Two lawsuits over Holocaust-era works filed in California — CBS News
In California, Jewish heirs of Holocaust victims and their representatives have filed two lawsuits over works held at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and the Auschwitz Memorial. The plaintiffs are seeking the return of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s paintings “Adam and Eve,” as well as watercolor portraits of prisoners that Dina Gottliebova Babbitt was forced to create at Auschwitz for Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
As CBS News reports, these are the first such lawsuits after laws were passed in California and at the U.S. federal level that strengthen the ability to file claims in the United States for the return of works forcibly taken from Jewish families during World War II.
Lawsuit against the Norton Simon Museum
The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and its board chair, Daniel Grichman, filed a claim with the Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday seeking the return of two paintings, “Adam and Eve,” painted in 1530. Marei von Saher, the sole heir of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, transferred the rights to these claims to the federation.
According to the federation, Hermann Göring seized the paintings from Goudstikker’s collection, after which they changed hands several times. In the 1960s, they were sold to the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, which was later renamed the Norton Simon Museum. The federation said it plans to direct most of the net proceeds from the returned works to assist about 2,500 Holocaust survivors living in the Los Angeles area.
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The Norton Simon Museum said it holds legal title to the paintings. It noted that in 2018, a federal court unanimously recognized the museum’s right to the works, and in 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review that ruling. According to the museum, the paintings originally belonged to the Stroganov family, and Goudstikker acquired them at an illegal auction in Berlin in 1931.
Watercolors from Auschwitz
On the same day, the daughters of the late Dina Gottliebova Babbitt filed a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles concerning watercolor portraits of other prisoners. The artist was held at Auschwitz, where she was forced to create these works for Mengele, who used them to document his experiments and racial research.
Auschwitz Memorial spokesperson Paweł Sawicki said that the portraits of Roma and Sinti victims should remain in the memorial’s collection as some of the few surviving documents of Mengele’s criminal experiments. He also said that the memorial does not consider the works Nazi-looted art because Babbitt created them against her will as a prisoner and did not hold ownership rights to them.
