Supreme Court Says Germany Can't Be Sued In Nazi-Era Art Case

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Germany Wednesday in a dispute over artworks obtained by the Nazis from German Jewish collectors in 1935.

The court unanimously rejected a lower court ruling that had allowed the heirs of the one-time owners to proceed with their claim that the sale had been coerced.

At the center of the case is the so-called Guelph treasure, one of the most famous collections of medieval artifacts in existence. Now valued at $250 million, it has long been on display in a German state museum in Berlin.

Jed Lieber, one of the heirs, claims his grandfather and the other two owners of the collection were forced by the Nazis to sell for a fraction of the collection's value.

"This was purchased by Hermann Goering, perhaps one of the most notorious art thieves of all time for his pal, Adolf Hitler, the monster who killed 6 million people," Leiber said in in interview last December.

In 2015, the heirs sued in the U.S. for return of the collection, but the Republic of Germany, backed by the Trump administration, sought to block the lawsuit, and on Wednesday prevailed.

Writing for the unanimous court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that in a case like this one involving international law as well as domestic law, "We do not look to the law of genocide ... we look to the law of property." And under both U.S. law and international law, a taking of property can be "wrongful" only where a country deprives an "alien," a foreigner, of property.

Today's decision involved the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which establishes the rules of the road for how the Unites States treats other countries in litigation. As Roberts put it, the FSIA has long recognized that U.S. "law governs domestically but does not rule the world." And he pointedly observed that the U.S. might well balk too if some of its historically bad behavior — say slavery or the internment of the Japanese in World War II — were punished by courts in other countries.

The justices, however, did not put a complete end to the Nazi art case. Instead, they sent it back to the lower court for arguments as to whether the Nazis' unique criminal treatment of German Jews put this claim outside the norm because the Jewish victims were no longer considered German citizens. [Copyright 2021 NPR]