The US Supreme Court will hear Monday a case involving an important medieval art collection that Nazi Germany acquired from Jewish dealers.
The clash centers on gold crosses, jewels and other religious works from the 11th to the 14th centuries that are now on exhibit in a museum in Berlin.
“This case has everything to do with restitution (and) remedying a forced sale, which has major financial implications. But at the heart of it is something that’s far more important, which is justice,” said Jed Leiber, a musician in California who has sued the German government on behalf of his grandfather.
The latter, Saemy Rosenberg, was an art dealer in Frankfurt in the 1920s.
Shortly before the stock market crash of 1929, Rosenberg and other Jewish colleagues bought the art trove from the duke of Brunswick, a descendant of a European dynasty known as the House of Guelph.
After the market tanked, the dealers managed to sell half of the pieces to American collectors in 1932. The rest they stored in safes in the Netherlands.
In 1935, two years after Hitler came to power, they sold the collection at a low price to Prussia, a centuries-old European state which still existed and was then run by Hermann Goring, who founded the Gestapo.
Read the article by in International Business Times.