In a unanimous decision on Wednesday, the US Supreme Court ruled that the heirs of Jewish art dealers cannot bring a lawsuit in US courts against Germany over the alleged forced sale of art and artifacts under the Nazi regime.
The case, Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp, concerned a trove of medieval Christian relics called the Welfenschatz that a consortium of art dealers had purchased in 1929. By 1931 the consortium had already sold half the collection to museums in the US and Europe, but in 1935 Hermann Goering, the Minister-President of Prussia and a deputy to Adolf Hitler, allegedly coerced the consortium into selling the remaining relics to Prussia at approximately one-third of their value. The US took control of the Welfenschatz after World War II before handing it over to the Federal Republic of Germany, which has had control of the collection ever since. In 2014, the heirs of the consortium, two in the US and one in the UK sought the return of the collection, claiming the original sale to Prussia was unlawful.
After negotiations with the German government failed, the heirs filed a suit in the federal district court in Washington, DC, asserting several common law property claims and seeking $250 million in compensation. Germany moved to dismiss the case claiming immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), which generally grants that foreign states are not subject to the jurisdiction of US courts. There is an exception for “property taken in violation of international law,” which Germany asserted did not apply in this situation, since it was a case of a sovereign nation taking the property of its own nationals. The three heirs claimed the exception did apply because “Germany’s purchase of the Welfenschatz was an act of genocide and the taking therefore violated the international law of genocide.”
The district court denied Germany’s motion to dismiss, which a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion, which held that the text of the statute, its legislative history and its amendments meant that the exception “does not cover expropriations of property belonging to a country’s own nationals.” The heirs urged the court to read the exception as broadly incorporating any international norm, not just the international laws of property, and specifically the UN Convention on Genocide. However, Roberts wrote that the court “need not decide whether the sale of the consortium’s property was an act of genocide because the expropriation exception is best read as referencing the international law of expropriation rather than of human rights.”
The court vacated the judgment of the appeals court and remanded the case to the district court for proceedings consistent with the opinion. It specifically directed the district court to consider the issue of whether the sale had been lawful in the first place, given that the sellers were not German nationals, an issue the heirs had mentioned in their brief but which the court did not address.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday also issued a one-sentence opinion in Republic of Hungary v. Simon, a similar suit by Jewish Holocaust survivors seeking compensation from Hungary for property taken from them during the war. The Court directed the lower court to reconsider the case in light of the opinion in Germany v. Philipp.
