The Story Behind ‘Woman in Gold’: Nazi Art Thieves and One Painting’s Return

There are many reasons that among the hundreds of thousands of cases involving artwork looted by the Nazis the story of Gustav Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” would particularly appeal to filmmakers. For one, there is the mesmerizing gold-flecked painting itself, which set a record price of $135 million when it was sold in 2006. Then there is the David-and-Goliath tale featuring a feisty octogenarian heroine — Ms. Bloch-Bauer’s niece Maria Altmann — taking on a recalcitrant Austrian government. And finally there is the satisfying conclusion. Ms. Altmann gets the portrait back. Justice prevails.

Yet even today, viewers may not realize how rare such justice is when it comes to the return of art looted during the Nazis’ reign of terror to its rightful owners or — as is now more likely, seven decades later — to their descendants.

As the new film “Woman in Gold,” starring Helen Mirren as the indefatigable Maria Altmann, acknowledges in a brief written prologue before the credits roll, more than 100,000 stolen works of art are still unaccounted for.