California Lawsuits Challenge Museums Over Nazi-Looted Art in Los Angeles and Auschwitz

Heirs of Jewish Holocaust victims and their representatives have filed two California lawsuits seeking the return of artworks looted by the Nazis that remain on display at major museums in Los Angeles and Auschwitz.

The cases are the first brought under recently enacted laws in California and Congress that expand U.S. legal avenues for recovering art forcibly taken from Jewish families during World War II.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and its board chair, Daniel Gryczman, filed one lawsuit Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court against the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. The suit seeks the return of Adam and Eve, two life-size oil-on-panel paintings created by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1530.

The second case was filed the same day in federal court in Los Angeles by the daughters of the late Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt. A Holocaust survivor and California-based animator, Babbitt was imprisoned at Auschwitz and forced to paint watercolors of fellow prisoners for Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician known as the “Angel of Death.”

Representatives for both museums said they legally own the works and plan to keep them on public display. Neither lawsuit identifies a monetary value for the paintings.

Nazi-looted art remains one of the most emotionally charged and legally complex disputes in the museum world. Jewish families continue to grapple with generations of trauma, while museums argue that preserving these works keeps an essential and painful chapter of history accessible to the public.

From 1933 to 1945, the Nazi regime orchestrated the largest art theft in history, seizing over 600,000 works across Europe from Jewish families, collectors and museums. Many of those pieces now sit in leading institutions worldwide, turning efforts to recover them into disputes that extend far beyond ordinary questions of ownership.

Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, said the organization is acting on behalf of Marei von Saher, the sole heir of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, seized the paintings from Goudstikker’s collection. They passed through several owners before being sold in the 1960s to the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, later renamed the Norton Simon Museum after its benefactor.

Farkas said the federation expects to direct most of the net proceeds from any recovery toward services for roughly 2,500 Holocaust survivors living in the Los Angeles area.

“These are incredibly beautiful European masterpieces stolen from a Jewish family to enrich the Nazi party and fund the war and death machine against the people,” he said. “It’s our honor to take on this role on behalf of the community and use most of the proceeds to help these elderly survivors live out the last years of their lives in dignity, comfort and peace – something their family members were denied during the Holocaust.”

In a statement, von Saher said she was thankful that the Jewish organization had agreed to pursue her family’s claim.

“This effort represents a meaningful step toward justice for Holocaust survivors and victims of Nazi era atrocities,” she said.

California Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat who represents Los Angeles’ Woodland Hills neighborhood, authored Assembly Bill 2867. Signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2024, the measure requires California law to apply when state residents or their heirs sue to recover art taken during the Holocaust or other acts of persecution. Gabriel, co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, introduced the bill after a federal court ruling allowed Madrid’s state-owned Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum to retain a multimillion-dollar Camille Pissarro impressionist work.

The Nazis seized that painting from the Cassirer family in 1939. The case that prompted California’s new law is expected to return to federal court in California next month.

Gabriel said museums should “do some deep introspection on whether they want to be on the right side of history.”

The Norton Simon Museum said a federal court unanimously ruled in 2018 that it had valid title to the Cranach paintings. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in May 2019, leaving the lower-court decisions intact.

According to the museum, the Cranach works originally belonged to the Stroganoff family and were sold by the Soviet Union in a 1931 illicit auction in Berlin, where Goudstikker bought them. Following a complicated chain of ownership, a Stroganoff descendant eventually sold the paintings to the museum, which later restored and conserved them.

“For nearly 50 years, they have been on view at the Norton Simon Museum and will continue to be accessible to the public for years to come,” the museum said.

Pawel Sawicki, a spokesperson for the Auschwitz Memorial, said the watercolors depicting Roma victims were created under coercion as Mengele documented his brutal experiments and racial research. The works, he said, “must remain in the Memorial” as evidence of the crimes. Sawicki also argued that they should not be described as “Nazi-looted art,” because Babbitt painted them unwillingly as a prisoner and therefore never owned the watercolors.

Sawicki said he understood the family’s feelings but maintained that the portraits of Roma and Sinti victims are among the few surviving records of Mengele’s criminal experiments. In his view, they should be preserved as unique documents of Auschwitz’s history.

“While fully respecting the rights of people who created some of the documents here, we are of the opinion that any loss in the collections of the Memorial will constitute irreparable harm,” he said. “… The loss of even the smallest part of the documentation is an irreparable loss and blemish on the memory of the victims of Auschwitz.”