Among the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis was the prominent Jewish Viennese cabaret performer Fritz Grünbaum. He was murdered at the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. Prior to his murder, the Nazis forced him to sign over his prized collection of more than 400 works of art.

Decades after the Nazis killed Grünbaum, one of his stolen pieces surfaced for sale on the international art market. When his family brought a legal action to recover their ancestor’s stolen property, a federal court inexplicably ruled that Grünbaum’s family could not prove that the art had been “transferred under duress.”

Grünbaum’s story is one of countless examples of the Nazis' widespread theft of Jewish-owned property, including hundreds of thousands of works of art, worth tens of billions of dollars. Despite efforts by the U.S. and Allies to return Nazi-looted art after World War II, and renewed efforts since the late 1990s, over 100,000 works of art still have not been returned to their rightful owners.

Grünbaum is just another victim of the Holocaust whom deniers would prefer we forget.

When survivors and their families seek justice through the courts, they face a litany of absurd and shocking defenses by museums, art dealers, private owners and foreign governments that insist on holding on to art stolen by the Nazis. These institutions claim the owners sold the art “voluntarily,” at a “fair” market price, even though these........

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