A surrealist painting worth more than a quarter-million euros that was forgotten by a businessman at Duesseldorf's airport has been recovered from a nearby recycling dumpster, police said Thursday.

The businessman, whose identity was not given, accidentally left behind the painting by French surrealist Yves Tanguy at a check-in counter as he boarded a flight from Duesseldorf to Tel Aviv on Nov. 27.

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By the time he landed in Israel and contacted Duesseldorf police, the 280,000-Euro (340,000-dollar) oeuvre, which had been wrapped in cardboard, had disappeared.

Despite multiple emails with details about the 40x60-centimeter (16X24-inch) painting, authorities could not locate the artwork, police spokesman Andre Hartwig said.

It was only after the businessman's nephew traveled to the airport from neighboring Belgium and talked with police directly with more information that an inspector was able to trace the painting to a paper recycling dumpster used by the airport's cleaning company.

"This was definitely one of our happiest stories this year," Hartwig said. "It was real detective work."

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Although U.S. District Judge John F. Walter criticized Baron Hans-Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the German industrialist whose name now graces the Madrid museum where the painting by Camille Pissarro hangs, for not doing all of the due diligence he could have when he acquired it in 1976, he found no evidence the museum knew it was looted art when it took possession in 1993.

Under Spanish law, he ruled, the painting is legally the museum's, although he also criticized Spain, calling its decision to keep it "inconsistent" with international agreements that it and other countries have signed "based upon the moral principle that art and cultural property confiscated by the Nazis from Holocaust (Shoah) victims should be returned to them or their heirs."

The museum's U.S. attorney, Thaddeus Stauber, said he believes the decision finally puts an end to a bitter legal fight that has pitted the family of Lilly Cassirer against the museum for 20 years.

"I think it puts an end to it because the court conducted, and we conducted, what the appellate court asked us to, which was a full trial on the merits," he told The Associated Press. "As a lawyer who has been involved in this case for 14 years, I'm pleased that the court did conduct a full trial. We now have a decision on the lawful owner and that should put an end to it."

Walter, who has seen the case returned to court twice by appeals and conducted the trial Stauber mentioned last December, indicated in his 34-page ruling that another appeal still could be possible. A lawyer for Lilly Cassirer's great-grandson, David Cassirer of San Diego, didn't say whether the family plans to appeal.

"We respectfully disagree that the court cannot force the Kingdom of Spain to comply with its moral commitments," attorney Steve Zack said.

The painting at issue, Pissarro's "Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie," is a stunning oil-on-canvas work depicting a rainy Paris street scene the artist observed from his window in 1897.

It was purchased directly from Pissarro's art dealer in 1900 by the father-in-law of Lilly Cassirer, who eventually inherited it and displayed it in her home for years. When she and her family fled the Holocaust in 1939 she traded it for passage out of the country.

For years the family thought it was lost, and the German government paid her $13,000 in reparations in 1958.

Then in 1999 a friend of her grandson, Claude, who had seen photos of the painting, discovered it was in the Thyssen-Bornemisza. It had been hanging there since shortly after a nonprofit foundation funded by Spain bought the baron's entire collection for $350 million and named the museum for him.

The painting had been sold and resold after Cassirer and her family fled Germany. The baron, a German industrialist who settled later in Spain, bought it from a U.S. dealer for $300,000 in 1976.

The baron never hid the painting, putting it on exhibition often.

"The court finds that there were sufficient suspicious circumstances or 'red flags' which should have prompted the baron to conduct additional inquiries as to the seller's title," the judge said.

Still, despite missing and torn provenance labels, the judge concluded that the baron and the museum foundation did not know the work was looted, and under Spanish law that allows the museum to keep it.

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Now more than 80 of those artworks have gone on display at an exhibition at the Auschwitz Memorial in Oswiecim, Poland.

"David Olere: The One Who Survived Crematorium III," shows the extermination process which took place at Auschwitz during the Holocaust through the late painter's own eyes.

A French Jew of Polish descent, Olere was part of a special unit of male Jewish prisoners, dubbed the Sonderkommando, chosen by the Nazis to discard the bodies of those killed in gas chambers.

"He is the only witness who documented this unimaginable cruelty in the form of paintings and drawings," Agnieszka Sieradzka, an art historian at the Museum Collections and one of the curators of the exhibition, said in a press release.

Born in Warsaw in 1902, Olere studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the Polish capital before eventually settling in Paris. He was arrested in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz, one of several concentration camps operated by the Nazis on Polish soil during the Holocaust in which some 6 million Jews were killed.

His grandson Marc Oler described the artist, who died in 1985, as "very, very tough, very, very talented, very, very traumatized."

"David Olere wanted the next generation to be aware so they could be … [spared] the horrors that he had been through and know peace," Oler, who attended the exhibition's opening on Tuesday, said.

The exhibition, which runs until March, displays its own collection of Olere's artwork as well as many others on loan from the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel and France's Mémorial de la Shoah.

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