FRED OLSEN, the reclusive shipping tycoon, revealed to The Times yesterday that his father, who saved dozens of paintings by Edvard Munch from destruction by the Nazis, also saved the life of a German Jewish doctor.

The 77-year-old billionaire recalled how in 1938 his father, Thomas Olsen, secured the safety of the artworks and the release from a concentration camp of the Berlin doctor who had saved his life.

Olsen travelled to Berlin in 1938 to be treated for an ulcer by Fritz Hirschberg, a specialist. Soon after the operation he learnt from a Norwegian schoolfriend there that the doctor and his 84-year-old mother had been transported to a concentration camp.

Olsen, who was prominent in Norwegian society, used his contacts to try to save them.

“A little money helped,” his son said yesterday. The doctor escaped to Sweden, but his mother was murdered.

After the Nazis denounced Munch’s art as degenerate, Olsen managed to get his collection of paintings out of Germany and, after the occupation of Norway in 1940, hid 36 of them on the family’s farm in the mountains in the remote district of Vaagaa until the country was liberated in 1945.

His son was speaking to The Times before tonight’s sale at Sotheby’s in London of a dozen of the pictures, which together are expected to fetch about £12 million. They make up the finest collection by Munch, the founding father of Expressionism, to appear on the market.

Asked why he was selling the paintings, Mr Olsen said that Munch had given thousands of works to Norway, whose museums can show only a fraction of their collection at any one time. He said: “I’m trying to make sure what my father hoped for — that Munch would be as well known and appreciated as the Impressionists. That would not happen if there were not enough Munchs abroad.”

His father befriended Munch as his neighbour in Hvitsten, a village in the Oslo fjord. Olsen bought the first of many paintings in the late 1920s, building up a collection that included a version of The Scream, on loan to the National Gallery in Washington. Summer Day, from 1904, is estimated to fetch about £3.5 million, but it could break the 1996 auction record for a Munch, when Girls on a Bridge sold for £4.4 million.

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