Spiegel reports that 29 US Congressmen have sent a letter to the Bavarian Minister President, Horst Seehofer, urging him to return Nazi loot to its rightful owners.

Some of the allegedly looted work belonging to Holocaust victims and, therefore, their heirs are stored in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne. Nine pieces there were stolen from the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim in the early 1930s, including six Max Beckmann and one Paul Klee. The museum insists the paintings were bought in 1932.

What Flechtheim heirs claim is that SA paramilitary hooligans stormed an auction organized by Flechtheim in March 1933 and helped themselves to what they considered “degenerate,” albeit lucrative, art.

Munich was a center for the distributing of looted Jewish art, with dealer Cornelius Gurlitt holding a lucrative trade for decades. In March 2012, 121 framed and 1,258 unframed artworks were seized by the District Prosecutor of Augsburg from an apartment in Schwabing, Munich. The artworks were Nazi loot.  Apparently, Cornelius Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand, was able to stash a part of the collection he was curating for the Nazis. The Bavarian government has announced an investigation on the Nazi loot but has failed to come up with concrete results thus far.

On 7 April 2014, Gurlitt came to an agreement with authorities to return art and then cooperate for the recovery of stolen art, so that it could be returned to its rightful owners. Not much has been achieved since. The US is home to many Holocaust survivors, who have lost patience with Germany. Of the hundreds of looted artworks in Gurlitt’s collection, only two have returned. The letter is the beginning of a campaign that is likely to keep up as it resonates with many of the Congressmen constituencies and there are well documented cases.