The latest point of contention in the long-running Nazi claim of plunder brought by the heirs of a consortium of Jewish merchants against the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) over the ownership of the Guelph Treasure relates to the nationalities of these dealers at the time they sold the collection of medieval objects in 1935.
The case concerns a treasure trove of objects dating from the 11th to the 15th century and whose value is estimated at at least 200 million euros. These objects are on long-term display at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin, which is managed by the SPK. According to the claimants, a consortium of Jewish dealers was forced in 1935 to sell the collection to the Prussian state under the leadership of Hermann Goering. The plaintiffs – Alan Philipp, Gerald G. Stiebel and Jed R. Leiber – filed their original claim in 2015.
Their lawsuit against the SPK, a German federal organization, was a major test of the reach of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), which protects other countries from lawsuits in the United States. Previously, the plaintiffs alleged that the FSIA did not apply to their case because the Guelph treasure was taken in connection with a human rights violation (the Holocaust).
In 2021, the case reached the United States Supreme Court, which on the side of Germany and sent the case back to federal district court for DC to determine whether the case could proceed on the basis that the resellers were “non-citizens” at the time of the sale, having been stripped of their citizenship by the government. German Nazi. Last summer, the federal district court found in favor of SPK.
The plaintiffs appealed the decision, prompting a hearing on Tuesday (April 18) in which their attorneys presented a new argument before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to explain why the case should be heard in a US court. According Courthouse Newsthey argued that two of the dealers had fled to the Netherlands, effectively becoming Dutch nationals, and that the others had become basically stateless. “The Nazi state took the [Guelph Treasure] by forced sale because the consortium of dealers was Jewish,” says the brief filed by the heirs of the DC Circuit. “This expropriation violates international law because in 1935 there was no legal or colloquial definition of ‘German’ that could possibly include these victims. At a minimum, therefore, the case concerns property held collectively by Dutch and German owners, the confiscation of which on discriminatory grounds clearly violates international law.
SPK’s attorneys, in a brief, write that the plaintiffs’ latest arguments “hint at possible legal theories with vague allegations,” adding, “plaintiffs lost those alternative arguments years ago.”
Jonathan Freiman of the law firm Wiggin and Dana, attorney for SPK, told the panel of judges that this argument had been available to the plaintiffs over the past eight years of litigation, but they had not made it. “They didn’t address it,” he said. “The plaintiffs themselves admitted that this property belonged to German companies in Frankfurt”
Nicholas O’Donnell of Sullivan & Worcester, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said Courthouse News that, “For Germany, of all countries, to assert […] that his Nazi predecessors considered Jews to be members of the German nation, or that the plaintiffs had not said so consistently for years, is outrageous. We eagerly await the Court’s decision.
The judges did not say when a decision in the case will be announced.
