Heirs of Jewish Art Collectors Pursue Works Sold in Nazi Era

DRESDEN, Germany -- When the Nazis came to power, Fritz Glaser was a marked man. A wealthy Jewish lawyer, he was also well known as a collector of modern art -- works condemned by Hitler as "degenerate" and soon banned under the Third Reich.

Miraculously, Glaser survived the Holocaust and the 1945 Allied firebombing of this city on the Elbe River. But his precious art collection was in shambles. During Nazi times, when Jews were routinely pressured to sell property at nominal prices, he was forced to liquidate much of his collection, according to his family. Amid the postwar wreckage, he sold a few remaining pieces to raise cash and saw the others confiscated by the communists before he died in East Germany in 1956.

A half-century later, Glaser's sole remaining heir is fighting an uphill battle to win back some of his artworks, which are now ranked as masterpieces. Armed with scraps of wartime letters and faded exhibition catalogs, Glaser's 69-year-old daughter-in-law is trying to prove he was coerced into selling his treasures to unscrupulous Nazi art dealers.

"In Germany, we really have difficulty in getting back artwork that was taken during the Holocaust," said Sabine Rudolph, an attorney for the heir, Ute Glaser. "It's a real problem, how to check these records. The museums don't want to know about any mistakes. They don't want to give private researchers access to their archives."

Today one of the sought-after artworks, "Max John," a 1920 oil-on-cardboard painting by the German portraitist Otto Dix, anchors the collection of the Freiburg Museum of Modern Art. Another, a 1918 watercolor by Paul Klee, is a prominent part of the collection at a museum in Munich. Art experts estimate each is worth millions of dollars. The museums have been reluctant to give up the paintings, saying there's no clear evidence of their history.

Ute Glaser is one of tens of thousands of people in Germany and elsewhere who six decades later are still seeking redress for crimes of the Nazi era -- slave labor, confiscated houses and stolen artwork among them. Artwork has proved one of the thorniest issues to resolve.

In 1998, the German government signed a pact known as the Washington Declaration, endorsing guidelines adopted by 43 countries for returning art and other assets seized during the Holocaust. A year later, Germany issued a follow-up pledge to comb its museum collections to determine if any pieces had been confiscated by the Nazis or sold under pressure.

But progress has been slow. German institutions have reported identifying more than 5,000 pieces that were possibly owned by Jews in the Nazi years, from 1933 through 1945, said Michael Franz, director of Germany's Lost Art Internet Database, but his agency has helped return only about 40 artworks in the past five years.

For one thing, German regulations governing such cases are complex and murky. Some rules say that by definition any sale by a Jew after 1938 was under duress; thus essentially all that must be demonstrated is that a sale took place. In other cases, specific evidence of coercion is required.

Museum directors say the biggest obstacle is a lack of funds to research the often-muddled provenance -- or ownership history -- of their collections. Some heirs suggest the bigger problem is museums that don't want to help.

Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and a billionaire art collector, praised Germany for its overall commitment to compensating Holocaust victims and their heirs. But he said museums must do more. "It's very, very important that the last prisoners of World War II be released, if in fact they've been stolen."

Issues of Responsibility

Lauder is co-founder of New York's Neue Galerie, home to many valuable works purchased from Jewish heirs who won them back from European museums after often-bitter disputes. Among them is "Berlin Street Scene," a 1913 painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner that was displayed for decades in a small state-owned museum in Berlin.