Guelph Treasure

The Guelph Treasure (German: Welfenschatz) is a collection of medieval ecclesiastical art originally housed at Brunswick Cathedral in Braunschweig, Germany.

In 1929 Ernest Augustus, former Duke of Brunswick, Head of House of Hanover, sold 82 items to a consortium of Frankfurt art dealers Saemy Rosenberg, Isaak Rosenbaum, Julius Falk Goldschmidt and Zacharias Hackenbroch for the price of 7.5 million Reichsmark.

In 1935 the remaining 42 pieces of the collection were sold for 4.25 million Reichsmarks in a transaction in the Netherlands to agents of Hermann Göring, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany.

In March 2014 the Limbach Commission, an advisory body to the German government, concluded that the treasure should not be handed over as the case did not meet the criteria defining a forced sale due to Nazi persecution.

[1] In February 2015, the heirs to the Jewish art dealers[6] sued Germany and the Bode Museum (via the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in order to recover the treasure, citing that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) enables them to sue Germany in United States courts for compensation of property taken from the dealers as "rights in property taken in violation of international law".