U.S. appeals court ends Herzog heirs’ battle for Nazi-looted art in Hungary

A federal appeals court in the United States has ended a 15-year legal battle over one of Hungary’s most significant Holocaust-era art seizures, ruling that American courts lack jurisdiction to hear claims by heirs seeking the return of artworks taken during World War II.

Descendants of Baron Mór Lipót Herzog — a Jewish Hungarian collector whose family’s art collection was confiscated after Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944 — lost their long-running U.S. lawsuit on January 23 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed dismissal of the case in a 33-page opinion.

The family’s initial 2010 lawsuit concerned 44 artworks from the Herzog Collection, a prewar trove of more than 2,000 pieces, including paintings by El Greco and Pierre-Auguste Renoir that remain in Hungarian state museums.

The case returned to the D.C. Circuit multiple times as lower courts reconsidered jurisdiction in light of shifting Supreme Court precedent. Judge Cornelia T.L. Pillard wrote that while the family’s claims carry moral weight, U.S. courts do not have the authority to grant relief, ending the family’s ability to pursue restitution in the United States.

“The only question we face today is not whether these plaintiffs deserve justice—they surely do—but whether Congress has granted U.S. courts the jurisdiction to provide it,” she wrote. “As explained above, it has not.”

Before the war, Herzog had assembled what the court described as “one of Europe’s great private collections of art,” including works by El Greco, Renoir, Diego Velázquez and Claude Monet. After his death, the collection passed to his children.

After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, Hungarian authorities, working with Nazi officials, seized Jewish property on a massive scale. The Herzog family tried to hide much of its more than 2,000-piece art collection, but the bulk of the works were discovered and confiscated.

The artworks were taken to the Budapest headquarters of Adolf Eichmann, a senior officer in the Schutzstaffel, the Nazi paramilitary organization known as the SS. Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, oversaw the deportation of Hungarian Jews.

Some pieces were selected for display or transport to Germany, while others were handed over to Hungarian state museums. The opinion does not specify how many followed each path, but most were never returned.

Three heirs — David L. de Csepel and sisters Julia Alice and Angela Maria Herzog — sued Hungary and several museums in Washington in 2010, seeking the return of 44 works or $100 million in compensation.

The case turned on the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, or FSIA, the federal statute that generally shields foreign governments from being sued in U.S. courts.

The heirs relied on the law’s “expropriation exception,” which allows lawsuits involving “rights in property taken in violation of international law” if certain commercial connections to the United States exist.

But the Supreme Court has narrowed that exception in recent years. In a 2021 ruling involving Germany, the justices held that the exception applies only to violations of the “international law of expropriation,” a body of law historically concerned with a state taking property from foreign nationals, and not broader human rights violations.

The D.C. Circuit ruled that the established framework prevented the Herzog heirs from pursuing their claims.

The court said the heirs failed to show that wartime seizures during a military occupation violate the international law of expropriation as understood when Congress enacted the FSIA in 1976.

The heirs argued that Nazi plunder was an uncompensated, discriminatory taking of foreign nationals’ property. But the court said they had not identified international authorities establishing that wartime confiscations fall within the expropriation exception.

Without such authority, the court concluded, the heirs had not made the “valid claim” required to overcome the sovereign immunity of the Hungarian government

The heirs also argued that their relatives, though technically Hungarian citizens, had been rendered “de facto stateless” during the Holocaust and should therefore be treated as foreign nationals under international law.

If accepted, that argument could have sidestepped what is known as the “domestic takings rule,” which bars U.S. lawsuits when a country takes property from its own nationals.

But even assuming the Herzogs had been rendered de facto stateless, the court said, the heirs failed to show that international expropriation law recognized such people as protected “aliens” at the time the FSIA was enacted.

The opinion cites historical authorities stating that under traditional international property law, stateless people were not protected in disputes over government takings, and that modern human rights law does not expand the court’s jurisdiction under the FSIA.

Because the expropriation exception looks specifically to property law, not general human rights law, the court said the heirs could not rely on broader principles condemning Nazi persecution.

The court also addressed two paintings that had been returned to the family after the war but were later retaken by Hungary’s communist government.

Even for those works, the appeals court panel found it lacked jurisdiction.

In one instance, documentary evidence showed that ownership had transferred to a Hungarian museum in 1951. In another, the painting had been listed as covered by a 1973 agreement between the United States and Hungary that settled claims by U.S. nationals arising from earlier expropriations.

The court said that agreement prevented further litigation in U.S. courts.

Pillard acknowledged that its ruling would be “a disappointment to a family that has spent decades seeking redress for the plunder of its property.”

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