CASES AND RECOVERY EXPERIENCE

Germany: The Case of the Hans Sachs Poster Collection

Berlin Court Orders Posters Returned to Heir of Dr. Hans Sachs. Museum Appeals. Latest Decision Gives Sachs Title and the Museum Possession.

Peter Sachs, the heir of Dr. Hans Sachs, a dentist who began collecting posters in 1905 and formed the greatest pre-War collection of posters, won a judgment in Berlin Administrative Court in February 2009 to recover over 4,000 of the posters that for decades had been in a museum (now the Deutsches Historisches Museum) in East Berlin.

There was no dispute that the Gestapo had seized the collection in the summer of 1938 on the orders of Josef Goebbels, or that Hans Sachs, having survived the war, received some restitution for his collection from the German Government. At the time it was seized, the Sachs collection had 12,500 posters.

Peter Sachs’s earlier attempt to recover the posters in 2007 was rejected by a government panel set up to review such claims. That panel held that since Hans Sachs had received some restitution payment, his son would not be able to recover the posters even though his father had believed the collection was destroyed. Further, Hans Sachs died in the United States in 1974 and never would have been able to get information about his collection from East Germany. The court claim, however, produced a different result, returning the collection to Peter Sachs, but the museum announced in early March 2009 that it would appeal.

This provoked much discussion about procedure and forum, since the two bodies reached opposite conclusions in the Sachs case. In late January, 2010, the Berlin Court of Appeals announced its decision that Peter Sachs has good title to the posters, but paradoxically overturns the earlier decision that he may get them back from the Museum. The written version should be issued by March.