UK: The complicated legal issue of looted art

From the Telegraph: The complicated legal issue of looted art
When German tanks rolled into Poland in September 1939, from day one Nazi forces indulged in looting on massive and systematic scale. Poland alone lost an estimated 516,000 items, about 43 per cent of its cultural heritage.

Some of the plundering was designed to provide German museums back home with new collections. But other times the art was taken to furnish the private collections of leading Nazis. Herman Goring, the Luftwaffe chief, for example, amassed a huge collection of some 2,000 paintings of which 50 per cent were stolen.

Thousands of items disappeared in the war, never to be seen again. While some of the missing works were destroyed in the fighting there have long been rumours of secret stockpiles of looted art, hidden by the Germans as the Allies advanced.

Since the war countries like Poland have made strenuous efforts to recover their property, and while they have often been successful recovery can be a fraught procedure.

In some cases, especially for works that belonged to Jews murdered in the Holocaust, just who owned what can be legally difficult to prove. Along with the owners, the war also claimed ownership records leaving claimants with little more than family memories as evidence that a painting once belonged to them.

Sometimes it is the case the works of art were orphaned in the war. Without a claimant or a paper-trail pointing investigators in the right direction the works can remain without an owner, and even now some 100,000 items have never been returned to their rightful owner.

Further complicating the issue was the counter-looting practiced by the Red Army. Eager to exact revenge on Germany for their country's wartime suffering Soviet forces happily seized German property. The recovery of German works of art taken to Russia after the end of the war remains a sensitive and emotional subject.