Property, Contracts, and Duress
If you point a gun at me and say you will kill me unless I agree to paint some pictures for you, then under most interpretations of common law, when you no longer have the gun pointed at me, I can renounce the agreement and sue (successfully) to have the paintings returned to me. Furthermore, if you sell or give those paintings to someone else, I can sue to regain my own property rights of the paintings because they were initially exchanged under duress.
This logic is being used by Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who was threatened with extermination in the Nazi war camps unless she painted pictures for Joseph Mengele. The fact that she used her talent to negotiate to save the life of her mother (along with her own) does not negate the fact that she exchanged the paintings under duress. Notably, [h/t to MA]
I don't know the proper jargon, but what is a reasonable time for the right of adverse possession (or statute of limitations whatever it should be called in this case)?
This logic is being used by Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who was threatened with extermination in the Nazi war camps unless she painted pictures for Joseph Mengele. The fact that she used her talent to negotiate to save the life of her mother (along with her own) does not negate the fact that she exchanged the paintings under duress. Notably, [h/t to MA]
Mengele singled her out, Mrs. Babbitt recalled, in March 1944, on a day when thousands of other prisoners were being taken to be exterminated. She said that she demanded of Mengele that he also spare her mother or she would commit suicide by touching an electrified fence. She and her mother were among the 27 Czechoslovak Jews to survive from their group of more than 5,000.Now she wants them back, but the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland has them and claims they are too important a part of the historical documentation of the Holocaust to return them to the original artist.
I don't know the proper jargon, but what is a reasonable time for the right of adverse possession (or statute of limitations whatever it should be called in this case)?
Category: Anti-Semitism, Economics, Economics and Law, Property Rights Posted on
Tuesday, September 5, 2006 at 12:15am
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Not ironic at all as they are not profiting from the work - not in the lowdown sense you mean it in any event.
And the vast bulk of the almost incalculable amount of property which was stolen from the Jews of Europe was taken not by the Nazis but by their gentile neighbours who had collaborated with the Germans willingly and joyfully in their many millions in the almost total destruction of European Jewry.
I am much more concerned with the Jewish property which the despicable anti-Semitic nation of Poland refuses to give up. Nothing used to give me greater pleasure than the knowledge that the Poles were locked firmly behind bars. Nothing saddened me more deeply than when they were released from that prison.
Oh, what a convenient alibi the Nazis have been for the gentiles of Europe.
"If the Auschwitz museum also has a claim on the suitcase, as I think it does, it's simply that the suitcase has become a sort of public document - a historical relic that has educational value. Arguably it can do more good in a commemorative museum. But can this override the son's entitlement? Perhaps not. I'm glad I don't have to adjudicate the issue."
In any event, a much more considered opinion than you will find in Hanna's post.