BERLIN (AFP)--- Fire has caused major damage to a German museum for an artist murdered in the Holocaust that was designed by US star architect Daniel Libeskind, a police spokesman said Tuesday.

The blaze broke out Monday at the Felix Nussbaum Museum in the western city of Osnabrueck, which has the world’s largest collection of works by the Jewish painter who was persecuted by the Nazis and killed at the Auschwitz death camp.

The fire destroyed much of the wooden facade of the building. Investigators are treating it as arson but said there was no indication it was politically motivated.

"We do not yet know if it was intentional or due to negligence," the spokesman said, adding that the blaze had caused thousands of euros (dollars) worth of damage.

The building, which opened in 1998 as an extention of Osnabrueck’s Cultural History Museum, bears the jagged lines and maze-like design Libeskind later used in his landmark Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Nussbaum was born in Osnabrueck in 1904 and became a leading painter and graphic artist in the 1920s and 1930s. After years in exile in Belgium after the rise of the Nazis in Germany, he was deported and killed at Auschwitz in 1944.