In Washington, a lawsuit was considered by Maria Altmann, the 88-year-old heir of Austrian Jew Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. In 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the Bloch-Bauer family left the country, leaving behind part of their property. Among the abandoned wealth was a collection of paintings, many of which are now worth millions of dollars. Altmann demanded that the Austrian government return to her six paintings by Gustav Klimt, which now hang in one of Vienna's museums. The market value of two portraits and four landscapes, according to rough estimates, now exceeds $100 million. However, Austria considered the elderly American woman's demand to be groundless. In Vienna's view, these paintings became state property long before the Anschluss - back in 1925. Then, after the death of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer's wife Adele, Klimt's works were donated to the museum according to her will.
Usually, in such situations, the case should be decided by a court, but here a serious problem arose. In principle, the question of ownership of Klimt's paintings would have to be considered in Vienna, but Maria Altmann absolutely did not want to start litigation in Europe, demanding that the case be decided by a California state court. Local judges, however, refused to hold an 'intercontinental trial', since the defendant was not a private individual but the Austrian state itself. In 1976, the United States passed a law protecting foreign governments from most lawsuits of this kind. It strictly limited the list of possible charges that can be brought against foreign governments in American courts.
Nevertheless, Ms. Altmann did not calm down and filed an appeal, which eventually reached the last instance - the US Supreme Court. The nine members of the bench had to decide whether the 1976 law provided grounds for such a lawsuit against Austria and whether the law could be applied retroactively, extending its effect to events that occurred 70 years ago. The White House also opposed such a lawsuit: the American administration had no desire whatsoever to aggravate relations with Vienna and hoped that the question of Klimt's paintings would sooner or later be settled through diplomatic means. The hopes were, on the whole, not groundless: as a rule, European governments are quite scrupulous about the return of property confiscated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It is not excluded that Vienna would have gone so far as to pay Altmann a certain compensation.
Now, after the publication of the court verdict, the heir of the Viennese collector has every right to litigate on her own turf. Many believe that she has a good chance of winning the case, since the story of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer's will has several unresolved questions. In any case, the US Supreme Court, by allowing lower courts to adjudicate European property issues, has created a highly scandalous precedent. It can now be expected that other plaintiffs will follow Maria Altmann to court. For example, experts believe that in the 1930s-1940s, the Nazis expropriated about 600,000 works of art from Jewish families.
The decision of the American judges provides a chance to start a new wave of property restitution. It is noted, in particular, that lawsuits have been filed in US courts against Poland (Warsaw was demanded to return lands that belonged to Jews before the Nazi occupation) and against the French railway company (former Nazi prisoners demanded compensation from it, since it was in its trains that they were transported to concentration camps). Until now, such lawsuits, which affected the interests of foreign states, were blocked by the courts.