Gurlitt-inspired Law Aimed to Ease Return of Nazi-Loot Rejected

A law that would extend the German statute of limitations on the return of stolen property from its current upper bound of 30 years has been rejected by the justice minister of German state, Rhineland-Palatinate, according to the dpa. The law has been dubbed the “Lex-Gurlitt” after the Munich art trove’s Cornelius Gurlitt in whose apartment around 1300 works of art were discovered in 2012, some of which are believed to be Nazi loot.

The law was proposed by Bavarian justice minister Winfried Bausback and will be discussed in the German Bundesrat, the country’s upper house, on Friday. According to his colleague from Rhineland-Palatinate, Jochen Hartloff, the law is too quick a reaction to the Gurlitt debacle and hasn’t been fully thought through.