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At around 4 am on Wednesday, November 6, 2013, I was sleeping in a Manhattan hotel when I was awakened by one of my phones for the Wall Street Journal. The night before, I had been covering the annual Impressionist and Modern Art Auction at Christie’s—a night during which dealers, speculators, and private collectors had bought just shy of $144.3 million worth of art in roughly the amount of time it takes to watch a feature film. The auction had included works by artists whose careers I had grown accustomed to analyzing for both their artistic merit and their market value—a cold but critical balance in covering the world’s largest legal but unregulated industry. That night, Christie’s had sold a Vincent van Gogh work on paper for $5.49 million, a Claude Monet for $8.12 million and—its top lot—a portrait by Pablo Picasso of one of his mistresses for $12.2 million.

On the phone, a Europe-based editor told me to return to Berlin immediately. This, he said, was bigger than New York’s November Auction Week, the most lucrative time annually for the global art market.

What exactly was “this,” I asked groggily. Though I was the chief European art reporter, editors had told me to concentrate on New York’s relationship with Europe that week rather than events in Europe itself. My editor told me that Focus magazine, a German cross between America’s Newsweek and People, had just revealed that an octogenarian recluse named Cornelius Gurlitt had been hiding approximately 1,200 works of art in his small Munich apartment—works by the same artists I had just covered at Christie’s.

Focus said that Cornelius had inherited them from his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had been one of the main art dealers for the Führermuseum, the museum Adolf Hitler planned to build to house Nazi-approved masterpieces, many looted from the Führer’s victims and from European museums. German government officials had confiscated the trove in early 2012 as part of a never-ending tax investigation. Yet they had concealed the trove’s existence for almost two years.

If the works were real, the collection was clearly worth tens of millions of dollars. There were pieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Max Liebermann, and dozens of other artists whose names the German government refused to release. Germany’s hiding of this find represented an egregious violation of the Washington Principles, a set of international regulations agreed to by Germany in 1998 intended to facilitate the return of Nazi-looted property to Hitler’s victims.

The Journal asked me to investigate the case and write a Page One article on the lives of Hildebrand and Cornelius Gurlitt within 72 hours, 10 of which would be consumed by travel. On the airplane, I contemplated the implications this story would have for Germany, the art world, and my career. I dozed in my cramped coach seat, preparing for several nights’ slumber under my desk in the Journal‘s bureau, located across from the German parliament. I had recently turned 26 years old. Little did I know that I was embarking on a five-year project that would confirm that the wounds of World War II were hardly healed and clearly demonstrate that the German government was ill prepared to deal with this problem of international proportions.