The US Supreme Court in Washington has dealt with the famous Welf Treasure. On Monday, the Supreme Court examined the demand from the descendants of German-Jewish art dealers for the return of the valuable collection of medieval showpieces, which is owned by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. It was about the question of whether US courts have jurisdiction in the legal dispute. A decision will only be made in the coming year.
The background to this is the sale of 42 objects from the Welfenschatz by German-Jewish art dealers in 1935. Their descendants argue that it was a forced sale. You have therefore sued the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and the Federal Republic in the USA for the surrender of the objects, the value of which they estimate at more than 200 million euros.
The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which is exhibiting the Guelph treasure consisting of shiny gold reliquary containers, crosses and supporting altars in the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts, argues that the case should not be tried by a US court. It was a deal between Germans in Germany. The foundation also considers the lawsuit to be unfounded: the sale of the Welfenschatz was not a “forced sale due to Nazi persecution”.
The focus of the Supreme Court deliberations held on Monday was a US law, according to which foreign states cannot claim immunity from US courts if property rights have been violated in the course of a violation of international law. The Holocaust is without question an “international crime,” said art dealer descendant Jed Leiber before the hearing at the AFP news agency.
However, several constitutional judges expressed doubts that the law could be applied to the Guelph treasure and the circumstances surrounding its sale. New judge Amy Coney Barrett said that if the law were to be interpreted broadly, “700 federal judges” in the US would soon have to deal with such claims.
In 2014, a German review commission chaired by the former President of the Federal Constitutional Court, Jutta Limbach, came to the conclusion that the collection was not a case of Nazi-looted art. The acquisition of the collection by the Prussian state in 1935 was not a “forced sale due to persecution”.
The treasure with showpieces from the 11th to 15th centuries originally belonged to the Braunschweig Cathedral, but in 1671 it became the property of the Princely House of the Welfs. The latter sold the 82 objects in 1929 to a consortium of Jewish art dealers who, according to the purchase agreement, were to sell the collection on. At first, however, they only managed to sell about half of the pieces.
In 1934, Dresdner Bank approached the consortium on behalf of the Prussian state to buy up the rest of the collection, which at the time was being held outside Germany in Amsterdam. A year later, both sides closed the deal for a purchase price of 4.25 million Reichsmarks. At the end of the war, the Allies confiscated the pieces in Berlin. They later ended up at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which has been exhibiting them to the public ever since.
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