A German court has ruled that a Jewish man living in the United States is the rightful owner of a rare poster the Gestapo seized from his father in 1938. Peter Sachs, 71, who lives in Florida, claims a total of 12,500 rare posters were taken on the orders of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The ruling could pave the way for the surviving portion of the collection, worth an estimated US$ 6 million, to be returned to Sachs. The collection of 4,000 posters are held by the German Historical Museum.
In a test case, Sachs sued for the return of two posters – a 1932 poster for ‘Die Blonde Venus’, starring Marlene Dietrich, and one for ‘Simplicissimus’, a satirical German weekly magazine, showing a red bulldog. The Berlin court ruled that it was unclear whether ‘Die Blonde Venus’ was part of his father's collection, but that there was no doubt about the ‘Simplicissimus’ poster and that it must be returned to him. Matthias Druba, Sachs' lawyer, said the ruling meant the court backed his client’s claim on the surviving portion of his father's collection at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.
Hans Sachs and his family fled Germany shortly after the posters were seized, setting up home in the US. They assumed the posters were lost forever, but in the 1960s Hans Sachs learned that a museum in East Berlin museum had some and wrote to the communist authorities about viewing them, without success. He died in 1974 without seeing them again.