Supreme Court rules against heirs of Jewish art traffickers from the Third Reich
The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday against the heirs of Jewish art dealers who suffered a huge loss after selling an important collection of medieval artifacts to Nazi leaders in Germany in the 1930s.
In a unanimous decision, the justices held that Germany is shielded by the principle of “sovereign immunity” and said federal law bars U.S. courts from deciding most legal claims involving foreign governments, except those involving “property taken in violation of international law.”
The high court agreed with Germany that this exception applies only to property taken from foreigners, not for “domestic takings.”
“This ‘domestic takings rule’ assumes that what a country does to property belonging to its own citizens within its own borders is not the subject of international law,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said for the court in Federal Republic of Germany vs. Philipp.
The court stopped short of dismissing the lawsuit, however. Roberts said the heirs could renew their claim in a lower court by arguing that Jewish art dealers were no longer citizens of Germany at the time of the sale in 1935.
However, the justices rejected the heirs’ main argument that the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign against Jews beginning in 1933 was such a grave and extraordinary violation of international law so as to waive Germany’s protection from claims for stolen or confiscated property during the Nazi era.
The court also tossed out a similar claim brought by several Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Hungary in a case called Republic of Hungary vs. Simon. The survivors had filed a suit against the state railroad in Hungary that confiscated the property of tens of thousands of Jews who were transported to Nazi death camps.
After Adolf Hitler’s party took power in 1933, Nazi officials expressed interest in the state obtaining the Welfenschatz, or Guelph Treasure, a collection of medieval Christian relics owned by a consortium of Jewish art dealers based in Frankfurt.
In 1935, Saemy Rosenberg signed the sales documents in Berlin on behalf of his partners, receiving about one-third of what they had paid for the items in 1929. The buyer was the Prussian State Museum, which was under the control of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy.
Jed Leiber, a musician and record producer in Los Angeles, said he learned of his grandfather’s role in the sale years after his death.
“This was a forced sale to one of the greatest art thieves of all time. And it was literally a present for Hitler,” Leiber said, referring to reports that Goering later presented the treasures to Hitler.
Crucible Commentary
The Welfenschatz, or Guelph Treasure, cited in the February 2021 Supreme Court case was part of the reliquary treasure at the former Stiftskirche St. Blasius zu Braunschweig (now Brunswick Cathedral). It is one of the most important collections of medieval German ecclesiastical art. In 1671 it came into the possession of the princely House of Guelph, which sold the treasure, then comprising 82 objects, to a consortium of Jewish art dealers in 1929, three weeks before the start of the Great Depression.
They sold a few dozen pieces to international buyers, but those sales only amounted to around 20% of the value of the entire collection. The Consortium stored the remainder of the collection—42 pieces, today worth at least $250 million—in Amsterdam.
In June 1935, the Prussian state, acting via Dresdner Bank, acquired 42 works in the Guelph Treasure for the Schlossmuseum, now the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts) operated by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin), from this Jewish consortium, . These pieces are owned by the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) along with two additional objects acquired in 1935 and 1937.
In 2008 Alan Philipp, Gerald Stiebel and Jed Leiber – Jewish descendants of the 1935 dealers demanded to have the treasure returned to them with reference to the very low price, the state – and Hermann Göring – bought the treasure for in 1935. The descendants claimed that the price paid at that time mirrored the fact that the sell was forced. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation stated that the price reflected the challenges the consortium had selling the artifacts from the treasure due to the Great Depression.
Heirs to the Jewish art dealers claim the sale to the Prussian State in the Third Reich was forced under persecution. The heirs never filed a lawsuit in the German courts. They did not pursue exhausted remedies in their native national court before seeking remedy in a foreign court, which in the case of the United States, had nothing to do with the German case.
The State of Berlin designated the Guelph Treasure as “cultural property of national significance” on February 6, 2015, after a several-month research process.
Sources:
https://archive.ph/MDDxj
