A Jewish art dealer who fled Nazi Germany after he was forced to auction off his gallery's art collection, lost everything and then rebuilt his life. His heirs say they have recovered a painting that the dealer lost during the Holocaust.

When Andreas Achenbach’s 1837 landscape was offered at Van Ham Fine Art Auctions in Cologne in May, the auction house encouraged the consignor to negotiate with the heirs.

Now the restituted painting will be handed over in a ceremony at the Canadian embassy in Berlin.

A consignor in the same auction of two other pictures that are said to have belonged to Stern would not negotiate with the heirs.

Max Stern became the head of his father's Dusseldorf art gallery in 1934, a year after the Nazis came into power. The next year he was told that he must cease art dealing and a forced sale of his inventory was held at the Lempertz auction house in Cologne.

Stern never received the proceeds of the sale of his artwork and fled to London in 1938. He made his way to Montreal and became a prominent art dealer there.

When he died in 1987, with no children, Stern left most of his estate to three universities: Concordia and McGill in Montreal and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The colleges began a campaign in 2002 to recover the lost art, creating the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, administered by Concordia.