Two claims filed in California on 14 September seek the return of seven portraits made at Auschwitz and a 16th-century diptych, testing whether the state’s 2024 restitution law can reopen cases blocked by procedural rules. The suits name the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Filed two days before the law’s deadline, they were the only claims to invoke its newly created right to sue over art lost through political persecution.
A short-lived California route
The 2024 statute permits claims even when statutes of limitation would otherwise bar them or when courts previously dismissed them on procedural grounds. Its filing window has now closed, but the two cases will test what the law does for claims already lodged before that deadline.
The museums could challenge the statute’s validity. They may also argue that US courts cannot examine actions taken by foreign governments within their own territories under the “act of state” doctrine. The claims therefore raise a question beyond who owns two groups of works: whether California’s law can overcome procedural barriers and keep the disputes in court.
Seven portraits made under duress
In federal court in Los Angeles, heirs of Dina Gottliebova Babbitt seek seven portraits of Roma prisoners that she painted in 1944 as an inmate at Auschwitz. The complaint says Nazi doctor Josef Mengele ordered the portraits and that Babbitt agreed to make them only to protect herself and her mother from being killed.
The heirs say Babbitt never sold or assigned the watercolours and that the museum has no lawful title. They seek the portraits’ return, damages for their use and a declaration of ownership. The museum acknowledges that Mengele ordered the works and Babbitt painted them, but argues that their origin and historical role cannot be separated from the crimes committed at Auschwitz.
A museum’s evidence argument
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum says the portraits are evidence of the persecution of Roma and Sinti, not simply artworks whose ownership can be considered apart from their creation. The museum’s position is that Mengele controlled the process, including the selection of subjects and the materials, and that the works document his pseudoscientific racial research.
That argument puts preservation and restitution in direct tension: the heirs claim a right to recover works made under coercion, while the museum says they belong at the site where the crimes occurred. Because the defendant is identified by the heirs as an instrumentality of Poland, they rely on an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. They allege the museum engages in commercial activity in the United States, a condition relevant to that exception.
The Cranach diptych and an earlier defeat
The state-court claim in Los Angeles concerns Adam and Eve, a diptych by Lucas Cranach the Elder dating to around 1530. The work was among more than 800 pieces stolen in June 1940 by Hermann Göring from the Netherlands gallery of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. After the war, the Allies transferred some Goudstikker works, including the diptych, to the Dutch government for restitution.
The claimants say the Dutch government wrongly gave the diptych to George Stroganoff-Scherbatoff in 1966, and that he sold it to the Norton Simon Museum in 1971. Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law pursued the museum for 11 years, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed her case in 2018 under the act-of-state doctrine. The present claimants, successors to Goudstikker’s last surviving heir, seek ownership, delivery and damages for detention and use.
The federal law at stake
The 2026 Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act (HEAR Act) denies current owners the act-of-state defence, among other defences, in claims to recover art lost through Nazi persecution. The statute expressly points to the Ninth Circuit’s dismissal of the earlier Goudstikker case as a reason to remove that barrier.
The Cranach claimants argue that the 2018 dismissal qualifies their case for a new filing under California’s 2024 law, which allows claims previously rejected on procedural grounds. Both cases now face disputes over the reach of these laws, the museums’ arguments and the distinction between ownership claims and the historical circumstances surrounding the works.
Takeaway: The two cases will test whether California’s expired 2024 law and the 2026 HEAR Act can clear procedural obstacles to restitution claims involving Nazi-looted art.
