Friedrich Gutmann

[2] A convert from Judaism,[3] Eugen Gutmann ran the bank in Berlin for over 40 years, developing it into a major German financial operation with an international reach.

At their home, Huize Bosbeek, in Heemstede, near Haarlem, Friedrich and his wife, Louise von Landau (whom he had married in 1913), led an "international way of life.

"[8] Their daughter, Lili, left home for Italy in 1938, where she married,[9] and at about the same time the couple's other child, Bernard (d. 1994), was in England attending university at Cambridge (he Anglicized the surname to "Goodman").

[13] In the spring of 1941, Karl Haberstock, the Nazi art dealer active in Paris,[14] visited Heemstede to "buy" the Gutmann collection (the offer was described as a "forced sale").

In October 1995 Simon Goodman found a photograph of one of the looted items in a 1994 exhibition catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

[20] "Landscape with Smokestacks" ("Paysage Avec Fumée de Cheminées," 1890), a pastel over monotype by Edgar Degas,[21] was cited in the catalogue as belonging to Daniel C. Searle, a pharmaceutical billionaire living near Chicago.

Previously in the collection of Max Silberberg, who put it up for auction,[22] Friedrich Gutmann had bought that work in 1931, and in 1939 sent it to the art firm of Paul Graupe et Cie in Paris for safekeeping.

Korte agreed with Safer's summary, that "what you're saying is that that unwillingness to know, that turning a blind eye [to Nazi art plunder during World War II] still applies to these paintings?

[26] After learning of the painting's current ownership (it was held in storage at the Art Institute), the Goodman brothers asked Searle for its return.

[31] The suit was believed to be the first instance in the United States of an individual suing for art stolen during the war,[32] and a "turning point" in helping to bring the subject of Nazi plunder "under the international spotlight.

[33] The request by Searle's lawyers to dismiss the case was rejected by a federal court district judge on July 30, 1998, and a date for a jury trial set for September 9.

Termed "a powerful British-made documentary on the dispute" by a Chicago newspaper, it "leaves little doubt that a jury… would likely have little sympathy with Searle's ongoing refusal to confront the evidence that the Degas he had purchased in good faith had been stolen by the Nazis.

[51] In 2020, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York State Department of Financial Services' Holocaust Claims Processing Office announced that it would return a 16th century silver cup to the family heirs.