By Kevin Akor
BERLIN, Feb. 17 — Germany’s Federal Foreign Office said Tuesday it has restituted an oil portrait by Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller to the heirs of Jewish art dealer Hans Lion, whose collection was dispossessed during the Nazi era.
The painting, Bust Portrait of a Man/Prince Albrecht August von Lippe-Detmold (1834), had been in the ministry’s holdings since 1955. Provenance research found it was loaned in 1937 by Lion for an exhibition in Salzburg and later entered the collection of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop between 1938 and 1945.
“This case shows that the restitution of cultural property confiscated from Jewish citizens during the National Socialist regime is still not complete, even 80 years on,” the Foreign Office said in a statement, adding it pursues all indications of Nazi-looted art in its collection and seeks “just and fair solutions” in line with the Washington Principles.
The ministry reported the work to the Lost Art Database in 2016 after locating it in Schleswig-Holstein as part of the former Ribbentrop Collection. Postwar records identified it as Reich property and transferred it to the Foreign Office.
Lion and his brothers ran an art dealership in Munich in the 1920s and 1930s, with branches in Berlin, Carlsbad and Marienbad. Facing mounting persecution, they fled Germany between late 1936 and mid-1937 to France and the United States, leaving most assets behind. Lion died in Vienna in 1956.
Germany in December 2025 established a new arbitration court for Nazi-looted cultural property, with federal, state and municipal authorities working alongside Jewish organizations to streamline restitution claims.
