[1] The day before the exhibition started, Adolf Hitler delivered a speech declaring "merciless war" on cultural disintegration, attacking "chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers".

[1] Degenerate art was defined as works that "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill".

Hitler's rise to power on 30 January 1933 was quickly followed by actions intended to cleanse the culture of so-called degeneracy: book burnings were organized, artists and musicians were dismissed from teaching positions, and museum curators were replaced by Party members.

Although Goebbels and some others admired the Expressionist works of artists such as Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, and Erich Heckel, a faction led by Alfred Rosenberg despised the Expressionists, and the result was a bitter ideological dispute which was settled only in September 1934, when Hitler – who denounced modern art and its practitioners as "incompetents, cheats and madmen"[1][3] – declared that there would be no place for modernist experimentation in the Reich.

[3] Goebbels put Adolf Ziegler, the head of the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste (Reich Chamber of Visual Art), in charge of a five-man commission that toured state collections in numerous cities, in two weeks seizing 5,238 works they deemed degenerate (showing qualities such as "decadence", "weakness of character","mental disease", and "racial impurity").

[3] The commission focused on works by artists mentioned in avant-garde publications, and was aided by some vehement opponents of modern art, such as Wolfgang Willrich.

[8] The Degenerate Art Exhibition included 650 paintings, sculptures and prints by 112 artists, primarily German:[3] Georg Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Georg Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Willi Baumeister, Kurt Schwitters and others.

[3][9] Ziegler also confiscated and exhibited works of foreign artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Grant Wood, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky.

[3] Another Degenerate Art Exhibition was hosted a few months later in Berlin, and later in Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Weimar, Halle, Vienna and Salzburg, to be seen by another million or so people.

[3] Many works were later sold off, although interested buyers were scarce and prices dropped drastically with the addition of such a large quantity of works to the art market:[16] Goebbels wrote of them changing hands between U.S. collectors for "ten cents a kilo", although some "foreign exchange ... will go into the pot for war expenses, and after the war will be devoted to the purchase of art.

MoMA highlights a collection of work that were deemed as "degenerate art" and removed from German state-owned museums by the Nazi government.