House Adopts Bill to Ease Heirs’ Recovery of Art That Nazis Looted

Legislation to make recovering Nazi-looted art easier for the heirs of victims won approval in the House of Representatives on Monday, despite concerns from some U.S. museums and European parties that it goes too far to eliminate legal defenses that courts have used to decide past claims.

The bill would extend the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016, which is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. That law was designed to address cases where museums had blocked claims by invoking the statute of limitations. It gave heirs of victims of Nazi theft extra time to file a claim — up to six years after locating or identifying a stolen artwork.

But even after the 2016 law was enacted, courts at times ruled that the passage of so many decades had unfairly hindered the ability of the current owners of disputed artworks, including major museums, to mount effective defenses. The new bill, which passed the Senate unanimously in December, would help claimants, in part by closing off such time-related defenses.

The bill now goes to President Trump for his consideration. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

The sponsors of the Senate bill include John Cornyn, a Texan Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. In a joint statement, eight senators who support the bill argued that the amendments were necessary because some museums, governments and institutions had “chosen to entrench and litigate, effectively preserving possession of stolen works.”

The efforts to strengthen the law enjoy broad support from Jewish and Holocaust survivors’ groups. The Association of Art Museum Directors funded a lobbying effort to try to keep some defenses relating to the passage of time that are currently permitted, describing it as a matter of fairness.

Sascha Freudenheim, a spokesman for the association, said the organization supported extending the HEAR Act in its original form. But the new amendments, he said, “would set a dangerous precedent by overturning fundamental principles of our legal system, threaten relations with foreign countries” and “undermine reasonable and good-faith defenses an institution may offer in the face of certain claims.”

Joel Greenberg, the president of Art Ashes, a nonprofit organization that helps families recover looted art, disagreed. “The extension of the HEAR Act is essential to ensure that claims to recover Nazi-looted art are decided on their merits, not dismissed on technical defenses like the passage of time,” he said.

The legislation could also have some impact on international disputes over looted art claims. U.S. courts have often stayed out of such cases, citing U.S. law that mainly treats foreign governments as immune from being sued in the United States. The exception under the law are cases where a claim is based on a “violation of international law.”

For example, there has been a longstanding dispute over the Guelph Treasure, a trove of gem-encrusted medieval ecclesiastical artifacts, which Jewish art dealers and investors sold to Prussia in 1935. The heirs to the dealers contend it was a forced sale because of the building persecution of Jews at that time. A German tribunal, however, has argued that the dealers received a fair price.

In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the American legal system did not have jurisdiction in the case because Germany had not violated international law in acquiring the Guelph Treasure. Later efforts by the heirs also failed, and their case was dismissed in 2023 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The bill passed by Congress holds that Nazi seizures of art should be considered violations of international law, and therefore not covered by sovereign immunity.

The HEAR Act extension “is a complete vindication of our position,” said Nicholas O’Donnell, who represented the heirs in the Guelph Treasure case. “It may be too late for us, but it would be a tremendous development for others.”

During deliberations on the legislation, German diplomats and representatives of the French national railway company, S.N.C.F., expressed concerns to members of Congress about eliminating the protections for sovereign immunity.

The German government has endorsed international principles on restituting Nazi-looted art and has its own arbitration tribunal to adjudicate claims. But officials at the German Embassy in Washington said the German government was concerned about the new bill’s exclusion of Nazi expropriation from sovereign immunity.

“We agree with the HEAR Act’s objective that victims of expropriated art during the Holocaust should get restitution,” the embassy said in a statement. “At the same time, it is Germany’s position to uphold core principles of international law, including the internationally recognized principle of state immunity. Thus, restitution claims should be primarily resolved within the competent national legal systems.”

S.N.C.F. declined to outline its position publicly. A senior manager of S.N.C.F. America, who asked not to be identified because of company briefing rules, said the company was also concerned that the law would impinge on protections for foreign entities.

“Of course, we support Holocaust survivors and their heirs being able to claim what is rightfully theirs,” he said. But there was concern, he added, that a new law could lead U.S. courts to override existing French structures for handling claims for restitution and compensation.

The manager said the company had no Nazi-looted art and was not facing any lawsuits in that regard.

Fifteen years ago, S.N.C.F. formally apologized for having transported 76,000 European Jews to the French-German border in freight trains between 1941 to 1944. German trains later took the deportees to Nazi death camps. In 2014, France agreed to compensate the victims of the deportations through a $60 million fund.

The law could have an immediate impact on some pending cases, according to Raymond Dowd, a lawyer who has represented the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian Jewish cabaret artist.

Grünbaum owned a large collection of artworks that his heirs argue were looted by the Nazis before his death at the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. Museums in the United States and abroad have argued against evidence that they were looted, although several have recently returned works to the heirs.

Pending in Federal District Court in Manhattan is a lawsuit by the heirs who seek the return of 12 works by Egon Schiele that are held by Austrian museums. Austria and the Leopold and Albertina museums in Vienna have submitted a motion to dismiss the suit on the basis of sovereign immunity.

The works involved in the dispute include the 1911 oil painting “Dead City III,” as well as “Self-Portrait With Grimace” (1910), “Standing Man in Red Shawl” (1913), and “Standing Girl With Orange Stockings” (1914).

In 2015, an Austrian government panel rejected the heirs’ claim for two works at the Albertina, saying “it cannot be established from the sources currently available that the two pictures were misappropriated from Fritz Grünbaum.”

The new legislation, Dowd said, “would assist recoveries of artworks held in Austrian state museums by eliminating the defense of sovereign immunity.”