Joel Hilton Fisher, a Washington lawyer who helped recover gold, silver and artwork looted by the Nazis in World War II, died on Saturday at a nursing home in Baltimore. He was 79.

In 1945, as a lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard assigned to the fiscal branch of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Mr. Fisher led a task force of 75 men charged with finding stolen property abandoned by the Nazis in the closing months of the war. His unit attached itself to combat units ''so it could scour each key town for hidden loot as quickly as the troops moved in,'' he told an interviewer in 1945.

The task force secured hundreds of bags of looted currency from France, Norway and Belgium, and gold coins, ingots and other valuables found hidden in a salt mine in Merkers, Germany, a small town 20 miles west of Weimar. It also discovered crates of wedding rings, gold fillings and silver picture frames taken from Jews and other victims of Nazi concentration camps. A report by the expeditionary force to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1945 valued the Merkers cache at about $2 billion.

After the war, Mr. Fisher was the executive assistant to Henry Wallace, the Secretary of Commerce. In 1947, he moved to Paris to become general counsel in Europe to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which helped resettle Jewish refugees.

Beginning in 1950, he practiced law in Washington, representing foreign airlines like British Airways, Air India and Air France. He also served as Washington counsel to the League of New York Theaters, the Broadway trade group, in the 1960's, helping to win the repeal of a 10 percent Federal excise tax on theater tickets. From 1993 until this year he was a consultant to the general secretary of Unesco.

Mr. Fisher was born in New York in 1918 and received undergraduate and law degrees from Syracuse University. His first marriage, to Mary Jane Johnson, ended in divorce in 1957. In 1958, he married Helene Aaronson Rich, who died in 1991. He is survived by a brother, Alvin, of Los Angeles; a son and a daughter by his first wife: John B., of Havre de Grace, Md., and Susan F. Sullam of Baltimore; a stepson, Frank Rich of New York, an editorial columnist for The New York Times; a stepdaughter, Polly A. Rich, of Washington, and four grandchildren.