[MSN] Germany returns painting to Jewish heir.

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Germany returns painting to Jewish heir

State of Lower Saxony returns 'Portrait of a Bearded Man' seized by Nazis 
Associated Press Published:  12.06.06, 12:26  

German officials on Tuesday returned a painting illegally taken by the Nazis
to the heir of a Jewish art dealer. The work had once belonged to Adolf
Hitler's right-hand man. 
The state of Lower Saxony returned "Portrait of a Bearded Man," by
18th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, to Charlene von
Saher, granddaughter of Jacques Goudstikker. 
Goudstikker, the Netherlands' biggest art dealer before World War II, fled
the country at the start of the war, losing an estimated 1,300 artworks. He
died after falling through a trap door on a ship heading to South America. 
About 800 of the works - including the one returned Tuesday - were seized by
Hitler's top aide, Field Marshall Hermann Goering. 
Lower Saxony's Culture Ministry said Goering sold it at an auction in Vienna
in 1943, where it was bought by Johannes Duerkop, then-director of the Lower
Saxony State Museum. Duerkop was also an administrator of the
Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, where the painting has hung ever
since. 
"For the state of Lower Saxony, it is a historical and moral obligation, to
return to the legal owners art which clearly was purchased illegally," state
culture minister Lutz Stratmann said in a statement. 
 
The German government signed an agreement in Washington, D.C., in 1998 to
step up efforts to return to their rightful owners works seized under the
Nazis. However, government officials and museum directors are calling for
more transparency in the process amid concern that Germany's galleries risk
losing scores of valuable and popular works acquired in good faith. 

A Berlin museum recently returned a 1913 painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
that was auctioned in New York for USD 38 million.

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