A controversial collection of art masterpieces has been willed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland, reports the institution, which said it received confirmation from the deceased owner's lawyer.
"Despite media speculation that the collection was going to be handed over to an art institution outside Germany, the news still struck us like a bolt out of the blue," read a museum statement.
It said it had never had any connection to the deceased owner, Cornelius Gurlitt, who died on Tuesday, aged 81, a week after a heart surgery.
The collection of about 1400 pieces only came to light in 2013 after investigators announced they had raided Gurlitt's home a year earlier, amid suspicions that he was holding work that had been illegally expropriated during the Nazi era.
A police task force is working under the assumption that 458 of the artworks were looted by the Nazis.
Gurlitt and his lawyers had said only 40 of the works were under suspicion.
In April, investigators agreed to return the works to Gurlitt, acknowledging that at least a part of the collection was rightfully his.
The trove includes modern classics - from artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Franz Marc, Paul Klee and Max Beckmann - valued at about 1 billion euros ($A1.5 billion).
According to a spokesman, Gurlitt had not seen the collection since its confiscation.
The museum said it was happy and pleasantly surprised by the news, but did not want to downplay the responsibility the inheritance would leave upon it, saying it "burdens us with a heavy responsibility and a host of difficult questions, questions that are pronouncedly of a legal and ethical nature".
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