Nazi victim's family sues Germany over looted art

The family of a Jewish art dealer killed at Auschwitz is suing Germany in the United States for damages incurred by the Nazis' confiscation of his collection, including paintings by El Greco, Pissarro and Rubens.

Walter Westfeld was arrested in 1938 on currency violation charges, sent to prison and then to Auschwitz, where he was killed, probably in 1943.

The lawsuit estimates that the value of Westfeld's collection would now be "tens of millions" of dollars.

The decision to sue Germany for damages is unusual. In most cases, the heirs of Nazi victims have sought the restitution of individual artworks -- as happened last week when the Minneapolis Institute of Arts returned a painting by Fernand Leger to the heirs of a French art dealer.

"There are several hundred items, and we don't know where they all are," said Jeffrey Schoenblum, a lawyer representing the Westfield family (the Westfelds anglicized the name). "It would be really difficult to locate all the works of art, which may be scattered around the world.

"We are suing the German government. It bears the legal and moral responsibility."

According to Jewish Claims Conference estimates, about 650,000 artworks were plundered by the Nazis during Adolf Hitler's 12-year rule. Hitler appointed a commission to hunt down old masters for a planned museum in his hometown of Linz, while Hermann Goering scoured Europe to expand the private collection he kept at his country estate near Berlin.

German Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Amelie Utz said the suit is "in very early stages of the process" and is being examined by the government and justice authorities.

Westfeld's three brothers ended up in Nashville. All three are now dead, and it is their children who are suing for damages, through the state court in Tennessee.

The family's representative is Fred Westfield, a retired professor of economics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Westfield, 81, was celebrating his 12th birthday when he last saw his uncle in 1938.

He noticed in 2004 that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had posted information about the uncertain provenance of a painting in its collection, "Portrait of a Man and a Woman in an Interior," by the 17th-century Dutch painter Eglon van der Neer, on its website.

After Westfield got in touch, a researcher at the museum tracked down the catalog for the sale of Walter Westfeld's collection at the Cologne auction house Lempertz in 1939.

The Westfields' case is complicated by differing views over who is Westfeld's rightful heir. The art dealer had no children and never married. His fiancée, Emilie Scheulen, was declared his wife and heir by a Dusseldorf court in 1956.

Scheulen, who was not a Jew, helped Westfeld try to smuggle his art out of Germany and was also jailed on currency charges. From his prison cell, Westfeld managed to write a will naming Scheulen as his heir. Scheulen, who died in 1990, was compensated by the German government for the loss of Westfeld's artworks in the 1950s. Her heirs are seeking restitution of individual works.

According to the Westfields' lawyer, the claims by Scheulen's heirs are "not relevant" to the case in Tennessee.