Proving that restitution isn’t merely a tactic for gaining monumentally expensive and important paintings, a German court overturned a lower court’s ruling and declared an American retiree the rightful owner of a large collection of posters. Here’s Bloomberg on the case:
Peter Sachs of Sarasota, Florida, filed a lawsuit against the Deutsches Historisches Museum last year. The Berlin museum possesses about 4,250 posters that once belonged to Sachs’s father, Hans Sachs, who was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in 1938 and later managed to flee Nazi Germany with his wife and son Peter, then aged 14 months.
Judge Norbert Stobbe said today the Berlin court will consult further on whether it will require the museum to hand over the collection to Peter Sachs. Its acknowledgement that 71- year-old Sachs is the owner contrasts with a ruling by a government panel led by former Constitutional Court Judge Jutta Limbach, which rebuffed Sachs’s claim in January 2007. [ . . . ]
Stobbe today rejected the museum’s argument that Hans Sachs, who died in 1974, had voluntarily relinquished ownership of his collection. The museum estimates the value of the surviving posters at more than 4.4 million euros ($5.8 million.)
Ex-Pilot is Owner of Nazi-Looted Posters, Judge Says (Bloomberg)
