Dan Snow's History Hit - Hunting Stolen Nazi Art

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

As the Nazi war machine rampaged across Europe it did not just take territory and resources from its conquests but also many thousands of pieces of art and other antiquities. Stolen from both galleries and individual victims of Nazi crimes allied troops discovered hidden caches of priceless artworks throughout Europe. As the war proceeded it had been recognised that these cultural treasures needed protection from the fighting and where necessary rescued and returned to their rightful owners. This job fell to the men and women of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA) often known as "Monuments Men". Around 400 strong this team of dedicated art historians and museum staff risked their lives on the frontlines in order to save some of the world's most precious cultural heritage. To help tell the story of these brave men and women Dan is joined by Robert Edsel founder of the Monuments Men Foundation. Robert guides us through the formation of the MFAA, its role during and after the war and the ongoing going work by his foundation to continue their legacy and reunite works of art that remain missing with their rightful owners.In the second half of the podcast, Dan speaks to Eric 'Randy' Schoenberg an American lawyer and genealogist, based in Los Angeles, California, specializing in legal cases related to the recovery of looted or stolen artworks, particularly those by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. Randy successfully sued the Austrian government on behalf of his client Maria Altmann and reclaimed five Gustav Klimt paintings that had been taken during the war. He talks about how he came to specialize in this aspect of the law, the case itself and the impact the return of the paintings had on both Maria's family and him. This episode was first broadcast on 16 September 2021.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got two people on the podcast today, both of whom have inspired major Hollywood films. That was unintentional, but it's happened. Both the guests have done that. The first guest you're going to hear from is Robert Edsel. He's an author. He wrote the fantastically successful Monuments Men, the Allied heroes, Nazi thieves, and greatest treasure hunt in history, that then got made into a movie, I'm sure many of you see, got made into a movie called The Monuments Fund, directed by and starring George Clooney. Heard of him. It's the story of how the vast amounts of looted art taken by the Nazis from Jewish people, from art galleries, from victims right across occupied Europe. All of that art had to be reconnected with its original owners.

And that work is continuing. And Robert Edsel has a foundation. He is the founder, he's the chairman of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art. That work goes on. That brings me to our second guest you'll hear in the second half of this podcast. Eric Randall Schoenberg. Randy, to his

friends like me, is a lawyer, he's a genealogist. He's based in LA. And he, as you'll hear, as a kind of favor to a family friend, said he would try tilting at the Austrian government. He would try and launch a legal challenge to recover some works of art by Gustav Klimt. He only went and did it. He only went and nailed it. He got this art back, restored it to its original owners, and made lots of money in the process because he waived his fee, take a share of the art if they managed to get it.

So that's pretty sweet. His work also inspired a movie, but in his case, Ryan Reynolds played him, actually played him in the movie. Ryan Reynolds, can you believe that? That was in the movie but in his case Ryan Reynolds played him actually played him in the movie Ryan Reynolds can be there that was in the movie Woman in Gold starring good old Helen Mirren so really this is a star-studded episode of the podcast it's crazy and after you listen to it or while you listen to it please go and check out the Klimt paintings themselves gorgeous gorgeous pieces by an artist in his pomp. Absolutely brilliant. Many of you will

have seen The Kiss. Woman in Gold, just as good. Sadly, all too often we hear about looted artworks, we hear about huge trade and illegally sourced antiquities going to auction and being bought and sold. We thought it'd be good to go back and look at the Second World War, look at the work of the Monuments Men, look at the work of these lawyers who attempted to return these works of art to their legal owners it's fascinating stuff so i hope you enjoy this in the robber edsel and randy here's a bit more about recovering looted nazi art no black white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Robert, thanks so much for coming on the pod.

Dan, great to be with you. The Monuments Men is such a catchy title. Who were these people and what was their job? It is a catchy title, and it's partly a misnomer because there were also women involved. The Monuments Men and Women were museum curators, directors of different institutions, cultural institutions. Some were artists themselves, librarians, architects, the most unlikely of heroes who walked away from very successful careers as civilians to volunteer to go into harm's way, putting on a uniform and going to World War II, prepared to be at risk, trying to preserve cultural treasures from the destruction of war and theft by Hitler

and the Nazis. When did it become clear that the monuments, men and women, were required? Like, who first went, hey, let's get some monuments made up here? Well, both the British and the Americans deserve credit on this because the British were the first to actually have what we could say are cultural preservation officers because of their activity in North Africa in places like Libya and Leptis Magna and others that are hugely important archaeological locations. So they had the understanding that you got a bunch of young Brits that have been on the farm and haven't been outside the country, much less to such exotic places. And they're walking around wanting to put their signatures on 2,000-year-old sculpture and things like that. Not a surprising human reaction. That wasn't a good thing. And so they were there to try and work with the troops and explain why these things are important and why it's important to preserve them. And it's part of the duty of a soldier.

The Americans deserve credit in the sense that really kind of the founding father of the Monuments Men and Women was a guy named George Stout, who was a restorer of works of art at Harvard. And he was old enough, he'd actually fought at the end of World War I and had the vision to see that there was going to be a Second World War and it was going to have to be fought on European soil. And the great danger was winning the battle and defeating Nazism, but destroying thousands of years of Western civilization's culture. So he made a pitch to the United States Army to create this group known as Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section, a portion of Civil Affairs Division, and Sir Kenneth Clark, who was a brilliant scholar and a great leader, his initial reaction was,

quote, great idea, period, it'll never work, end quote. And he was convinced that while it was a meritorious suggestion, no army of any country would ever listen to a bunch of art scholars or historians running around telling them what they could and couldn't shoot at. But he proved wrong. It turned out, much to the surprise of a lot of these men and women, that when they went to their superior officers, many of whom were much, much younger than they were, the age of their students, in fact, they were glad to know about why these things were important and went to great lengths to avoid damaging them. So obviously, there's a concern around modern warfare, high explosive weapons, and the kind of damage that that could do to

the heritage fabric. When does looting become an issue? When did it become clear that the Nazis were conducting astonishing levels of looting? Yeah, it's a great question. I think you put your finger on a really important point. George Stout's great concern in having the vision to create this group of cultural preservationists was seeing the technological developments that took place in the Spanish Civil War that the Nazis contributed to employing, which was the technology of firebombing. And of course, fires are devastating to libraries and certain kinds of things in museums. And that was his concern, was that the technology is so much different to World War I,

that this is a grave, grave threat to thousands of years of accumulated knowledge of mankind. So that was what the motivation was. And it really drove them to initially work with allied air commanders to try and steer allied bombing away from these targets and make sure that, I suppose, like a doctor, first do no harm. Don't let the damage come from us. But as they got there and effected temporary repairs and got boots on the ground, they started to realize the enormity of the theft. It was different in Italy than it was in Northern Europe. Italy, it was more driven by spite because the Italians had changed sides in the war in mid-1943 and the Germans felt betrayed.

And at that stage, some of it was looting and some of it was just burning as they evacuated and gradually moved further north. In northern Europe, the buzz bombing, the Blitzkrieg, all these wanton bombing attacks by Germany on Covent Garden and other areas. So many of the great churches, the Christopher Wren churches in London, damaged or destroyed as a result of the bombing. The Christopher Wren churches in London damaged or destroyed as a result of the bombing. And then as they moved into France and into Belgium, these monuments officers, many of them haven't been educated in Europe, knowing what should be there and realizing it's gone. And when they started doing interrogations and tracking leads, all they heard was it went east. was it went east. So I think in Paris was the first time that the enormity of what had taken place and the degree of premeditation that had been put in place to determine where these things were and loot them really took hold. And it was at that stage their job started shifting from trying to preserve structures to locate and try and recover the movable objects.

Okay, so let's come back to that first bit of the job. The Americans, when did they first kind of go into combat, as it were? Were they sitting with Allied planners? Were they near the front line? Were they like, hey, don't drop too many bombs near that. We like that. What was the first moment when this idea was put into effect? Nobody really envisioned that they would be, they knew they would be with the troops. That was the whole idea. That was the structure. But I think the army wanted to keep a bunch of art scholars and historians and college professors in uniform away from the front line. They'll muck it up or they'll get killed. But more and more as the efforts progressed, they needed to be able to be

the first responder. They needed to be in there with the troops, not only to assess what damage there was and what was missing, but also to make sure proper security precautions were taken to prevent allied troops from taking things, whether as souvenirs or deliberately stealing. And so by the time we got to the spring 1945, two Monuments officers, in fact, were killed in combat. One was a British Monuments officer, Ronald Balfour, who was a great scholar at King's College. He was killed in Cleve, Germany, relocating church treasures that were in the middle of a combat zone and bad luck walking along the street with four other guys pushing a cart that had the church treasures. The guys were on one side of the street. He was by himself on the other and an artillery round came in and the other four

guys were fine and he was killed. The following month in April 45, an American, Walter Hutchhausen, was killed, caught behind enemy lines and killed in a spray of machine gun fire. Do we know what the troops that they're embedded with actually thought of these guys? Did they think it was as absurd as it had been feared? No, I think where the slow to accept mentality took place was more the higher up the chain of command they went before you get to General Eisenhower and his leadership, because Eisenhower absolutely understood why it was important. He considered that one of the reasons that the war was fought was to preserve rights, preserve lives, of course,

but to what end that we preserve lives and then the whole history of civilizations wiped out. So I think he considered that an important thing. But there were commanders beneath him that I think took a queer eye to the idea of not aiming at a target if there's a sharpshooter in it. But the Monument Men might be saying, you know, it's an important church. There are other ways to go about doing this. It depended. I do believe, though, that from looking at their letters and interviewing 21 of them in the course of my career, that what you see is great surprise and pride as they wrote home to their spouses and loved ones that this seems to be working, much to our surprise. We've got young commanders coming up to us at various times saying, wow, this is amazing. How are we doing? You found any stolen works of art. And as the

war rolled on, and I think it became clear the outcome, there was more and more amazement and engagement on the part of soldiers wanting to be participating in what was becoming the greatest treasure hunt in history. When it becomes clear that it's not just preserving buildings, things from battlefield damage, but there's a kind of treasure hunt that's going on. How does that mission change? I think at that stage, it's a critical moment that they're trying to find so many works of art, church treasures and other things. And it was at this point in time that the Monuments Men are trying to

continue doing their work and stay in touch. And does that work continue after the war, after the shooting war is finished? Yeah, it does. In fact, the army at the end of the war did not want to find itself in the situation it did, where at the close of war, the combat soldier's job is finished. It becomes a policing action. But someone's got to go find millions of stolen cultural treasures. And they're in thousands of hiding places from salt mines to caves and castles. And then someone's got to figure out what are we going to do with all this stuff? What do you do when you find paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt, some of the oldest documents in writing from

libraries throughout Europe, ethnological museum treasures. The list of things the Nazis stole was limitless. And the answer was, give it to the monuments, men and women. They're museum people. They are used to running large institutions with lots of items. The army didn't want to be in the position of doing it, but someone had to do it and there wasn't anybody else to give it to. And interestingly, in hindsight, if you would have been out looking for people with CVs to tackle a job like that, you would have been interviewing and hiring the people that happened to already be there. So they stayed there when the combat soldier's job was ending, the work of the Monuments Men and Women really was just beginning. And they stayed in Europe, in Germany, and from 1944, when they had boots on the ground,

until 1951 was when the collecting points that they created to sort through these stolen objects and determine what countries they'd been taken from and return them. At that point in time, they closed the collecting points and turned over the things that they had not identified the rightful owner to the new government in Germany to continue the efforts, which continue on to this day. And by the time they came home, they had returned more than 4 million stolen objects

to the countries from which they had been stolen. 4 million, and that's an undercount. And then a million objects on top of that that belonged to German museums or individuals that had been damaged during the war and they couldn't store them anywhere. So the Monuments Men were the custodians of these things. And you say that the work goes on today. Bring it right up to date. There are still hundreds of thousands of things worth billions of dollars that are missing from World War II. Of course, if it was porcelain, it's probably broken. If it's gold or silver, it's probably been melted down. And if it was an object, say the amber panels, that was a very large object and took 10 people to move around, it's unlikely in my view that it survived because someone would have seen you moving it. But the things that were portable, the things that could be put in someone's jacket or a canvas that wasn't too heavy could be taken off a stretcher and rolled up. Those things that are missing, I think there's a good chance that they're out there.

And this is an exciting time as we sadly will lose in the next five to seven years the rest of the World War II generation, the combat soldiers, the immigrants, displaced persons. The things that they have in their attics and basements and hanging on walls are going to have new owners. That's just a demographic fact. to find old rare books, documents, manuscripts, paintings, and other things that may have been put away, some in hiding, but some that were just taken by young kids as souvenirs of war, not understanding their importance, and then just gathered dust all these years. You say it's an exciting time. So there's still developments going on today. The Monuments Men Foundation, which I founded in 2007, was created not only to preserve the legacy of these men and women from 14 countries, predominantly United States and British, but also make sure that they receive the recognition today that they didn't receive at the end of the war, because when all the soldiers that were coming home were being recognized and thanked, the Monuments of Men and Women's job was really just beginning. And by the time they came home, late 40s, early 50s, the world was engaged in a new war in Korea, the Cold War, of course. World War II was in the distant rearview mirror, so no one ever properly thanked

them for their military service. So we were successful in having a lot of recognition, both in the UK as well as in the United States with the passage of the Congressional Gold Medal for all the monuments, men and women that served. But we also continue their mission and we locate and return missing objects, whether they were stolen, whether they were taken as souvenirs. We don't care how someone's got them. We just want to see them back to their rightful place. And we've found and returned more than 30 objects, some priceless over the last 10 years. And that effort continues today. And tell me about any particular pieces that you're working on at the moment. Well, there's a painting that was of particular interest to us by a great 18th century Italian artist, Bernardo Bellotto, who was known

for his extraordinary renditions of cities in Europe, these view scenes that were so precise and so accurate, painted in the 1700s, that after the war, when it came time to reconstruct some of the most obliterated cities in Poland and other areas, they used his paintings as models for how to recreate what was there because they were so accurate. They were the equivalent of a photograph in precision. And one of those paintings was owned by a German Jew, Dr. Max Emden, who sold the painting, and it has been contested about why he sold it, but the answer is he was persecuted severely by the Nazis. He was a wealthy guy who moved across the border into Switzerland, thinking wrongly that he could just wire transfer or Venmo his money to him, whatever the equivalents were at

the time, as he needed it to maintain his lifestyle. But of course, the Nazis, they didn't care whether somebody was in Germany or across the border. If they were a German Jew and they had wealth, they were in the gun sights of the Nazis for persecution. And they shut down his access to get his funds. He was a large real estate owner in Germany. They confiscated his real estate. He owned department stores. They wouldn't allow him to access his revenue from those things. And he died insolvent. And so he sold three paintings that were acquired by Hitler for his Führermuseum. And two years ago, the German government that had two of these three pictures, the Monuments Men Found, realized their mistake in not returning these two pictures to the family.

And their commission that reviews these things recommended that the German government return both pictures to the Inden heirs, and they did. And they actually ruled on all three of the paintings, but the third one, they weren't sure where it was. We've since found it. We believe it's in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, down the road from where I am in Dallas. It is a prominent work of art that hangs on the wall there. There is an ongoing dispute between the Emden heirs and the museum. The museum, in my view, has demonstrated complete reluctance to acknowledge that this picture was Dr. Emden's despite photographic evidence that identifies it as such. And

unfortunately, there are some museums out there that, in my view, play catch me if you can, instead of embracing the moral arc of history, which is what the Monuments Men and Women's Service was all the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. It's not the David at the Academia in Florence. 99.99% of the people who go to this museum won't even know that it's there. It's not there. So it's a chance to do the right thing and honor the service, not just to the monuments of men and women, but tens of millions of soldiers from all these countries that fought this war for a reason. And that was the legacy of General Eisenhower, I think, said that there always stands beyond the materialism and destructiveness of war, those ideals for which it was fought. And this was one of those ideals. And it didn't have a shelf life to it. That concept didn't expire after 30 or 40 years. Wrong's wrong. Stealing,

stealing. So fix it. How did it come to be in the museum in the first place? Just for a new book or film, Dr. Emden's third picture, this one by Bellotto, the Monuments Men found three of them. Two of them they passed on to the German government because they didn't know about the Emdens because he had died and the son had already immigrated to Chile to try and survive. The third one, they mistakenly returned to the Netherlands because another collector was looking for a painting by the same artist of the same name because this guy was so good, he recreated multiple versions of his picture. The Netherlands restituted it to the wrong person. And this person, we believe,

could quickly identify that the picture that he got back was not his. But he took advantage of it and he changed the provenance on it, in our view, and then later sold it, which is why he changed the provenance, and took labels off the back. And then the collector that bought it donated it to the museum. So to add injury to insult, the museum has zero cost basis in this picture. They didn't even pay for it. They got it for free in 1961. Now, you know, a museum has a responsibility to preserve the assets of the museum. You don't just take it off the wall because some guy walks in off the street. But at the same point in time, the thing I think their greatest charge is preserve the reputation of their museum. And this is not helpful in that regard. I didn't even know that these disputes are still rumbling on

in the numbers that they are today. Tell us, how do people support what you're doing or learn more about the foundation? What can people do? Thanks for asking. Visit monumentsmenfoundation.org. They can become a member of the foundation and support our work. They can learn about the case I just mentioned involving the Bellotto and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. We have biographies on all 350 or so monuments, men and women, people in the United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, and Commonwealth countries should feel very proud because there are incredibly accomplished Monuments men and women from New Zealand, from Australia. The second largest number of Monuments officers came from England. And

one in particular that endeared her heart to me, Ann Popham Bell, who died just a few years ago at 103 or 104, and was an incredible scholar. She was married to Clive Bell, whose aunt was Virginia Woolf. She had two great careers, not only as a Monuments woman working in the British sector. Her role was the restitution of thousands of church bells that the Nazis had stolen from churches in France and Belgium, going through and identifying the foundry marks on each of the bells and dealing with the disputes that took place and getting those things back. She performed a hugely important task. And then after the war, had this great literary career, authoring books about Virginia Woolf and her diary. And she's a member of the British Royal

Literary Society and was decorated recently by Her Majesty shortly before her passing. So she's just one of many remarkable figures. And she did our shared cultural heritage proud and certainly did England proud. And people there should know about her and be thankful that someone of such great character and leadership served. Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and telling us all about it. You're welcome. Thank you, Dan. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We heard from Robert Edsel talking about the Monuments Men.

Coming up after this is Randy Schoenberg about how he went to the Supreme Court to win back some stolen paintings. More after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to

Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Randy, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Happy to be here. What was your journey into this very particular aspect of law, recovery of looted treasures? It started really just because an old family friend of mine, Maria Altman, called me up and asked me to help her with her recovery of these amazing Klimt paintings. But Maria was just a family friend. She had been friends with my grandparents. I sort of half-joked that she knew me since my mother was in diapers. She really did know my mother as a baby, and of

course me. And she and her husband were very, very close friends of the family. They came on trips with us when my grandmother was alive. And so it was very natural that she called me up for advice. And so that's how it started. And once I was representing her, I was able to help a lot of other people also. And talk me through the Klimt paintings. What had been the history of those beautiful pieces of art? So Maria's uncle and aunt, Ferdinand and Adela, who were brother and sister of her parents. In other words, two boys named Bloch married two girls named Bauer. And so they were double uncles or double aunts. So the uncle and aunt had no kids, but they had an enormous art collection in Vienna, including these wonderful Klimt paintings, but also many dozens of other fabulous artworks. Maria's aunt Adele had died in the 1920s, but her uncle was still around in the 1930s when the Nazis invaded in 1938. And he fled immediately, first to his estate outside of Prague in Czechoslovakia. And then when the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia, he escaped again to Zurich,

Switzerland, and he stayed there through the end of the war. But he had no kids and died shortly after the war in 1945, after the war ended, and left whatever was in his estate, which was nothing basically at that time except the hope to recover things, to his two nieces and one nephew. And Maria was one of those nieces. Maria was one of those nieces. She was the baby of her family, the fifth child, and the only one left when, in 1998, an opportunity arose where they could actually try to recover these paintings. And how interesting. So he just left them with like a post-it note saying, if you can get them, these paintings are yours. He had a short will. It's, I think, a page long saying, I give my estate to my two nieces and nephew. And that was it because he was penniless. He was being put up by friends in a vacant hotel in Switzerland. And right, there was not a lot of tourism during World War II, as you can imagine. So the hotels were empty. And some friends put him up in a hotel

and he stayed there without any family or friends, survived until the end of 1945 and unfortunately died then, never being able to return to Austria and never having recovered any of his property. And did these people he left it to, did they harbour any realistic hope of achieving that or was it just like a family story? Well, they were all over the place. Maria was by that time in Los Angeles. Her brother was up in Vancouver, Canada. And then she had a sister who had remained behind and had been in hiding in Yugoslavia and came out of hiding with her husband and two kids. And then her husband was executed by the communists and she escaped to Palestine and then on to Canada. And so we're really up to the three of them to try to figure out how to recover things.

And they had a family friend who was a lawyer in Vienna. And he started to try to do that once the restitution laws came into effect in 1948. And he was moderately successful. He got some artworks out that they had recovered and some other property, but not the famous Klimt paintings. Because in that case, the Austrians took the position that the paintings had already been donated to them in the 1920s when Maria's aunt Adela died. And so the position that the paintings had already been donated to them in the 1920s when Maria Zantedela died. And so they said that the paintings had to stay there. That turned out not to be completely true. And that's how we ended up reversing that so many years later. So the Klimt paintings were in a museum in Austria. They'd ended up via Nazi looters?

Like, how did that work? It's different in every case with the Nazis at that time in Austria. But in this particular case, there was a lawyer who had the very unfortunate name of Dr. Fuhrer. That was really his name. And he was a big Nazi. And he was in charge of liquidating Ferdinand's estate. And so he distributed, he sold basically all of the artworks, two of the Klimt paintings he traded to the Austrian gallery. And then he gott paintings he traded to the Austrian Gallery, and then he got one back that Ferdinand had already donated and sold that off to another guy. And it's a long story, but at the end of the war, three of the paintings were in the Austrian

Gallery, two portraits and the apple tree. One painting was in the City Museum of Vienna. Another one, Dr. Fuhrer kept, with 11 other pictures to pay himself for a job well done liquidating the estate. And so they were all over the place. And it was really the lawyer for the family, Dr. Rienisch, his job was trying to find the property and then try to recover it. And as I said, he was moderately successful. Ultimately, what he did was he had a meeting with the Austrians and they said, you know, we want to keep the Klimt paintings and you have all these other artworks that you want to send out to your clients in Canada and in the United States. And we're not going to let those out unless you give us the Klimt paintings. And so he agreed to do that.

We know this because he wrote a letter to his client the very next day explaining what had happened. And he said, you know, I made a deal and gave up on the Klimt paintings, but I hope to get all these other paintings out. And that was somewhat successful. He was able to export a lot of what turned out to be less valuable paintings to the family in Canada and Los Angeles. I remember when I visited Maria, she had one of them still on the wall of these old sort of Austrian 19th century Biedermeier paintings. But the Klimt paintings, if you had asked her before this started out, she would have said, oh, it's too bad. My aunt gave them to the museum in her will, because that was the story she was told. And it turned out that that wasn't true. What is the law governing this? International law? Is there

international agreements around restitution? Or is actually this case, does it just pivot around the fact whether or not the aunt had given them away or not? Great question. So the answer is that each country sort of has its own law. And often it's very difficult to decide what law to apply because the artworks move from one jurisdiction to another. So it's one of the real difficulties that we have that there is no sort of international rule. And a matter of fact, there's a very important distinction between the law in the United States and in most of Europe. And a matter of fact, there's a very important distinction between the law in the United States and in most of Europe. And that is in the United States, we have a concept that the thief cannot convey good title, meaning once something's stolen, it remains stolen no matter

how many times it's sold to a good faith purchaser. Whereas in continental Europe, at least, it's the opposite. So a good faith purchaser can have a defense and say, I bought something unwittingly, not knowing it was stolen, and therefore I get to keep it. Because you have this Solomonic choice sometimes between two victims. You have the original owner from whom it was stolen, and then you have the innocent purchaser, the third party who buys it, and which one gets to keep the painting. You can't, like King Solomon, threaten to cut it in half and give half to each side. The law has to decide one or the other. The American rule is that the original owner keeps it, which means that the Latin caveat emptor,

let the buyer beware. When you buy property, you have to get title insurance and things like that because you can't be sure that you're getting it. That's the American rule. The European rule benefits the bona fide purchaser. The good faith purchaser says, hey, I didn't know it was stolen and I get to keep it. And then the original owner is out of luck. And so sometimes there's that difference that makes a big difference in these cases. What happened in our case was that Austria, after a journalist named Hubertus Czernin published a bunch of articles on formerly Jewish owned artworks that were in Austrian museum collections and had never been returned, they passed a law saying that we're

going to start returning these now. Anything that in the post-war period was not properly dealt with and not returned to these families for whatever reason, we're going to start returning them. So there was a brand new law in Austria that we took advantage, but that's not the case necessarily in other countries. You fought and won the case in the Supreme Court of the US. Yeah, it was a long ordeal. We tried initially to do a lawsuit in Austria, but it was too expensive, actually. They would have required Maria to pay attorney's fees for the other side, all of her assets, and she was deep in her 80s. So that was not going to be possible. So I very naively, I was a young lawyer. I looked at the possibility

of suing in the United States where Maria had been a citizen since the end of the war and had lived for many years. And there was a law that said you could sue a foreign state only in certain rare exceptions. So ordinarily they're immune from prosecution. You can't sue a foreign state. But this law that was passed in the 1970s said you could sue a foreign state in a case concerning property taken in violation of international law that was owned or operated by an agency or instrumentality of a foreign state that was engaged in a commercial activity in the United States. So I thought, well, if the paintings were taken by the Nazis in violation of international law and they're owned or operated by this museum, which is a federal museum, it's an agency or instrumentality of the Republic of Austria, if I can find some commercial activity that the museum does in the United States, I can sue.

And I found that they had published books and they advertised in the United States and they accepted U.S. credit cards. It was a thin thread, but I found enough that I thought I could proceed with Maria. So I left the big firm that I was at that didn't want to do this. And I went out on my own and I filed a lawsuit against the Republic of Austria to recover these paintings in Los Angeles. And that issue, whether I was right to do that, whether there was jurisdiction over the case, that went all the way up over the case, that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And of course, everybody was certain we were going to lose, but miraculously, we did not lose. And we were allowed to proceed with the case. That was in 2004. So it

was already six years into the case. We were just sort of at step one and were allowed to proceed. And then the next year, Austria offered to do an arbitration to get the case finished in Austria. And so we took it out of the U.S. court system, went back into Austria and did an arbitration in front of three Austrian judges. And then we won that also. So it was really a very long and amazing ordeal. I was very, very fortunate. Did Maria get to enjoy five Gustav Klimt paintings on her wall in Vancouver? Not on her wall. She was in Los Angeles and she lived after they fled from Austria. The family was not wealthy. She left a

very sort of normal middle-class life here. And living as a widow alone in a house, you don't necessarily want to have a hundred million dollar painting on your wall, but the family was able to enjoy them. We had a big exhibit in Los Angeles almost immediately after the paintings were returned in 2006. And that was really, for me, the best part because Maria would say over and over again that she remembered every weekend going over to her aunt and uncles and after her aunt died, just to her uncle's house where he had a single room that was a memorial to his wife, Ade Adele with flowers on the table and these amazing paintings on the walls all in one room. And so we had this exhibit where, again, all the

paintings were just in one room. It was the only thing in that one room. And Maria was there, the last surviving member of her generation with her kids and her nieces and nephews and grandchildren all in this one room with these paintings again. And for me, that was sort of the best moment of the whole thing. But in the end, the family, again, it was not just Maria, it was five heirs, decided they would not keep the paintings on their walls, but they'd find other homes for them. And so some of them were sold off. One is on permanent display in New York at what's called the Neue Gallery. It's a small museum in the upper east side of Manhattan that focuses on German and Austrian art. And there you can see the famous gold portrait of Adela Blochbauer because Ronald Lauder bought it for that museum.

So it was a very happy ending. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts.

That is, and did it, I mean, this is gossipy, but they must have received hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, did it change all their lives? It was, of course, an enormous amount of money. And I even got paid, which was never expected from the beginning because everybody thought we would certainly lose. And so all of us, I think, received more money than anybody really should ever get. But I don't think for any of the family members, it really changed their life very much. I remember my rabbi asked me, how does it feel after you've won this big case? Has it changed you? And I said, well, the one thing that I feel really good about is I know I can afford to pay for my kids' education and college and I can pay off my home

and things like that. And that was true, I think, for Maria too. She said famously she would like to get a new dishwasher and something like that. But she lived very comfortably through the end of her life. A few years later, she lived to be 95 and her nieces and nephews, the same thing. So anyway, it was, I would say not a life-changing case in that sense, but certainly a great journey for all of us. And the most important thing was telling the story. I remember telling Maria when we went to the Supreme Court and again, everybody thought we would lose, but there she was on the front page of the newspaper because she had this case in the Supreme Court. And I said, Maria, win or lose, at least people are going to know what happened to your family during World War II and what happened to these beautiful paintings.

So speaking of which, you've been very modest, but you became an important philanthropist and you donated money to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. In terms of that memory of the war, in terms of teaching people about the Holocaust and preserving that, do you feel that there is work to be done in that department, that there's a danger that our memories are becoming foggy of that, that museums like the one that you supported are more important than ever? I was so fortunate to be in a position, I actually was involved in the museum and became the president of the museum before we won, right before. And then when we did win and I received payment, I was in a position to really help build a new building, which is what they wanted to do. And I inserted myself

in the process also of redesigning the entire museum exhibit because I love history and knew, I guess I thought at least enough about it in a general way to really lead that effort. And so it was really meaningful for me to be able to turn this into something that did end up educating. They get about 50,000 or more people going through the museum every year because it is not only important to remember the past, obviously, but it's increasingly of interest to people. And that's what I found amazing that I'm going to be 55. I remember growing up in the 70s and on TV, there were a lot of TV shows about the war, about World War II, usually about big battles in the Pacific or battles in the

Atlantic and in Europe, not so much focusing on the Holocaust aspect. But I think as time has gone on, what makes World War II unique among all the big battles from, you know, Battle of Hastings to the Napoleonic Wars to the Thirty Years' War, etc., that we learned about in high school, what makes World War II unique is the Holocaust. And increasingly, and it's not just the families like mine who live through it who are interested, but I think it's become one of these world stories that people want to learn about. They want to know what happened because it is, without exaggeration, the worst human-caused catastrophe in the history of mankind. It seems like that should be an exaggeration, but it isn't. It really isn't. It's the worst thing that men have ever done in the history of

our human race. And so people need to learn about that. How did it happen? Why did it happen? What happened exactly? Who was affected? There's so many different lessons that can be learned. And I think it's just endlessly interesting and fascinating. It's also one of these calamities where we have a tremendous amount of information, where we have, let's say, the Shoah archive of 52,000 eyewitness testimonies. 52,000. That's 120,000 hours of video. So if you wanted to watch it 2,000 hours a year, it would take you 60 years to watch just the eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust that was recorded by the Shoah Foundation. That's leaving aside the documentary evidence and all of the other evidence that is out there. So it's just an enormously well-documented

world catastrophe. And so people are increasingly interested in it. So it's just an enormously well-documented world catastrophe. And so people are increasingly interested in it. And it's very fortunate that I was able to use my success in this one case in feeding this effort to educate people about the Holocaust. And then last question, Randy, Ryan Reynolds played you in the movie. I'm sorry everyone asks this, but what was that like? Is that funny? Going to the silver screen and seeing that? I mean, he's not as good looking as you are. Sure, sure. You would be the first person ever to say that.

It was a shock for me. I remember hearing his name, and he was not exactly who came to mind when I envisioned this turning into a film, because he is so famously good looking, and I am famously not. But he did a great job. I only met him one time, actually, in the whole process. I offered to speak with him if he wanted to, but he didn't, which I understood because he's not a mimic. He wasn't trying to be me. He has to play a role,

which is not me. It's about me. It's based on my life, but it had to be him also. And I thought he did a very good job. There are elements of me, certainly in his mannerisms and the way he comported himself in the film. But I'm not an actor. I wouldn't want to be one. It seems too difficult. But he, I think, did a terrific job with it. I remember I met Helen Mirren, actually, a little more.

And I said to her, I said, I can't believe that you all memorize all these lines because I saw them do a scene and they have to do the same thing you know five six seven ten times the same thing with the same emotion and getting the words exactly right and I said I couldn't possibly do that she said oh she was very charming by the way she said oh that's easy once you're trained you can do that so easily what you do speaking sort of extemporaneously in front of a court that seems so impossible to me and I said well you're kind, but that's super easy compared to what she was doing. Dude, Randy, I'm with Helen Mirren on this. I think you're crazy. The idea of arguing a case for the Supreme Court, wow. Ryan Reynolds got it easy compared to you, sir. Well, thank you very much for coming on this pod and telling me all about your remarkable experiences.

Thank you so much. Thanks for the interview and have a great rest of the day. Thank you very much for coming on this pod and telling me all about your remarkable experiences. Thank you so much. Thanks for the interview and have a great rest of the day. Thank you. you