A Jewish family, a famous European museum and the battle for a Nazi-looted masterpiece
It was early 1939 and the window for Jews like Lilly Cassirer Neubauer to escape was rapidly closing. The Nazis had been tightening their grip on Germany, ransacking synagogues and Jewish homes and schools. Death camps would follow soon.
In desperation, she surrendered an exquisite impressionist painting in her family’s art collection for a visa to flee Germany at the dawn of World War II.
Six decades later, Lilly’s grandson in San Diego made a shocking discovery: the painting had resurfaced in Europe, tied to the scion of a German industrialist family that helped finance Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
Today, Lilly’s great-grandson David Cassirer awaits a decisive ruling in the family’s long legal battle to reclaim the painting, now in a Spanish museum. The work by Camille Pissarro is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
The fight isn’t only about money, but family legacy and a conflict between law and morality.
From the early 1930s until the war’s end in 1945, the Nazis stole an estimated 650,000 paintings and other artworks. Many have never been found, while legal battles for others rage on. Each family’s case is different, but a decisive legal victory for one often benefits many, and Jewish families, restitution experts and attorneys the world over have been watching the Cassirer case closely for decades.
Thaddeus Stauber, an attorney for the museum, declined to comment on behalf of his clients.
Cassirer — now 69, of Colorado — said he wants to see the case to the end for his great-grandmother, who lived with his family in the U.S. for several years before her death in 1962, and his father, Claude, who died in 2010 dreaming of the painting’s return.
“As a Holocaust survivor,
