
Nazi-looting of artworks by Vincent van Gogh

Many priceless artworks by the Dutch post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh were looted by Nazis during the Third Reich (1933-1945), mostly from Jewish collectors forced into exile or murdered.
Some of these works have disappeared into private collections, others have resurfaced in museums, at auction, or have been reclaimed, often in high profile lawsuits taken by their former owners. However, the German Lost Art Foundation still lists dozens of missing van Goghs. As of 2021, the "Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal" published by the American Alliance of Museums, lists 73 Van Gogh's acquired by American museums after 1933 with questionable provenance.
Background.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), the famous Dutch post-impressionist painter, was one of many artists whose artworks were looted by Nazis, either by direct seizure or by forced or duress sales. During Adolph Hitler's Third Reich, 1933-1945, an estimated 20% of all artwork in Europe was plundered by the Nazis. All property owned by Jews, including artworks, were seized as part of the Holocaust. Van Gogh's many Jewish collectors, who had played an important role in the popularisation and dissemination of Van Gogh's work, were targeted. In the Netherlands, Van Gogh's birthplace and home of many of his collectors, 75% of the Jews would perish in the Holocaust, and special Nazi looting organizations seized all their property, including art. Some artworks were sold to finance the Nazi war machine, and other entered the private collections of Nazi officials. Some of the most famous Van Gogh artworks passed through Nazi hands, and many have never been found.
Van Gogh's Jewish Collectors.
There has been much scholarly speculation about Van Gogh's relations with Jewish artists, including his tutor, Dr. M.B. Mendes da Costa, a Jewish teacher in Amsterdam. The complete number of Van Gogh's Jewish collectors is unknown, in part because in the aftermath of the Holocaust the names of Jewish owners were often erased from the ownership history, or provenance, in order to deny or falsify the true origins of artworks and make it difficult to connect the artworks to their former Jewish owners. Databases created to attempt to track the art lost during the Nazi terror include many Van Goghs. Some of them have disappeared into private hands. Others have resurfaced in museums or at auctions and have been reclaimed, often in high profile lawsuits, by their former owners. 
In 1999, Germany restituted a van Gogh drawing, "L’Olivette", to the only surviving heir of Max Silberberg, a Jewish art collector from Breslau who died in a Nazi concentration camp. Silberberg's 143 piece collection of impressionists, considered one of the finest private collections in Europe, was sold off in "Jew auctions" before he was killed. 
In 2006, the Detroit Institute of Arts was faced with a claim for a van Gogh landscape called "The Diggers" filed by Martha Nathan, originally of Frankfurt, Germany. The museum, which had been gifted the painting by the Detroit collector Robert H. Tannahill, fought the claim, filing a filed a declaratory action in the U.S. District Court in Detroit, requesting to be named as the painting's owner.
In February of 2012 an heir of Margarethe Mauthner, a German Jew forced into exile, made a claim for "Vue des Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer" against the Swiss Oskar Reinhart collection, following an earlier claim for "Vue de l'asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy" against the Hollywood movie star Elizabeth Taylor.
Before the Nazi's rise, the Jewish collector Mendelssohn-Bartholdy owned several magnificent van Goghs, including the iconic "Sunflowers", a landscape in Provence and "Madame Roulin and Her Baby", which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.<ref>