Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz co-authored the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016, introduced in April, which would reset the statute of limitations, giving families six years to pursue claims once looted items are identified.
The broad bipartisan support was evident at Tuesday’s hearing, where the Texans’ Democratic partners, Chuck Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, also spoke of the urgent need to make it easier to pursue claims.
Cruz, in his opening statement, said, “the quest to reunite the families of Holocaust victims with their stolen heritage is ultimately a quest to help them reclaim a tangible link to a happier time in their family’s history — a time before the darkness of the Holocaust. That is far more valuable than whatever economic value the works of art or cultural artifacts might have today. Indeed, that is priceless.”
Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and a former U.S. ambassador to Austria, told senators that one of the most “despicable” aspects of the Nazi thefts has been that governments, museums and savvy collectors outside Germany were complicit in keeping art from its rightful owners.
“This was the dirty secret of the postwar art world, and people who should have known better were part of it,” he said.
He thanked Congress “on behalf of the Jewish people” for addressing the issue, saying, “It’s been long overdue.”
He also asserted that some museums have been trying to run out the clock on statutes of limitations in various jurisdictions, hoping the rightful heirs will lose interest, die or simply give up in frustration.
“This is not justice. Stalling claims is an abuse of the system,” he said.
Monica Dugot, international director of restitution at Christie’s, testified that her auction house checks art against up to a dozen databases and occasionally finds a match. Unfortunately, she said, complete information is rarely available.
Simon Goodman’s family has recovered about 20 paintings, 10 sculptures and nearly 300 antiques taken from his grandparents during World War II, a quest he documented in The Orpheus Clock. He noted that many of the stolen pieces ended up in museums and private collections after being sold, apparently legally, by governments that took ownership after the war.
Often those sellers didn’t know, or didn’t try hard to find, the legitimate owners.
“There are many works on the market today that theoretically have a clean bill of health,” he told the senators, creating layers of difficulty for claimant families.
Mirren starred in the 2015 film Woman in Gold, the story of a Jewish woman who fled Vienna, lost relatives in death camps, and 60 years later sought to recover her family’s treasures. She’s no fan of Cruz. In February, when he was still a GOP contender for president, she told Britain’s Channel 4 that in her eyes, he might be worse than Donald Trump, calling him an “extreme right conservative.”
But she and Cruz spoke amiably after the hearing, sticking to art theft and her movie career. She signed autographs, as he and other senators lined up for a chat.
Mirren was born in 1945, at the end of the war, and isn’t Jewish. Until she played Maria Altmann, she said, “I never really truly confronted the absolute reality of what happened in those days.”
She called it a moral imperative to reunite stolen artifacts with their owners. While her cinematic story ended with success, many survivors have found it impossible to prove ownership of lost art.
The Nazis destroyed many records. Lesser works have disappeared into private collections. Families decimated, dispersed and impoverished by war lacked records or means to pursue claims.
The Commission for Art Recovery, an international organization founded in 1997 and affiliated with the World Jewish Congress, estimates that Nazis stole about a fifth of European art during the war.
Tens of thousands of works – paintings, sculptures, antiques and silver and gold items – are still missing. Some have been located in museums, but the rightful owners haven’t been found.
The Monuments Men Foundation has identified 40 major works still missing, including paintings by Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh.
The U.S. and other countries began to unseal records of artwork recovered after World War II in the late 1990s, after an international agreement encouraging compensation for owners of Nazi-confiscated art.
One senator after another expressed abhorrence at the Nazi crimes. Several Jewish lawmakers spoke in especially personal terms.
“It was an act of inhumanity, robbing the victims of dignity and respect and culture that has lasted all of these years,” said Blumenthal. Even to simply describe this as the “greatest displacement of art in human history … fails to do justice to the horror and unspeakable inhumanity of that era and what they did.”
Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa expressed his commitment to the cause and promised sponsors to move the bill through the full committee when it’s ready.