This pair of lawsuits are the first to be filed after the recent passage of laws by California and Congress, which strengthen U.S.-based claims to artwork that were forcibly taken from Jewish families during World War II.
One case was filed in federal court in Los Angeles by the daughters of the late Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt, a Holocaust survivor and California-based animator who was held in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp operated in German-occupied southern Poland between May 1940 and January 1945. It was the largest of the German Nazi concentration and death camps during World War II.
The lawsuit demanded the return of watercolors of fellow prisoners that Gottliebova Babbitt was forced to paint for Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician who had earned the nickname the “Angel of Death.”
The AP agency quoted Paweł Sawicki, a spokesperson for the Auschwitz Memorial, as saying the watercolors of Roma victims that Gottliebova Babbitt was forced to paint to document Mengele’s horrendous experiments and racial research, “must remain in the Memorial” to document the man’s crimes.
He argued these paintings must not be mischaracterized as “Nazi-looted art” because Gottliebova Babbitt painted them against her will as a prisoner and therefore didn’t have ownership of the watercolors.
Photo: PAP R.Koszowski
While he understands the family’s sentiments, Sawicki said the portraits of Roma and Sinti victims are among the few remaining documents of Mengele’s criminal experiments and should be treated as unique documents related to the history of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“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,” the AP wrote.
“The loss of even the smallest part of the documentation is an irreparable loss and blemish on the memory of the victims of Auschwitz”, Sawicki was quoted as saying.
The other lawsuit was filed against Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena for the return of Adam and Eve, two life-size oil-on-panel masterpieces created by Lucas Carnach the Elder in 1530 and taken by the Nazis from the Cassirer family in 1939.
The issue of Nazi-looted art is an emotional, legally and ethically charged topic that pits Jewish families that have suffered inter-generational trauma against museums that say they are trying to preserve a painful, yet important, chapter of history, the AP wrote.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime orchestrated the largest art theft in world history, seizing over 600,000 works of art across Europe from Jewish families, collectors and museums.
Decades later, many of these masterpieces reside in prominent museums around the world, making the push for their recovery more complex than a simple property dispute.
Established by the Germans in 1940, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp became a central site of the Nazi genocide.
Over the course of its operation, more than 1 million people were murdered there, primarily Jews, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of other nationalities.
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Source: PAP, AP