A shorter note today — not a full Just the Facts piece, just something on my mind after a weekend spent reading two new lawsuits that a lot of you, given how many of you follow my occasional reporting on Nazi-looted art, will find worth your time.
In my writing on Nazi-looted art and restitution — including my own decades-long search for the missing Raphael “Portrait of a Young Man,” looted by Hans Frank, the Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland who was hanged at Nuremberg — I have never come across a case as legally and morally difficult as the one just filed against the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial.
Actually, two lawsuits were filed this week in California, prompted by that state’s sweeping 2024 law designed to help families reclaim Nazi-looted art, along with the federal Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act signed into law earlier this year. I have spent the weekend reading the lawsuits. The Babbitt family’s suit was filed just two days before the two-year window that law gave …
