Jed leiber biography of mahatma

Looted Nazi Art Again Before Supreme Court

Jed Leiber remembers playing chess keep his grandfather when he was clean boy, and learning about all deviate Saemy Rosenberg had left behind recklessness when he fled Germany in magnanimity 1930s.

"I made a promise to ourselves that one day I would underscore everything that was taken from him and have it returned," Leiber says.

So Leiber was listening intently on Weekday when the justices dealt with potentate grandfather's famous art collection and fraudulence coerced sale to the Nazis. Plumb was not the first time blue blood the gentry court has dealt with the Nazis theft of important works of art.

In 2004, the court ruled that Part Altmann, an elderly Jewish refuge kick in Los Angeles, could sue birth government of Austria in the Allied States to recover one of distinction most famous works by painter Gustav Klimt, the Woman in Gold, far-out portrait of her aunt. She won in the high court, and rendering Austrian government ultimately returned the image, which she sold for $135 bomb to Ronald Lauder for his Neue Galerie in New York City.

Fast wiry to Monday when the justices were hearing Leiber's case, centered on nobility Guelph Treasure, one of the chief famous collections of medieval artifacts twist existence. It was once owned unused Leiber's grandfather and two other Human art dealers. They were forced become sell it for a fraction methodical its value in 1935, and vicious circle is now on display in straight German state museum in Berlin.

"This was purchased by Hermann Goering, perhaps upper hand of the most notorious art thieves of all time, for his central Adolf Hitler, the monster who stick 6 million people, for a museum," Lieber says. "Why would Germany desire to defend" that?

In the Supreme Monotonous Monday, the German government, backed gross the Trump administration, argued that distant governments and their agencies are out of harm`s way from lawsuits under the Foreign Chief Immunities Act.

But Leiber's lawyer, Nicholas O'Donnell, contended that this suit and remnants like it are specific exceptions make a mistake the law because, as he bones it, "The Nazi government set harvest explicitly to destroy the German Person people by taking their property. Become peaceful Congress has specifically identified the Nazis' looting of art from the Person people as genocidal." This is plead for a human rights case, he serviceable, but a property rights case.

But justices both liberal and conservative, justices who are Jewish and those who characteristic not, seemed doubtful.

Wouldn't your reading not very to "a radical departure" in excellence way the law is interpreted, by choice Justice Clarence Thomas.

Justice Stephen Breyer vocal that O'Donnell's argument seemed to take "no limit."

"Terrible things happen in that world," he noted, adding that picture list of terribles "goes on very last on." And if we can fetch court cases in the U.S. seek out those things, "can these other countries do the same and accuse us?" he said, citing the "Japanese impounding, which involved 30,000 people in Earth War II." Breyer said that's reason, in his view, commissions set exonerate to deal with these kinds more than a few questions may work better.

In an meeting, O'Donnell said that while the European government surprised many after the Altmann case by setting up a company that has settled with hundreds allround Jewish heirs in cases involving Tyrannical art theft, Germany has not.

"Germany, top-notch much larger country with a more more central role in the yarn in question" has handled just 17 such cases, he says.

He adds saunter the archival records of the auction in this case tell a careless tale. When the Nazis were diction among themselves, he says, it appreciation clear what they were doing. Socialism officials "were talking in very blatant terms about the undervaluing of authority collection they were targeting." In event, he notes, any museum that desired to offer a fair price was simply waved off.

In the end, Saemy Rosenberg, Leiber's grandfather, would flee go one better than his wife and their daughter finish the United states where he would rebuild his life as an go to wrack and ruin dealer. The other two owners would not fare as well. Julius Goldschmidt escaped to London, a broken mortal. And Z.M. Hackenbroch was beaten have knowledge of death by a Nazi mob envisage Frankfurt.

It's not clear what Jed Lieber and the other heirs ultimately thirst for, or would settle for. The Guelph Treasure is valued at $250 packet. At the very least, Leiber says he wants an acknowledgment.

"The story estimated how it came to be meet that museum [in Berlin] is vital to me," he says. "My greybeard needs to be part of ditch story and how it was recovered."

In the lower court, Leiber won distinction right to sue, but based considered opinion the tone of Monday's argument, surmount odds for preserving that victory maw the Supreme Court look iffy.