A mural on display at Berlin's Jewish Museum shows an Allied soldier holding a painting looted by the Nazis from a Jewish family in Paris in 1945. In 2013, Holocaust survivors and heirs are still waiting to have their artworks returned.
Photograph by: John MacDougall, Agence France-Presse, Getty Images Files , London Daily Telegraph
Heirs of Jewish victims of the Nazis have been offered new hope that lost family artworks will be returned after signals that German chancellor Angela Merkel is considering an overhaul of its much-criticized art restitution policy.
U.S. and Israeli officials and prominent Jewish leaders have begun a diplomatic push for Germany and its museums to speed up and bring transparency to the often slow process.
Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire who heads the World Jewish Congress, said this month he will lobby Berlin to form a committee of independent art experts to trawl through German museums for possible Nazi loot.
The onus is on Jewish heirs to track down artworks in museums, galleries and private collections that they believe were looted and to prove they were seized or sold cheaply under duress.
Mel Urbach, a New York lawyer and restitution expert who represents the British heirs of a prominent Jewish art dealer, said he believes Monika Grutters, the new German culture minister, would support a new approach.
The catalyst for the campaign was the revelation last month that Bavaria had kept secret for 20 months the discovery of 1,400 artworks found in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, an elderly Munich recluse whose father was a Nazi-authorized art dealer.
Even though Germany signed the 1998 Washington accords on the return of Nazi plunder, Gurlitt may be entitled to keep most of the paintings, in part because the country's statute of limitations has passed for individual claims. But the new Bavarian justice minister said he is drafting legislation to lift that statute of limitations in such cases.
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