Monuments men retrieving stolen art from Neuschwanstein Castle near the end of WWII. Public domain. The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act of 2025 significantly reshapes the legal landscape by eliminating time-based and procedural defenses, ensuring that Nazi-looted art claims are decided on their merits rather than dismissed on technical grounds. Its passage highlights the tension between claimants seeking justice and museums urging caution, while noting that courts will ultimately determine how effectively the law resolves longstanding restitution disputes.
Passage and Purpose of the HEAR Act of 2025
Soldier washing his hands. Nearby, works of art are stored around the sink. Photo taken in a castle in Germany at the end of WWII. U.S. federal government photo, public domain.
On April 13, 2026, President Donald Trump signed the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act of 2025, turning what had already been a sweeping bipartisan measure into Public Law 119-82. The law passed the Senate by unanimous consent on December 10, 2025, cleared the House by voice vote on March 16, 2026, and was on the President’s desk eleven days later.
The consequences of the statute’s passage may be very significant. It amends the original 2016 HEAR Act, which was enacted to help Holocaust survivors and heirs bring claims for art lost through Nazi persecution. The 2016 law created a national six-year statute of limitations that began only when a claimant actually discovered both the location of the artwork and the basis for the claim. The 2025 law goes further. It makes the HEAR Act permanent, bars time-based defenses such as laches and adverse possession, limits discretionary court actions that are not based on the substantive merits of the claims, and changes the treatment of foreign sovereign immunity in regard to Nazi-looted art.
Congress’s Direct Intervention in Case Law
The law states its purpose boldly: “The intent of this Act is to permit claims to recover Nazi-looted art to be brought, notwithstanding the passage of time since World War II.” It then names cases in which Congress concluded that courts had frustrated that purpose, including Zuckerman v. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena, and Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp.
Including specific court cases is an unusually pointed legislative intervention by Congress, which has now effectively told courts that, in this category of cases, certain familiar defenses should no longer decide the outcome.
The original HEAR Act grew out of a basic problem: Nazi-looted art claims often failed before courts reached the historical merits. Families who had fled persecution, lost records, crossed borders, or discovered artworks only decades later could find their claims barred by statutes of limitations. The 2016 Act addressed part of that problem by giving claimants six years from actual discovery to file. But defendants, including museums, continued to rely on other doctrines tied to the passage of time.
Eliminating Time-Based and Procedural Defenses
Rhineland Campaign 1945 Monuments men Mainfränkisches Museum, 1945, source: Earl F. Ziemke: The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944–1946. U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1975.
The 2025 Act provides that, for claims otherwise timely under the HEAR Act, “all defenses or substantive doctrines based on the passage of time, including laches, adverse possession, acquisitive prescription, and usucapion,[1] may not be applied.” It also bars “non-merits discretionary bases for dismissal,” including the act of state doctrine, international comity, forum non conveniens, prudential exhaustion, and similar doctrines unrelated to the merits.
In plain English, Congress has told courts not to dismiss covered Nazi-looted art claims simply because too much time has passed, because a foreign sovereign is involved, or because a court thinks another forum would be more appropriate. The stated aim is to force litigation toward the underlying questions: Was the artwork lost because of Nazi persecution? Who owned it? Was the later transfer valid? Who has the better title now?
Political Support – Advocates for the Law and Critics Against its Expansion
Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic lead in the Senate, framed the measure in moral terms after the House vote. “The theft of art by the Nazi regime was more than a pilfering of property, it was an act of inhumanity,” he said. “Our bipartisan effort seeks to strengthen measures to bring long overdue justice to families whose cherished art was brazenly stolen by the Nazis.” Blumenthal’s office issued a press release saying that the bill responded to museums, governments, and institutions that had, in its view, “stonewall[ed] legitimate claims,” obscured provenance, and used aggressive legal tactics to outlast survivors and heirs.
Supporters of the bill have emphasized that Holocaust restitution claims are not ordinary property disputes. The looting occurred in the context of genocide, coerced sales, and the deliberate destruction of families and records. On that view, ordinary timing defenses risk exacerbating the effects of the original crime: the chaos and dispossession caused by Nazi persecution can become the reason heirs cannot prove their claims.
Monuments Man Lt. Frank P. Albright, Polish Liaison Officer Maj. Karol Estreicher, Monuments Man Capt. Everett Parker Lesley, and Pfc. Joe D. Espinosa, guard with the 34th Field Artillery Battalion, pose with Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine upon its return to Poland in April 1946. U.S. federal government photo, public domain.
That argument has attracted broad support from Jewish and Holocaust survivor organizations. According to Senator Blumenthal’s March 2026 statement, endorsers included the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA, Jewish Federations of North America, Simon Wiesenthal Center, the World Jewish Congress, and others.
However, museums and some foreign parties warned that Congress was stripping away defenses that can be essential in very old disputes. The Association of Art Museum Directors supported extending the original HEAR Act but objected to the stronger amendments. In a New York Times article, AAMD spokesman Sascha Freudenheim said the amendments “would set a dangerous precedent by overturning fundamental principles of our legal system, threaten relations with foreign countries” and “undermine reasonable and good-faith defenses an institution may offer in the face of certain claims.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art also urged caution. According to earlier Times reporting, the Met participated in discussions with congressional representatives about changes being considered before the House bill was released. A Met spokeswoman said the museum “has long been a leader in the field of Nazi-era provenance research” and has “a well-documented history of seeking resolution for works that were lost in the Holocaust.” The museum’s concern, according to congressional aides cited by the Times, centered on preserving some time-based defenses and including an expiration date.
Key Cases Driving Reform
Pablo Picasso, The Actor, Collection of Metropolitan Museum, New York. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
The tension is visible in Zuckerman v. Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the cases Congress expressly cited. The claim concerned Picasso’s “The Actor,” which had been sold by Paul Leffmann, a German Jewish businessman who fled the Nazis. His heirs argued that the sale was made under duress. The Second Circuit held that, although the 2016 HEAR Act allowed claims otherwise barred by statutes of limitations, it did not eliminate the equitable defense of laches. The court concluded that the Met had been prejudiced by the decades that had passed since World War II. Congress now identifies Zuckerman as an example of courts frustrating the HEAR Act’s purpose.
Another example is Cassirer v. Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation, involving Camille Pissarro’s “Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon. Effect of Rain.” The painting had been surrendered by Lilly Cassirer Neubauer in Nazi Germany before eventually entering the collection of Spain’s Thyssen-Bornemisza museum. Litigation in U.S. courts turned on choice of law and property doctrines, including acquisitive prescription. The 2025 Act’s explicit reference to “acquisitive prescription” and “usucapion” is a direct response to cases like Cassirer, where foreign property law can favor a current possessor after long passage of time.
Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum is another case Congress singled out. That dispute involved works by Lucas Cranach the Elder once held by Jacques Goudstikker, a Dutch Jewish art dealer whose collection was looted after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. U.S. courts rejected the claim in part through the act of state doctrine, which limits judicial review of certain sovereign acts. The new law specifically bars act-of-state dismissals in covered HEAR Act claims.
Foreign Sovereign Immunity and International Impact
Domes Reliquary, part of the Guelph Treasure, Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts) in Berlin, Wikimedia Commons, photo FA2010, 2009, public domain.
The statute also addresses Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp, the Supreme Court case involving the Guelph Treasure, a collection of medieval ecclesiastical objects sold in 1935 by Jewish art dealers to Prussia. The heirs argued that the sale was coerced in the context of Nazi persecution. The Supreme Court held that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act’s expropriation exception did not apply because a government’s taking of its own nationals’ property is generally treated as a domestic taking, not a violation of international law. The 2025 HEAR Act responds by stating that covered claims are to be treated as involving “rights in violation of international law” for FSIA purposes, “without regard to the nationality or citizenship of the alleged victim.”
That provision drew strong support from Nicholas O’Donnell, who represented the heirs in the Guelph Treasure litigation. Speaking to The New York Times, O’Donnell called the HEAR Act extension “a complete vindication of our position,” adding: “It may be too late for us, but it would be a tremendous development for others.”
The foreign-sovereign-immunity provision may be one of the law’s most consequential features. It could affect claims against state museums or foreign-government-controlled collections, not just private collectors or American museums. The New York Times reported concerns from German diplomats and representatives of France’s national railway company, SNCF, about eliminating protections tied to sovereign immunity. Germany’s embassy said it agreed with the HEAR Act’s restitution objective but wished to uphold “core principles of international law,” including state immunity.
Pending cases may test those boundaries quickly. One example is litigation involving works by Egon Schiele once owned by Fritz Grünbaum, the Austrian Jewish cabaret performer who died at Dachau. Grünbaum’s heirs have pursued claims involving works held by Austrian museums, including the Leopold Museum and the Albertina. According to restitution lawyer Raymond Dowd, the 2025 law could assist claims against Austrian state museums by eliminating sovereign-immunity defenses.
The Grünbaum litigation also illustrates why supporters see the law as necessary. In Reif v. Nagy, heirs of Grünbaum successfully recovered two Schiele works in New York, a rare court-ordered restitution under the HEAR Act framework. But other claims involving the same historical events have faced institutional resistance, factual disputes, and jurisdictional defenses. Frank Lord, writing in The Art Newspaper, observed that although the 2016 HEAR Act allowed some claims to move forward, court-ordered recoveries remained limited; he identified Reif v. Nagy as the rare civil case citing the Act that resulted in an order requiring a current owner to return art.
Lord also cautioned against assuming the new statute will solve every problem. Eliminating laches or sovereign immunity does not answer every factual question. If records are missing, witnesses are dead, or the history of a transaction remains ambiguous, courts will still have to decide whether claimants can prove ownership, duress, confiscation, or invalid transfer. As Lord put it, “Legislation cannot repair gaps in the historical record.”
A Shift in Legal Balance
Monuments Men. U.S. soldier guarding art, manuscripts, treasure in a church in Ellingen, Germany. Wikimedia Commons, U.S. federal government photo, public domain.
In many ways, the HEAR Act of 2025 opens legal avenues into court. It does not guarantee victory once a claimant is inside. Museums may still argue that a work was not looted, that a sale was not coerced, that the claimant lacks title, or that the evidence fails on the merits. What they may no longer do, in covered claims, is ask courts to dismiss because the claim is too old, too diplomatically sensitive, better heard elsewhere, or barred by doctrines unrelated to who rightfully owns the object.
For museums, that is a major shift. Many institutions have spent decades building provenance-research programs and adopting restitution guidelines, but they also maintain fiduciary obligations to collections and donors. A museum may believe it is acting responsibly by defending title where evidence is incomplete or contested. The AAMD’s position reflects that institutional concern: extending the HEAR Act, yes; eliminating good-faith defenses, no.
For claimants, however, those defenses can look like a continuation of the injustice. They argue that families dispossessed during the Holocaust should not lose again because a museum acquired the work long ago, because documents disappeared in wartime, or because the current holder now finds the passage of time inconvenient. The 2025 Act largely accepts that view.
The law’s severability clause suggests Congress expected constitutional challenges to some of its provisions. It provides that if any provision is held invalid, the rest of the Act remains in force. That matters because defendants may argue that Congress has gone too far in restricting defenses, altering pending cases, or expanding jurisdiction over foreign states. The statute applies not only to future claims but also to claims pending on the date of enactment, including cases on appeal or still within the time to appeal.
Whether the HEAR Act of 2025 produces a wave of restitutions is uncertain. But the law has already changed the negotiating posture. Claimants now have a stronger path to court, museums have fewer threshold defenses, and foreign state institutions may face greater exposure in U.S. litigation.
The statute was described by Frank Lord as a generational moment; it redefines what fairness means in Nazi-looted art litigation. For Congress, fairness now means that time should not cleanse Nazi-era dispossession. For museums and current possessors, fairness still requires room to contest uncertain claims in good faith. The courts will now have to reconcile those two visions under a statute that leaves little doubt about which side Congress wanted to strengthen.
[1] Usucapion (or usucaption) is a civil law concept, originating from Roman law, where ownership of property is acquired through continuous, uninterrupted, and peaceful possession for a legally defined period.
