The Recovery of Nazi-Looted Art: The Bloch-Bauer Klimt Paintings

this program is presented by university of california television like what you learn visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest UC TV programs as many of you know my name is Richard Hecht and it is my great pleasure once again to welcome all of you to yet another talent symposium in Jewish Studies before I briefly introduce our speaker tonight I would like us to recognize and to thank the many individuals and foundations that year in and year out help us sponsor events like we're going to enjoy this evening we you join me please in showing our great appreciation to all of those people I'm sure that there are more than a few of you who think that the program committee Leonard and myself were very astute to invite Randall Schoenberg shortly after the release of the monuments read how many of you thought that raise your hands right but it's really a little bit more complicated than that like many of you we have been reading about Randall Schoenberg and the blowhole Bauer Klimt paintings for several years but it was the discovery of more than 1,400 paintings in Munich last year that made us in the program committee want to learn more about the looted art paintings throughout Europe and thus we wanted to invite someone who has been an indefatigable and courageous may I say warrior in the effort to reclaim art stolen from Jews during the Holocaust the taliban's symposium from it's very beginning eighteen years ago has been interested in how the Jewish experience has intersected the cultures in which Jews have made their own histories reportage of looted art has become increasingly a part of the news in large part because of men and women like mr. Schoenberg and recently a correspondent for the New York Times reported on how she had become interested in the more than 2,000 unclaimed works of art looted or sold under the most murky circumstances during the Second World War in France only 80 such orphaned works have been returned and the rest sit or hang in 57 French museums which are their custodians and guardians Cherne Berg and Maria Altmann have been engaged in a found ly important tasks for all of us yes the Klimt paintings belong to a particular Jewish family and had their origins in a particular milieu of Belle Epoque Vienna but they are also part of our collective patrimony thus Iran dilution Berg has rested these paintings from the historical and human processes set in motion by National Socialism and his victory in the Supreme Court against extraordinary odds according to many lawyers has very important implications for the return of other works that really belong to all of us will you please now welcome Iran discern Berg good evening good evening everybody and thank you again for such a nice introduction professor Hecht it's a real pleasure for me let them adjust the volume it's a real pleasure for me to be here at UCSB in Santa Barbara to speak about this case my father still recalls the summer he spent here in Santa Barbara in 1948 when my grandfather the composer Arnold Schoenberg was teaching at Music Academy of the West with lucky laymen and here we are in lotte lehmann hall so it's really nice to come full circle and a really an honor for me to be here so I'm here to speak today about the case that I handled for our family friend actually family friend on my mother's side of the family Maria Altmann who would also be tickled the that I am speaking and lot to layman Hall because she was a huge fan of opera and could quote from basically any opera and did so frequently during during my work with her on this case so let's get into the famous case of the Klimt paintings and Maria Altman's story Maria was the fifth and last child of Gustav and Teresa bloch-bauer who were the bloch-bauers little history in Vienna Jews really did weren't allowed to live there much until after 1848 and after that time especially after 1867 when Jews obtained full civil rights in Austria there was basically a flood of Jewish families from the surrounding areas of the austro-hungarian Empire what's now Czech Czech Republic Slovakia Hungary and parts of Galicia into Vienna and many of these families took advantage of the Industrial Revolution that was going on at that time and were able to get involved in industries and invest in companies that became fabulously successful and the blocks were one of these families there was Ferdinand and Gustav block Ferdinand the younger brother let's see if I can show him there became the president of the trian sugar industry corporation if you've been to vienna and you've eaten the pastries you know how important sugar is to their diet this became one of the largest sugar companies in all of Central Europe they didn't use cane sugar by the way it was beet sugar in that part of the world and he became fabulously wealthy so there were two boys named Bloch Ferdinand and Gustav and they married two girls two sisters named Bower adayla and Teresa so here the older ones Gustav and Teresa who married first and then the younger siblings Ferdinand and adayla Gustav in Teresa had five children I mentioned the youngest was was Maria but unfortunately Ferdinand and adayla were unsuccessful having children there were several stillborn babies as she lost a number of pregnancies and so tragically they did not have any children but perhaps to compensate for that they amassed an enormous art collection they became real connoisseurs and collectors of art now Ferdinand who was somewhat older than a day lay a little bit more conservative you can see him here after a hunt he liked the traditional 19th century style Austrian painters people you may never have heard of but we're very famous in their day for Anan Volta Muller or Rudolph Renault adayla on the other hand was a woman a modern woman in the in the early sense of that term she was the type of person who would have gone on to a professional career and studied if she were living today but at that time that just wasn't done if you were the daughter of a banker married to the president of a sugar company and she instead surrounded herself with artists and intellectuals and formed one of the really the premier salons in Vienna where she entertained the likes of Gustav Klimt and famous writers like Schnitzler and people like that who was Gustav Klimt Gustav Klimt was the most famous artist in Vienna at a hundred years ago at the turn of the 20th century he was the most expensive artist in Vienna and he was support in his somewhat modern somewhat impressionist style by a number of these newly rich Jewish families like the bloch-bauers the bloch-bauers as you'll hear owned as many as seven paintings by Gustav Klimt there was another family the later family and the circa kondal family each of them owned eight to ten paintings by Gustav Klimt so this just these three Jewish families alone supported Klimt and bought perhaps as many as 30% of his total output before he died in 1918 so a dealer and Ferdinand commissioned Klimt let's go ahead to paint this beautiful portrait of a dealer in 1907 she's still in her 20s in this and Klimt paints one of his most magnate magnificent portraits the famous gold portrait it has this sort of gold mosaic there are only four paintings that Klimt did in that style the more famous one would be the kiss that's probably on the dorm room walls of every other dorm room in the UCSB here and this would be maybe the second most famous of that gold style the portrait of Adele bloch-bauer and they kept this painting and the others which I'll go through in their palais here on the elisabeth Strasse in vienna if you've been to vienna vienna has a large boulevard called the ring that circles the inner city and one street after that is the Elisabeth Strasse so this is really one block away from the ring it's about a block and a half away from the famous opera and the main part of Vienna it's a beautiful Palais and they filled this with their artworks including the Klimt paintings I wanted to go back and show you also the the bloch-bauers had this castle outside of Prague just to show you how they how they lived and this is near where the blocks were from in Bohemia this summer home was of course taken just as an aside the summer home was taken by the Nazis when they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939 and made the home of the reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia a man named Reinhard Heydrich he's famous of course or infamous for really starting up the Final Solution with the famous Vaughn's a conference he planned that whole conference while he was living in Ferdinand and a list summer home and then was assassinated two months later leaving the home on his way to Prague which resulted in the famous massacre of the people of leadership in retaliation so that's just an aside in this amazing story so the bloch-bauers as I said commissioned and bought a number of paintings by Gustav Klimt so first was this beautiful portrait a de lasat actually for a second full-length portrait she's the only sitter who has two full-length portraits from Klimt I believe this one of course in a much different style you can see some Japanese influence perhaps much cooler picture they also owned some landscapes this early beech wood or birch tree depending on whether you look at the thin trees or the thick ones they give it different titles beautiful this apple tree which may have been painted while Klimt was visiting with the bloch-bauers in their estate outside of Prague they bought probably from crimps estate this slightly unfinished painting let me see if I can point it out to you for the art people see it's a slightly unfinished painting so it probably was left over in Clips estate after he died during the flu epidemic in 1918 and they had this beautiful number three of the Schloss camera matters a series so there these six paintings by Klimt that they had purchased and then a day later unfortunately died very suddenly in 1925 of meningitis this was of course before penicillin nowadays she would have been cured but then she died very quickly and she had left behind a will that she had written two years earlier after her mother had passed away it's a handwritten will these are two of the four pages and it's it's not completely unsophisticated it actually looks like she may have had some help from her brother gustaf Ferdinand's brother who was the lawyer for the family and in fact she names Gustav as the executor of her estate now she makes a number of requests in this and and as I said a de leur was a very social person she had this salon and she was also very civic-minded her niece Maria sort of jokingly called her a socialist socialite she was very left-leaning and very much supportive of the new socialist government in Austria at that time and so she made various requests to the workers Society and the orphan Society in Vienna and right over here she talks about the Klimt paintings and she says my two portraits and the four landscapes of Gustav Klimt - eh eh gotten that means I ask please my husband after his death to give them to the Austrian state gallery in Vienna and at the same Clause she also talks about their library outside of Prague which is supposed to go to the the worker's society now in 1925 when she died the will was probated by her brother-in-law Gustav and Gustav submitted a document to the court and he presented the will in an interesting way he said the the deceased makes certain requests in her will which do not have the binding character of a testament now what did he mean by that well if you've gone through the process of making a will you know there are a lot of formalities that we require for wills signatures and witnesses and things like that and one of the one of the formalities that we require is that you'd be very precise in a will and in Wills we differentiate between a a direction right a testamentary direction and language which which is called precatory precatory language is just a request so to give you an example if my wife and I had a dog and I said in my will a dear wife after I'm gone please take care of the dog okay and as soon as I drop dead she says thank God we're getting rid of that dog tomorrow that's okay because it was just a request right it was predatory please take care of the dog if on the other hand I had said as a condition of receiving a penny from my estate you must take care of our dog in the manner to which he has become accustomed till his dying day right that's now precatory that's clearly language that is meant to be binding so interestingly at the time Ferdinand's brother gustav writes that this language they consider precatory right not binding however he wrote that Ferdinand promised to fulfill his wife wife's wishes anyway in other words he wasn't bound to what he promised to do so and certainly in 1926 he fully intended to fulfill his wife's wishes and give these paintings after his death to the Austrian gallery and then he adds one more clause and he says it should be noted that the paintings were not her property but his sort of interesting remember this is not a community property state back in 1920s Austria writes of the man owns the property and the rule actually is that it's presumed to be his property now she had property she owned half of their beautiful house in Vienna for example but at the time that she died these were not considered part of her estate they were his so presumably he's the one that purchased the paintings from Klimt and they were considered his and not not her so even though she says my two portraits and the four landscapes perhaps she was referring to the portraits of me not portraits belonging to me at least that's how it was seen okay so what happens next in 1936 Ferdinand who is by now the president of the Friends of the Austrian gallery actually gives this painting before he died right add a list at only afterwards but before he died he gives this painting to the Austrian gallery to to assist with their collection so that leaves him with five he then he picks up in the meantime another Klimt painting which we probably won't talk about but let's see if I can show it to you this portrait of his friend Amalia at circa kondal so he ends up with six but not the same six that add a lot about in her will so in 1938 the world turns upside down for Austrian Jewish families when the Nazis annexed Austria and the famous unch loose of March 1938 four prominent Jewish families like the bloch-bauers this was a catastrophe and people like Ferdinand bloch-bauer had to flee immediately and so he left actually on the eve of the onsh loose and fled the country and went first to his summer home in Czechoslovakia and then when the Nazis surrounded that six months later he went to Zurich Switzerland and he actually stayed in a hotel in Zurich Switzerland living off of money loaned to him by friends until the end of the war and died unfortunately just after the war ended in November 1945 never having returned to Vienna never having recovered any of his property but he survived as I said he had no children what happened to the rest of his family his brother Gustav had remained behind and became very ill and actually died in June of 1938 his widow and children then prepared to leave and for the most part they were able to escape by September October or November of that year his widow Teresa and there are three sons managed to get out and go to Vancouver Canada where they ended up the daughters a little bit differently they had the daughter Louisa was married to a baron Goodman in Croatia and they thought they would go there and avoid the Nazis but of course the Nazis and their collaborators in Croatia then took over and so they were nearly deported several times we've managed to survive the war she and her husband and two kids in Croatia unfortunately at the end of the war her husband who had hidden during the Nazi period was then arrested by the communists and executed for being a capitalist in the post-war period and so she then escaped and went to Israel with her two children and ended up also in Vancouver Canada the youngest in the family Maria has a different story Maria had been married in December 19:37 she was just 21 years old she turned 22 in February of 1938 so just a few weeks after her birthday the Nazis then invaded she had been married for two months and she found herself in a much different circumstance obviously her husband was Fritz Altman an aspiring opera singer he would also be really happy that I'm speaking here in LA to laman hall and he was the younger brother of a another famous industrialist named Bernard Altman Bernard Altman was a sweater manufacturer he amassed a enormous fortune in Vienna and later in the United States like Ferdinand bloch-bauer Bernard Altman had to flee immediately when the Nazis came in and he he was really smart so he had this sweater company and he wired all of his customers and said don't send any money to Vienna I'm gonna come and pick it up and so he went to Budapest and Rome and Paris and London and picked up all the receivables that were due his comp company took the money and bought a new factory in Liverpool England and started up a business there like that right he's like the type of guy if you put him on a deserted island on Friday he'd be a millionaire by Monday so the Nazis didn't like this because the Nazis when they annexed Austria they took over these Jewish owned companies like the Sugar Company like Bernard Altman's textile firm and Aryan Eyes dit that means they replaced the the Jewish officers and directors with non Jews who were Nazis and basically stole the companies so they were very upset with Bernard for taking all the money that belonged to his company and starting up this new company in England so they accused him of all sorts of wrongdoing and then arrested his younger brother Fritz the opera singer and basically held him ransom they sent him to Dachau one of the early concentration camps in southern Germany and Fritz spent several months in Dachau until Bernard was able to make enough money in England that he could send money back to Austria and basically ransom his younger brother so he made a deal with the Nazi sent back the money got his brother out of Dachau Fritz was then still under house arrest they actually lived in the in the Bernard Altman complex with the factory and Fritz and Maria were held under house arrest for several months until Bernard then was able to engineer their escape they gave the slip to their Gestapo watchman and managed to board a plane that flew to northern Germany and then crossed the border illegally into Holland and to freedom they went then quickly to Liverpool and then Bernard sent them to Fall River Massachusetts where he was starting up yet another textile factory they stayed there for a year or two and then came to Los Angeles where they reconnected with some of their old Viennese friends my mother's parents Eric intruded sisal and that's really how I get into the story 70 years later because my mother grew up with the Altman kids as as really her closest friends so Maria is down here the rest of the family is up there Ferdinand dies in 1945 the war is over and what happened to the paintings right they don't know but here's what we found out in 1939 in January there was a meeting held in Ferdinand's home in Vienna and attending this meeting were representatives of all of the local museums in Vienna representatives of the Gestapo the secret police representatives of Hitler and Goering who were interested in acquiring art from Jewish collections and also a lawyer who had been assigned to liquidate Ferdinand's estate a man by the name of Eric Fuhrer that was his last name was Fuehrer a big Nazi who actually Ferdinand had hoped would save his estate from the taxes that were being imposed on him but he then turned of course it became the liquidator what the Nazis did by the way is they accused Jews like Ferdinand of tax evasion they couldn't defend themselves having fled the judgments would then be put in place and they would then use those judgments to liquidate the entire the entire state and so that's what happened to these paintings and they had a meeting to decide which paintings would go to which museum and which collections so as I said Ferdinand had this conservative taste he liked the 19th century Austrian artists there was another guy who really liked those paintings his name was Adolf Hitler okay Adolf Hitler had studied art in Vienna was very conservative when he went around Europe amassing paintings he liked these same conservative ones and so he actually took a couple of the paintings from the bloch-bauer collection for his own personal collection Hermann Goering also got a couple and the other works were distributed the bloch-bauers had a 300 piece antique porcelain collection that's cups and saucers 300 settings those were auctioned off there was a giant auction and they were sold off one of the local museums got about 30 settings and the rest were just strewn all over the place and so what happened to the Klimt painting so let's go back to those and I'll tell you it's a little complicated sorry I don't like the facts you have to live with whatever happened I can't make them up so there dr. Fuhrer makes a deal with the Austrian gallery and says I'll trade you the gold portrait and the apple tree where is it okay apple tree and the gold portrait I'll give you that if you give me back the Schloss camera matzos a painting the the castle painting that Ferdinand had given so dr. fear gets this painting back and then sells it to a guy named Gustavo shitski okay who is Gustavo shitski he is a famous Nazi film director he his most famous movie was a was called Haim care or returning home it was about the invasion of Poland and he made enormous amount of money with these Nazi propaganda films and used the money then to buy paintings by his father Gustav Klimt yes Gustavo shitski is one of the eighteen illegitimate children sired by Gustav Klimt and he collected his father's works during the war principally from Jewish collections now this one had been in the museum was traded out and sold to him sort of interesting yet Klimt they say the Klimt painted in a long smock with nothing on underneath and and not necessarily the society ladies like adayla but for his his models that he picked up off the street apparently a lot of them became pregnant after the after they posed for him so okay so that's the gold portrait and the Appletree are now in the museum the other one that was in the museum is now out the museum then buys from dr. Fuhrer the second portrait of a dealer so they end up with two portraits and the apple trees the beech wood is purchased by the City Museum of Vienna from the estate and houses in Andhra is kept along with 11 other paintings by dr. Fuhrer to pay himself for a job well done right so at the end of the war the paintings are a number of different places right gustavo shitski has this one dr. Ferrer has this one the museum Austrian gallery has this one the City Museum has the birch trees and then the two portraits are in the Austrian gallery now when Ferdinand died in November 1945 he left behind a very short will and it said I give my state to my two nieces and one of his nephews and his estate at that time consisted of nothing other than the hope that they could recover property that had belonged to him in Austria and Czechoslovakia he had recovered nothing and had nothing so was then up to his two nieces and nephew to try to recover what they could and they hired a family friend dr. Gustav Rhenish a lawyer in Vienna who was given the task of trying to find and recover Ferdinand's property and it included also issues relating to the sugar company and the house right and the all these different assets that they had and of course the artworks so it took him until the end of 1947 before he found that the Klimt paintings were in the Austrian gallery most of the museum's were closed after the war and he wrote to the Austrian gallery and said what is your position with regard to my clients claims of restitution in the gallery responded in January of 1948 with a letter that said these paintings were given to us by a de LeBlanc bower in her will when she died in 1925 we own all six paintings mentioned in the will we only have three of them so not only we're not giving you these three back but you have to go find us the other three and give them back to us right even the one that the museum itself had given back to dr. Ferrer and was now with her shitski so they took a very aggressive approach dr. rena sh the family lawyer had found a number of other artworks he found the twelve paintings that dr. fuhrer had kept for example which included one of the clint's he also contacted the munich art collecting point now for those of you who have already seen the monuments man you know a little bit more about this than back before the movie when I had to explain it but the US government had a a troupe of art historian soldiers who went and collected artworks throughout Germany that were taken by the Nazis and mainly from large collections that were stored in salt mines in Salzburg and outside of Munich the collections of Hitler and Goering and as I mentioned a couple of these paintings and that were from the bloch-bauer collection but unfortunately the monuments men in the US government had a interesting procedure they decided they weren't going to give back paintings to any individual they weren't gonna handle individual claims that wasn't their business what they decided was they would return the paintings to the country of origin so if the works were stolen from France they would give him back to France and let France decide what to do with them if they were from Holland give him back to Holland Austria give him back to Austria and so the procedure for a family like the bloch-bauers was they had to apply to the Austrian government to write to the US government in Munich to request that these paintings be sent back to Vienna which is what happened in this case so several of the paintings were sent back to Vienna then dr. Rina SH had to make an application to recover the paintings and when he did and wanted to send them out of the country to his clients he had to apply for an export permit remember his clients were in Canada and Los Angeles and Austria then used this procedure after the war to extort paintings from Jewish families unfortunately and not just with the bloch-bauers but the Austrian Rothschilds and the laborers and all of these other big Austrian Jewish families that had managed to survive outside of Austria and wanted their artwork sent to them they had to apply for export permits and what Austria would do is they'd say no no these artworks are too important to our country we can't let them out of the country and if the family appealed they would say well we might be willing to let some art work out if you donate these other ones right so it was like a quid pro quo we'll let you let some out you give us the others and this happened to many families so dr. rena SH was faced with a dilemma he knew that he couldn't get any of the artworks out that he had recovered without making some sort of deal like this and also with the Klimt paintings there was this dispute because they said it was a daily blow flowers will that gave them the paintings so he had not seen the will actually the Austrian gallery had had collected the legal file so he wasn't even able to see it until the day he met with the Austrian officials in April 1948 and he made an agreement with them that day he looked at the will and he wrote to his clients the next day which is how we know this and he said well the will may or may not be binding right because he had seen the language said but there's this promise of faired an end and so what I did was I told them we wouldn't fight over the Klimt paintings we'll let those stay in the Austrian gallery but we want to have export permits for all the other works the several dozen other works that we recovered and this deal worked over the next 12 months he was able to export several dozen recovered painting to his clients the Klimt paintings unfortunately stayed in Vienna they had to donate donate a few other Klimt drawings and porcelain settings but for the most part this procedure worked as well as as he could get it to work and he left the clam paintings in Vienna so if you'd asked Maria Altmann the baby of the family right who let her brother do most of this with dr. rena SH you'd asked her what happened to the portrait of your your aunt adayla she would say oh well it's too bad my aunt gave these to the museum in her will and we never recovered them after the war and that's really where things stood until 1998 at the end of 1997 beginning of 1998 there was an exhibit in New York City of Austrian artwork not not Klimt paintings painting by his his contemporary agon Sheila and there was an allegation from two families the two works in that that exhibit were stolen and the district attorney in in New York Morgenthau decided that he would seize them as stolen property and so very suddenly he sees these two paintings it was international news and in Austria it created outrage and the Austrian Minister of Education and Culture went on TV and she said this is ridiculous we don't have looted paintings in Austria everything was given back after the war we can't be accused of such things well there was a journalist in Austria terrific guy named who Burgess Janine and who Barrett just decided to take a look and see if that was correct if they didn't have any looted paintings in Austria and he looked at the provenance of a number of works in Austrian museums and this painting although in the guidebook to the Austrian gallery it said that it had been donated by the bloch-bauer family in 1936 he went into the file and he saw the letter from dr. Fuhrer in 1941 signed Heil Hitler handing over this painting so he thought this is not right and he figured out also after the war that there was this extortion procedure so he wrote a series of articles a real expose in 1998 and the Austrian to their credit decided they would then study this and at the end of the year and in September that year they proposed a new law and the new law said that if we have in our federal museums artworks that were never returned or were returned and then donated in exchange for export permits for other paintings we're going to give those back and at this point Maria got a call from Austria and about this new law and so she she tried to call my mother to ask me she knew I was a young lawyer and thought maybe I can help her with it and she tried to call my mother but my mother was actually in Austria at the time with my dad and so she called me at the office I was working downtown in Los Angeles and I was 31 years old and and she called me and said hi this is Maria and I knew who she was she's an old family friend hadn't seen her for a number of years and she said I just got this call from Austria and maybe you don't know this but there were these paintings and I said no I know a little about it because I was just online reading the Austrian news my parents were in Vienna so I had gone online to try to read what was happening in Vienna and there sure enough was this article about artworks that I had read and it mentioned her family and so I said no I just read about it it seems really interesting and so she said well I'd like to talk to you about it so we met her sister had just passed away she was really Maria was the last one in her family from that generation and she had collected all of these documents and she brought them to me and I looked at it and I said wow this really looks like you might be able to get these paintings back because we had the letter from the lawyer saying that he had made this deal and it looked like this new law might allow her to recover the paintings so I said I'd love to help you with this and I convinced my law firm to let me do this and and then in the beginning it was just dealing with whatever Austrian procedure they had set up the new law that they passed in Austria didn't allow you to sue to recover artworks it set up just a commission in an eternal Commission that that they appointed people to there wasn't a single Jewish person on the committee and they were going to decide on their own what paintings to return and whatnot and so I wrote to the Commission I said I'm helping represent Maria Altmann and her family and we know you're looking at their their collection we have a lot of documents would you like to see them and I didn't get any response so for about four weeks so I said okay well they really should see these whether they want to or not and I sent them off and they said thank you but we're going to take care of it ourselves I found in Austrian Lauria to prepare some legal opinions on the wheel of a daily bloch-bauer and sent those in and then I called up and and the and said I would like to come and speak to the committee and they said no no we don't allow anybody to speak to our committee and I said well it's sort of difficult you know being so far away and they said well no we're gonna take care of it and sure enough in June of 1999 they committee met and announced that they were not returning the Klimt paintings they decided they would return some porcelain and drawings but the Klimt paintings were not going back and the reason they gave was that they will have a daily bloch-bauer gave these paintings to the museum and I thought well that doesn't seem right because Maria's father didn't think that was right Maria's lawyer dr. rena Sh didn't think that was right and not looking at it myself it didn't didn't feel right didn't seem right i said maria i think we really should pursue this so how would we pursue it we decided to look for an austrian lawyer who would take the case and i found one man named chef on gulnur and he said well the new Austrian law doesn't allow you to sue but maybe we can make some sort of declaratory relief type lawsuit and he drew something up and said okay we're ready to file it but you realize that you have to pay court costs in Austria I said okay what is it it's a few hundred dollars in the United States I didn't think that it would be so expensive in Austria he said no you have to deposit a percentage of the value at stake in the litigation so at this point that paintings were already very famous and we had estimates that they were worth over a hundred million dollars she might have to pay two million dollars just to proceed with the case in Austria so we said of course that's not possible he said well let me try to get it reduced so he made an application to the court saying she didn't have enough money could you reduce the requirement and the court said well yes that doesn't make sense she doesn't have to pay more than everything she owns she just has to pay everything she owns literally all of her assets other than her house she would have had to deposit in the Co her entire life savings and she was at that time 86 years old so we said no no that's not that's not going to happen and and so then I said to Maria I said well let me see maybe you can sue in Los Angeles right you're you've been a citizen here for since the 1940s since before the trade of the painting why can't you sue in in the United States and I very naively opened up the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and found a section which is called the foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 so not surprisingly you can tell by the title the the general rule is you cannot sue a foreign state remember these paintings were owned by Austria foreign state foreign States are generally immune from prosecution they are they have sovereign immunity but there's an exception that I read in the law and it wasn't used very often hardly ever and the exception said if the property was taken in violation of international law right Nazis I thought we could argue that if the the property was owned or operated by an agency or instrumentality of a foreign state so in this case they were owned or operated by the museum which was acting as an agency or instrumentality of the foreign state and that agency or instrumentality is engaged in a commercial activity in the United States then you consume so all I had to show was that the museum did something in the US and I found book that they sold right they had they used the advertised for tourists they accepted us credit cards I thought we could we could maybe did use this section of the law so I went to my my law firm and I said you know I really think I should be able to do this case and they said forget it they're not in the business of tilting at windmills and and they said no way so I actually I left the big firm that I was at and I was around the birth of our second child and that summer I prepared a complaint for Maria Altmann and I filed a complaint against Austria in federal court didn't cost two million dollars it was two hundred fifteen dollars or something like that and the idea was let's let's see where this goes let's like let's keep the case alive so Austria responded by hiring a nice Jewish law firm Proskauer Rose Maria said what do you mean Jewish law firm I said well if you look at the list of lawyers they have 20 lawyers in New York in Los Angeles with names like Lavy Levin Levine that type of thing so ok their traditional traditionally Jewish law firm judge Proskauer was was very involved in American Jewish Committee Congress I always get them confused anyway so the lawyer they hired ended up actually not being Jewish but I think they thought I was told that they thought he was and they the law the law firm of course responded to our complaint by seeking to dismiss it filing a motion to dismiss which is what you do in federal court and they had about a dozen grounds to dismiss the lawsuit and one of their grounds was that we could not use the foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 that I had found in the in the rulebook because that would be impermissible retroactively right the law was passed in 1976 and we're talking about events that took place in the 1930s and 1940s so they said it was inappropriate to do that fortunately we had a terrific judge in the district court florence marie cooper not just terrific because she ruled in my favor but also she's a really wonderful person and she much to everybody's surprise said that the case could go forward all right there was really no one expecting this and and she rejected this argument on sovereign immunity now because it was a sovereign immunity question because we were suing a foreign country they had an immediate right to an appeal in the Ninth Circuit this isn't true for any other type of case so they went to the Ninth Circuit and I argued for the first time in front of three judges in the Ninth Circuit in Pasadena and again the issues were the sovereign immunity act is it impermissibly retroactive etc and again much to everybody's surprise we won three oh all three judges agreed with our position well at this point the United States government started getting phone calls from Japan and Mexico and places like that saying are we about to get sued for everything that ever happened in our country in the United States what is going on in this crazy court in the Ninth Circuit in California and the US government actually filed a brief then against us seeking reversal of this decision in the Ninth Circuit thank goodness the Ninth Circuit didn't didn't change its mind they the judges did not change their opinion but then of course Austria petitioned to the supreme court to hear the case now ordinarily supreme court doesn't take many cases but when you're a foreign country and you have the US government on your side it sort of increases the chances and this Court actually took the case so although we had one at the district court we one of the Ninth Circuit once the Supreme Court took the case all bets were off again because for those of you who are lawyers you know the Ninth Circuit gets reversed like 180 percent of the time they're always doing things that the Supreme Court says is completely wrong and so this really appeared to be one of those type of cases so I prepared them to go and argue this case in the US Supreme Court obviously for the first time for me and it was a little bit of a surreal experience I had prepared for it by having what what they call moot court practice sessions I did one in Santa Clara and one at USC and one in Georgetown Law School and professors and lawyers pretend to be the justices and they pepper you with questions so you you think you're you know you're getting a lot of practice and I I felt like I I had been asked everything and I really was ready for this experience but I didn't have very high expectations I wanted my main goal was that we wouldn't lose nine oh right that we would get at least one justice to give our side of the story and but by the time I got up to speak I was the last speaker because austria's lawyer went first and then the US government lawyer it seemed at least some of the justices were if not leaning our way at least entertaining the possibility that we might be right and so I got up to speak and you don't prepare a speech in the Supreme Court because they interrupt you right so I had just an outline and I said there are four grounds for affirming the Ninth Circuit ground one is and I said the first ground and I got interrupted by justice Souter and justice Souter has since retired he had a very strong New England drawl and he started asking me this long convoluted question and it sounded to me like that yeah like and and that's that's what I heard I had no idea so unfortunately there's there's no videotape but there's there's an audiotape you could actually unfortunately listen to this and and so you can hear me say um I'm sorry your honor I didn't understand the question and then there were gasps from the audience like I was the skater that fell on the first jump it was that type of moment and but all of the other justices just smiled as if to say oh he does that all the time with we didn't understand it either right and it was complete and icebreaker completely terrific for me because it it really just it was a surreal situation what am I going to lecture the Supreme Court I'm just a kid representing my grandmother's friend trying to convince them that we should be able to sue a country to recover paintings that had never left Vienna and it was completely crazy so the rest of the argument went like a dream they'd ask questions I'd answer if I could I didn't make things up and it was it was terrific and afterwards I just sort of floated out of the Supreme Court and my dad who's a retired judge I think for the first time I thought you might actually have a chance of winning right and and we were all excited and I got home and I opened up the daily journal our law newspaper and it had a big headline on the kit on the argument and said court likely to reverse Altman case and it was all about how we were gonna lose a full page and I called up the journalists I said you know couldn't she have said Randy does a pretty good job right something right because of course everybody expected us to lose and here it was in black and white I said okay well you you know he said I could tell by the body language I've been reviewing the Supreme Court for 35 years that type of thing you don't stand a chance as what he told me so I said okay that's probably true can you do me a favor when you find out can you call me because the Supreme Court doesn't tell you in advance when they make a decision they just announce it and the only people there every day are the journalists so I said if when you find out give me a call so sure enough three months later I'm making breakfast for the kids right it's three hours later in Washington and we get a phone call and it's this journalist Dave Pike and he says this is Dave Pike I said okay give me the bad news he said not bad news you won 6-3 oh and I nearly fainted right I mean I always knew it was possible but didn't want to believe it so we won I tried to call Maria and and she her line was busy of course because everyone was calling her so I I drove over to her house and we embraced and everybody was so happy and then we realized what did we win we won the right to start the lawsuit in Los Angeles that was it we were at square one so this was already 2004 when when this happened and so then we went back into regular litigation when I affectionately called Discovery Hell where the lawyers basically torture each other and I'm pretty good at that but we got into that for about a year and a half and then finally we had a court-ordered mediation now up to this point 2005 it was a year 7 of the case the Austrians had refused to meet with us to discuss the case had refused to even entertain the idea of any type of resolution or settlement so when we had to do the mediation I said it's not going anywhere Maria we just have to show up it's a formality I said I said to the other side and said you picked the mediator you picked the place I don't care so they picked a historian not a lawyer but a historian from Graz Austria uh and it was at their office and we went there and very quickly he said you know I sensed that both sides want to get this over with so Maria was 89 years old yes we wanted to get it over with I think the Austrians had a different idea of what over over with meant than we did but yes both sides wanted to get it over with and he said well why don't we have an arbitration in Austria you pick one arbitrator they pick the other those two pick the third and we'll have three Austrian arbitrators decide the case because after all it depends on Austrian law and everything's in German and this is by the way something I had written to the Austrian government after the initial decision in 1999 and it had been flatly rejected the minister had said if you don't like it go to court right so that's what we did but now they had come around seven years later and they wanted to do an arbitration so I said well let me talk to my client and I went in a closed room with Maria and I said ah isn't this great we can do this arbitration and it would be terrific and she said are you crazy all right we we have every judge loves us right all the way up to the Supreme Court why would I want to go back and trust Austrians to decide this case and I said Maria if you want this case decided in your lifetime we have to take this chance because they will drag it out and drag it out endlessly in our court system we could go back up to the Supreme Court even if we were to win and they could refuse to comply with the judgement and what then right so this could go on forever I said this way if we go into Austria and do an arbitration if we win we really win so she thankfully she she stuck with me and we agreed to do an arbitration I went to Vienna and I did an arbitration it was in German I had a translator but my Germans pretty good and it was there no live witnesses to add a live lock of ours will of 1923 so it was all about the legal issues and the documents and what they said and the arbitrator's were supposed to make a ruling relatively quickly but it dragged on and on and finally after rumors were swirling in Vienna that we had lost there was a night in January where I was returning home from a poker game where I had lost a little money feeling a little dejected and sure enough on my blackberry there was a a message from the arbitrators and nine hours later in in Austria it was in the morning there and I went to the computer to open it up and it was the decision and I had to read it right so you know German right the the verbs always at the end so flipping page page right finally I get to the verb we won we won unanimously all three Austrian arbitrators agreed with the argument that I had made all along which was that a de LeBlanc Bauer may have wanted her husband to give these paintings after his death but he didn't and he wasn't bound to do that she didn't give the paintings to the museum they were his paintings and he gave his estate to his heirs not to the Austrian gallery so that in 1948 when this deal was made to leave the Klimt paintings in the museum it was a deal in exchange for export permits and therefore under Austria's new law these paintings had to be returned so they ordered the return of five Klimt paintings five very famous Clin paintings to maria and her family and then we celebrated it was it was a great it was a great moment so very quickly we had to decide what to do with them Austria had negotiated for the right to buy the paintings but they they decided in a matter of weeks that they didn't want to and so we had to decide what to do so I contacted stephanie baron a curator at the LA County Museum of Art and I called her up and I said Stephanie how'd you like to have an exhibit of five Klimt paintings and she said we'd love to have an exhibit and she in 30 days put together a major exhibit we managed to get the paintings out of Austria and into the LA County Museum of Art and it was really one of the most successful exhibits that they've ever had with just the five paintings and they were again in one room just like they had been in Ferdinand's home he had kept them all in a single room of memorial to his dear wife and that's how they were presented to the public in Los Angeles and then for the first time Maria could show her children and grandchildren most of whom had not been to Vienna these paintings that had been in her her family home in her uncle and aunts home it was really I for me the best moment of the whole thing because our motivation had always been to try to recover the paintings but also to tell the story right because whether we won or lost what happened to this family is is emblematic of what happened to so many millions of families during World War two in the to the extent that we could use this story as a vehicle for telling again and reminding people what had happened during the Nazi years we thought it was a worthwhile endeavor having recovered the paintings of course they were extremely valuable and the heirs had to decide what to do with them and so they ended up making a decision it wasn't just Maria but her her sister and brothers families they decided to sell this gold portrait to Ronald Lauder for the neue gallery his Museum of German Austrian art in New York and it's on permanent display in the neue gallery on 86th and fifth so if you go to New York you can see this magnificent picture the other paintings were then auctioned off at Christie's and found their way presumably into private collections a lot of people are very upset by that because they were taken out of the public eye and put in in private collections but we have to remember these were private property they were in a family home until they were taken out by the Nazis in 1938 and in expropriated so I think it's somewhat appropriate that they're back in in private collections and I'm not sure actually where they where they are I heard a rumor one was in Montecito but I'm not sure if anybody's seen it oh hey maybe this one I don't know anyway so so one of them so that's the story of the famous Klimt paintings as a result of this case I actually handled a number of other cases and we're going to take questions I may be able to talk about them this painting by the way which was also stolen from Ferdinand bloch-bauer was not returned the same arbitrators decided not to return it despite the fact that it clearly belonged to Ferdinand and was taken from him it also was alleged to have been in the hands of the family this woman's family she was herself murdered by the Nazis along with one of her daughters another daughter managed to survive and her husband supposedly got the painting from Ferdinand I don't believe it but that's what the story is and then sold it to an art dealer so her family also tried to claim the picture and the Austrians said well two Jewish families fighting over painting we're going to give it to none of you and so they kept it in it's on display in the Austrian gallery totally outrageous I think this is a painting that Maria Altman's brother-in-law Bernard Altman owned the Austrian gallery got it from Gustav whoosh its key remember him who bought it in the auction of his property and and that was recovered by his heirs as well as various other paintings so there are many many stolen paintings if you want to see some really hot stolen paintings these two Khurana are hanging in Pasadena at the Norton Simon museum they are hundred percent looted art they were owned by a Jewish dealer named sticker he fled and drowned fell off the boat leaving Holland fleeing into England Hermann Goering ended up getting these paintings from his collection they were collected by the monuments men remember them what did the monuments do men do did they give it back to individuals no they gave it back to Holland Holland kept this and 200 other works from the house sticker collection and refused to give them back to his widow in the 1960s the Dutch sold these two paintings to a count stroganoff like beef stroganoff right and he he had falsely alleged that they had been taken by the Russians during the Communist revolution from his family but they actually weren't they were probably taken from a church that's another story but they he sold the paintings to Norton Simon who put them in his museum and there's been litigation going on for six years now it's in the ninth circuit again the question right now for the Ninth Circuit is would allowing this suit to recover these paintings interfere with US foreign policy because because the Dutch didn't give it back the Dutch I should add in 2006 one week after the Klimt paintings were returned they returned another hundred ninety eight pictures to the cloud sticker family but of course these they had already sold so I'm sure the Dutch wouldn't mind if Norton Simon gave them back but the lawyers are fighting over it so there are a lot of stolen paintings still out there these are a good example I wanted to finish by saying that as a result of the success very unexpected success in this case I was able to also get very involved with the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and I've been president of the museum for the last eight years during which time we built a new museum it's in Pan Pacific Park which is across from the Grove in the Fairfax and Beverley area of Los Angeles if you know where that is and it's a beautiful new museum the museum itself the architecture just won two awards from the American Institute of architecture it's only the sixth building in the last 63 years to win both an award for the exterior and the interior of the building so it's a beautiful building in itself and you can see some of here so I like to remind people when we talk about these famous paintings and the artworks and what happened to the clamps I think you need to keep things in perspective there's a good reason why we're still talking about paintings paintings were not the first thing on everybody's mind the end of the war right there were many other things that people had to worry about six million people had been murdered there their people needed to rebuild their lives and putting paintings back in the right place I think wasn't high on everybody's agenda which is why we're still talking about it now decades decades later they are one of the few things though that can be restored even 6070 years after the fact and it's really so amazingly fulfilling for me that I've been able to spend some of my time with this type of work coming from a family as I do of refugees of victims of the Nazis all four of my grandparents fled from the Nazis and found refuge here in the United States I have one great-grandfather who was left behind and and was murdered in Treblinka for me to be able to you know as the second or third generation after to be able to participate in just a little bit of making things right has been really the most fulfilling part of my life and I thank you very much for coming and listening today I think I think that we have time for some questions but remember that this is going to be on the University of California's television network and therefore we have to use the microphones and I see that there's a microphone here I'm not sure whether there's a microphone or microphone there so so those of you who want to ask questions you have to come to the microphones on that side or this side so who's going to start you have to come forward wait a second so we can't see so okay great that was an amazing presentation wasn't it extraordinary it's absolutely extraordinary okay so we have our first question go ahead please if you know what's the status of all the real estate that these people left behind can you turn it back on there we go the question was what happened to the real estate I showed you some of it very good question so this Palais actually was returned to the bloch-bauers after the paintings were we had another arbitration and this they returned because it had been essentially thrown away by the family in 1955 as part of the settlement of the Sugar Company shares in other words to in order to resolve that they were required to give up a claim to this Palais which had been taken over during the Nazi period and used as offices for the railroad for the Nazi and an Austrian later the Austrian railroad so it was in federal hands and they had an arbitration procedure and ended up returning it the castle outside of Prague which was the home of Reinhard Heydrich the bloch-bauers never recovered any property from Czechoslovakia they tried after the war but shortly after the war in that 1948 time frame the Communists took over and all claims of restitution were wiped out the checks belatedly past a restitution law after things changed in the 1990s but that law only allowed original victims and their children to apply for a very small amount of restitution maria as a nice and heir by will was not entitled to to make any claim what happened to the property was the checks after Vaslav Havel took over this was still in in government hands right the government had had taken it from as Nazi property and it was owned by the government but before they passed a law allowing for restitution of property the Czechs privatized properties like this and sold them off for peanuts to private companies and individuals so they couldn't be recovered so this has never been recovered it's apparently lying in a sort of semi ruined State and there was an article a couple of years ago that one of reinhard heydrich skids because they had sort of grown up in this house was talking about maybe fixing it up or buying it and fixing it up and then that was that was quashed he didn't realize that they don't really like the hydrates in the Czech Czech Republic but but the Czechs as nice as they are and I love them but they're not so great on the restitution front and so this is an Blum attic really of what what is transpired all over Eastern Europe so not just Czech Republic but Slovakia Hungary Poland especially Ukraine Lithuania Latvia etcetera have not been very good at unwinding all of these transactions and returning Jewish property when when I say not very good I mean terrible I hope that answers the question do we have any other no one else is lined up to that's question come over I think people should maybe come down and line up if you're interested in asking a question right so that we can go through yes hi my name is Celeste Friedman and I contacted you mmm-maybe 2009 or 2008 I'm the granddaughter of Emmet's fibril an artist and designer from Vienna and you by email introduced me to Sophie Lilly and I met with her in Vienna I'm doing a huge research project now and my grandmother and mother's artwork and I discovered huge collections of her work and the Mac and other museums there there are large private collections as well and it's still Austria is difficult to do they don't really want to discuss it with me yeah and I'm dealing with issues of copyright and current exhibitions and so on one publishers already produce postcards using manga where can I get support for that now here I am in dialogue with Sophie Lilly and an attorney there but I need some support here very it's very hard the question is to work where can you get support for claims if you're dealing with with the Austrians or even just to talk with someone about the game plan yeah it's it's very difficult I mean these cases are also different it's very hard and and so unusual and rare that it's very hard to find people who who can really help or know anything about it I often say to people you can do it as well as I can because there there is no expert in how to handle some of these cases it's it's an interesting fact you know if if someone today breaks into your home and steals your property you can go to the police and help they'll help find the person maybe they'll come and look at the crime scene they'll take records if they find the person they'll help recover your property that was never the case for Jews in in Europe anywhere in Europe so when their property was taken the for the enemy after the war there was never any agency set up to help people recover their property not one and it's really that that's really the thing that they caused I think the most problem everybody was on his or her own and had to had to recover things on their own I think the the organization that helps people these days to some degree is the claims conference in New York they handle a lot of claims but they they may or may not be able to help and then there are legal aid organizations like bet setec which is a Jewish legal aid organization in Los Angeles and they have a Holocaust reparations clinic where they help people and then lawyers and people like like me who who have some experience in this also offer offered to help but it's it's very tough and and as you said the Austrians can be difficult to deal with it's it's almost as if sometimes they they sort of want to do the right thing but not completely so they'll do it halfway and you can see with the Klimt paintings right they give back some property but can't really go all the way and get and give it back without being forced and so sometimes you have to you have to use other means but if you want we can talk later about it this is another question yes go up to the mic please based on your experience with this I was wondering at what point if ever you think that one would lose their claim of restitution after 100 years 500 years it's a good question it's a good question what should be the limit on these type of claims and we have rules and and Europe also has rules that allow for a statute of limitations for example the California statute of limitations for a while when we were litigating allowed Nazi looted art claims to be filed with route without regard to any other statute of limitation of that that statute was declared unconstitutional in a 2-1 decision by the Ninth Circuit in the corona painting case we then the California statute of limitations amended and I was involved in in that so now that now you have six years after discovery and it's not just Nazi looted artwork but any other artwork so if the artwork has not been found has not been located in the United States at least they have a discovery rule in most states and sometimes it's three years sometimes it's five six years that allows you a certain amount of time after you find your artwork to recover it so in that sense in California now the law will allow you to go a hundred years if it stays hidden for a hundred years because the rule in the United States is that a thief cannot convey good title what does that mean so the original owner keeps ownership of the work after it's stolen even if it's handed through six different individuals even if it's sold to someone who buys it in good faith the original owner gets to keep it interestingly the European rule is is the opposite the European rule the original owner has the duty to try to alert everybody that the painting is stolen and if someone buy something in good faith they get to keep it I'll give you an example of where that that really came came to the fore and I have to say it's if this is a hard issue this is a very hard issue it's really like like King Solomon right the the famous story where the the women are fighting over the baby and he says oh let's cut the baby in half right and then the real mother says no she can have it okay so unfortunately our law doesn't allow the judge to be King Solomon and say Oh cut the baby in half it has to decide who gets to keep the baby is it the original owner or is it the good-faith purchaser and you have essentially two victims right you have the original owner who lost it when a thief stole it and then you have someone who may have bought the painting without having any idea that it was stolen this is a perfect example this Picasso painting was owned by a family from Berlin and was sent for safekeeping to the art dealer Justin Tannhauser in who was then in Paris he was a German art dealer but in in the 1930s Tannhauser fled if you ever go to the Guggenheim Museum you'll see the Tannhauser wing with all of their good artwork he fled Paris and this was on a wall he actually had a picture of this on the wall of his home and his his where he he sold his artworks so after the war it was published this small picture black-and-white picture of this painting was published in a book on looted art missing from France and but it disappeared in the 1970s a an art dealer who lives here in Santa Barbara I believe what was then in New York bought the painting not knowing it was stolen from a French dealer who told him that it came from the Picasso family and he put it in the window in his shop in New York and a very wealthy family that all stores from Chicago anybody from Chicago there's an all-star wing of East Asian art at the Art Institute of Chicago they plunked down I think $375,000 in the 1970s for this picture okay so obviously they had no idea that it was Nazi looted art they put it in their home Lakeshore Drive in Chicago and then mr. all's derf died mrs. all starve decided she would try to sell it in a dealer sent it to to Switzerland and someone interested in buying it contacted the Art Loss Register the Art Loss Register is a basically a computer database it's funded by the auction companies and it keeps track of looted art and they said this is a missing painting it's been missing since World War two it's published in this book of missing paintings and and they actually tracked down the grandson of the original owner who was the last remaining heir who was studying law at Berkeley and when they couldn't resolve the case they introduced him to me and I had to file a lawsuit against the woman in Chicago and it was long complicated story took years to settle but she ultimately ended up paying for this painting again and she paid over seven million dollars in order to keep it but what was the issue was for her very hard to understand I hear she was an innocent party right she had paid money completely innocently and purchased this and what should the rule be should the rule be this American rule that the original owner keeps title and the good-faith purchaser is out of luck or should it be the European rule because remember the dealer had bought it in Europe in good faith right and so if he got good title according to European law why shouldn't he have good title when he brings it over here so that that's an open unanswered question in the law right now and that's why a lot of these cases settle instead of going all the way to trial because we're not quite sure whether a court would apply the French law that says that the dealer got good title or the American law that says the dealer didn't get good title and that she didn't get good title so very comp these cases are extremely complicated and when you talk about statute of limitations and certain defenses it's extremely complicated but I think the correct approach is the American approach especially for these type of works especially given the fact that victims of the Nazis weren't able to go out and tell people that their artworks were stolen they weren't allowed really the same avenues as everybody else to protect their works and prevent it from being sold thank you for that question fine one more question okay and I'm gonna go over here to the right side sure so go ahead please yeah I just had I saw in the paper a few years back that Russia had an exhibit I believe in New York at the Met and there was this whole controversial issue brought up about it being Sloane stuff as well and then there is all this stuff about huh sudhish literature that had been kept by Russia and is in their galleries being shown so how common is this problem and I know that after that horror deal Russia didn't want to actually go out and let their artwork go around the world and you lose the public interest of it and of course there's American diplomatic relations that are heard so how common is this and what is there that you can actually do as a country you know right well a lot depends on on the approach of our government here in the United States I was actually involved a little bit in one of these cases the Russians after the end of communism right they have these artworks that were were expropriated were taken without compensation from wealthy Russian families the most famous the shu-kun collection that I think is that the Hermitage of every famous impressionist painting you can imagine and these have been going on tour and every once in a while the shooken family does something to try to get them back and it's a question I thought it was an open question but apparently not according to our State Department whether our country recognizes the communists expropriations of 1917 or not the answer is they do our country says that's fine and we're not going to mess with Russia on those issues so we're even when the paintings come here to look to the United States they're granted immunity by the State Department and they can tour the United States and not and not have to return these artworks now Russia has also other artworks that were taken as as trophies after the their victory in world war ii and this is a little bit more of a complicated issue because there is a tradition under international law for countries especially countries like russia who were attacked and suffered great losses for those countries to be able to get compensation by taking artworks from the defeated country so Russia took a number of German artworks from German museums thinking they were German property some of them may actually have been Jewish property that the German museums had taken and put in their collection so it makes it sort of doubly taken but they took a lot of these back to Russia you know they took everything they took trucks and machinery and food and whatever they found and sent them back to Russia to compensate for all the damages that they had incurred and there it's it's a little problematic now you mentioned by the way that Russia and Germany have a continuing dialogue about the return of a lot of those artworks whenever Merkel and Putin get together it's one of their topics of conversation I guess and when he's not watching skating and then you mentioned also the lavato Rebbe has his family library which was taken by the Russians that was discovered there's an ongoing lawsuit in in Washington that's based pretty much on the Altman case suing a foreign country for property taken in violation of international law the Russians chose not to respond and there was a default judgment and then it went up on appeal and it's a complicated case and the problem is sort of like the problem they talked with Maria Altmann about let's say you win what then in the United States so there they're doing this lawsuit but the Russians can just say we don't care that you have a judgment against us saying that we have to return these we're going to keep them and and so really some of these cases need need a different Avenue for resolution and that's that's certainly one of them did you have a follow up or your do the you know you no longer have a country willing to cooperate with what what having to use do you follow I mean war is the only answer right seriously there's not much you can do from one country to get another country to do something short of short of declaring war and and it's really not something probably that our that our government wants to do so unfortunately our time is up I want to thank you all again for coming thank you very much okay you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 23,896

Rating: 4.7113404 out of 5

Keywords: Nazi-Looted Art, Gustav Klimt, E. Randol Schoenberg

Id: zTi0q6AVDIY

Length: 84min 41sec (5081 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 09 2014