The Hans Sachs posters: seized 1938, returned 2012

In 1938 a collection of posters was taken from the flat of Hans Sachs in Berlin-Schöneberg. Sachs was a Jewish dentist who had collected posters since 1896. The Federal Court of Justice, Germany’s highest court for civil cases, says the Reich Propaganda Ministry had the collection removed. Joseph Goebbels, who died in 1945, was the minister. The Guardian and Christie’s say the Gestapo carried out the seizure.

The Guardian and Christie’s report that Sachs was arrested on 9 November 1938, the night of Kristallnacht. WLRN says he was taken to Sachsenhausen camp. The court records that he left Germany at the end of 1938 and went to the United States. After the war the posters were missing. In 1961 Sachs received 225,000 Deutsche Marks under the Federal Restitution Act, a West German compensation law. Later he learned that part of the collection had appeared in a museum in East Berlin. He died in 1974. His wife died in 1998, and their son Peter Sachs inherited.

The sources disagree on the size of the collection. The BBC, the New York Post and WLRN say Sachs is thought to have owned 12,500 posters. The Federal Court says 4,259 had been identified when it gave its ruling. The posters were held by the Deutsches Historisches Museum, a public foundation in Berlin. The BBC says Peter Sachs found them in 2005. The New York Times reports that a German government advisory panel rejected his petition in 2007. He sued in 2008, first for two posters. The Berlin Regional Court ordered one of them returned on 10 February 2009. The Court of Appeal found for the museum on 28 January 2010.

On 16 March 2012 the Federal Court of Justice reversed that decision. It held that an owner of art taken by Nazi injustice can demand it back under section 985 of the Civil Code, if the art was missing after the war and so could not be claimed under Allied restitution law. The taking was a seizure with no formal act of expropriation, so Sachs never lost ownership in law. The restitution deadline of 30 June 1950 did not bar the claim, because the posters reappeared after it. The court also found that Sachs’s family had not given up the claim. The museum said it accepted the ruling.

Osen LLC, the lawyers for Peter Sachs, give 4,344 as the number of posters returned in October 2012. The New York Times reported in November 2012 that Guernsey’s, a New York auction house, planned to sell about 3,600 posters in three sales and to give about 800 to museums. Other reports give different numbers for the posters sold, kept and given away. The first sale ran from 18 to 20 January 2013 in New York. It offered 1,233 lots with no reserve and, the New York Post reports, made about $2.5 million in total.

Peter Sachs died in 2013, according to Tablet. The collection is now dispersed. The sources used here disagree on how many posters were sold, how many the family kept and how many went to museums.