Paintings taken by Nazis are given back to heirs of Holocaust victims

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Two 16th century oil paintings that had been on display for decades at Hearst Castle were returned Friday to the heirs of its original Jewish owners who were forced to flee Nazi Germany and sell the art.

The Renaissance-era paintings belonged to Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer, two art dealers who were forced to liquidate their Berlin gallery in 1935, when Germany required Jewish citizens to report their assets to the government. Jakob Oppenheimer died in 1941 in France, where the couple had fled, and his wife later died at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

The return of the paintings to two Oppenheimer grandchildren, 73-year-old Peter Bloch of Florida and 73-year-old Inge Blackshear of Argentina, was the United States’ 25th settlement involving repatriation of artwork taken from Jews by the Nazis, said Erik Ledbetter, director of international programs and ethics at the American Association of Museums.

“The Nazis had a morbid fascination with committing their crimes under the cover of legitimacy,” Ledbetter said. “They had a twisted genius for inventing legal mechanisms which seemed to be legitimate but in fact were mechanisms of theft, and that’s what happened to the Oppenheimers.”

Heirs of artwork stolen by the Nazis have been reunited with pieces displayed at some the nation’s most prestigious museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and The National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The paintings were spotted by Eva Sterzing, the family’s Paris-based attorney who saw a 1976 pamphlet featuring artwork at the estate built by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon. They had been on display in the estate’s Italian style Doge Suite.

Hoyt Fields, director of the Hearst Castle museum, said three paintings were purchased in 1935 from the I.S. Goldschmidt Gallery in Berlin. He said Hearst was likely unaware of their origin. Hearst Corp. deeded the artworks to the state in 1972, when the castle and its contents became part of the state park system.