Heirs of Nazi victims filed two lawsuits in Los Angeles on September 14, 2026, to reclaim art stolen more than 80 years ago, the Los Angeles Times reported, after new laws revived long-blocked claims.
The cases will test whether stolen art can ever become legal property after passing through decades of honest buyers.
In the first case, the daughters of Auschwitz survivor Dina Gottliebova Babbitt sued the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland in federal court in Los Angeles.
Their mother painted seven watercolor portraits of Roma prisoners, members of a persecuted ethnic minority, on the orders of Josef Mengele, the Nazi camp doctor who ran deadly experiments.
At least six of the sheets carry her wartime signature, Dinah 1944, the lawsuit says.
Babbitt survived the camp, built a career as a Hollywood animation artist in California, and died in 2009 with the paintings still in Poland.
The Auschwitz Memorial has turned down return requests since at least 1999, when United States Representative Shelley Berkley pressed Poland to return the works to the then 76-year-old artist.
"The portraits of Roma victims are the few remaining fragments of the documentation made by Mengele as part of his criminal experiments," museum spokesperson Pawel Sawicki said.
The second lawsuit targets the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena over Adam and Eve, two life-size panels painted around 1530 by German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles filed that case in Los Angeles County Superior Court after Marei von Saher, the last heir of the paintings' prewar owner, signed her claim over to the group.
Jacques Goudstikker, a leading Jewish art dealer in the Netherlands, owned the panels until he fled the German invasion in May 1940 and died during the escape.
Nazi leader Hermann Goring then seized the collection in a forced sale, a case timelineshows, and Allied troops recovered the panels at the war's end.
The Dutch government got the works back after World War II but sold the pair in 1966 to Russian aristocrat George Stroganoff-Sherbatoff instead of returning them to the Goudstikker family.
Collector Norton Simon bought the panels from Stroganoff-Sherbatoff in 1971 for $800,000.
Von Saher first sued the museum in 2007 and finally lost in 2018, when a federal appeals court said American judges could not undo the Dutch government's official decisions.
The Norton Simon Museum answers that courts up to the United States Supreme Court confirmed its title, and that the art will stay on public view.
Both filings rest on Assembly Bill 2867, a California law that Governor Gavin Newsom signed on September 16, 2024, according to the governor's office.
The law lets California families refile art claims that courts earlier threw out on technical grounds rather than on the facts.
The bill also tells judges to apply California rules, under which a thief can never pass legal ownership to anyone, a Senate analysis explains.
Lawmakers acted after a federal appeals court let a Spanish museum keep a Camille Pissarro painting that the Nazis took from the Cassirer family.
"It is both a moral and legal imperative that these valuable and sentimental pieces be returned to their rightful owners," Newsom said at the signing.
Congress followed on April 13, 2026, when a federal law reinforced the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016.
The federal law strips away defenses based on the passage of time, such as statutes of limitations, the deadlines that normally kill old claims.
Together the laws push courts to decide one question: who truly owns the art, not how long ago it vanished.
Federation board chair Daniel Gryczman told the Los Angeles Times that money from any future sale of the $24 million panels would help struggling Holocaust survivors in the Los Angeles area.
Both museums plan to fight, and neither court has ruled.
Eighty years after the war, the question of who owns its stolen art now sits with two Los Angeles courts.
