Holocaust victims ask Supreme Court for help reclaiming art and property – By Devin Dwyer (ABC News) / Dec 7 2020
Foreign governments have immunity in U.S. courts with a few exceptions.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday wrestled with whether to allow a group of Holocaust victims and their descendants to sue Germany and Hungary in American courts in a bid to reclaim millions of dollars of property allegedly stolen during World War II, including a collection of art that ended up in the hands of Adolf Hitler.
While federal law gives broad immunity to foreign governments in U.S. courts, there is an exception for cases involving property taken in violation of international law.
Fourteen Jewish survivors of the Hungarian Holocaust sued their government and a state-owned railway in U.S. court in 2010 alleging “systematic” property theft in the 1940s as state officials deported hundreds of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps.
In a separate case, three heirs of German-Jewish art dealers turned to U.S. courts for help reclaiming a $250 million collection of medieval religious and devotional art, known as the Welfenschatz, which they say was coercively obtained by the Nazis in 1935 and given to Hilter as a “surprise gift.”
