The latest lawsuits over Nazi-era artworks expose a conflict that cannot be resolved by ownership records alone: Jewish heirs seek restitution for works taken amid persecution, while museums argue that public access and historical preservation now carry their own moral weight.

Jewish heirs and their representatives filed two cases in Los Angeles on the same day. The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles is seeking the return of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve from the Norton Simon Museum, while the daughters of Holocaust survivor and artist Dina Gottliebova Babbitt are suing for the return of watercolors she was forced to create at Auschwitz for Josef Mengele.¹

The heirs’ position is rooted in the wider history of Nazi plunder: between 1933 and 1945, the regime seized more than 600,000 artworks from Jewish families, collectors and museums. Marei von Saher, heir to Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, called the lawsuit “a meaningful step toward justice for Holocaust survivors and victims of Nazi-era atrocities.”¹ The federation says proceeds from any recovery would largely support roughly 2,500 Holocaust survivors in the Los Angeles area.

The Norton Simon Museum counters that its title to the Cranach paintings was upheld unanimously by a federal court in 2018, and that the US Supreme Court declined to intervene the following year. It says the works have been publicly displayed for nearly five decades and will remain accessible.¹

The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum presents a different defense. Its spokesperson says Babbitt’s watercolors should not be labeled Nazi-looted art because she created them under coercion and never owned them. The museum argues they are among the few surviving records of Mengele’s experiments and that removing them would cause “irreparable harm” to the memorial and the memory of victims.¹

The cases therefore pit legal title against restitution, and private trauma against institutional memory. New laws may reopen the claims, but they do not settle the deeper question of who should control objects created or seized through Nazi crimes.