U.S Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell said that “President Trump instructed his team to be aggressive in this work.”
By World Israel News Staff
Two vases dating from the era of Louis XVI and stolen by the Nazis were returned to the heirs of their original owners at a ceremony in Berlin on August 1 thanks to work done by the U.S. Embassy and the FBI, Fox News reported.
The vases were the rightful property of the family of Harry Fuld, a German Jew who established the first modern telephone system in Germany, the Frankfurt-based H. Fuld & Co. Telefon und Telegraphenwerke AG.
The FBI said the vases are worth about $120,000.
“Finding ways to bring small measures of justice to the victims of the Holocaust and their families, even after so many years of injustice, is a priority of the Trump Administration,” U.S. mbassador to Germany Richard Grenell told Fox News.
“From the very beginning, President Trump instructed his team to be aggressive in this work. Returning these Nazi stolen works of art to their owners’ families was a group effort by the team at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, the FBI, German private citizens and many others,” he said.
“We hope this one success story will encourage others to keep researching and pushing auction houses and governments to return the thousands of other Nazi stolen items on the market to their rightful owners,” he added.
Harry and his wife, Lucie Mayer Fuld, lived in Germany in the 1930s, the FBI said. Harry passed away during a 1932 trip to Switzerland.
The Nazis came to power a year later and seized Lucie’s bank accounts, “placing an exit tax on her if she left the country. She fled Germany in 1939 with only a few of her possessions, leaving behind her home and much of the artwork in it,” the FBI said.
The FBI says the Nazis auctioned off the vases in 1940, listing them as “two bronze vases, fire gilded, two-tone, French, Louis XVI, 1780-1890.”