Supreme Court agrees to hear Nazi art case

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court agreed Thursday to hear a case involving the descendants of a group of Jewish art dealers from Germany who say their ancestors were forced to sell a collection of religious art to the Nazi government in 1935.

The justices will decide whether the dispute involving foreign citizens suing a foreign government belongs in U.S. courts. A lower court allowed the case to go forward, but Germany asked the Supreme Court to weigh in.

The justices also took a case involving Hungarian nationals suing Hungary over property taken from them during World War II.

In the case involving Germany, the group of people who sued are descendants of art dealers who in 1929 together bought a collection of religious artworks from the 11th to 15th centuries known as the Guelph Treasure. The collection is known in German as the Welfenschatz. An appeals court in Washington allowed the case to go forward in 2018.



The U.S. Supreme Court is seen Tuesday, June 30, 2020 in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)


Read more: https://apnews.com/3fe60cf650bee8997d7f091fe2e8d84e

[bucolic_frolic]

1. I don't think the article tells enough details to form an opinion

Now if the assets are currently held in a US bank, or in a corporation with a US subsidiary, that's one issue. Or if they could tie it back to the repatriation of artwork in US-occupied Germany, that's another. But asking the US government to hold the current German government accountable? Like they didn't follow law post-war? More issues than we are told here.

[JudyM]

2. Background: A 1938 Nazi Law Forced Jews to Register Their Wealth--Making It Easier to Steal

“Aryanization was essentially a gigantic, trans-European trafficking operation in stolen goods,” writes historian Götz Aly in Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. As Nazi-occupied territory grew from Austria to Poland to more of Eastern Europe, so, too, did the number of Jewish families the Nazis could steal from. Jews had faced discrimination in Germany—and much of Europe—before the April 1938 edict, but that new law marked a turning point. One legal advisor for the Nazi Ministry of Economics deemed it the “forerunner to a complete and definitive removal of Jews from the German economy.”
...
For those Jews with the means to leave the country, legally emigrating meant relinquishing 50 percent of one’s monetary assets, and then exchanging the rest of the remaining Reichsmarks for the currency of whatever country would be the final destination. “By late 1938, they were allowing Jews to keep only 8 percent of what their Reichsmarks were worth in the foreign country,” Hayes says—which only made it harder to find a safe haven, since the Jewish refugees couldn’t take any of their savings with them.
...
And ordinary citizens were more than willing to participate in the looting of Jewish property. “When the Nazis wipe out the Jewish inhabitants of a village in eastern Poland [later in the war], one of the first things they would do is distribute all the property to the locals,” Hayes says. “This was a way of winning popular support. It created a complicity between the occupiers and the occupied, and a common interest, and the Nazis exploited that.”

Business owners benefitted as much as private individuals. Companies like Neckermann, which sold mail-order goods and vacation packages, and Evonik, a manufacturing group formerly known as Degussa, bought businesses formerly owned by Jewish people. The ability to consolidate power made them leaders of their industries, and implicit partners with the Nazi government. Each of these transactions were legal, and many were meticulously recorded.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1938-nazi-law-forced-jews-register-their-wealthmaking-it-easier-steal-180968894/

[bucolic_frolic]

4. Correct, it was essentially a political system of plunder under cover of war and holocaust

They were both looters and shooters! The looters' loot? Some of it disappeared, some of the bank accounts disappeared. Post-war Germany remains a somewhat murky record.

Think it couldn't happen here? I'd say anyone who doesn't see this as a possibility right now is in a serious state of denial.

[JudyM]

5. I think we're waking up. The diversity and passion of the BLM marches seems significant even

more broadly.

[LeftInTX]

3. Very interesting

[obamanut2012]

6. Republic of Austria v. Altmann

I wonder how this SCOTUS case may influence the Court.

Great film about this, Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, and Tatiana Maslany.

[CTyankee]

7. I was thinking the same thing. The "woman in gold" is about the famous Klimt painting of

Adele Bloch Bauer. I think the book about it was called "Lady in Gold" and tells how the painting wound up the Neue Gallery in NYC, where it can be seen today.

It's a fascinating story, absolutely wonderful and it turned out well for all concerned, IMO.

[MichMan]

8. According to the link, the sale occurred in 1929

That was a few years before the Nazi party took control of the government. The article states both 1929 & 1935, so which one was it?

[csziggy]

9. The collecetion known as the Guelph Treasure was assembled in 1929

In 1929 Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick, sold 82 items to a consortium of Frankfurt art dealers Saemy Rosenberg, Isaak Rosenbaum, Julius Falk Goldschmidt and Zacharias Hackenbroch. Items from the Treasure were exhibited in the United States in 1930–31.[1] Cleveland Museum of Art purchased nine pieces and more were sold to other museums and private collectors.

In 1934 the remaining 40 pieces of the collection, which had been retained by several German-Jewish art dealers from Frankfurt, were purchased for 4.25 million Reichsmarks and displayed in Berlin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guelph_Treasure

The dispute is whether the 1934 sale was forced on Jewish art dealers by the Nazis.