Adolf Hitler in 1940 ordered his generals to loot and confiscate works of art from Jewish homes, museums, libraries and synagogues. More than 2 million pieces were acquired by Nazi Germany through looting and forced sales. 

For decades after World War II, art dealers and museums failed to properly investigate the provenance of artwork tainted by the Nazis. 

“If you can trace the provenance of an old masterwork from the artist’s studio in the 19th century right up until it was purchased by a Jewish family in 1932, then there’s a gap, and it suddenly appears on the art market in 1950… that’s very suspicious,” says Marlowe. 

Nazi-looted art was one of the first areas where museums and governments agreed morally that something needed to be done. In 1998, 44 countries signed the “Washington Principles,” a set of 11 guidelines for settling restitution claims with heirs of the original owners of Nazi-looted art. 

Not all masterpieces were willingly returned. A prominent fight centered on Gustav Klimt’s gold-flecked 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, better known as the “Woman in Gold.” The remarkable painting hung in an Austrian gallery, where the museum claimed it had been willed by the owners.

But Maria Altmann, the niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, knew that the Nazis had looted the family’s priceless art collection when it was forced to flee Austria in 1938. She sued the Austrian government for the return of her aunt’s beloved portrait. 

“Maria Altmann was this elderly woman in her 80s living in Southern California,” says Marlowe, “and she just sort of decided she was going to make this her crusade.”

In 2006, an Austrian arbitration panel ordered the return of the painting to Altmann. It was sold at auction to the cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder for $135 million, one of the highest prices ever for a single painting and now hangs at the Neue Galerie in New York City. 

Sacred Native American objects have been displayed for centuries in museums without permission of the tribes from which they were taken. The U.S. Congress in 1990 passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, requiring American museums to evaluate all Native American holdings, especially human remains and funerary objects.

The law “puts the onus on museums,” says Marlowe. “You need to figure out where this came from and offer it back to those communities—anything in your collection that is human remains, that are funerary goods, or that are sacred items.”

But it has no international jurisdiction. In 1992, a Native American man visited the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, Scotland, and saw a Ghost Dance shirt on display that had been taken from the body of a slain Lakota warrior at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. Ghost Dance shirts were sacred items that tribes believed protected their wearers from enemies.

The museum initially fought requests to return the shirt to the Wounded Knee Survivors Association, but the Glasgow City Council eventually decided that the shirt’s repatriation was a moral duty. In 1999, the shirt was moved to the Museum of the South Dakota State Historical Society in Pierre. Some say the shirt should go to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe’s Cultural Center in Eagle Butte, the Lakota Times reported.

The The Iraq Museum in Baghdad held one of the greatest collections of antiquities related to the development of human culture in ancient Mesopotamia. Over four days in 2003, everything changed. As U.S. troops prepared to invade Baghdad, the museum was left unprotected and looters ransacked the building. They made off with an estimated 17,000 artifacts. 

“The looting of the Baghdad museum happened on live TV,” says Marlowe. “Suddenly the whole world realized, ‘Oh my God, this is what looting actually looks like.’”

Countless additional artifacts were illegally excavated in Iraq during the chaotic years of U.S. occupation and historic sites including the ancient city of Nimrud were destroyed by the Islamic State group. In subsequent years, UNESCO and the U.S. government have worked to locate stolen Iraqi artifacts and repatriate them. 

One important victory was the recovery of an ancient Sumerian sculpture dating to 2,400 B.C. The headless stone sculpture, believed to be King Entemena of Lagash, weighs more than 550 pounds, making it the heaviest object looted from the Baghdad museum. It was smuggled into Syria and sold on the antiquities market, then recovered by undercover U.S. agents in 2006.

In the 1960s, British art dealer Douglas Latchford set up shop in Thailand outside an ancient Buddhist temple. With local villagers on his payroll, Latchford looted priceless artifacts from the temple and from sites in Vietnam and Cambodia. 

Latchford, who authorities described as “a prolific dealer of stolen antiquities,” was indicted on charges of trafficking looted artifacts in 2019, but died before the case went to trial. His estate was ordered to forfeit $12 million traced back to illegal sales, the New York Times reported. 

Treasures looted from Southeast Asia were sold by dealers like Latchford to respectable art galleries and museums around the world. That’s how four stunning bronze statues of buddhas and bodhisattvas made their way into the collection of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. In 2024, the Thai government contacted the museum and asked for the statues back. The museum quickly determined that the pieces had, in fact, been looted. 

Instead of immediately shipping the statues to Thailand, though, the Asian Art Museum requested and received permission to display them in a special exhibit to educate people about provenance and looted art. 

Museum officials said how they acquired the art and explained that their “thinking has evolved over the years and here's what we're trying to do to right this wrong,” Marlowe says.

About 2,000 years ago, the hilltop city of Bubon in southern Turkey erected a shrine for its Roman rulers, filling it with 15 beautifully rendered, life-sized bronze statues of emperors including Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. 

Buried by earthquakes, the toppled statues were rediscovered by local farmers in the 1960s who knew it was illegal to sell them. But they needed the money, dug them up and took them to the port city of Izmir and sold them to an art dealer called “American Bob.” 

“Life-size statuary from the ancient Mediterranean is extremely rare,” says Marlowe. “Typically, you might get one new piece surfacing every five or 10 years. And suddenly there was this glut of ancient bronze statuary on the market.”

Years later, authorities identified “American Bob” as Robert Hecht, an antiquities dealer accused of peddling looted goods. Hecht sold the bronzes to dealers in Switzerland, and from there the statues made their way to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

“For a very long time, scholars in the field all knew the story of the looting of Bubon, but the museums were all like, ‘Well, you can't prove it,’” says Marlowe. 

That proof finally came thanks to the persistence of Marlowe and archaeologist Jale Inan, who produced detailed drawings showing how each of the stolen statues fit around the shrine in Bubon. 

The Met repatriated its bronze in 2023 and the Cleveland Museum of Art will return its statue after a “farewell” exhibition that started this month and lasts through July.

In 1897, a British trading expedition traveled to the Kingdom of Benin in modern-day Nigeria. The unarmed expedition was attacked by local chiefs acting against the orders of the Benin king. Six British officials and nearly 200 African porters were killed.

In retaliation, the British army raided Benin under explicit orders to loot the royal palace and burn it to the ground. Thousands of objects from the royal treasury were stolen during the attack. Some were gifted to British colonial officers and others were auctioned back in England. 

“Plundering of artifacts happened on a massive scale during the colonial era,” says Marlowe. “Things were seized in wartime as a way of compensating the soldiers informally. Soldiers were allowed to plunder—helping themselves to human beings as well as to objects.”

At least 3,000 artifacts from the Benin raid ended up in museum collections around the world, including the so-called “Benin Bronzes,” elaborately decorated plaques made from cast-copper and ivory that date back to the 15th and 16th centuries. 

“To my mind, the case of the Benin Bronzes is one of the clearest examples of the violence by which a lot of colonial pieces left their country of origin and are now sitting in our museums,” says Marlowe.

In 2022, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art repatriated all of its 29 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, but not all museums feel compelled to return the looted goods. The British Museum, for example, continues to display its Benin Bronzes, explaining that the Kingdom of Benin was “incorporated into the British Empire” from 1897 to 1960. 

In 1988, the J. Paul Getty Museum in California unveiled a magnificent, seven-and-a-half-foot tall sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite in mid-stride with her gown flowing behind her.

The Getty spent $18 million to acquire the goddess statue. It took Italian investigators decades to prove that the statue—which may actually represent the goddess Demeter—was illegally excavated in the 1970s from a site called Morgantina in Sicily. In 2004, a middleman named Giacomo Medici was convicted of smuggling the statue out of Italy. 

“The fact that his name is Medici is a wonderful irony, because he was not an art patron; he's like an art destroyer,” says Marlowe, who says that the statue passed through many hands before it ended up in the Getty. “The more steps in between, the easier it is for the museums to claim total ignorance.”

The Getty returned nearly 50 ancient artifacts to Italy and Greece in the mid-2000s, including the iconic goddess statue. The repatriated statue now resides in the Museo Archeologico di Aidone, a small museum in Aidone, Sicily.