essential to survival in Appalachia.
The recovery from the Great Recession hasn't arrived.
In coal these days they just take the top of the mountain and you don't need many men for that.
Around here a thousand were laid off in the last two years.
Twelve percent of the folks don't have enough to eat.
And we met them waiting for their number at Zion Family Ministries Church where a charity called Feeding America was handing out just enough to get through a week -- if you stretch.
for the Health Wagon, Gardner and Meade.
They've known these people and each other most their lives.
Scott Pelley: You've been together since 8th grade? Paula Meade: Eighth grade.
Yes.
Scott Pelley: Why do you do this work? Paula Meade: Because somebody has to.
You know, there's people here, you know, we always, we had dreams.
We wanted to move away from here.
We all, you know, we did.
And then we come back and we saw the need.
And actually there's a vulnerable population here that's different from the rest of America.
I mean there are people, you can replicate this.
But we're kind of forgotten.
There's no one here to take care of 'em but us.
These patients would be taken care of in the The federal government pays the extra cost to the states for three years but Virginia and the others that opted out fear that the cost in the future could bankrupt them.
So the health wagon patients we met have fallen through this untended gap.
[Do you have insurance? No ma'am.
.]
Scott Pelley: Have any of you tried to sign up for the president's health insurance plan? Voices: No-- Scott Pelley: Why not? Brittany Phipps: I can't afford it.
Sissy Cantrell: I can't either.
Sissy Cantrell was laid off from a head start center.
She's been suffering from migraines and seizures.
[I cry for no reason at all.
OK.
Have you been seeing a counselor? No.
OK.
.]
She came away from the Health Wagon with medication.
[I did want to ask you.
.]
Brittany Phipps works more than 50 hours a week, but that's two part-time jobs so there's no insurance for her diabetes.
Scott Pelley: So you're getting your insulin through the Health Wagon? Brittany Phipps: I am now.
Yeah.
Scott Pelley: And if that wasn't available, where would you get the insulin? Brittany Phipps: I don't know.
Walter Laney's diabetes blinded him in one eye and threatens the other.
The Health Wagon stabilized him and set him up with a specialist.
[Hey Walter, this is Dr.
Isaacs, how's it going? Pretty good.
How've you're sugars been? OK.
.]
Walter Laney: They got my blood sugars back under control.
Before this year, I was in the hospital three, four times and this year, I ain't been in none since I've been seeing them.
If it hadn't a been for them, I don't think I'd be here today.
Outside the church where they were handing out food we met Dr.
Joe Smiddy, a lung specialist who's the Health Wagon's volunteer medical director.
Joe Smiddy: This is a Third World country of diabetes, hypertension, lung cancer, and COPD.
Dr.
Smiddy drives a second Health Wagon, a tractor-trailer X-ray lab.
Scott Pelley: I guess they taught you something about radiology and all of that in medical school.
Did they teach you how to drive an Joe Smiddy: I did have to go to tractor-trailer school.
And it took a long time.
Scott Pelley: Was that harder than medical school in some ways? Joe Smiddy: It was very difficult to get anyone to insure a doctor to drive a tractor-trailer.
The insurance companies didn't believe me.
His X-ray screen is a window on chronic, untreated disease including black lung from the mines.
Joe Smiddy: We've seen coal workers pneumoconiosis, emphysema, COPD, enlarged hearts.
There's here today.
Scott Pelley: Just today? Joe Smiddy: Just today.
Scott Pelley: But when they leave your Health Wagon, they still don't have health insurance.
How do they get treated for these things that you're finding? Joe Smiddy: We negotiate.
We can talk to the hospital system.
We don't leave any patient unattended.
We raise money for them.
Scott Pelley: You find a way.
Joe Smiddy: We will find a way.
They found a way to get Glenda Moore radiation for her brain cancer.
But she'd been a smoker for 25 years.
And she died three months after our interview.
Scott Pelley: You don't like this idea of receiving charity? Glenda Moore: No.
Oh, I hate it.
My dad was in the military.
And when he was diagnosed with cancer, he was taken care of.
And I don't know, I just always assumed, you know, that's how it would work.
Scott Pelley: Do you think things would've been different if you'd had an opportunity to go to a doctor more often? Glenda Moore: Oh, definitely.
I know it would be different.
The outreach to all the people like Glenda Moore costs the Health Wagon about a million and a half dollars a year, a third of that is from those federal grants, and the rest from donations.
Doctors volunteer and pharmaceutical companies donate drugs.
But when we were with them [We got no electricity on the health side.
.]
they sure could have used a new truck battery.
[There goes.
Yay! .]
Teresa Gardner: Can we give you all a free flu shot for helping us? Man: Need a free flu shot, Beaver? Nope.
Ok.
Teresa Gardner and Paula Meade apply for grants.
And travel to churches praying for donations and passing the plate.
Scott Pelley: Are there days you say to yourself, "I can't do this anymore.
" Paula Meade: Oh, every day.
Not every day.
I shouldn't say every day.
There are a lot of days you get frustrated because we're writing grants till 10:00 at night.
We're begging for money.
And you're almost in tears because we're like, "OK, what are we gonna do," because I've got a family too.
It gets frustrating, it gets hard.
Scott Pelley: It's enough to wear you out, Teresa.
Teresa Gardner: We're pretty beat down by the end of the day on most days really.
But we do get more out of it then we ever give.
Paula Meade: When you look at it practically, you think, "What in the world am I thinking?" But then I have that one patient that may come in and say, "Couldn't bring you anything, can't pay anything but here's a quilt I wanna give you.
" And I mean when they do that and they're so heartfelt and you just-- and they put their arms around you, "I don't know what I'd do without you" [You're doing a lot better.
.]
Paula Meade: It lets you think, "OK, I was put here for a purpose.
" Teresa Gardner: And you can do it another day.
[You're a blessing to us.
Well thank you all.
You're blessing us.
.]
Teresa Gardner: It's them and that's what touches our heart.
This week in Virginia, there is a crisis at the capital where the new Democratic governor is demanding Medicaid expansion from the Republican House.
But neither side will budge and now there's a threat of a government shutdown in that state.
There's no shutting down the Health Wagon though.
Gardner and Meade have raised money for a new truck and they hope to get it on the road in the spring.
Two years ago, German authorities conducting a routine tax investigation stumbled on the largest trove of missing art since the end of World War II.
The massive collection -- barely a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of artworks still missing -- was discovered in a Munich apartment owned by Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive 81-year-old son of one of Hitler's favorite art dealers.
Most of it was art plundered from museums and from Jewish collections.
For Germans, it was an unwelcome reminder of a bitter history.
To the heirs of the victims, it's perhaps a last chance to recover a small vestige of family history.
The discovery also triggered a legal battle about who really owns that art.
Morley Safer: Did you have any idea that he had so many paintings in that apartment? Ekkeheart Gurlitt: I tell you what.
Nobody had any idea about this.
Really.
How can you live with 1,400 paintings in a flat? A 90 square meter flat, I thought, maybe has 100 or 150 but one thou-- we are laugh everybody was surprised, you know.
Ekkeheart Gurlitt is Cornelius Gurlitt's cousin.
A rather flamboyant photographer now living in Barcelona.
Ekkeheart Gurlitt: His friends were his paintings, right.
And for the last 60 years he was living with his paintings, which was his-- his idea of life, you know.
Morley Safer: Of the 1,400-- Ekkeheart Gurlitt: One thousand four-hundred and six.
Morley Safer: You've got it right down to the last one.
Ekkeheart Gurlitt: I mean, it's different if you have 1,400 Picasso or you have 1,406.
Right? Picasso was just the beginning.
Cornelius Gurlitt's secret hoard of art included modern masters like Matisse, Chagall, Franz Marc and Otto Dix.
Gurlitt's small world fell apart in late 2010 almost by accident.
Traveling back from Switzerland to Germany, a customs inspection brought him under suspicion and triggered a tax investigation that would be his undoing.
Willi Korte: They had caught him on a train with 9,000 Euros in cash in his pocket which made him suspicious.
Then they tried to look him up here in their files and they couldn't find him.
The man didn't seem to exist.
He wasn't registered.
He didn't pay taxes.
He didn't receive any benefits.
So the man just wasn't there.
Willi Korte is a lawyer who specializes in tracking down stolen art.
Willi Korte: I can imagine sort of the conclusions they drew when they saw this old man surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of works of art.
"There's something very fishy going on.
And maybe he's a secret art dealer.
Maybe he's involved in some smuggling activities.
There must be enormous amounts of money at stake.
" It was on February 28, 2012, that agents from the German customs police raided a fifth floor apartment in this nondescript building in Munich.
It's fair to say they were blown away by what they found: 1,400 works of art, some of them worth millions.
They also found 80-year-old Cornelius Gurlitt, a virtual hermit, who's said the only friends he had in this world were his art.
Art thought to be worth over a billion dollars.
Art piled on shelves.
Much of it art the Nazis declared to be degenerate.
It was art taken from the walls of museums and from Jewish-owned galleries and collectors.
All of it acquired by Hildebrand Gurlitt, Cornelius's father.
He was a leading art dealer chosen by Hitler to sell the art to customers abroad for hard currency.
Much of it featured in a 1937 degenerate art show in which Hitler wanted to show Germans what he regarded as the decadence and depravity of modern avant-garde art.
Art historian Vanessa Voigt, a specialist in art of that era, was called in by police during the raid.
Vanessa Voigt: I saw there Cornelius Gurlitt.
He is an-- a man who is ill.
He was afraid and he didn't speak.
Cornelius sat stunned as agents went through his apartment.
Morley Safer: Did he say anything to you or to the agents from the government? Vanessa Voigt: No.
He was really shocked of this situation, I think.
In this apartment, there were no people for many, many years.
I think there were perhaps an art dealer, but no one else.
Morley Safer: Did he seem to be sane? Vanessa Voigt: Yeah.
He was.
His cousin says after Cornelius' father died he never allowed anyone into the apartment or his crumbling house in Salzburg, Austria, where he kept a collection of 238 works of art of immense value like this painting by Monet.
Ekkeheart Gurlitt: He gave him the whole-- the collection of these paintings as inheritance, right? For-- so to-- to survive.
So every time Cornelius would run out of money, he sold one of these paintings, right? Almost overlooked among the cache was a small drawing of a piano player by the German romanticist Carl Spitzweg.
It is a drawing Martha Hinrichsen has spent the better part of her life trying to track down.
The Nazis had confiscated it from her grandfather, Henri Hinrichsen, along with his entire art collection.
Morley Safer: Before the Gurlitt collection was discovered had you pretty much given up hope? Martha Hinrichsen: I was absolutely stunned.
I wasn't expecting anything like that.
During the raid, agents found Gurlitt's father's records from 1940 which reveal details of a sale of four works once owned by her grandfather.
The sale was really theft by other means.
Hinrichsen never received the money.
In 1942, he was gassed at Auschwitz.
Martha Hinrichsen: Legally, it was a sale.
Morally and ethically is another question.
Morley Safer: But with the seller having no choice.
Martha Hinrichsen: Exactly.
Another painting Gurlitt had was "Two Riders on the Beach" by Max Liebermann now valued at more than a million dollars.
David Toren, now 88 and blind, left Germany on a Kindertransport days before the war began.
He last saw the painting at his uncle's home in Breslau just before his father was arrested by the Nazis.
Both parents were murdered at Auschwitz.
David Toren: There came two guys from the Gestapo-- "We have instructions to-- to take you to Gestapo headquarters.
" That day, I remember every little detail.
I was sitting in the anteroom at the Winter Garden and looked at the picture and that was the last time I saw that picture.
Toren had been searching for any trace of his family's art collection, but all he found was a 1939 Nazi inventory that mentions the Liebermann painting.
David Toren: The letter says that the action to confiscate art owned by Jews has been very successful, but there's still some rich Jews left.
And the first example, he mentions my uncle.
And the letter ends with, "I want the Jew, David Friedman, not to dispose of any of the art objects until we come back.
" After the war the Allies' art recovery unit, "The Monuments Men," found and returned millions of artworks.
They also found Hildebrand Gurlitt hiding out in this Bavarian castle owned by a local Nazi party leader.
Inside were hundreds of treasures Hildebrand and his young son Cornelius had hidden.
Many more were apparently stashed in hiding places all over Germany.
Morley Safer: The Monuments Men took some of his paintings but they let him keep most of his collection, did they not? Willi Korte: That's an unresolved mystery.
I think up to this day he was able to produce one story after another about how he had acquired these before the war and for reasons that I have a hard time understanding is he got away with it.
Among the artworks in that castle was David Toren's uncle's painting.
Hildebrant Gurlitt told the Monuments Men it was a gift from his parents before the war, and that painting--like most of the others-- was returned to him.
Morley Safer: Did he feel any-- did he feel any guilt working for the Nazis? Ekkeheart Gurlitt: I'm sorry, but he had to survive.
So what would you do? I mean, this is-- this is just a thing.
What-- what-- what would you do? Morley Safer: But was he as innocent as he claimed? Vanessa Voigt: Most of these artworks were stolen, I think.
Confiscated from Jewish families or stolen, yeah.
Hannes Hartung and Tido Park, two lawyers who have represented Cornelius Gurlitt, say the sins of the father should not be visited on the son.
Hannes Hartung: Hildebrand Gurlitt wasn't completely innocent.
That's for sure.
And not there are cases we will deal 'em in a fair manner because you know, under German law, morality has nothing to say.
This-- no, I'm sorry to tell you, but the German law, it's a law which has not been made for the horrible outcome of the Third Reich and all that happened.
So now what we are talking about now is about morality and how to deal with moral responsibility.
German law puts a 30-year statute of limitations on stolen property so the works -- by law -- remain the property of Cornelius Gurlitt.
As for the art itself, authorities won't explain why they kept the discovery a secret for nearly two years.
Morley Safer: How strong is the government's criminal case against him? Tido Park: They really don't have a strong case.
They pretend to have a case because they have, of course, to justify the seizure of the whole collection.
Right now the collection is in the hands of a task force which is examining each work for evidence of looting.
Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel heads up the task force.
Uwe Hartmann is the chief researcher.
He says even as Germany was collapsing in 1945 the Nazis were dutifully recording the art thefts.
Morley Safer: Why did they keep these records of the evidence of their own crimes? Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel: You mustn't throw public documents away.
That's what they learned in s-- that's what they did.
Uwe Hartmann: That's the German gré¦ndlichkeit.
To do his duty-- Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel: Yeah.
They weren't allowed to.
Uwe Hartmann: --until the last day.
The task force is initially examining 590 works as potentially looted from Jews -- including this Matisse which was looted from Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg in 1941.
Morley Safer: Beyond the minutiae of legality, there's a larger question and that's the moral question.
Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel: Eighty years after Hitler took over.
Seventy-five years after the synagogues burned in German.
Yes, we know.
That's the moral obligation.
And we take it seriously.
Very seriously.
On the other side, there are the laws.
Morley Safer: So you're not making judgments.
Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel: No.
We are not a court.
We can't.
We mustn't.
Morley Safer: But you could still recommend.
Ingrid Bergreen-Merkel:: Mr.
Gurlitt told me when I talked to him, he said, "What's-- what's been taken away? What had been robbed?" That was his words.
"Has to be given-- back.
" Cornelius Gurlitt -- who is recovering from a heart operation -- says the collection is rightfully his and that his father did nothing wrong.
But he says he is willing to negotiate.
Morley Safer: What a lot of people might wonder is there's nothing to negotiate here.
These paintings were-- either belonged to German museums, and should go back to those German museums, or to Jews who owned collections and were forced to sell them.
Tido Park: Mr.
Gurlitt is absolutely willing to find fair solutions.
But what we need of course is clear evidence.
Because we have some letters addressed to Mr.
Gurlitt saying, "Oh-- look, my grandma had a specific painting nothing.
As for Martha Hinrichsen, she has filed a claim with the task force but has little confidence she or her family will ever see her grandfather's drawing.
Martha Hinrichsen: Quite honestly, I don't believe in my lifetime, because I think this is going to be a long, long battle.
Cornelius Gurlitt is close to an agreement with the German authorities.
He has agreed to give up paintings proven to be stolen and will retain the rest.