Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum holds 16th-century paintings stolen by the Nazis during the second world war

Jewish heirs of Holocaust victims and their representatives have filed two lawsuits in California staking their claims to Nazi-looted paintings that still hang on the walls of prominent museums in Los Angeles and Auschwitz.

This pair of lawsuits are the first to be filed after the recent passage of laws by California and the US Congress, which strengthen US-based claims to artwork that were forcibly taken from Jewish families during the second world war.