Several pieces of artwork considered as “deviant” by the Nazis have been unearthed in Berlin.

The 11 sculptures, discovered when a construction team began digging a new railway line in the German capital, were thought to have been destroyed after the Holocaust.

But the terracotta and bronze statues, including one of a mother with her child and another of a woman stretching, were hidden underneath the site of a building destroyed in a fire in 1944.

The pieces were part of a collection of 15,000 artworks deemed to go against Nazi ideology or to contain degenerate sexual elements.

With the exception of one of the statues which is in too fragile a state, the works will now go on display in Berlin's Neues Museum.

Museum director Matthias Wemhoff said that when the building had gone up in flames, “each floor fell onto the next.

“Everything that couldn't be burnt collected at the bottom in the basement.”

Klaus Wowereit, Mayor of Berlin, called the discovery a "small miracle".

He said: “It shows a lot about the dark times of the city."