New York investigators seized three pieces of art from three out-of-state museums that they said had been stolen from a Jewish art collector killed during the Holocaust and rightly belonged to the Nazi victim’s heirs.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office issued warrants to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio for works by the 1900s Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele. According to the warrants, “there is reasonable cause to believe” that the works constitute stolen property.

Prosecutors say the artworks rightly belong to three living heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a prominent Jewish art collector killed at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1941. Before the action on Sept. 13, the Grünbaum heirs had filed civil claims also against the Museum of Modern Art and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, and several individual defendants. In total, the plaintiffs are seeking to recover about a dozen Schiele works.

In 2018, Judge Charles V. Ramos found that “a signature at gunpoint cannot lead to a valid conveyance” of someone’s personal property.