Jewish Heirs File Two California Lawsuits Over Nazi-Looted Art at Norton Simon and Auschwitz
Jewish heirs of Holocaust victims and their representatives have filed two lawsuits in California seeking the return of Nazi-looted paintings that remain on display at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and the Auschwitz Memorial.
The two lawsuits are the first filed since California and Congress recently enacted measures that strengthen U.S.-based claims to artworks forcibly taken from Jewish families during World War II. If successful, they could shape how museums and courts handle Holocaust-era restitution claims for years to come; if not, they may reinforce institutional defenses built on legal title, provenance disputes and the passage of time.
In Los Angeles Superior Court, the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and its board chair, Daniel Gryczman, sued the Norton Simon Museum for the return of “Adam and Eve,” two life-size oil-on-panel masterpieces created by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1530.
In federal court in Los Angeles the same day, the daughters of the late Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt filed a separate suit. Babbitt, a Holocaust survivor and California animator, was held at Auschwitz, where she was forced to paint watercolor portraits of fellow prisoners for Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician known as the “Angel of Death.”
Both museums say they hold legal title to the works and intend to continue displaying them to the public. The lawsuits do not specify the monetary value of the paintings.
The disputes touch on one of the most emotionally and legally fraught questions in Holocaust restitution: how to balance the claims of families carrying intergenerational trauma against museums that say they are preserving a painful but important chapter of history.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime orchestrated the largest art theft in world history, seizing more than 600,000 works across Europe from Jewish families, collectors and museums. Decades later, many of those masterpieces reside in prominent museums around the world, making the push for their recovery far more complex than a simple property dispute.
Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, said the organization has taken up the cause on behalf of Marei von Saher, sole heir of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. Von Saher signed over her rights to the federation.
The Cranach paintings were seized from Goudstikker’s collection by Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, and changed hands several times before being sold in the 1960s to the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, which was renamed the Norton Simon Museum in honor of its benefactor.
Farkas said the federation plans to use most of the net proceeds from any recovered art to provide much-needed help to the roughly 2,500 Holocaust survivors living in the Los Angeles area.
“These are incredibly beautiful European masterpieces stolen from a Jewish family to enrich the Nazi party and fund the war and death machine against the people,” he said. “It’s our honor to take on this role on behalf of the community and use most of the proceeds to help these elderly survivors live out the last years of their lives in dignity, comfort and peace — something their family members were denied during the Holocaust.”
Von Saher said in a statement that she is grateful to the Jewish organization for taking up her family’s cause.
“This effort represents a meaningful step toward justice for Holocaust survivors and victims of Nazi-era atrocities,” she said.
The legal push follows new legislation in California. Democratic Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, who represents the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, authored Assembly Bill 2867, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in September 2024. The law requires that state law apply in lawsuits brought by California residents or their heirs to recover art seized during the Holocaust or during other acts of persecution.
Gabriel, who co-chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, introduced the legislation in response to a federal court ruling that allowed the state-owned Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid to keep a multimillion-dollar Camille Pissarro impressionist masterpiece. That painting had been taken by the Nazis from the Cassirer family in 1939. The case, which prompted the new law, is expected to be heard in federal court in California next month.
Gabriel said it is time for museums to “do some deep introspection on whether they want to be on the right side of history.”
The Norton Simon Museum released a statement noting that a federal court in 2018 unanimously determined the museum had proper title to the Cranach paintings. In May 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to get involved in the case, leaving lower court rulings in place.
The museum said the Cranach paintings originally belonged to the Stroganoff family and were put up for sale in 1931 by the Soviet Union in an illicit auction in Berlin, where they were purchased by Goudstikker. After a complicated journey, the paintings were sold to the museum by a Stroganoff family descendant. The museum later restored and preserved the pieces.
“For nearly 50 years, they have been on view at the Norton Simon Museum and will continue to be accessible to the public for years to come,” the statement said.
Pawel Sawicki, a spokesperson for the Auschwitz Memorial, said the watercolors of Roma victims that Gottliebova Babbitt was forced to paint for Mengele — to document his horrendous experiments and racial research — must remain in the memorial to document the man’s crimes.
He said these paintings must not be mischaracterized as “Nazi-looted art” because Gottliebova Babbitt painted them against her will as a prisoner and therefore did not have ownership of the watercolors.
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,” he said. “… The loss of even the smallest part of the documentation is an irreparable loss and blemish on the memory of the victims of Auschwitz.”