QUICK TAKES - Jan. 20, 2009
When Peter Sachs was only a year old in 1938, the Nazis seized his father’s collection of 12,500 rare posters on the orders of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
Sachs’ father, Hans, a Jewish dentist, was then thrown into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. After his wife managed to secure his release, the family fled to Boston, leaving the posters behind.
Today, about 4,000 of the posters, worth at least $5.9 million, are in the possession of the German Historical Museum in Berlin, largely in storage. Peter Sachs will try to get them back in a Berlin administrative court hearing today.
“I think that any disposition of the posters would be preferable to their languishing in a museum for 70 years without ever seeing the light of day,†said Sachs, who lives in Sarasota, Fla.
Sachs, 71, lost his first attempt to have the posters returned through a German restitution panel, known as the Limbach Commission, which ruled in 2007 that the museum was the rightful owner.
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