The most attended art show of its era was designed to make visitors hate everything on the walls. This episode examines the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, where a regime intent on destroying modernism inadvertently handed the avant-garde its biggest platform in history. We trace the road there from 1933, including the bureaucratic war between Joseph Goebbels, who privately admired expressionists like Emil Nolde and Ernst Barlach, and party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who despised all modern art. Hitler settled the dispute in September 1934, and when he later fired the jury of the approved Great German Art Exhibition and installed his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, a panicked Goebbels scrambled for a way back into favor.

The result was a two-week blitz led by Adolf Ziegler in which more than 5,000 works were seized from  ...