Manhattan DA returns art stolen by the Nazis to one-time owner’s heirs

Jewish cabaret performer and art collector Fritz Grünbaum died in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. On Friday, his heirs were reunited with two drawings that prosecutors say the Nazis stole from him, then trafficked illegally through New York.

At a small ceremony at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, law enforcement officials returned two drawings by Austrian artist Egon Schiele to Grünbaum’s descendants: “Girl with Black Hair” and “Portrait of a Man.”

“These were on his walls. He looked at them. He loved them,” Timothy Reif, whose grandfather was raised by Grünbaum, said in an interview after the ceremony.

Grünbaum, the son of an art dealer, was a prominent cabaret artist, librettist, comedian and film and radio star in Austria before the war.

After the Germans invaded in 1938, court records show Grünbaum tried to flee the Nazi regime but couldn’t get across the Czechoslovakian border. The Nazis arrested him, and he spent the rest of his life in Nazi concentration camps. In 1941, he was killed at Dachau, according to court papers.

Raymond Dowd, an attorney who has represented Grünbaum’s heirs for nearly two decades, described the late performer as a “tremendous figure of courage” who risked his life mocking the Nazis at cabaret performances before the war. He said Grünbaum was the inspiration for the emcee character in the musical “Cabaret.”

Even at Dachau, Dowd said, the comedian put on shows for his fellow prisoners and was still cracking jokes just two weeks before his death, when he stood on the tables and put on a New Year’s show.

“That’s how he kept their spirits alive,” the attorney said in an interview.

While Grünbaum was imprisoned at Dachau, according to court records, the Nazis forced him to sign over his power of attorney to his wife, Elisabeth Grünbaum, who was still in Austria. Four days later, a Nazi official forced her to let him inventory Grünbaum’s hundreds of artworks, including more than…