News:

In September, Moderna Museet Stockholm decided that a portrait by Austrian expressions artist Oskar Kokoshka would be returned to the family of Alfred Flechtheim.  The museum bought the piece in 1934, a year after Alexander Vömel, an art dealer who was a member of the Nazi Party's brownshirts paramilitary group, confiscated Flechtheim's entire Dusseldorf gallery.  In 2009, the same museum  returned a painting by Emil Nolde to a Jewish family which once owned it. In October, a court in Paris ruled that a Pissarro painting stolen from a French Jewish family during the German occupation must be returned to them.  It has taken decades to return these pieces but  there are  still  other pieces of  art that were  wrongly taken from Jewish families during the  Nazi expansion in the 1920s through the 1940s..  A new lawsuit filed in the U.S. seeks to have 143 paintings taken and they  know where the paintings are located  ... in  a prominent museum in the Netherlands. 

The  law firms of Berg & Androphy and E. Paul Gibson P.C  filed a lawsuit on  behalf of Bruce Berg, a grandson of the late Benjamin Katz and a great-nephew of the late Nathan Katz, brothers and partners who owned paintings, including  valuable works by Dutch “Old Masters” such as Ferdinand Bol, Pieter Claesz, Jan Steen, and the school of Rembrandt..  According to the lawsuit the paintings were sold or traded under duress to representatives of the Nazi regime between mid-1940 and 1942, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

According to Rebecca Gibson of Berg & Androphy, the paintings, once taken, were meant to be displayed in Adolf Hitler’s future ‘Führermuseum’ in Linz, Austria, or for the massive art collection of war criminal Hermann Goering. Goering personally inspected and selected a number of the paintings named in the lawsuit. While Goering paid for the art, it was at deep discount and the proceeds were used by the Katz family to  keep their relatives and families from being transported to concentration and death camps.  Gibson said,  "Nazi agents deceptively cloaked the forced sales in the appearance of legality, avoiding the wholesale looting carried out in other occupied countries."

According to the lawsuit, restitution attempts were impossible for decades, as The Netherlands stopped accepting restitution claims in the 1950s.  Androphy said, “The Dutch government and museum defendants have known for decades that the paintings claimed do not belong to them. The Dutch have maintained a vested interest in keeping this art, and displaying it in their museums for profit and for the world to see.  The world would be better served by returning the art to descendants of the Katz family in recognition of the plundering and suffering caused by the immoral tactics and atrocities of the Nazis. Although nothing could undo the pain of memories, acknowledging that the art belongs to the Katz family would be a significant step in honoring their legacy and the memories of the victim families.  The current failure by the Dutch to do the right thing has precipitated this lawsuit requesting the U.S. Court to do only what is fair and legal.”

The claimed paintings were returned to the Netherlands after World War II by the U.S. military for restitution to their original owners, according to the lawsuit.   Following the establishment of the Washington Principles on Nazi Confiscated Art in 1998, under which some countries are lagging, the Dutch government began developing a new restitution process.  As part of this process, The Netherlands established the Origins Unknown Agency led by Professor Rudi Ekkart, who investigated the provenance of every artwork in the region's collection.   In April of 2011, the Katz heirs and their attorney learned that a museum located in the former East Germany planned to return several paintings to the Netherlands. The Katz heirs and their attorney at the time learned of the planned return in April of 2011, and learned that some of these artworks may be associated  with the Goering  purchases.

According to the lawsuit, despite the undisputable historical facts of duress facing Dutch Jews during the occupation, the Netherlands relied on a faulty notion that sales by Jewish art dealers “in principle constituted ordinary sales” despite the weight of evidence of the sales  being under extraordinary duress.  Gibson said,  "The family had no choice but  to pursue the paintings through the United  States court."

The case is “Bruce Berg v. Kingdom of The Netherlands, et al,” Case No. 2:18-cv-3123-BHH in the U.S. District Court of South Carolina, Charleston Division.