During the Holocaust, Nazis stole art, jewelry and other items from Jewish individuals, and 80 years later, their descendants are still fighting to get the items back.

The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act gives victims and their heirs six years from the time they discover stolen art to file a civil suit over it in U.S. courts. The HEAR Act is set to sunset Dec. 31, 2026, but a new bill, which seeks to extend the law, was approved unanimously by the Senate on Dec. 10.  The House has yet to vote on it. 

Courtroom battles over the pieces have had some limited success, but they are often stymied by the passage of time, difficulty proving ownership and authenticity, sovereign immunity and other complications involving international litigation, art law experts say.

Meanwhile, some families don’t know about the items their relatives lost or that thefts can potentially be traced to individual owners, auction houses, museums or storage facilities.

Jonathan Schwartz, a Detroit attorney, is on a mission to help families find and retrieve the art and other items taken from their relatives during the Holocaust. 

“What we have is the largest art crime in history,” says Schwartz, a Taft Stettinius & Hollister partner. “While it happened in the past, it’s still ongoing as people discover what was taken from their families.”

 “The clock,” he adds, “is ticking on their ability to have their art returned.” 

Schwartz works with Holocaust survivor Clara Garbon-Radnoti to translate and make public records from Hungary documenting how officials stole items. The documents, he says, detail where the art and other assets went and could still be stored today.

It’s estimated that between 550,000 and 600,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust. The document trove that Garbon-Radnoti has been translating contains inventories, transit records and receipts of art, some of which landed at museums within Hungary, Schwartz says.

“Our goal is to give people this information and try to help them get their property back,” he says. “These people were wiped out from history, and there’s value in keeping their memories alive by telling this part of the story.”

He adds that Holocaust survivors and their first-generation descendants—as well as first-generation descendants of victims—are dying, along with memories of what was stolen. 

A few states have jumped in to help with Holocaust-era art claims and transparency efforts. In August 2022, New York began requiring museums in the state to inform the public about artwork in their collections known to have been stolen or involved in a forced sale during the Holocaust. In September 2024, California passed a law aiming to eliminate legal loopholes in stolen art cases and ensure that California law, not foreign law, applies to lawsuits involving these thefts.

Still, cases involving Holocaust-era art claims face an uphill battle, says Nicholas M. O'Donnell, who has written extensively on Nazi-looted art and the law.

In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act barred heirs of Jewish art dealers from suing Germany in federal court over a collection of medieval art. 

O’Donnell, a partner at Sullivan & Worcester in Boston, says  the question he gets asked the most is, “’Are these claims going to be all done soon?'

“My answer is always no, because art can be anywhere, hidden,” he says. The question, he adds, is whether it will get increasingly difficult to use the court system to get the items back.

Schwartz helped found the Holocaust Art Recovery Initiative, a joint project of the Arts, Communications, Entertainment and Sports Section of the State Bar of Michigan and the Jewish Bar Association of Michigan.

But his side project, helping Garbon-Radnoti translate Hungarian records from the Holocaust, has become a bit of a passion, he says. Most of the items inventoried belonged to Jews who were overwhelmingly sent to death camps. 

For almost two decades, Garbon-Radnoti has been translating the documents, which are contained in over 180 digitized, searchable microfilm reels with more than 160,000 frames that were donated to the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. 

Born in Hungary, Garbon-Radnoti lost her father, sister and most of her extended family in the Holocaust. She evaded capture by the Nazis and their Hungarian supporters by hiding in 22 different places until the war ended. 

While reviewing the documents, she happened upon the name of her aunt and saw some information listing some of the family’s possessions, including a rolling pin, four kitchen chairs and a kitchen table. 

At 96, Garbon-Radnoti says the translation process “hasn’t been easy, but it was necessary.”

“This was more important than playing cards or doing something else,” Garbon-Radnoti said during a recent telephone interview from her home, with Schwartz by her side and trying, but failing, to set up a Zoom call on her computer. “I felt this was a good occupation for me in my retirement.”

Schwartz says he and Garbon-Radnoti—who with her late husband developed and ran an aviation logistics and technology business—work together “effortlessly.”

“She has a sharp wit, and we talk about many things—the documents, Hungarian history, art, our families, her memories, politics, the absurdity of certain bureaucratic details and the human moments that surface in the archives,” says Schwartz, who generally comes to her home with deli food. 

“I don’t mind when she smokes an occasional cigarette,” he adds.

More recently, Schwartz has been using artificial intelligence tools to assist with research and help speed up the process. 

As Garbon-Radnoti translates the records the Hungarian government kept of the lootings, Schwartz is revealing their contents in lectures, news editorials, websites and social media. 

“It’s important for this new generation to know what was going on during the Holocaust, to learn from it and to adjust themselves accordingly,” Garbon-Radnoti says. “This is a way to warn them. They feel very safe in their lives, and they don’t realize the danger that can come at them.”

During the Holocaust, more than 600,000 items were stolen from Jewish families, including Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a gold-flecked painting from 1907. But there are also paintings from lesser-known artists, as well as jewelry, furniture, rugs, statues and items of religious significance, such as Shabbat candle holders and Passover seder plates.

In some cases, the items were taken after the families were forced out of their homes. In other instances, the families had no choice but to sell. 

Jennifer A. Kreder, of counsel at the New York City-based Rottenberg Lipman Rich, specializes in international business transactions and art law. She describes how some art owners were forced to sell their treasures to escape.  She adds that some recent litigation focuses on the return of artwork sold under duress. 

“Just because a signature is on a piece of paper doesn’t mean that it was voluntary,” Kreder says.

The Hungarian authorities, Schwartz says, even documented an inventory of children’s toys taken from orphanages. 

The document trove also traces works by Rembrandt and Renoir. And they include records of more personal or religious items. In 1944, Hungarian officials documented 90 stolen Torah scrolls, Schwartz says.

“What drives me is the simple fact that this evidence has been sitting in archives for 80 years while victims or survivors and their families were told that their claims were impossible to prove,” Schwartz says. 

 “I don’t want to die with this information on my shoulders,” he adds.

In the United States, litigation over art stolen by the Nazis heated up in in the 1990s, when it became easier to search through archives throughout Europe. In addition, increased public awareness and the establishment of international agreements, along with the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, opened renewed interest in tracking down and attempting to have stolen art returned.

Some cases have attempted to establish proof of Nazi theft, while others pursued the idea of coercion or duress, O’Donnell says. 

There’s a basic recognition “that there was no such thing as an arm’s length transaction for groups targeted by the Nazis,” he adds. 

Nevertheless, he says, litigation to recover stolen art often ends up settling for financial compensation or failing because of legal impediments.

Pierre Ciric, the founding member of the Ciric Law Firm in New York City, specializes in cultural heritage law, including  restitution for art looted during the Holocaust. According to him, cases filed in U.S. courts can run up against defenses such as issues concerning the passage of time, choice of law and sovereign immunity.

Another issue is laches, a term that describes a legal doctrine barring claims if the defense can show the plaintiffs unreasonably delayed asserting their rights, causing prejudice to the defendants. Museums have had cases dismissed with such arguments, Kreder says. 

Museums, she says, also argue  that “there’s a public interest in allowing more people to view works of art by keeping them in public spaces.”

“I think there’s a public interest in standing against profiting from genocide,” Kreder adds. 

But William L. Charron, a partner in the New York office of Pryor Cashman and co-chair of the firm’s art law group, has a nuanced perspective on cases over allegations of stolen art. He’s represented both individual collectors and museums fighting to keep the art they bought and families trying to have their items returned. 

Claimants suing “good-faith owners” sometimes rely on allegations that Nazi theft occurred when evidence needed to prove that no longer exists. 

That can be “highly problematic,” he says. 

“These cases can be complicated, and the law has to figure out how to keep fairness in the system,” Charron says. “Good-faith owners shouldn’t be forced to return art based on speculation that Nazi theft occurred.” 

For years, courts were also applying different state statutes of limitations and standards when it came to allowing claims to proceed.

In 2016, Congress jumped in to help, unanimously passing the HEAR Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law. Under the act, lawsuits over stolen Holocaust-era art can be filed in U.S. courts, so long as the property was taken between Jan. 1, 1933, and Dec. 31, 1945. 

If the HEAR Act is not extended, state laws would govern for any cases filed. 

In May 2025, Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, introduced the HEAR Act of 2025. Unlike the original HEAR Act, the new bill contains no sunset provision. In addition, the proposed bill eliminates some common defenses to litigation over Holocaust-era art. 

The proposed HEAR Act extension has sparked controversy with some new provisions, including one expanding the ability of heirs to sue foreign governments in U.S. courts. 

By allowing certain cases against foreign governments to proceed, the proposed HEAR Act extension is attempting to bypass Supreme Court precedent related to suing foreign governments, Charron says.

In addition, the proposed law removes laches as an equitable defense.

But Charron says that removing laches is “turning a cold shoulder” to “fairness in the legal system.” He also points out that laches is a judicial option, and Congress removing it potentially presents a separation of powers issue. 

The Association of Art Museum Directors say the HEAR Act should be renewed, but only with a 10-year extension for claims to be filed, according to spokesman Sascha D. Freudenheim.

The current version, however, “would set a dangerous precedent by overturning fundamental principles of our legal system, threaten relations with foreign countries, undermine reasonable and good-faith defenses an institution may offer in the face of certain claims, and perhaps most important may lead to more litigation,” the Association of Art Museum Directors said in a statement. 

Alternatively, Ciric says, “the recent growth in online research resources has made it easier for descendants of victims to check out their relatives’ stories and investigate family losses.”

“The third or fourth generation of Holocaust victims’ descendants often decide that cultural losses are something worth fighting for,” he says.