While the incomparable Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd does not take place in Dresden, that is where today brought news of a robbery at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the State Art Collections that house the treasures of the Free State of Saxony. Specifically, two thieves broke into the Grünes Gewölbe—the Green Vault—which holds the rarest objects of all. Headlines understandably honed in on monetary values in the hundreds of millions or even billions, but these objects are, in fact, priceless. It is a horrifying crime against a rich cultural heritage in an historic city.
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Topics:
Holy Roman Empire,
Dresden,
DDR,
Gemäldegalerie Dresden,
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Theft,
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden,
East Germany,
Tashkent,
Paris Court of Appeal,
Goodnight Moon,
Anne Hawley,
House of Wettin,
Augustus the Strong,
Zwinger,
Frauenkirche,
Rezidenzschloss,
Fürstenzug,
Gottfried Semper,
Grünes Gewölbe,
Margaret Wise Brown,
Clement Hurd,
Residenzschloss,
Green Vault,
Thomas Crown affair,
Bond villain,
Marion Ackerman,
Michael Kretschmer,
Free State of Saxony,
Freistaat Sachsen,
Electorate of Saxony,
Thirty Years War,
Schatzkammer,
Wittelsbach,
GDR
My client Alexander Khochinsky is safely back in the United States after an eight-month ordeal spurred by Poland’s retaliation for his assertion of restitution for his mother’s property lost in Poland during the Holocaust. The rejection this month by the French courts of Poland’s request to extradite my client for prosecution in the courts of Poland—courts called out as lacking judicial independence by the European Court of Justice—was the second failed attempt by Poland to abuse the international extradition system, and came directly on the heels of being held in default in Khochinsky’s lawsuit here in the United States for damages arising out of Poland’s bad-faith extradition effort that ended in 2015. Khochinsky is represented in France by Jean-Jacques Neuer.
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Topics:
Alexander Khochinsky,
Nazi-looted art,
Red Army,
extradition,
FSIA,
"Girl with Dove",
Antoine Pesne,
Poland,
Przemysl,
USSR,
Belzec,
Lviv,
Uzbekistan,
European Court of Justice,
Paris Charles de Gaulle,
Tashkent,
28 U.S.C. § 1607,
28 U.S.C. § 1605(a),
Paris Court of Appeal
