Jewish heirs file lawsuits to recover Nazi-looted artworks from California museums

Jewish families filed lawsuits in California in 2024 to reclaim art stolen by the Nazis during World War Two. One case involves two oil paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, made around 1530. The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles says the Nazis took them and gave them to Hermann Göring. The paintings are now held at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. In another case, the daughters of Holocaust survivor Dina Gottliebova Babbitt want watercolors their mother painted while imprisoned at Auschwitz. Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime took more than 600,000 works of art from Jewish people across Europe. The cases were filed under a new California law that gives claimants two years to refile previously dismissed cases.