Gifts included the Johannes Driesch (1901 - 1930) drawing, Familie und Liebespaar, and Lionel Feiniger's Viadukt to the Museum für Kunst und Heimatgeschichte in Enfert,[4][5] He also loaned artworks to museums, such as Landungssteg by Lionel Feiniger[6] and Tänzerinnen by Erich Henkel.

His widow Thekla, who emigrated from Germany to the UK via Switzerland, said that she was forced to sell paintings by the Gestapo.

[9] She was forced to deposit paintings with the Cologne Art Association in 1937, and was later told, falsely, that they had been destroyed.

[13] Several works, such as Berlin Street Scene (1913) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner[14] and Nude by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, have been returned to his granddaughter and heir, Anita Halpin, and subsequently sold; the former sold at auction for £20.5 million to the Neue Galerie New York, which also paid over £1 million to Halpin for Nude.

[15] Restitution was opposed by Ludwig von Pufendorf, Wolfgang Henze of the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Archive in Bern, Switzerland; and Bernd Schultz, managing shareholder of Berlin's Villa Grisebach auction house who stated that they thought that the Hess family sold because of the financial crisis unrelated to any Nazi pressure.