Two Last-Minute Nazi-Loot Suits Test California’s Restitution Law
On 29 September 2026, The Art Newspaper reported that two Nazi-loot claims filed in California on 14 September — two days before a 2024 state filing window closed — are now the only cases ever to use that statute. One asks the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to give up Lucas Cranach the Elder’s life-size diptych Adam and Eve (c. 1530). The other asks the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland to return watercolours that Dina Gottliebova Babbitt was forced to paint in the camp in 1944.
What: Two lawsuits over Nazi-era losses, filed under a now-expired 2024 California statute
Where: Los Angeles Superior Court and U.S. District Court, Los Angeles
When: Filed 14 September 2026; analysed by The Art Newspaper on 29 September 2026
Who: Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles and Daniel Gryczman v. Norton Simon Museum; heirs of Dina Gottliebova Babbitt v. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
Section: Heists, Law & Restitution
What happened
According to The Art Newspaper, the Los Angeles Times and Courthouse News Service, the California complaints were filed on 14 September 2026, just inside a two-year window created by California Code of Civil Procedure section 338.2, enacted in 2024. That law gave residents a new route to sue for property lost through political persecution when earlier cases had failed on procedure. The window closed in mid-September 2026. These two filings are, the newspaper says, the only claims that used it.
In Los Angeles Superior Court, the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles and its board chair, Daniel Gryczman — acting as assignees of Marei von Saher, sole surviving heir of the Dutch dealer Jacques Goudstikker — demand the return of Cranach’s Adam and Eve. In June 1940, Hermann Göring seized more than 800 works from Goudstikker’s gallery in the occupied Netherlands. After the war the diptych passed through Dutch government hands; in 1966 it was delivered to George Stroganoff-Scherbatoff, who sold it to the Norton Simon in 1971. Von Saher lost an eleven-year federal fight in 2018, when the Ninth Circuit dismissed the case under the act-of-state doctrine. The museum says court after court, including the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the appeal, confirmed its title, and that it will keep the panels on public view.
In federal court the same day, Babbitt’s daughters sued the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum over seven watercolour portraits of Roma prisoners. Babbitt, a Czech Jew later known as a California animator, painted them in 1944 under orders from Josef Mengele. The museum’s deputy spokesman, Pawel Sawicki, told reporters the sheets are “unique evidence” of crimes against Roma and Sinti and “not simply works whose ownership can be considered separately from the circumstances in which they were created.” The heirs say she never freely sold or assigned them.
Congress separately passed a Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery statute, signed in April 2026, which — as both the Los Angeles Times and The Art Newspaper report — is designed to strip current holders of several technical defences, including act of state, in Nazi-persecution claims. Museum responses are expected from mid-October for the Norton Simon and from mid-November for Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Why it matters
Restitution fights rarely die when a court says no. They wait for a new statute. California’s 2024 law was written after heirs lost cases on timing and on foreign-act doctrines, including the long Cassirer–Thyssen dispute over a Pissarro. Jesse Gabriel, who authored the California measure, told The Art Newspaper the law was “for exactly this type of situation.”
The two complaints could not be more different, and that is the point. One is a pair of Reformation nudes that spent decades as trophies — first Göring’s, then a museum’s — after a dealer died fleeing. The other is camp paperwork that the memorial argues must stay where the crime happened. A court that treats both as ordinary title disputes will please one side and alarm the other. A court that treats the watercolours as evidence first will draw a line many families do not want drawn around “art.”
Neither museum has conceded. Mid-autumn motions will show whether the new federal text actually kills the defences that ended von Saher’s last case, and whether a Polish state memorial can be hauled into a California courtroom at all.
The painting behind the story
Cranach’s Pasadena panels are not in the Sapiens Verbum print shop. The nearest work we have already written about, with a documented Nazi seizure, is Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine — taken into Hans Frank’s offices in occupied Kraków and recovered in 1945. The subject is different. The pattern is not: a picture that survived the war in the wrong hands, and a legal argument that still has not run out.
Read the essay: Lady with an Ermine: The Leonardo the Nazis Almost Kept.
Get Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine as a museum-quality print, canvas, or poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
Shop This Print →
💬 Over to you: Should a Holocaust memorial treat forced camp portraits as evidence that must stay on site, or as an artist’s work that heirs can reclaim? Tell us in the comments.
Sources
The Art Newspaper, 29 September 2026
Los Angeles Times, 16 September 2026
The Guardian, 19 September 2026
Courthouse News Service, 15 September 2026
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