The discovery of the largest cache of looted Nazi art since the end of World War II, with an estimated worth of well over a billion dollars, in a shabby Munich apartment belonging to an 80-year-old art dealer named Cornelius Gurlitt was an obvious revelation. The discovery that local authorities had chosen to keep that information to themselves for nearly two years was a disturbing shock. In the opinion of many scholars and legal experts, it calls into question Germany’s commitment to the restoration of looted art to its rightful owners.
On Monday, after a mounting uproar, a list of 25 artworks—three paintings and 22 drawings—was released on the Lost Art Internet Database, the official German governmental website for looted art. But the overwhelming majority of works in Gurlitt’s collection remain unknown, an enormous black hole for potential claimants, some number of whom have surely died during the delay. “The amount of information that’s available is just really astonishingly small,” said Frank Lord, a lawyer at Herrick, Feinstein with experience in looted-art cases. An initial accounting offered on the site indicated that less than half of Gurlitt’s artworks were suspected to be looted from Jewish collectors. “If they have a sense that 590 works are from Jewish ownership, then they need to be published now,” said Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe.