From 1926 Bernhard Degenhart studied art history in Munich, Vienna and Berlin. He wrote his thesis on Lorenzo di Credi at the University of Munich at first with August Liebmann Mayer. After Mayer had been obliged to renounce his professorship as a result of antisemitic attacks, particularly from his colleague Wilhelm Pinder, Degenhart completed his doctorate in 1931 with the ardent Nazi Pinder. After working as an unpaid research assistant in the Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich, he obtained a bursary at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and from 1933 to 1939 a position as assistant at the Biblioteca Hertziana (from 1938 Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Art and Cultural History in Palazzo Zuccari) in Rome. In 1935 he married his colleague, the photographer and art historian Hilde Lotz-Bauer (1907–1999), but the marriage ended after four years. At that time, Degenhart published works on artists in the Quattrocento and Venetian painting and his celebrated essay on the graphology of hand drawing ("Zur Graphologie der Handzeichnung"). In his application in 1939 to State Secretary Kajetan Mühlmann for a position at the Graphische Sammlung Albertina he stated that he was a member of a foreign NSDAP organization. His efforts paid off: in September 1939 he became a curator in the Albertina. In Vienna he met Anton Faistauer's last partner, the ceramic artist Adelgunde Krippel (1900–1986), whom he married in 1943. Gundl Krippel-Degenhart herself had excellent contacts with the Vienna art scene, including Mühlmann. Degenhart, Franz Kieslinger and Eduard Plietzsch worked in 1940/41 for office in The Hague of the Mühlmann organization ("Dienststelle Mühlmann"), responsible for the seizure and disposal of Dutch artworks. In March 1941 Degenhart turned down the offer by the Reichsstatthalterei in Vienna to become director of the Picture Gallery in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in place of Bruno Grimschitz. At the time he was conducting research in particular on Antonio Pisanello. When Degenhart was stationed from early 1943 as a soldier in the Ceasefire Commission in Turin set up to maintain the ceasefire between Italy and France, the Reichsstatthalterei in Vienna provided him with funds to purchase contemporary Italian graphic art for the Albertina. He subsequently acquired valuable prints by artists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Marino Marini and Alberto Morandi, using the war situation to purchase works cheaply from the artists themselves. He was less successful in a similar action in Nice, where he selected and paid for works in the studio of Henri Matisse. Matisse, in increasing peril on account of the Nazi regime, never sent the drawings to the Albertina in spite of the ever more impatient demands from Vienna. In the last few weeks of the war, in April 1945, Degenhart worked to protect Italian art in Merano for Leo Bruhns, his former superior at the Hertziana, and Joseph Ringler, director of the Tyrol Museum of Folk Art. No doubt because of his dismissal from the Albertina, he remained in the following years in Italy, teaching at the Istituto di Studi Germanici in Rome, until he obtained a position in 1949 as a restorer at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, whose director he became in 1965, remaining in this position until his retirement in 1971. During this time he worked with his colleague and third wife Annegrit Schmitt (born 1929) on his opus magnum Corpus der italienischen Zeichnungen 1300–1450. In 2011 the auction house Ketterer auctioned a large number of letters written by artists to Degenhart from his estate, which it has not been possible to consult to date, however.